Dreaming of Post-War Scotland: How do we tell the full complex stories of ourselves?
Bella Caledonia, 8 August 2025
Gerry Hassan
The Invisible Spirit, Surgeon’s Hall, until 9 August; the Space Venue 45, 11, 13-16 August; the Space, Niddry Street, 18-23 August.
Make It Happen, Edinburgh Festival Theatre, until 9 August.
Alistair Moffat, To See Ourselves: A Personal History of Scotland since 1950, Birlinn £18.99.
The widely accepted belief that stories make a nation has become a cliché. It may be true but does not describe the kinds of stories or the storytellers – and who is included and excluded from prevailing narratives.
This is as true of Scotland as anywhere, and of post-war Scotland. Yet while we may think we know the defining stories of the past eighty years, this was not a homogeneous era and has gone through several distinct periods. All of which is a challenge to how we understand recent times and portray them in the present.
High Hopes and Post-War Scotland
The play The Invisible Spirit – based on Kenneth Roy’s impressive book of the same name – covers Scotland during 1945-75. Written by Roy who passed away in 2018, the work attempts to cover these thirty years in less than one hour to fit Edinburgh Fringe needs: this being a condensed version of Roy’s original script, directed by Katie Jackson.
The Invisible Spirit takes the audience on a breakneck speed tour of the years from the end of the Second World War in Europe to the demise of the post-war consensus as it fractured in the mid-1970s with consequences which are still unravelling today.
It opens on VE Day in George Square, Glasgow, during Winston Churchill’s failed attempt to morph from wartime to peacetime leader. Three actors (Elaine Stirrat, Chris Alexander, Fergus John McCann) interchange constantly and seamlessly as they adopt new characters, voices and contexts to fill more than half a dozen stories that portray the scale of change across post-war Scotland.
We get newspaper headlines, media reports, murders, mining disasters, scandals and more to set the many scenes. Many of the moments chosen are well-kent which can sometimes be a disadvantage. There is reference to Winnie Ewing winning Hamilton for the SNP in 1967: a defining moment in our politics. The end point of the play features Jimmy Reid and UCS, and the famous Reid Rectoral Address at Glasgow University in 1972 warning of the cost of ‘human alienation’ – and that ‘A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings.’
This closing crescendo of the play, with Reid’s clarion call, leaves many questions unanswered. This might be alright for some, but Reid’s words have been cited so many times they have become part of the mythology of modern Scotland. And in this The Invisible Spirit isn’t quite sure what it is: it clearly isn’t myth busting, but is it mythmaking?
It is indisputably jam-packed, informative, challenging and fast paced with the three actors rising to the task of presenting so many stories and characters. Constrained by its truncated time, it condenses much into just under one hour. Overall, one is left with what feels a brave, ambitious and audacious attempt to capture our history and tell something of who and what we are. Doing so in the Edinburgh Fringe, when so much of the festival feels like it could be beamed in from a far-off non-Scottish world, almost feels like a soft act of creative subversion.
Edinburgh, Scotland and Britain’s Big Bang Banking Explosion
Fast forward a few decades and Make It Happen addresses the rise and fall of Fred Goodwin and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) in an ambitious theatrical piece. Written by James Graham, directed by Andrew Panton, this is a joint production of Dundee Rep (for which I have always had a special affection, as a Dundonian growing up on their productions) and National Theatre of Scotland, and tells a story that is Edinburgh, Scottish, UK and international in its scope.
The set designs are striking and ingenious, the intent to tell a familiar story in fresh light welcome, while an obvious political intelligence runs through the play as you would expect from someone as alert to the changing zeitgeist of recent times as writer James Graham.
It charts the meteoric rise of the Paisley accountant Fred Goodwin as he cost cuts at Clydesdale Bank, gaining the moniker ‘Fred the Shred’, before becoming the leading figure in RBS encouraged at first by George Mathewson and then unchallenged. As his reign becomes more arrogant and self-assured Goodwin is visited by the ghost of Adam Smith played by Brian Cox.
Cox hams it up as you would expect. But underpinning this is the wilful distortion of Smith’s ideas by the Thatcherite right celebrating only one part of Smith’s ideas: “the invisible hand of the market” and competition and ignoring his stress on “moral philosophy.” The caricatured Smith is the actual ghost that has endured these past few decades (as opposed to Cox’s ghost who is disgusted at this turn of events). Graham presents this as a misunderstanding of Smith by Goodwin, when it is a deliberate misreading – something true of Thatcherism, the Institute of Economic Affairs and its bastard child Trussonomics.
Gordon Brown, played by Andy Clark, along with Alistair Darling are sycophantic and cringing during Goodwin’s rise, then shocked when the RBS banker uses the cultural and legislative environment of deregulation and encouraging corporate greed to become an out of control capitalist devouring all in his path. Brown’s elemental anger at this, his adaptivity in the 2008 banking crash, and his compromised moral compass, are well-conveyed in a way they seldom are.
Fred Goodwin portrayed by Sandy Grierson is less convincing, perhaps being beyond capture. The hubris, arrogance, brutalness and addiction to power are all only hinted at or played out in miniature. Maybe Goodwin was a messanic empty vessel lacking obvious charisma. But he clearly had something and believed in something: no matter how wrong and self-destructive it was, as well as costly for millions.
This audacious play works on many levels but does not completely succeed. While the musical singsongs of Goodwin and his banking chums doing karaoke add something, the wider cast musical numbers are extraneous. More critically is the lack of definition at the core of the play. On one level it concerns the rise of the masters of the universe banking clash and how they got away with it, enabled by the likes of Brown and Darling who only realised the extent of the monsters they had helped create too late.
This is a tale for all seasons. It is an Edinburgh story and watched by a mostly Edinburgh audience in the International Festival is the equivalent of a collective therapy session. Part of the city was taken in by Goodwin’s lies and hyper-salesmanship. The mantra across the city in middle class circles was ‘this is the boom which will never burst’: a delusion self-evidently ridiculous at the time but bought into by many.
Yet is this a play about one man and one institution or an attempt to scrutinise an Edinburgh and universal story, or the limits of speculative capitalism? Or is it about the capture, misunderstanding and misselling of Adam Smith’s ideas? It is about all of these but in so doing tackles more than it can satisfactorily handle while leaving lots on which to ruminate. Nowhere is there room for touching on the uncomfortable fact that Goodwin did in a way get away with it. Brown may fulminate at one point in the play that he wanted to see Goodwin in chains, but it never happened. And no banker in the UK ever paid the price of their liberty and was put behind bars for crashing the economy.
Living with the end of Labour Scotland
These two plays cover major parts of Scotland’s history. The Invisible Spirit focuses on a particular, even insular set of stories about Scotland, while Make It Happen addresses Scotland and its connection to the global and universal.
The first explores the long story of peak Labour Scotland 1945-75, its highs, lows, ending and enduring influence, alongside human-interest stories. This is an account which still transfixes part of society – Baby Boomer Scotland – and which a large part of that generation have not moved on from. Some still in their hearts pine for normal service to return and the old ways before the rise of the SNP and breakdown of that managed society to rise again. Implicit in The Invisible Spirit is that generational story and set of now illusive hopes.
Running through The Invisible Spirit was the power of collective memories, of a generation (including the audience that go to such a show) and of Kenneth Roy and his contribution to this. It was a tribute to these and to the memory and memories of Roy: which felt very appropriate and touching and something that Scotland does not do enough of. That of course is a bigger question about Scottish culture and the lack of ambition and imagination of too many funders for too long.
Make It Happen covers more recent events and is a story we are still living with. One reviewer wrote that ‘RBS was the Darien of our age’, the disaster in Panama cited every time there is a Scottish humiliation. They described the long aftermath as leaving ‘a chastened Scotland in a troubled Britain.’ This is typical self-flagellation. The buy-in of Scotland’s middle classes to Goodwin’s illusionary utopia was aided by Scottish born politicians (Brown and Salmond cheering him on), but also by UK regulation (and lack of), banking and economics. This is not a completely Edinburgh or Scottish story; it is a universal morality play for our times.
Selective Stories of Scotland
Finally, Alistair Moffat’s book To See Ourselves: A Personal History of Scotland since 1950 covers on a wider canvas much of the same terrain as the two plays. Only more is much less. The giveaway are the words ‘personal history’ which seem to make Moffat think he can tell very selective stories with minimum research.
Moffat has written prolifically on what seems every aspect of Scotland bar sport (am I tempting fate here?). While he is a skilled writer at crafting an observation the books have come at increasing speed in recent times and in the past year we have had very concise histories of Edinburgh and Glasgow clearly aimed at the occasional buyer and tourist looking for an untaxing introduction.
To See Ourselves is not without merit at times but lacks real depth, direction or point. We are all used to non-narrative accounts now, but this comes close to lacking any point beyond putting Moffat’s everyday existence into the story of Scotland. Hence, COVID and lockdown begins when somebody phones him and gives him the tip-off about the virus. There is an unintended echo of Generation Z and the culture war belief that every issue and the entire world revolves around your experience which has led to some disastrous over-zealotry.
Events whirl past: Goodwin and RBS, the rise of the SNP and fall of Labour, at a blistering pace with no explanation; seismic events are completely ignored such as the implosion of Glasgow Rangers FC, as is for the most part football and its role in society, rugby taking up more column inches. Alex Salmond appears; Nicola Sturgeon emerges and becomes First Minister; bizarrely the text then has no place for the fall of Sturgeon as she just disappears. Instead, Moffat switches without pause to UK politics and the stories of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, and the Tory humiliation of 2024. A reader from a far-off land would be left mystified and clueless about what happened to Sturgeon and the SNP.
The section on the 2014 independence referendum is telling, bringing Moffat’s views to the fore with no filter. He was of course against independence or ‘separatism’ as he calls it; and assisted the Better Together campaign in its panic-stricken last days, working with Brown and aiding David Cameron.
There is nothing wrong in hearing a pro-union account of 2014. But this is Moffat’s gut instincts. He believes ‘the Vow’ snatched victory from the jaws of defeat (which lots of independence supporters believe and for which there is zero evidence). He sees the campaign as ‘divisive’ and ‘bad-tempered’, ‘peppered with … occasional scuffles in the streets’ and looks aghast at the prospect of independence. Anyone reading this as the sole account of 2014 would be mystified as to why 45% of Scotland voted for independence: which Moffat declares ‘an emphatic result’.
This is an inadvertently revealing book but not in the way Moffat would want. He mentions in places his upbringing on a council housing estate in Kelso, but he has not only long left that world but has no obvious feel for the everyday fabric of Scotland or empathy for the folk who struggle to make ends meet. There is a place for a better version of a book like this: in-between the meticulously researched dense history books and Ladybird Books of simple stories. This is neither of these, but it is much closer to the latter than it should be. In the words of a bookseller, this amounts to ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys: the history version’ with a void where it should have a heart and mind.
Widening the Canvas of Scotland’s Stories: It is not all about politics
Three historical accounts. All different. What do they tell us about Scotland and a history we are still living with? They point to the challenge of telling stories which transgress across different eras and periods and recounting them in another time. They point to the problem for some of coming to terms with the end of Labour Scotland 1945-75 and the managed society of the post-war consensus. They illustrate the destructive, self-mythologising power of finance capitalism and its power to spellbind, corrupt and corrode. And underline that since the 2008 banking crash the UK economic model is obviously broken with no clear alternative in sight.
This is an age of anger, charge and countercharge, alongside contestment. It is an environment which has fuelled right-wing populist nationalism, Brexit and the bitter, febrile atmosphere of the present which is only going to get more acute in the short term with some on the right openly fanning the flames of a future ‘English civil war’.
Where that leaves Scotland is an ongoing question. For some the answer is the simple obvious one of independence and escape now despite no current escape or independence plan. A constant thread in all three accounts is the belief that by emphasising the injustices of the past that they can be overcome in the future when Scotland has never been as egalitarian as many like to think.
Perhaps one of the answers is to step back and see what we have come through: from 1945, 1975, 2008, 2014. While also inviting the single story of Baby Boomer Scotland with which we have lived with so long to finally leave the stage to other new stories.
A final thought. Politics matter. But they are not everything. Other stories have an equal claim on the human imagination. Watching these two plays and reading Moffat’s book I thought where is the acknowledgement of human joy, play, fun, creativity and celebration? They were conspicuous by their absence or marginal. They are as important as the big stuff often throwing fresh light onto old stories.
Scotland needs to address some big questions about itself. But part will come from acknowledging every part of what makes us who we are, including the everyday and what some would see as small things. Now that is the kind of play and book I would like to read about modern Scotland. Let’s hope an emerging playwright, writer or novelist §is somewhere thinking along these lines.
