Scottish Independence

The Scotland of the Democratic Future: Some Tentative Lessons from Chile Gerry Hassan Della Caledonia, February 14th 2013 It has been a telling week for the contours of the future debate on whether Scotland becomes independent. Both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns contain different tones and messages within them, but what has been revealing has been the over-reach and uncompromising character of the UK Government in dealing with its pesky, upstart northern troublemaker. We shouldn’t expect anything better. The British state has increasingly become the vehicle of a narrow set of economic and political interests, introverted, obsessed with their own

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Do we want to tell a story of Scotland’s ‘Good Society’? Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, February 9th 2013 ‘We are all social democrats now’, Scots politicians might say – Salmond, Lamont, Rennie, even the occasional Tory seeking redemption. Scotland is a land imbued and shaped by social democracy, but which has spent little time or energy in defining this in terms of its philosophy, values and practice. And increasingly this matters. To Labour, social democracy has always been what it says it does from the local Labour council to Labour in government. To the SNP a catch-all populist party, social

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Lessons from Anzio: Scots do not need to cling to the wreckage of Britain Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, February 2nd 2013 Today is the 70^th anniversary of the final surrender of the last German forces at Stalingrad, the battle which militarily and psychologically dealt an irreversible blow to Hitler’s plans for world domination. Last week I was in Rome on holiday and went to commemorate the 69^th anniversary of the Anglo-American landings at Anzio, just south of the capital, the summation of which occurred a year and a half after Stalingrad. This was the week of Cameron’s big European intervention,

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Talking about the Elephant in the Room: The British State Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, January 12th 2012 ‘The Great Debate’ is away to begin. More than a year and a half of sound and fury and already tanks and troops are being mobilised and on maneouvres on both sides. There is one massive elephant in the room which nearly always goes unstated and unacknowledged, namely, the reality of the British state. For different reasons, both pro-independence and anti-independence supporters refuse to engage with the complexities and challenges of this. Pro-independence supporters do this continuously. Irvine Welsh in a piece this

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A New Scottish Democracy: A Small Nation with Big Ideas Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, January 5th 2013 The Scottish experience like most places is filled with myths and delusions about who we are and what it says about us. Unlike other places, Scotland also seems to have a deep-seated conservatism, lack of curiosity in others, and a profound insularity which sees Scotland as exceptional and unique. This spreads across the political spectrum, from complacent social democrats to safety-first nationalists and unionists who never acknowledge that in the last two decades 24 new nation states have emerged from the end of

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Scotland as an Idea and Place of Substance Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, December 29th 2012 It has been a tumultuous year, across Europe, the world, and in its own way for Scotland. It was the year that the independence referendum was agreed, of the collapse and rebirth of Rangers FC, and the continued decline of the British establishment and public trust in it. At the year’s end, the Radical Independence Conference brought together a new generation of twentysomething activists, Creative Scotland parted company with much of the arts world (and lost as a result two of its senior figures), and

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Does Scotland really want to do something about inequality? Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, December 22nd 2012 Scotland thinks and acts left. The complexity of evidence on values and policies shows that Scotland isn’t that much different from the rest of the UK. But the dominant account of Scotland is centre-left, or even left, in how it sees and positions itself, and how it votes. Such a political culture not surprisingly spends a large amount of time articulating its concerns on social justice. We see ourselves as more egalitarian and less hierarchical than our Southern neighbours and maybe even more Nordic

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Growing Up with the Idea of Independence Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, December 8th 2012 The Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s intervention this week on the case for Scottish independence attracted significant attention and comment. It has been rightly seen as a maturing moment and evolution of the debate both in content and tone, recognised by the responses of Brian Wilson in ‘The Scotsman’ and Alex Massie in ‘The Spectator’ online. Sturgeon’s intervention caused Wilson to call on politicians to ‘listen rather than talk. Listen and understand. Listen and be inspired’. Massie wrote that, ‘Almost every unionist in Scotland

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Manifesto for a Culture of Self-Determination Gerry Hassan National Collective/Open Democracy, December 5th 2012 Introduction: Scottish Politics and Language In the last few weeks people have become increasingly aware, and to some extent concerned, about the rising prevalence of a culture of abuse, insult and invective in Scottish politics around and associated with the independence referendum. There is a longer story to this, of the failure and dogma of Labour unionism, of the SNP’s adoption of command and control politics, and of an embryonic self-government movement unable so far to find full form and voice. At the same time

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What are Modern Scotland’s Three Defining Stories? Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, December 4th 2012 What are Scotland’s defining stories at this crucial point in our history? Many of our traditional accounts are suffering from exhaustion, discredited or hollowed out, from the collectivist dreams of salvation from socialism to the belief in religious redemption, both with their sense of either being damned or saved. There are arguably three pivotal accounts present at this time: the Scotland of the egalitarian impulse, the Scotland of the democratic intellect and the nation and culture of popular sovereignty. This is not the reality of contemporary

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