Pomp and insignificance

SOMEWHERE deep in the heart of Tartan Day, concealed within a veritable babushka of shortbread tins, is the kernel of a good idea. Of course, it makes sense to seek closer links and sense of shared purpose with at least some of the 20 million Americans who report Scottish ancestry within their DNA.

A fair proportion of that diaspora has done well for itself in the Land of the Free. People of Scots descent, as of any other descent, have risen to influential positions and acquired great wealth. At least a minority of them might be interested, if encouraged to think that way, in utilising some of their assets in Scotland’s favour.

This is nothing new and there are plenty of well-established examples of American money coming back to help good Scottish causes. The National Trust for Scotland always knew where to go looking, long before Tartan Day was born. So, in its own way, did the old Locate in Scotland. But, fair enough, there is a strong case for strengthening the links in a more systematic way.

So far, so good and so non-controversial. But a considerable leap is required to travel from that principle to some of the things that were done in Scotland’s name last week in New York.

I doubt, for instance, if the sight of Mo Johnston and a Swedish porn star performing (albeit separately) on a Manhattan catwalk, greatly enhanced the cause. And what is the point of sending a group of politicians who are barely household names in their own households?

The basic problem with Tartan Day is that it has ambushed the whole issue of Scotland’s image in the world at exactly the time when some rational thought should have been going into how Scotland wanted to position and present itself in the 21st century.

Much of what surrounds Tartan Day is the antithesis of what Scotland requires - an unproductive orgy of stereotypes which panders to perceptions rather than leads them.

Let me get two objections out of the way. First, I am all in favour of tartan as a component part of Scotland’s identity. It is often beautiful, it is hugely fashionable, it is a statement of place and antiquity.

As a backdrop to other images of Scotland that we need to present to the world, tartan is perfect. The Irish would kill for it - but its role should not be as the centrepiece of our national self-promotion in the United States, or anywhere else.

There was a great opportunity at the time of devolution to really work on this identity issue; the blending of ancient and modern into a world-beating formula.

I don’t like always coming back to Ireland as role model, since they sometimes get things wrong as well as right. But the classic job they have done on the use of traditional images, combined with dynamic, modern messages, would not have been a bad model to follow. Instead, before we had time to think about it, we had Sean Connery and the entire cast of Brigadoon clomping down Fifth Avenue in kilts.

My second non-objection is to spending money. I don’t know what Tartan Day costs and it will be creatively accounted for by being spread over a number of budgets. But I’m pretty sure that if they were all totted up, we would be into quite a few millions. Spending the money on international promotion of Scotland is fine by me.

But for heaven’s sake, let’s spend it more wisely than on repeating the already tiresome Tartan Day ritual for years to come.

Tartan Day was not developed from within Scotland but was latched on to after the Scottish-American establishment had designed it in their own image. As anyone who has had any contact with migr societies knows, there is a massive gap between perceptions of "the old country" and modern realities. There was also the particular problem that, as well as many decent and well-intentioned Americans, we got mixed up with some thoroughly dodgy ones.

I remember the genesis of Tartan Day very well, since I was UK trade minister at the time and fighting an intensive battle for the very survival of the Scottish cashmere knitwear industry. Cashmere had become caught up in the Banana Wars as one of the entirely innocent products targeted by the US trade authorities for punitive import duties, unless the European Union would comply with a World Trade Organisation ruling on the importation of bananas.

The inclusion of a distinctively Scottish product on the hit-list was no accident - and the surreal nature of this scenario was compounded by the fact that its prime mover was Senator Trent Lott, who was deeply into the pay of "big bananas" in the United States.

While I was fighting off this cynical threat to thousands of Scottish jobs, Senator Lott was being fted by some inane Scottish politicians because he was the founding father of Tartan Day and had sponsored a ten-a-penny Congressional motion on the subject.

But there was more to Senator Lott than bananas. He was eventually driven out of public office on grounds of racism - still quite a feat in the Deep South.

Lott had always been a racist and Scotland should have seen red lights flashing all around him; just as minimal inquiry would have established the close links between the ‘tartan’ movement, particularly in the South, and a weird brand of white supremacist politics. Even after Lott’s downfall, however, we managed to find another beauty to link arms with this year.

On the grounds that hardly anyone in the United States knows anything about Tartan Day - although the Scottish Executive website assures us that it is "now firmly part of the US calendar" - we can take comfort in the fact that Scotland’s entanglement with the ultra-right has also gone largely unnoticed.

However, in any better-conceived approach to winning friends and influencing people in Washington, it would have been a very odd place to start.

Scotland should leave Tartan Day behind. I was talking about this recently to Donnie Munro, who has a lot of experience of fund-raising for Sabhal Mor Ostaig in the United States. His proposal is for a Scotland House in New York - a year-round showcase for the best in Scotland, with a professionally managed cultural programme. One difference in that approach, incidentally, would be that Gaelic - which is wholly marginalised by the tartan brigade - could be given its proper place.

Alongside that approach, it occurs to me that I will be in Houston next month for the world’s biggest offshore oil event, when the place will be awash with Scots and very little tartan. They will be there on the basis of globally respected expertise and entrepreneurism.

There are no shortcuts to that kind of recognition. The best answer is to build on the things that we are good at in the places where they are recognised, and forget about the confection of artificial events.