A People's History of Scotland (36 page)

Yet acceptance of devolution in the British ruling circles did not equate with any wish to loosen the Union. In 1995, the journalist George Rosie encountered a senior Whitehall civil servant in the mountains of Sutherland. Over a drink, he asked him why a London government would not want to see Scotland independent. The civil servant ticked off the reasons on the fingers of his hand:

One, oil. Two, gas. Three, fish. Four, water. Five, land. The oil and gas are self-explanatory, even now. Fish might not mean much to the British but it is a superb bargaining counter in Europe. Water
will be important one day, I suspect. And as for all this [gesturing to the hills], well, this is our, how shall I say it, breathing space. That bit of elbow room that every country should have.
⁷¹

Timex

The US multinational corporation Timex decided to break the union at its Dundee plant, announcing lay-offs just before Christmas in 1992. At the start of the new year, letters saying who would be sacked and who could stay were sent out by management. The workers refused to accept the letters and occupied the canteen. Management promised negotiations so they returned to work, although they voted overwhelmingly for action.

The negotiations never took place and the company refused a union offer to go to ACAS, the government conciliation service. So on 29 January 1993 the workers walked out on strike. A month later they returned ready to work en masse, only to be told they would have to accept a 10 percent wage cut and a reduction in pension. When they refused this offer they were locked out. Scabs were brought in to do their work, leading to mass pickets outside the plant with delegations of supporters travelling from across Britain to give support.

In April, several local workplaces stopped work to join demonstrators from NCR, Levi's, Ninewells Hospital and others who were marching to the factory gates to join pickets. A rally in a nearby park was attended by 6,000 people. On 17 May, 5,000 people from across the city, the rest of Scotland and south of the border joined in solidarity outside the factory gates, despite the police halting coaches bringing delegations to join the strikers. It took police over twenty minutes to force the scab bus through the picket line, and they simply gave up on trying to get scabs in cars and delivery trucks through.

In June 1993, the socialist journalist Paul Foot joined the picket line at Timex. His subsequent report is a gripping read. He interviewed Margaret Thompson, who had just returned from Norway,
where she picketed the headquarters of the Olsen Line, eventual owners of Timex. She had already been to London, Manchester, Newcastle and Brighton to raise solidarity:

I've been a shop steward for 20 years, but I never felt half what I feel today. I think it's because I realise my capabilities. I'm not just a worker at Timex, I've got a brain. If you do the same thing for 20 years, your brain goes soft. When I went into Timex as a girl, I was quiet as a lamb. Now I feel like a rottweiler. I think the best thing about this is you suddenly realise you have friends everywhere. At a factory in Newcastle they had exactly £110 in their coffers. After they heard us speak they gave us … £110, and I suddenly realised I was crying. They'd never met us, and they gave us everything.

Another striker, Jessie Britton, asked about leftists and others joining the picket lines. She responded: ‘They are always complaining about outside agitators. But where would we be without the people from outside who support us? … we could never have got where we have without these young people selling papers and whipping up support for us.' Jessie also told Foot where she stood in relation to anti-union laws that attempted to restrict numbers on the picket lines, and the appeal from union leaders to respect the law: ‘They are worried about their assets … but we aren't worried about our assets. We haven't got any. What use are union assets to us if we lose the strike and can't have a union?'

Foot writes that he ‘asked gingerly' about the role of women in the strike. Jessie laughed and simply said, ‘right here the men do the dishes and the women do the fighting.'

The report resounds with the wit and banter of the strikers, interrupted only when someone tries to cross the picket line. He sums up by quoting Debbie Osborne explaining, ‘When I was in there [she said, giving a contemptuous jerk of the head at the factory gates] I felt like a nobody. Now I feel a somebody. In fact I feel ten times more important than anyone in there.'
⁷²

Eventually, in August 1993 the management, aware they could
not defeat the strikers, chose to walk away, closing the plant. The workers did not achieve victory but they did not feel defeated either.

Cultural Shift

Despite the damage inflicted on it, Scotland was experiencing a new cultural vibrancy during the Thatcher era. Novelists such as James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, William McIlvanney, Iain Banks and Irvine Welsh were international figures. A new generation of Glasgow painters made their mark: Ken Currie, Steven Campbell, Jenny Saville, Adrian Wiszniewski and Peter Howson. The classical composer James MacMillan had world renown. The folk music scene was engaged in all sorts of cross-overs, including with what is called ‘World Music', a patronising term meaning non-Anglo-Saxon music. Scots were beginning to feel confident in a new identity that no longer centred on militarism and sport, and which was recognised elsewhere in the world.

Things were moving on from the start of the 1970s when Tom Nairn famously wrote, paraphrasing Denis Diderot, that ‘Scotland will be free when the last Church of Scotland minister is strangled by the last copy of the
Sunday Post
.' The poet Iain Crichton Smith spoke similarly: ‘When I see one of these Free Church ministers on the street in Lewis, I feel like walking across the road and hitting him in the face.'
⁷³

Kevin Williamson founded the magazine
Rebel Inc
in 1992, and argued that the period between then and the creation of a Scottish parliament in 1999 was ‘the making of Scotland'. He launched the magazine on May Day 1992, just nine days after John Major's surprise general election victory, upstairs in a leading Edinburgh bookshop. He recalled, ‘we had the bit between our teeth and we fought back.'

The backlash that followed was inevitable. He was invited onto BBC Radio Scotland's lunchtime arts show to defend himself against accusations of bad language, violence, filth and depravity. On that
day technicians were on strike, and Kevin seized the moment when the presenter asked:

‘So, Kevin, how do you defend your publication?'

‘Well, Colin [Bell], I'd like to defend the magazine but as a trade unionist myself I'm going down to join the BECTU picket line outside'.
⁷⁴

It is easy to portray the cultural upsurge of the 1980s and '90s as simply a response to Thatcherism, but its roots were a lot deeper, and preceded the 1979 Westminster election. Alasdair Gray, Jeff Torrington and James Kelman wrote for more than a decade before finally having their books published in Scotland and England. Tom Leonard's
The Good Thief
appeared in the first issue of
Scottish International
in January 1968, but when he had tried to publish poems in
Glasgow University Magazine
the printer refused them because of the language. Later a typesetter wanted ‘foreign language rates' for setting some of his poems. Kelman had been writing since about 1967 but his first collection of short stories,
An Old Pub Near the Angel
, was published only in 1973 in the USA and received little notice in Scotland or England.

Scottish International
appeared between 1968 and 1974 and became a platform for these new writers. It published extracts from Alasdair Gray's
Lanark
, helping him secure a Scottish Arts Council grant to complete it.
SI
also published Alan Spence's stories. Its editor was Harry Tait, while two poets, Edwin Morgan and Robert Garioch, were members of its editorial board.

Lanark
is, simply, a masterpiece. Gray's book is set in two places: the Glasgow where he grew up and lives, and the strange dystopian world of Unthank, a grey, oppressive place where Lanark, his hero, is trapped by emotional repression. Gray sees the novel, and much of his other writing, as an exploration of the ability of human beings to love and of the obstacles that inhibit that capacity.

Meanwhile, radical theatre came to Scotland in the 1970s when, for example, Billy Connolly starred in
The Great Northern Welly Boot Show
, based loosely on the UCS sit-in. The 7:84 theatre company had
been set up in London in 1971, involving, among others, John McGrath, Elizabeth MacLennan and David MacLeanan (the title came from an
Economist
article that said just 7 percent of Britain's population owned 84 percent of the wealth), and in 1973 they formed 7:84 Scotland.

That year they took
The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil
on a tour of Scotland, travelling in a Transit van across the country. It was a rousing attack on the Clearances and much else. McGrath recalls that on its first performance they were ‘staggered to see an Aberdeen audience stand up and cheer at the end'.
⁷⁵
They moved on to the Highlands, performing in village halls and with a ceildh at the end of each show.

Their next play was
The Game's a Bogey
, centring on the figure of John Maclean. It opened at a miner's welfare club in Glenrothes and toured industrial Scotland, bringing Maclean to a whole new audience.
⁷⁶
The Scottish TUC sponsored their later shows, as they did concerts of the Laggan, the left-wing folk group featuring the powerful voice of Arthur Johnstone.

Subsequently, what was most remarkable in all this was the sheer volume of first-class writing that came forth. Alasdair Gray and James Kelman met each other, and Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead, for the first time in 1971 at a writers' group organised by Philip Hobsbaum, a lecturer in English at Glasgow University. What was equally remarkable was that the majority of this new writing reflected working-class experience and used everyday language, as spoken by ordinary Scots. James Kelman explains why:

The establishment demands art from its own perspective but these forms of committed art have always been as suffocating to me as the impositions laid down by the British State, although I should point out of course that I am a socialist myself. I wanted none of any of it … How could I write from within my own place and time if I was forced to adopt the received language of the ruling class? Not to challenge the rules of narrative was to be coerced into assimilation, I would be forced to write in the voice of an imagined member of the ruling class. I saw the struggle as towards a
selfcontained world. This meant I had to work my way through language, find a way of making it my own.
⁷⁷

At the beginning of the 1980s, Peter Kravitz was working at the publisher Polygon. He recalled that if you asked about Scottish fiction in a bookshop you would be directed to historical romances. Publishers and bodies such as the Scottish Arts Council had little interest in encouraging new writers dealing with contemporary Scotland:

When on behalf of Polygon I sent them [James] Kelman's second novel,
A Chancer
, they deemed it unworthy of a grant towards publication costs. They had received a complaint from a Conservative Member of Parliament, Alick Buchanan-Smith; one of his constituents had picked up Kelman's previous novel,
The Busconductor Hines
, in an Edinburgh bookshop, and was shocked that taxpayers' money was subsidising such language. Those who claimed to represent culture had lost their collective nerve.
⁷⁸

In December 1990, the
Scots Magazine
– a favourite read among Scots abroad – published an article by Maurice Fleming entitled ‘Scotland the Depraved'. In it he called for a return to the values of the comic classics of Compton Mackenzie and more publicity for writers who could celebrate Scotland as opposed to those he labelled ‘the terrible twosome': Kelman and Irvine Welsh, joined by Duncan McLean. He describes his targets as ‘desperate to plumb even deeper depths of depravity'. These writers, he said, ‘appear to view Scotland with undisguised and malicious disgust [portraying the place as] a nation of drunks, drug addicts and dropouts'.
⁷⁹

In 1992, the tabloid
Daily Record
ran a story under the headline ‘Sex Shockers on School's Reading List', claiming ‘dirty books' and ‘classroom porn shockers' were in the library at Johnstone High School. As a result, five books were taken off the shelves:
A Chancer
and
Greyhound for Breakfast
by James Kelman;
The Color Purple
by Alice Walker;
The Cider House Rules
by John Irving; and
Perfume
by Patrick Süskind. Strathclyde Region's
Director of Education then ordered all post-1970 fiction to be removed and vetted.
⁸⁰

Kelman's first published novel,
The Busconductor Hines
, did not reach the prestigious Booker Prize shortlist. However, Richard Cobb (the chairman of the judges) did express his shock that ‘one of the novels seemed to be written entirely in Glaswegian', as if that were enough to pass judgement on it. Anne Smith, editor of the (then Edinburgh-based)
Literary Review
, said of it, ‘Who wants to read 300 pages about the life of a bus conductor where nothing much happens anyway?'
⁸¹

Kelman's novel
How Late It Was, How Late
, published in 1994, was awarded the Booker Prize. The judges' decision was not unanimous, with Rabbi Julia Neuberger calling the decision a ‘disgrace'.
⁸²
She added it was ‘just a drunken Scotsman railing against bureaucracy'. The English journalist Simon Jenkins described the author as an ‘illiterate savage'.
⁸³