I CAN’T remember who it was who first coined the idea that Scotland is made up of a loose confederation of “city-states” – but the notion…
I CAN’T remember who it was who first coined the idea that Scotland is made up of a loose confederation of “city-states” – but the notion always appealed to me.
I appreciate that this is the kind of stupid accusation politicians of all parties are obliged to come up with in their local election literature from time to time. As far as John Swinney is concerned, he must be thinking he’s heard this song before. It was back in September 2009, during the SNP’s first spell of minority government, that he was accused of having “a clear anti-Glasgow agenda” and “anti-Glasgow bias” by local Labour politicians – a storyline which the party now seems awfully keen to revive, in a week in which John Swinney became the first First Minister for a decade who doesn’t represent a Glaswegian constituency in Holyrood.
This domination is often coloured in with a grim nostalgic sense that the truest stories and experiences of being Scottish are miserabilist tales of post-industrial decay, deprivation and substance dependency. In the 1980s, another scholar of Scottish literature, Cairns Craig, expressed concerns that “the death throes of industrial west-central Scotland have become the touchstone of authenticity for our culture”.
The rest is political history. Correctly sensing a political opportunity, the SNP leaned into the new electoral opportunities in populous urban Scotland, running out the Labour MPs in 2015 and winning the next Holyrood election handily. Listening to some of the urban commentary on Kate Forbes, you might think rural Scotland is uniformly a bastion of social conservatism and religious observance. The small mid-Argyll I grew up in had many outward forms of religious observance but was as functionally godless a place as I’ve ever lived in. The urban clichés which are proving just as popular with Scotland’s healthy band of reactionary columnists are just as dull.
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