The book is about what role writers and intellectuals played in Scottish devolution, and particularly the idea that they exercised some kind of leadership role; that Scottish writers and the Scottish intelligentsia applied pressure to the political system from outside the political system and transformed the constitution. That sounds outlandish, but it’s an orthodoxy in literary studies.

Exactly, this whole idea that writers made Holyrood possible and that Scottish parliamentary democracy is an extension of cultural democracy. So the period after the ’79 referendum is when, according to [literary critic] Cairns Craig, there was a spontaneous declaration of cultural independence where people in Scotland decided that notwithstanding the failure of the referendum, the fact that there was no Scottish Assembly, they were going to behave as though Scotland and Scottish culture in particular had a higher degree of autonomy. So in this prefigurative way you make it real through your actions. There’s quite a bit of truth to that. Where I become a bit more sceptical is seeing the relationship between Scottish culture and Scottish politics through that frame. In my view you can’t understand the political developments which lead to Scottish devolution if you leave outside the frame, as is often the case, electoral politics. And you have to go back to the late ’60s and early ’70s to understand why devolution happened. It wasn’t because of poets or writers, in a nutshell.

That’s true, but it’s a narrative that suits everybody. If you were a political scientist and you were trying to explain why Scotland had a parliament in 1999 when it didn’t have one in 1979, culture would probably not be right at the top of your list. You’d be looking at a quite dreary, at times quite cynical political process in which the Labour party was eventually persuaded that its own interests lay in the area of devolution. That’s really the turning point in mid 1974. Devolution’s a big deal and it seems to need a big explanation. And the cultural explanation suits both the cultural intelligentsia who are claiming a certain kind of leadership of power through understanding recent history that way, but it also suits the political parties and operators who know the dreary, slow and somewhat ugly process through which devolution was actually delivered. That is not a glowing and inspiring tale, but the story of writers and artists channelling popular feeling, moving ahead of the politicians, acting as a kind of vanguard, that’s a much more appealing story, and it doesn’t really conflict with the interests of either the Labour party or the SNP. It kind of suits everyone.

In the book I try to explore parallel stories of devolution, and the story that is familiar in Scottish cultural studies is the dream, where writers and artists recover democratic agency and cultural self-knowledge. They make Scotland want to be and know itself as Scotland. That paves the way for a distinctively Scottish politics, it wins a consensus for Scottish devolution. Self-government is the main theme not only of national politics but national culture. That’s a persuasive story up to a point and you can read a lot of Scottish writing, Scottish art, through that prism pretty comfortably. But it’s difficult to square that story with the political and electoral side of the process, which is what I’m calling the grind, which is looking from the late ’60s into the ’90s, at how exactly the party political system dealt with something it was initially extremely confused with, which was rising votes for the SNP, and how the constitutional and electoral order digested this unwelcome change and how it thought best to accommodate and hopefully neutralise what at the outset seemed quite a destabilising threat. The grind is less inspiring! 

I think [it’s] in many ways the underappreciated side of the story, of all these internal debates and disputes within the Labour party and within the PLP, right from the mid ’70s onwards. There is a set of compelling arguments about why it is dangerous for the Labour movement to give succour and recognition to a movement that is potentially going to unravel the parliamentary road to a Labour government, if not socialism. Nobody really carried the day intellectually, because it’s short term electoral strategy that kind of decides all these things. The Labour movement has engaged with constitutional questions like devolution in a more thoughtful but more haphazard way than people seem to remember now. And there is a really complicated connection between how the left thinks about constitutional reform and where Scottish nationalism ended up. The British left has found its arguments, and especially its critique of the British state, taken up by nationalists and pursued to logical conclusions. 

There’s a very short term, ad hoc quality to constitutional change in the second half of the 20th century. You can’t make a nice tidy intellectual explanation, you have to look at the nitty gritty of individual junctures and crises and elections to understand how everything has happened. In the second election of 1974, Labour performed a U-Turn and decided it was in favour of Scottish devolution and that had to be squared in a pretty brazen and cynical way to the Trade Union movement. The famous Dalintober Street fix. There’s not a very stirring democratic tale to be told of how Labour got behind devolution and how Labour understood devolution to be a democratising reform of the UK state. That was an argument that was only really floated when it needed to be floated, and then it passed into the byways of mainstream Labour thought. I think that actually is a pattern that continues right down to today, where you can see that although there is a lot of radical political economy in the Corbynist project, I’m very unclear what their view of constitutional change or reform is supposed to be. The point I’m trying to make is that there’s not really a cohesive tradition of Labourite thinking on constitutional reform you can trace right across this period. There’s a really fascinating story about how elements of the reforming tradition in Labour set their sights on the constitution under particular sorts of pressure at particular junctures. 

It’s in that period where these mainly young, almost entirely male, Scottish intellectuals are grappling with what they inherit from the [interwar] Scottish Renaissance movement and [its leader, the poet] Hugh MacDiarmid. His particular vision of Scottishness and committent to independence stands in tension with cosmopolitan currents. But what’s so interesting when you rattle off names like Edwin Morgan, Tom McGrath, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alexander Trocchi, Tom Leonard, James Kelman, these are figures who would later become fully incorporated into the idea of a unified Scottish literature as though they were all part of the same social expression, a kind of strongly grounded social and political consensus towards Scottish identity. Scottish identity is the unifying rubric through which culture and politics are drawn together through devolution, and it doesn’t take much effort to see that these people had very different investments in Scottishness from each other. 

[After 1967] lots of people are going, “something is happening in Scottish politics and culture,” but there’s a lot of ambivalence about what it might mean. And especially on the cosmopolitan cultural left, there’s quite a bit of wariness of where this sudden burst of popular feeling might be heading. The politics of the SNP are not remotely attractive to any of these people around that time. This is why it’s such a rich period: a whole bunch of totally different agendas – politically, linguistically, culturally, poetically – come in to a complicated conflict. But viewed within the national frame the conflict goes off to one side and you just see there’s an energy in Scottish society. 

I think that has been a really strong and lasting pattern in Scottish culture since the ’70s. That the cultural elite, who were never really viewed as establishment, although they clearly are, carry out and still adopt the postures of a kind of insurgent dissident faction who are outside the sphere of government. But in fact the current Scottish government, and indeed the Scottish Parliament itself, is created in their image, they gave it that origin story. And so the way in which there’s a conflation between political nationalism and cultural rebellion conceals a lot of interests and contradictions in Scottish culture.

Exactly. There’s room to be critical about that. I think on the whole the cultural sector in Scotland is proud and flattered that the Parliament continually doffs its hat to artists and cultural figures. But I think they’re not as willing as they could be to see the flipside of that, that this is a government institution that is in a sense selling itself to the polity under that flag of cultural expression. 

That’s a such a strong pattern that you see even to this day. The best and most influential example is probably the Claim Of Right, which is delivered in 1988 then published in 1989. We have what is effectively the great and the good of Scottish civil society constituting themselves as a Scottish constitutional convention, and making very grand claims on behalf of the people, although there’s really no democratic legitimacy at all to what they did. There was no consultative, let alone electoral, checking that the people were behind this. What you have was effectively the cultural, political and academic elite of Scotland, telling the British government, “we are the Scottish people, we exercise a kind of popular sovereignty, and here are our demands. We want distinctive Scottish Government, we want a parliament.” And that becomes the blueprint for devolution, but only because it has the buy in of the key political parties, except for the SNP. And that pattern whereby the cultural, the political, and academic elite in Scottish society, feels able to speak on behalf of the people, despite there being, because of their success in the establishment of a Scottish parliament, an elected Scottish government, is something I find puzzling to this day. 

This is where I think there’s a real gap opening up between reality and myth in that to a certain extent it’s plausible to think that those writers and artists of the ’80s and ’90s were leading something or at least ahead of the democratic process. But the form of Scottish nationalism that kind of went viral after the 2014 Indyref has clearly overtaken anything that emerged from the cultural intelligentsia. And so I would say the populist nationalism that you’re seeing in street movements [such as All Under One Banner] have very little in common with the earlier devolutionary movements, which were really very elite centred, let’s say. Not necessarily elitist in their ideology, but they emerged from a basically liberal democratic elite who had other forms of social capital and authority behind them, and that’s how they led this very consensual, very polite, very well-behaved movement for devolution. 

Now you have this much more populist movement that is, in terms of its political strength, significantly more powerful I would say than that legacy elite of Scottish culture who see themselves as almost the official carriers of Scottish identity, the champions of Scottishness. They have a certain cultural politics of Scottishness which is lovely and liberal and pluralist and civic in its orientation towards independence. And the populist movements are very complicated, pretty incoherent ideologically, but clearly not behind a liberal democratic programme. It’s a much more straightforward populist nationalism, and there are chauvinist and reactionary elements in it, and it’s not necessarily completely defined by them, but it is willing to go into all sorts of political directions, opportunistically if necessary, to achieve this one single-minded goal. So what you have is an earlier elite being surpassed and sidelined and made increasingly irrelevant by a mass movement, a mass movement whose loyalty, although it’s strained at the moment, is not at all to respected figures in Scottish writing and painting and music, but entirely to the vehicle for its aim, which is the SNP. Artists and intellectuals are discovering what they had somehow forgotten, which is that they’re quite marginal to mainstream Scottish society, they didn’t actually speak for the people, they were permitted within a specific context defined by electoral forces.