1

A Safe Haven For Authenticity?

This talk aims to explore part of the overall conference theme from the perspective(s)
which have been the concerns of Here & Now magazine. Those who don't know the
magazine may want a brief description of what that might be.
Here & Now emerged, initially in Glasgow, as a conscious attempt to relate to the way
things are rather than the way we might like things to be. This has meant less stress
on arranging the groupings and regroupings of the "movement" into fascinating
patterns and greater emphasis on the changing conditions which most of us actually
experience in our daily lives. Given the years in question, that has brought some
emphasis on changing working conditions. By even mentioning such factors, we find
ourselves strangely marginalised on the Freedom Bookshop List as covering "workers'
issues".
The relevant factors for purposes of this talk are
(a) firstly the geographical specificity (Glasgow) and, equally significantly, the fact
that the specific has subsequently become at the least dualistic, with the pattern
settling into alternating production between "Leeds" and "Glasgow".
(b) By discussing changing working conditions, we have been led into discussing
managerialism as a project - more, as a project continuous with the sympathies of the
institutionalised New Left. As such, that involves placing doubts over the liberal
Enlightenment project.
So this talk will take a particular instance – the supposed drive towards a Scottish
State or sub-State – and relate it to a wider problematic around the politics of
nationhood and statehood and even the politics of politics itself.
The Scottish Question presents many enigmatic elements. Not the least of these for
anyone here who was subjected to any opinionated media prior to the 1992 general
election must be how so little came of so much. Commentators were dispatched to
report on the coming constitutional crisis. And nothing happened, nothing at all. How
did this come about? How too did a situation arise where a session at the Glasgow
Conference in May this year featured some anarchists placing some electoral hopes on
the SNP as a means for social change?
Claims and Rights
It will be necessary to discuss the evolution of the Scottish Question in relation to the
"left-liberal" consensus of the past decade. There is a much broader subject there, that
of how a "rights-based" agenda became the accepted norm for recognising,
categorising and discussing social questions. Possibly we can return to that in
discussion, but for the moment it may be enough to mention that Charter 88 has
served as a focal point for that kind of discussion, at least as it impinges on politics,
and that there was a two-way relationship between the Charter and the Scottish
Question, one in which each took an illusion of strength from the other. As Charter 88
and the revived Campaign for a Scottish Assembly drew from one another, the
resolution of the Scottish Question became the lever on which the entire edifice of
power would be, if not toppled, at least disturbed and rebuilt.
At the risk of boring everyone who had to view endless media "mission to explain"
sessions on the impending and permanently deferred Scottish constitutional crisis, I
am now going to devote some time to a more detailed examination of the Scottish
Question, particularly as it played out in the late 1980s. Much of the material here has
been reconstituted from several articles on the subject which appeared in "Here &
Now" (described by someone as "anarcho-Unionist").
In the first place, despite its presentation, particularly in grouping round a document
 2

called "A Claim of Right For Scotland", which consciously recalled previous such documents
in 1689 and 1842, there was little which was eternal in the background.
The 1689 document was adopted by the Scottish Parliament as it tail-ended the
English Parliament in promulgating a "revolution settlement" to discard James VII & II.
The terms related heavily to the religious concerns which played a central part in
Scottish society, establishing grounds for legitimate monarchical rule as involving
neither catholicism nor episcopacy. The accession of William of Orange was thought to
involve acceptance of these terms.
The 1842 Claim of Right came at the other end of the religious wars, with the
Disruption which brought the Free Church of Scotland into being.
The history proposed by advocates of Scottish independence lacks such contours.
There, the sole event of any meaning is the adoption of the 1707 Act of Union, seen as
a web of bribery and treachery. It may be significant for what follows to note that this
view plays down the economic circumstances which led to the Union, particularly the
crisis in the Scottish mercantile economy caused by the Darien fiasco and the threat of
tariff barriers posed to trade with England.
Partly as a result of these economic circumstances, and partly from a viewpoint
regarding the history of confessional strife as the nightmare from which they were
trying to awake, "progressive thought" in the 18th century favoured maximal
integration with England. In sharp contrast with the roles apparently taken in our
times, the "reactionary" Tories wished to protect the traditionally-Scottish institutions
from the Whigs' modernist zeal. The modern conservative historian Michael Fry writes:
"The preservation of Scots Law is often instanced as a vital element in national
identity. But Whigs had come to regard the law, which also provided the personnel of
the local ruling class, as the fountainhead of Scottish authoritarianism. The answer
then would be to assimilate it to English law...". 1
After the Referendum
Jumping to our time, these positions had reversed by the time the movement towards
devolution in the late 20th century took hold. Scottish "opinion-formers" were shocked
by the failure of the 1979 referendum on the creation of a Scottish Assembly with
limited powers. All the expectations had been that the measure, however flawed,
would gain the necessary scale of majority. What was actually indicated was a very
lukewarm popular acceptance (for whatever reason).
The columnist Neal Ascherson described the mood thus: "After March 1979, I watched
many friends and acquaintances in Scotland begin to disintegrate. Over the previous
four years, they had begun to assume a future of interesting, coherent, constructive
things to do... This future was suddenly cancelled." 2 This already indicates acceptance
of a misconceived social model which was to be repeated over the next ten years: an
active political/administrative stratum requiring and failing to gain plebicital
acceptance.
The trauma in the administrative strata was made more acute by the nature of the UK
government which took power after the failure to institute the Scottish Assembly had
toppled the Callaghan government. Normal bi-partisan expectations for life during a
period of opposition had been something approaching business-as-usual, albeit in
straitened circumstances. The new Conservative government's blend of centralist
authoritarianism and economic liberalism (which is, of course, another subject for
fuller discussion in its own right) challenged many of the presuppositions of the
political class. Severe limitations were being placed on the possibilities of maintaining
alternative power bases in local government or in "balanced" participation in quasi-
1"The Whig Interpretation of Scottish History" in "The Manufacture of Scottish History" p80
2"Scotland Grows Meaner and Leaner" (Observer, 26/2/89)
 3

local governmental institutions such as regional health boards.

By the mid-1980s a perception of the UK State (or "Ukania") as "an increasingly airless
room" (as Ascherson described it in his 1986 Mackintosh Memorial lecture) was
leading to a political reformulation which saw progress as inherent in the adoption of
new constitutional arrangements rather than being established and expanded through
popular struggle (or generated by economic liberalism).
The 1987 Election
While the electoral system's working during the 1987 General Election exaggerated
the Conservative victory in England, it worked in another direction in Scotland,
emphasising a continuing decline in Conservative support. In the early 1950s, the
Conservatives had controlled over half the Scottish parliamentary seats; now they
were reduced to just 10 seats, while Labour won 50.
But no power. Feelings of injustice became evident in Scotland. Bizarrely, the ranks of
Scottish Labourism, that stolid back-to-the-future brigade, began to see themselves as
a National Liberation Movement. Tom Nairn commented that "The irony is that
Scotland's quest for a more modern and distinct identity has ended in the clammy
embrace of the party historically most hypnotised by Britishness." 3 However, that irony
is lessened if we discard a univocal progressivism, which had demonstrably not
applied to Scotland's history.
But the perception of electoral injustice was definitely there. For example, it fueled the
discussion and debate day event on Politics & Culture which we organised in Glasgow
in July 1987 under the auspices of the Free University Project. There was particularly
widespread discontent about the Scottish "Community Charge" which had been
pushed through parliament (by weight of English Conservative votes) just before the
1987 election, as a crisis management response to earlier discontent over a Scottish
Rating Revaluation. Already, there was talk of rejecting the Poll Tax through non-
payment.
People had a variety of reasons for rejecting the Poll Tax (which again is a subject for
separate study) but, perhaps surprisingly in these circumstances, this did give rise to a
successful campaign.
The Scottish Assembly Campaign
Less successful was to be the other by-product of the Scottish reception of the 1987
election result, the revived campaign for some kind of assembly. Coincidentally, an
attempt was made to revive the moribund Campaign for a Scottish Assembly in
Edinburgh on the same day as our Culture & Politics conference. One of the magazine
groups invited to participate in our conference solemnly informed us that the
Edinburgh meeting was far more important; in the event it was again stillborn and it
was not until a few weeks later that the Campaign became properly re-established.
When it did manage to get under way, it set up a Constitutional Steering Committee,
consisting of various political, administrative and religious figures to report on the
means by which a Scottish Assembly could be established. It was that group which
produced the 1988 Claim of Right For Scotland.
The 1988 Claim of Right: Details
The declared starting-point for the preparation of the Claim of Right was that
"Parliamentary government under the present British constitution had failed Scotland
and more than Parliamentary action was needed to redeem the failure" (1.1) That
statement gives every appearance of radicalism - indeed we would all even agree with
it - but what followed was far from radical, for it constantly reduced the crisis in

3Marxism Today, July 1987

 4

representative politics to a local matter.

The 1707 Act of Union had maintained the distinct Scottish traditions of Church, Law
and Education. As mentioned above, progressive enlightened thought had
subsequently worked to erode these differences. The authors of the Claim of Right
repeatedly identify the crisis in society with the non-identity of the law-making body
(the UK Parliament) and the population affected by the resulting legislation (see
sections 2.6, 3.8, 6.1, 6.5 & 7.4). For example, section 3.8 states: "We are not aware of
any other instance ... of a territory which has a distinctive corpus of law and an
acknowledged right to distinctive policies but yet has no body expressly elected to
safeguard and supervise these. The existing machinery of Scottish government is an
attempt either to create an illusion or to achieve the impossible."
While technically anomalous, this is, of course, no more scandalous than the quirks of
any other State, now or in the past. The very idea that the interests of law-makers can
be identical with the interest of the population as a whole is to deny differences of
class, religion, region, culture - and power itself. Those who pretend otherwise are
hiding their own sectional interests in a declaration of general injustice.
The Claim of Right dealt only in the general. Despite having a title which echoed past
works born of religious disputation, it said not a word about religious differences, in
particular of the Scottish-Irish connection or the sectarianism so prevalent in
Lanarkshire. Such matters lie in the life-world; the administrative strata place
themselves above that.
Throughout, it manipulated a static model of "Scotland" amenable to contrast with the
English State. A long section on An Assembly and the Scottish Economy fell-back on
the "North-South Divide" (5.6.4) to provide something passing for a dynamic
explanation for relative economic decline. By accepting that as a premise, it was led to
(and comforted by) the conclusion that "Business congregates where it can find
politicians to lend it an ear and fight its cause" (5.6.12). Michael Fry rightly heard "the
authentic voice of clapped-out corporatism" in that revealing statement. Compare the
appreciation by Gianfranco Miglio of the Lombard League that "From an economic
viewpoint, the optimal dimension of a political aggregation would seem to be the
nation. But even here production and exchange requirements seek and find
satisfaction in areas larger or smaller than the nation, which is simply the mask
modern political classes wear to play their role in the struggle for power." 4
Although perceived as part of an international tendency towards regionalism, the
Claim of Right lacked any sophisticated model of federal autonomy, even such as can
be found emanating from the Lombard League's theorists. Instead, the (self-evident)
statement that "Every large state is almost bound to contain within it a series of
micro-economies differing appreciably from each other" (5.6.1) was followed by no
exploration of the relevance to the intended Assembly.
The second part of the document was devoted to the question of how to concoct a
Constitutional Convention which could put the elite stratum back in their rightful
places. Formulae proposing differing combinations of MPs, councillors (eyes of newt!)
and church officials were proposed. And this was indeed what was established, albeit
without participation by the Conservative Party or by the SNP at party level.
The Convention staggered along, bolstered by occasional meeting in the great halls of
state. The intention had been to seek plebicital support by organising a referendum.
But perhaps the one lesson which had been learned from 1979 was the ease with
which their pretensions to represent "the nation" could evaporate if put to the test; in
fact, the referendum never took place. In "normal" circumstances it would probably
have died a death, but the politicians were haunted by fear of the apparently

4"The Myth of the Great Nation", 1987 in Telos 90

 5

ascendant SNP, under the influence of Jim Sillars' impatience.

So, like a failing newspaper, the Convention was relaunched. On St.Andrews Day 1990
they presented their conclusions, in a document called Towards Scotland's Parliament. In his
commentary, Canon Kenyon Wright, a leading light of the Convention, proclaimed that
it "will give new hope to Scotland and to many far beyond, of a new form of
democracy, which is fully participative and not just representative." Of course, the
document contained no such ideas, unless one counts a bland set of electoral house
rules: "that it produces results in which the number of seats for various parties is
broadly related to the numbers of votes cast for them..., that it ensures, or at least
takes effective positive action to bring about, equal representation of men and women,
and encourages fair representation of ethnic and other minority groups;... that it
preserves a link between the member and his/her constituency;... that the system is
designed to place the greatest possible power in the hands of the electorate". It hardly
takes a lawyer to point out what poor insubstantial stuff this is. How, then could True
Believers like Bernard Crick describe this and the preceding Claim of Right to be "truly
on a level with the great pamphlets of the American and French Revolutions" 5?
English will-to-believe
At the end of 1988, various celebrities, retired judges and left-liberal figures launched
Charter 88, a campaign for renewal of the British State's institutions. The Scottish
question was given some prominence: in the 3rd paragraph, right in the middle of a
general diagnosis of the slippage of liberties, there suddenly appears a sentence
complaining that "Scotland is governed like a province from Whitehall".
As a campaign, Charter 88 lacks strategy and depth, despite its proclamation that "To
make real the freedoms we once took for granted means for the first time to take
them for ourselves". It therefore needed to boost developments elsewhere in order to
appear to be going somewhere. The Scottish question was seen as something
essentially external which could nonetheless force an agenda of constitutional change.
Regular editorials and boosting articles appeared in the New Statesman & Society
(then functioning as the Charter 88 house-journal): for example, Sarah Benton
proclaimed that "Scotland's ferment is generating ideas for more user-friendly political
structures"6.
Similarly, the fast-decomposing Communist Party, in its draft manifesto for the 1990s
proclaimed the Constitutional Convention to be the most striking expression of
imaginative opposition to "Thatcherism". Political representation was uncomplicated
for the CP, who showed basic arithmetic skills in adding up membership figures to
announce that the Convention represented "80% of the Scottish people through their
institutions and organisations"7.
The willingness to embrace shadows stretched across the liberal-left. David Marquand
admired the Convention's "roots in the autonomous institutions of a civil society on the
march" and celebrated the Scots' ability to "fashion a participatory constitution in a
participatory manner".8
Scottish will-to-believe
The situation among Scottish supporters was more complex, and involved fewer
illusions about the social forces involved (but equal illusions about the strength of
popular support). Tom Nairn described the Claim of Right as "a magisterial repudiation
of the British constitution by elements of the indigenous elite" 9. For him, though, it

5New Statesman 7/12/90

6New Statesman 7/7/89
7Manifesto For New Times, p.12
8Guardian, 28/2/92
9Guardian, 1/4/89
 6

opened a possibility to destroy Britain's "strange simulacrum of democracy".

Canon Wright expressed the fears of his social stratum when he talked of "a
contemporary reality of increasingly centralised authority, with its erosion of all
alternative bases of community power and of the traditional institutions which have
been the foundations of Scottish identity and values." 10
Neal Ascherson acknowledged the role of corporatism in structuring Scottish society: a
"densely-woven mat of patronage and clientship whose threads almost all lead directly
or indirectly back to the State."11 However, the patron-client relationship would adjust
and survive a transition from the older corporatism to the modern Keynesian
nationalism whose prospect seems to excite Ascherson.
Missing that point, other interest groups designed their own turrets for the assembly's
castle in the sky. Scottish feminists produced their Woman's Claim of Right; the ex-
Maoist Workers' Party of Scotland at least recognised the narrowness of a debate
whose most radical proposition appeared to be the use of proportional representation
to choose between rival bands of political careerists and instead advocated computer
democracy. The mania for decision-based politics was well under way.
If any of them had noticed the Convention's lack of legitimacy, they kept quiet about
it. Later, in the post-mortems, Jim Ross, part-author of the Claim of Right
acknowledged that there had been "little more than token endeavour" 12 to establishing
legitimacy. There had been no referendum. All that was tangible was the apparent
opinion poll support - for independence mind, not for the convention - and the support
of the Scottish people "through their institutions". Which does not a movement make.
But at the time, the Convention supporters continues to talk-up their child's
achievements. Isobel Lindsay, the Convention Convener, a leading SNP member and
professional lecturer, listed the parties and interest groups who were participating in
the Convention and described it as "a classic example of civil society at work" 13.
This was echoed by media pundits stuck in the whirl of circular reasoning. The Scottish
media were infatuated with the Constitutional Quadrille and had given it saturation
coverage; it had so much coverage that it must be the issue of popular concern;
therefore, the media were practising a new kind of "tele-democracy". To quote Pat
Kane, they had "laid the ground of self-understanding that had to be transmuted
eventually into a popular concern with power and democracy". He claimed there was
"a general elision between political and cultural representation: that cultural autonomy
has been a crucial substratum for political autonomy" 14.
Spring 1992
So as the spring 1992 general election approached, there were two main strands
ostensibly operating against the status quo.
1. The maximalist strand identified with the SNP, despite the party showing
different faces to its urban and rural constituencies. The Sillarsite
programme was based on a now-or-never apocalypsism - Scotland would
grasp its own future if sufficient SNP MPs were elected.
2. The constitutionalist strand seemed to see the election as providing the
plebicite which would lead to a new political settlement based on the
Constitutional Convention. David Steel had the role of prime-minister-in-
waiting. Bizarrely for a project which had begun from dissatisfaction with

10Towards Scotland's Parliament

11Independent on Sunday 16/9/90
12Scotland on Sunday, 16/8/92
13New Left Review 191
14The Guardian, 6/2/92
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the electoral system, the grounds for electoral success or failure were
vague and ultimately rested on a diminution of the number of
Conservative MPs. That was assumed to be likely, because their support
lay constant in the low 20% range, and a wipe-out was even anticipated.

The ground work had been lamentable. No Tory seats were lost (which, by similar
bizarre rules, was presented as a plebicital success for the status quo) and by 3am on
10th April, the edifice of the Constitutional Convention was collapsing. Canon Wright
spluttered his way through election-night interviews, unable to suggest where the
Convention could go now. Within weeks, the faces at the top of the Scottish political
class were changing: out went Malcolm Bruce, the Liberal-Democrat leader, judged to
be too closely associated with the Convention, out went Charles Gray, convenor of the
massive Strathclyde Regional Council. On the maximalist side, Jim Sillars again retired
hurt, decrying the Scots as "90 minute patriots".
Outer Layer
So what lessons were learned from the Constitutional Convention debacle? Nothing
that went to core questions of the legitimacy of political representation. Instead the
lessons were presented as matters of conduct:
• Isobel Lindsay's assessment is a particularly clear example: "Whatever its
other faults, the SNP has been non-violent, constitutional and non-racist.
Like the other opposition parties and campaigning groups in Scotland, it
has tried to channel the substantial frustration which exists here into
positive political activity. There was no violence in Scotland over the poll
tax which was not the case in the south. Credit should be given for this
commitment to the democratic political process despite the unfairness of
the system".15 Moderate progress within the bounds of the law.
• Others returned to ritual invocations of unity, for example in an article in
Labour Research which resorted once more to listing the trade unions
whose conferences had endorsed the Convention documents. The article
tries to concoct an optimism about a "strength of feeling that... has seen
thousands of people on the streets calling for self-government and a new
political unity for all opposition parties".16
Little by way of reappraisal has been heard from the professors and civil society
theorists. Tenure means never having to say you're sorry.
Survival of Tradition
It is arguable that, just as one would not base a discussion of football tactical theory
around the antics of Ally's Tartan Army in Argentina in 1978, little can be read into the
crumbling of the Convention's overblown pretensions. On the contrary, what occurred
in Scotland, guileless as it was, and because of that lack of guile, did show up the
contours of modern politics better than most adventures.
As mentioned earlier, the Convention-al position, by its naming, by its backward
references to the 1707 Union, showed a concern for history which stretches right back
to the beginning of the modern age. There was a perception of unfinished business
dating back a remarkably long time. The 18th century continues to raise controversy.
How could a nation which had been reduced to famine and bankruptcy bring forth the
Scottish Enlightenment and then the beginnings of economic development in the
space of one lifetime, a lifetime which propagandists would see as a time of repeated
national humiliation? These questions continue to be reanalysed by professional

15Letter in The Guardian, 19/5/92

16Devolution: The Chance of Unity in the June 1992 issue of Labour Research
 8

historians. But not by the Convention apologists, for whom these are just
inconveniences. The parliament was suspended - fact. That remains, and the task in
another time of crisis, at the time of decline of the industrial society which began to
ascend in the 18th century, is to put it back into sitting.
This is where we can become more contentious in drawing lessons from the Assembly
debacle. Politics experiences a continued crisis but avoids placing its own role in
question. Alasdair MacIntyre has written that "What the Enlightenment made us for
the most part blind to... is a conception of rational enquiry as embodied in tradition". 17
This blind-spot was a striking feature of all progressive thought as it played out its role
as accomplice of capitalism. And it is this blind-spot which allows and requires social
mediation by the New Class. Politics is the classical field for such intervention. As in
Scotland, so elsewhere.
We have still not escaped from the currents of a stream of history which eroded and
then broke-up the old empires, whose cohesion was based merely on power, and
replaced them with the apparently natural identity of state with nation. I'll quote the
dodgy Miglio again in this context (if only because he is one of the few to recognise it):
"States have not been produced by nationalities but, on the contrary, by the prolonged
authoritarian exercise of political power which homogenised those who were governed
and made them into a nation".18
From statecraft based on aristocratic intrigue came politics based on "rational"
representation of socio-economic forces: the age of the individual, of democracy. This
stream placed 19th century radicals literally on the same side of the barricades as
nationalists. Intellectuals escape from what appeared to be the suffocation of
conformity through the medium of modernity. Bakunin is, of course, someone capable
of holding several apparently-contrary positions. Basing myself on the first appendix to
"Statism and Anarchy", despite his distrust of raising science to the status of a religion
(or at least scientists to the priest-status), there is, nonetheless, a faith in the wider
idea of progress. I don't want to degenerate into cod-psychology (especially with
Bakunin who has suffered much from such interpretations of his life and motivations)
but something of his own position in breaking from the family community echoes in his
striking denunciation of the mir in terms of patriarchy, the rule of the father's law.
Attractive to modern ears as that early example of neo-feminism might be, it begs
questions on how the activity conforming to "rationalist" decision-making came to
supplant tradition-based activity ("rules-of-thumb"). And while Bakunin does stress
that "popular life, popular development, popular progress belong to the people
themselves" and that this is "the accumulation of experience and thought transmitted
from generation to generation" (p205), specialist roles are allocated to the insecure
and radicalised over-educated young, the intellectual proletariat.
So controversies over party versus federal forms, vanguard versus popular initiative
played across the field. But overall, radicalism was progressive; like the forces of
capitalism it viewed tradition's duties and mutual obligations as ties of bondage to be
overcome. An unattainable universalism ("The workers have no country") coexisted
with really-existing political practice within the democratic nation-states won by (or in
the process of being won by) national liberation struggles.
In our times, radicals have continued to acknowledge the principle of "the right of
nations to self-determination", as did the authors of the Claim of Right (6.5). That
principle has brought paralysis in the face of problematic situations such as in Israel,
Ireland, or Bosnia. (Some years ago, in an article on State and Nationality in Palestine, Akiva
Orr contrasted the practical value of a principle of "separation of nationality from the
state".)

17"Whose Justice? What Rationality?" p7

18"The Myth of the Great Nation", 1987, in Telos 90
 9

In 1976, in a Bratach Dubh pamphlet concluding that anarchists should support

national liberation struggles (while trying to realise federal and libertarian organisation
within the areas of struggle), Alfredo Bonnano utilises material from Front Libertaire to
reconstruct an ethnicity resulting from colonialism, which can then support his
conclusion: "Ethnic culture.. is of those who, in a given group suffer the same
exploitation. Ethnic culture is class culture and for this reason is revolutionary
culture..." This ends in the old refrain "The decisive struggle to be carried out must be
a world-wide class struggle of exploited against exploiters".
Bringing matters back to the Scottish Question, I'd like to discuss how anarchist
attitudes have become implicated, admittedly to a lesser degree than many politicos,
in the morass. In the 1970s, the SNP slogan was "It's time for self-government". Those
who had coined that slogan obviously intended it to remain at a governmental level,
but it did raise the idea that it could be subverted, that the principle was equally
applicable at neighbourhood, at workplace level. In such a way, it was seen as
compatible with the Take-over the City overall thrust of campaigning inspired by the
Italian events. In the Scottish context, despite the hope that self-managerial ideas
were in the air, the strategy had nothing like the success which it had in Italy. When
looking back on such a campaign, the temptation is to ascribe its failure to voluntarist
factors - lack of numbers, lack of will. Quite possibly, it is equally due to the specific
Italian circumstances which had led to the theory of the "mass worker" - which had
also been a factor omitted from the Scottish reading of the strategy.
So, at the time, there was a tendency to avoid the "nationalism is always reactionary"
response typical of the ultra-left and hope that there were positive elements implicit.
This did have the virtue of avoiding the ethnic twisting of the Front Libertaire
approach, the attempt to invent the particular from the supposedly universal. Where
the hopes were far too high was that politics, even the politics of "self-government" or,
for that matter "self-management", remained wedded to the separation of deed from
decision, and that separation always allows the mediators to practise their
"ventriloquism", talking on behalf of essential and absent archetypical groups.
Coming right up to the present, at the very start I mentioned the session on the
Scottish Question at the Glasgow conference in May. That was a curious affair. Not the
least reason is that in recent years what we might call the libertarian area has
widened in such a way that it can be inclusive of some whose anti-party stance is
based on disgust with the really-existing parties. So one of the introductory talks at the
session was by an academic who tends to join, leave and form parties (most recently a
Scottish Socialist Party).
But there were also long-standing anarchists there who were obviously sympathetic to
the SNP, one having explicitly voted that way in April 1992, in the hope of change.
There were others, too, who were basically taking a Nationalist alignment, for
example, having urged people to attend the demonstration at the European heads of
state conference in Edinburgh last year a demonstration which provided the SNP with
a show of strength. Hoping for change by proxy, in the absence of something better.
Nothing came of the Convention, whatever the tide of history supposedly running in
the regionalist direction. The Convention was an expression of these regionalist trends
and demonstrably operated sectional interests as if they were a general interest. In
itself, it was also inclusive of other tendencies which can be regarded as "regionalist" -
the "rainbow coalition" of supposed essences whose expression guarantees political
authenticity today.
Legitimacy continues to be a problem. Regionalisms of all kinds seem to offer grounds
on which authenticity can be recreated and re-enacted. They offer new opportunities
for "ventriloquism" by professional politicians and administrators, speaking on behalf
of their chosen constituency of the oppressed. But the attempt to juggle with these
 10

conflicting interests at the centre implodes, giving legislation which manages to be

both overbearing and incompetent. And legitimacy still eludes the managers: whether
dismissed (the Scots' cowardice in their cumulative voting pattern in April 1992) or
condemned (the Isle of Dogs), the old category of reaction awaits those who fail to
conform with the managerial enlightenment. So liberal politics regenerates itself as
programmes of education, guidance, and (worse) therapy (in the specialist's "We are
only coming to understand..." talk of oppression). Authenticity cannot be found in the
programmatic. It exists in the traditional rules-of-thumb of the lifeworld as they
attempt to resist managerial incorporation. In that sense, managerialism with a human
face has no more to offer us than John Major's safe havens did the Iraqis.

Talk given at History Workshop 27, Leeds Metropolitan University, 21 November 1993