Christopher Harvie to Scottish Urban Regeneration Forum Annual Conference 31.01.08
NB: The below are Professor Harvie’s own notes; he ad-libbed for much of his talk and therefore deviated from these during his presentation. Please note that it does not give a completely accurate representation of what he said on the day of the Conference
To Scotland in the Coming Time
I'If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worse.'
Every year the better part of a ton of material will descend on my office, and in my weightless world at least 150 emails a day. Most of this I junk without reading, no matter how generous its motives, how touching its stories. I am in Parliament because of certain qualities of expertise, and certain ambitions. Those causesthat matter to me aren't well-endowed. Hence my specialisation: in economics, planning, higher education, transport.
And what will appear – at least at first - as the predominant gloom of my discourse this morning.
I am in an unusual position, being a 63 years old fixed term MSP. I have no political career in view. I want to help Scotland to become independent, because its political system, as well as that of the UK, has atrophied and to be radically shocked into consciousness and reform. It is a country whose intestinal social problems are only outweighed by its economic and political dysfunction. It has perhaps not much more time than this parliament provides, in which to recover.
In this I belong to an energetic and on the face of it unhelpful Scottish social-critical tradition, notable for Thomas Carlyle and Hugh MacDiarmid, to whom the potential of the country is social, but also being continually battered down by a failure which is personal. The one injunction on me as a social scientist is to describe things as they are, without sentiment or special pleading, and take it from there.
There is a solution which I sense emerging in a rather opaque way.I'll call it the New Democratic Intellect. It will figure as the 'come-to-Jesus' bit at the end of this talk, and will I hope be worth waiting for.
It isn't going to be easy, and democratic intellectitself is a paradoxical term. As coined in the 1930s by Walter Elliot and George Davie it meant open access to knowledge, but this inevitably produced inequalities of outcome. What remained was commitment to a national cause (as best primed to undertake reform) and – at normal or at worst – migration to richer markets.
The democratic intellect sets off from the same point as Matthew Arnold's 'culture – the great help out of our difficulties', but is not, emphatically, part of the 'culture industry'. The latter is about converting intellect, skill, insight into a cash return, and the Scots have always been rather too skilful in this: from the Kailyard on. Being ahead of the game, we might say: but we're not always clear about what the game is. So a bit of – rather grim – clarification is in order.
Our invention and technology is bust: reduced to a bar-room boast. In the North Sea epoch we did much – rig positioning was a brilliant achievement – but we've forgotten it. Instead, the demolition of one of Britain's most sophisticated shipyards, Scott Lithgow of Port Glasgow, and its conversion to four call centres, has been claimed as showing theadvance of 'the knowledge industries'; the demolition of John Browns at Clydebank will provide 'luxury homes and retail opportunities'. This is misinformation amounting to self-delusion, and too much of the tide of print flowing into my office is justifying this.
The oddity of our current evolution is that we are well-provided with imaginative, Carlyleian critiques, but where our enterprise-generator ought to be – an adaptive market-stimulated economy and a planned infrastructure - there's a vacuum. What concerns me is the consequence of this in thirty years time. What will face us? Over 40% of our population will be elderly to aged, yet those who will have to care for them seem lacking in the caritativeskills and virtues. Our multiplication of households has stemmed from this lack of social skill and not been accompanied by enough income to sustain them.
An enterprise culture has talked itself up, yet seems parasitic on social breakdown: popular through charity and hype, not through innovation. Consider Sir Tom Hunter, benefactor extraordinaire, yet someone who made his pile out of transforming the Scots into the worst-dressed nation in Europe, poured into sports-clothes with grew in elaboration as the folk inside them bulged out. Carlyle would have had his say about that!
In this I don't exaggerate. In Parliament one is continually under pressure from both ends of the scale: from enterprise interests and charity interests. The first are lop-sided: demanding laisser-faire while naïve about its consequences. Sir George Mathewson, former boss of our biggest bank, attacked the planning process, yet seemed oblivious to the ability of groups like themajor supermarkets to force through their own monopolistic version of retail at the expense of farmers, local shops and markets, and of consumers themselves. The damage the likes of Tesco may have done to our enterprise culture may be terminal. Read Joanna Blythman's Shopped (2005), a critique from inside Scotland, but one almost wholly ignored. The Royal Bank made much of its dough from railway privatisation. Need I say more?
It gets worse. As an itinerant Voltaire I tend to drift around the Brigadoons of the Bildungsbürgertum. My own generation took early retirement a decade ago and we've lived well. I'm not so sure about the educational institutions themselves, parcelled out between the bean-counters, those who've simply given up, and the kids who stare at their feet. In thirty years teaching in Germany and lecturing all over the place from New Orleans to the Urals, I got about five letters from Scottish teachers…
There are worse things than inertness. There is the capacity for criminality of directionless society: in Mending Scotland I guesstimated the Black Economy at up to 5% of our GDP, and I have the Scottish Futures Forum working on this at the moment. From drug-generated money laundering at one end, to British Aerospace dominating the Clyde, encompassing (if we tot up the 'recycling' element) taxis, tanning studios, pubs n' clubs, waste disposal, security. No Glasgow gang is without its accountant and its solicitor. In some respects they're the SMEs we wish we had.
Now I am, in general, concerned about this, as its outcome will be directionless – oligarchic monopoly capitalism and a disempowered consumer estate, comforting itself with consumption, incapable of originating new ideas. Both are now in crisis: this is no longer credit crashbut credit crunch, but have we the industrial intellect to recover?
Against this? We have the potentially valuable sense that we are in a British endgame: that the institutions of British nationality which once drew loyalties – politics, the press, the BBC – are now in free fall. We are on our own to go where we want, without much restraint, but we must always keep the worst case in mind.
The problem is that dysfunction preys on dysfunction: we have a sort of meso-economy of restitution, a symbolic articulation of grievances, a concern with symbolic grievances, lie the preoccupation with the Highland land issue to the exclusion of the much more severe imprint of urban deprivation. The worry is that this cumulatively will push us even further from the track. This may not be reassuring as the dis-synergies pile up, with decline in one area aggravating the situation in neighbour disciplines: so that decline becomes cumulative.
'If way to the better there be
It exacts a full look at the worse.'
The words are Thomas Hardy's, a reaction to the condemnation of Jude the Obscure in the 1890s; something akin to Henrik Ibsen's fury in Ghosts not long before, and which would also show itself in James Joyce's Dubliners with its image of the city as 'the centre of paralysis'. Scotlandis our 'centre of paralysis', and we have to cast a very cold eye on it indeed.
IIPossibilities of Renewal
And here we have the paradox, and paradise, of possible Resurrection, through 'the Might of the Mighty Atlantic'. The phrase is Arthur Hugh Clough's from one of the great Victorian didactic poems 'The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich'.
The ways in which the renewables revolution can alter Scotland are far-reaching, and we are only just grasping their implications. The real potential of the new technologies will, I think, come through wave-chambers (which can compress air to be used in bi-directional air turbines) and subsea rotors which utilise the strong currents passing through such channels as the Pentland Firth. These raise huge problems of power-storage and transmission, but not insuperable ones.
In the short term, the creation of such power-sources will be fed into undersea transmission systems (power-cables in gas-insulated pipes) and exported to Europe. But the real industrial advantages come in local use, by devising means of storage: by electrolysis, flywheels, pump storage. Accessibility of power, its conservation and re-use in subordinate, ecologically-sustainable ways, are the keys to our future. And not only our future;should clean energy really balloon in potential, then the chances of Scotland actually being able to reverse the threat to the existence of the union race. We may, however, only be able to capitalise on this by moving our population and industry north, though this can of course be aided by such projects as railway electrification.
All of this seems deeply pessimistic – and is. So are there ways out? All I can say is that I've been there – and can claim these exist. The Open University, on whose foundation course I worked, showed in 1969-71 a radicalism in embracing new educational and communications technologies. It set up, by revolutionary means, a completely new sort of educational market - which outran the available technology. This has now caught up, but at a stage when our university community is under threat.
So something like 'a project for a New Democratic Intellect' could, quite rapidly, catch up. It's a question of energising concepts and outlooks and buying in expertise and importing people, schemes and ideas, which can rapidly exercise a multiplier effect. This could be half-conventional, half new-technology in its structure, embracing on-line instruction, block-releases, summer schools, compact-seminars.
There is, therefore, the chance of a real revival in the Scottish economy, but one we have to nurture very carefully because we no longer have the institutions capable of governing it. Those industries which helped capture North Sea oil no longer exist; or have been sold abroad. The nuclear alternative is in the hands of the French; the renewables alternative in those of the Germans. This could imply takeover or (more optimistically) divide and rule. Here I think that we have to create two things: a Scottish Renewables body (notionally called 'Statewave'?) which can act as a national stakeholder representative and executive.
Linked to this is the problem: do we train enough expert workers? I hope to start a study of higher/further education going in the next four weeks and asking such questions in my constituency, which has three major potential renewables sites: Rosyth, Methil and Burntisland, and on the input side three universities and three higher education institutes on the other side. How are these to be placed in a synergy-generating relationship?
Have we a public culture that assesses and manages technology? Again, enquire of Scottish Council, of Chambers of Commerce, of Universities and heads of Council education authorities. Compare with progress. Though it might be better in the somewhat longer term to commission a small, high-level professional group and let them get on with it.
Have we got the transport infrastructure in place, and are we making the appropriate selection of modes? Again, another area of dynamism. My experience in arguing for the Borders rail link suggests a highly negative attitude among an elite obsessed with personal outcomes and not with community investment. The inadequacy ofour public transport, is patent, but the plans to extend it in the near future are drowning criticism, as they are far too dependent on conventional motions of car-based mobility. How long will the motor age survive the building (at vast expense) of the ForthRoadBridge?
What I'm suggesting here is a regenerated synergy which can reverse the rather negative element visible in my introduction. I think it's possible – but only possible by questioning many of the generalities we have up to now been content to coexist with.
I would stress in particular the need to open up the Scottish media – preferably at the expense of the controlled-circulation element. It is better to subsidise a competitive press – say by government advertising – than this insidious and unproductive form of privatisation.
So: technology can be our way out, but we cannot steam into it. 'We are in a tight place' and must make a plan, as John Buchan's old Peter Pienaar would argue, and we haven't much time in which to do it.
Ends