Well Rounded View
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The Great Divide
Journalists have a bad habit of hoarding their old cuttings. I have a friend, moving to a smaller house, who realised he would have to dispose of his volumes of ancient articles, written over a lifetime in the profession. They amounted to 1400 articles and 500,000 words.
His family advised him to dump them in a skip. “No one will ever want to read them,” they said comfortingly. He couldn’t quite bear to part with them, however, and persuaded his newspaper to put them on a memory stick. Somehow, he felt, that summed up his life. Everything reduced to a little device, half the size of a matchbox. “And no one will want to read that either,” he thought. “But at least it’s there.”
My freelance volumes don’t quite match that. They go back to the early 1990s when I first started writing for The Times after I stopped editing The Scotsman. “We want to know what’s going on in Scotland,” said my then editor, Peter Stothard. “It’s a bit of a foreign country, but we are interested.”
And so they were. I wrote regularly on matters as wide-ranging as the Scottish judicial system, the international appeal of the kilt, the future of grouse, the possible scrapping of the night sleeper to Fort William, the nationalism of Robert Burns, and the prospects for devolution. I even imagined what a future Scottish Parliament might be like. I posited George Robertson (now Lord Robertson of Port Ellen) as leader of the Scottish Labour Party, and Ian Lang (Lord Lang of Monkton) for the Tories, with Nicholas Fairbairn and Donald Findlay on the back benches. OK, but I got David Steel as Presiding Officer right.
In those days I sometimes squeezed three articles a week on Scotland into the main edition of the paper. There was an apparently limitless appetite.
Then came devolution, and something odd happened. The interest dried up. From a point where almost every offering was accepted, the agenda moved on. Scotland was yesterday’s story, and it became increasingly difficult to interest London in anything other than the odd quirky piece about a single teacher school in the Hebrides, or the revival of an ancient haggis-throwing competition in the depths of Dumfriesshire.
This is not just about The Times, of which I am proud to be Scotland Editor. Most other national papers experienced the same phenomenon.
Scotland had chosen its own destiny, and from now on it could look after itself. Scottish stories were routinely dumped for main editions. Only occasionally – the Glasgow terror attack, Peter Tobin, Tommy Sheridan, the Lockerbie bombing – did it impinge on the national consciousness. So far had Scotland drifted off the map, that it sometimes appeared that a small earthquake in Chile (no one hurt) was of greater interest in London than the wholesale reform of the Scottish legal system, or the election of a minority government at Holyrood.
I find this one of the more unexpected, and disheartening, outcomes of devolution, and I cannot quite explain it. That Scotland should have disappeared into a distant mist for most people south of the border is not just a loss for those who still believe in a united kingdom, it is a diminution of our culture. Take poetry. The death of Edwin Morgan, one of the commanding literary figures of the late 20th Century, meant little in the English media, not because his poetry was under-rated by the critics or his fellow-poets - “his courage as a man and his constancy as a poet only seemed to increase with age,” said Seamus Heaney - but because he was Scottish. Save for the Edinburgh Festival, little of Scottish cultural life impinges on the British scene. A political revolution in a whole range of social policy north of the border takes place without any of the lessons being noticed, let alone learnt. The current debate on proportional representation at Westminster is conducted as if it was entirely new to Britain. The fact that it has been practised at Holyrood for more than ten years comes as a surprise to most commentators. Legal institutions like the Children’s Panel - way ahead of anything in England - are ignored. Minimum pricing in alcohol, fiercely debated, if rejected in Scotland, is now being introduced in England, but the arguments are conducted as if they were entirely new. One could go on.
This is not meant to be a Scottish whinge. In many ways it is refreshing that we can have a national debate here without having to heap the blame on Westminster when things go wrong, or refer final decisions to the Commons or the Lords because that is where power lies. We are a healthier democracy, in my view, because politics has been decentralised, and no one would wish to reverse a constitutional experiment which is still evolving.
But I cannot help thinking that something has been lost in the process; that the diversity of a United Kingdom, with which writers, politicians and the public have been familiar for centuries, has been reduced as a result, to be replaced by a more narrow, metropolitan-centred view of the world. I believe that is a loss to us all.
Britain has become a diminished country, and the semi-detached State of Scotland a lesser place.
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Tods Murray recently hosted a Times Scotland Business Forum, chaired by Magnus Linklater, considering the future of renewable energy in Scotland. Click here to find out more
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