THE OPEN CITY When the mood of the music changes, the walls of the city shake. Late 1960s slogan, attributed to Plato INTRODUCTION The first step to a better future is imagining one. Glasgow 2020 has been a practical experiment to find an alternative to the closed city by opening up Glasgow’s future to the mass imagination of its citizens. This chapter shares the storylines generated for the future of Glasgow and explores what it and other cities can learn from the process. It then asks how bottom-up storylines can be turned into action and begins to map

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Changin’ Scotland No.  10  March 16-18th 2007 Phil Hanlon on health and well-being, Peter Lamont on the psychology of magic, Zosia Fraser and Ola Witkowska on the Polish experience in Scotland, David Pratt on the Palestinian intifada, Neil MacKay on ‘the war on terror’, the film ‘Shooters’ about young people in the Highlands with Jenny McBain. Music from the Burach Band and with an extra attraction on the Thursday nite Michael Marra.

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After Blair, After Socialism and the Search for a New Story Gerry Hassan Introductory Chapter in Gerry Hassan (ed.), After Blair: Politics after the New Labour Decade, Lawrence and Wishart in association with Compass 2006 The historian’s puzzle is why the Labour Party lasted so long: what could more perfectly illustrate the principle of social inertia? Like democracy itself, the Labour Party was a reaction against the feudal tradition. It arose out of the old working class as it was called, which had such solidarity because its name belied it: it was not so much class as caste. Michael

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Labour, Britishness and concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ Gerry Hassan Chapter in Gerry Hassan (ed.), After Blair: Politics after the New Labour Decade, Lawrence and Wishart in association with Compass 2006 Introduction The Labour Party for most of its history has not thought very much about the concepts of ‘nation’, ‘state’ and Britishness. It has tended to assume these as a given and unproblematic. Labour has never mounted a plausible and persuasive counter-story of what the UK and idea of ‘Britain’ means. Instead, it has adopted a narrative of the British nation and state which has been shaped by the

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Changin’ Scotland No. 9  November 3-5th 2006 Bernard Crick on multiculturalism, Rob Brown on independence, Sandy Campbell and Lorraine Mann on young people, Peter Gill on the AIDS pandemic, David Pratt on the Middle East and Neil Mackay on ‘the war on terror’.

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Changin’ Scotland No. 8  March 17-19th 2006 Iain Macwhirter, Gerry Hassan and Carol Craig on the Scots and imagination, David Hayman on Afghanistan, Dylan Evans on the politics of modernism and utopia, Michael Russell on culture and writing plus a film from Camcorder Guerillas on Dungavel Detention Centre.

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The Next Left: A Transatlantic Conversation Jonathan Freedland and Michael Walzer Published in Gerry Hassan (ed.), After Blair: Politics after the New Labour Decade, Lawrence and Wishart in association with Compass 2006. London May 23rd 2005 Dear Michael, In the Clinton-Blair years, progressive parties in Britain and the US joined forces, trading electoral techniques and even the ‘New’ philosophy that saw them shed unpopular positions on welfare, crime etc in order to become more electable: New Labour, New Democrats. In Britain that approach has weathered better than it did in the US: Labour is still in government while Democrats

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Changin’ Scotland No. 7  November 6th-8th 2005 Michael Fry on the Highland Clearances, Bruce Kent, Helen Steven and Ellen Moxley on the politics of the peace movement, the Edinburgh young peoples’ film ‘We Wont Get Fooled Again’ about the G8 Summit,  the film ‘How the West was Won’ on US politics and music from the Centre of Excellence for Traditional Music in Plockton.

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Changin’ Scotland No. 6  March 18-20th 2005 Christopher Harvie  on contemporary Scotland, Lesley Riddoch on Africa, Ruaraidh Nicholl, Gerry Hassan, Carol Craig and Alex Bell on Scotland 2020, Michael Russell chairing the Sunday ‘open’ session, plus the film ‘The Power of Good’ about the life of Nicholas Winton. Music from Nancy Nicolson.

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'an enticing mixture of fiction and commentary in the model of a 'European' cultural production'. Richard Parry, Scottish Affairs Scotland 2020: The Power of Hope Gerry Hassan and Eddie Gibb A unique feature of human consciousness is its inclusion of the future. Expectations strongly affect all aspects of human functioning. . . . Hope inspires a feeling of well-being and is a spur to action. Hopelessness, the inability to imagine a tolerable future, is a powerful motive for suicide. Jerome Frank, ‘The role of hope in psychotherapy’ (1) Introduction Scotland is a nation of narrators

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