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National Fever/ Page NATIONAL FEVER. The "Scottish Question" was promoted as a central issue during the Spring 1992 UK election campaign. Nothing came of it. However, that failure may actually increase its wider significance as a failure of politics. During the months prior to the election, the entire liberal-left anticipated change to the government of Scotland. This would be a break expressed through the normal channels. It would restore a continuity by throwing off a foreign yoke. It would express a popular will discontented with the available means of expression. How could such a consensus hold together? Previous articles in Here & Now have discussed the Scottish Constitutional Convention, a conglomerate of clerics, lawyers, local government bureaucrats and political bosses. This modernised Estates General brought together those whose pivot is the State, but who hid behind loose statements about the Scots being more community-oriented than the English (a certain entry for a 1992 Dictionary of Received Ideas). By reducing the developments in international capitalism through the 1980s to the imposition of "Thatcherism" on a people who didn't want it, those sectors who prospered in the corporatism of the discarded postwar settlement hoped to carve a niche for the 1990s. Theirs was a conservative defence of sectional interests against Tory neo-liberal radicalism. But the Convention's legitimacy within Scotland was precarious. It represented a "party for moderate progress within the bounds of the law", which needed forceful presence from both the independence position of the Scottish National Party and the campaign against the Community Charge, but representing neither. This was despite the wild projections of its popularity to audiences outside Scotland, boosted by those who hoped that Scottish people might push forward their own programme. Convention architect Jim Ross now criticizes it for putting "little more than token endeavour" into trying to establish legitimacy. (Scotland on Sunday, 16/8/92). The Conventioneers had failed to organise their own planned referendum, but carried on choosing the wallpaper, confident that the 1992 election would install them in office. Repeating past mistakes, David Steel once more went home to "prepare for government". In the event, they were first hit by a virus unleashed by media groups, not least for their own ends. The launch of the redesigned Scotsman newspaper coincided with its publication of an opinion poll showing apparent 50% support for Scottish independence. The conversion of The Sun to nationalism was more controversial, whether the motivation was populist or was calculated to enhance Conservative electoral chances by splitting the opposition. These media actions laid out the body politic for inspection and speculation. The Scotsman followed this up with a series of excruciatingly worthy probes into the working of Scottish autonomy. Meanwhile, the Convention fell into disarray faced with the swelling inflammation. Prominent members conceded that they had lost the initiative in the months of procedural discussion. The Scotsman group also organised a showpiece public debate between the Scottish party leaders, a supine simulation of debate: eyes forward and silence for the four stars on stage with a few questions after the set-piece speeches. Unpromising base material transformed by the apprentice sourcerers of the press: "The Scotsman's Great Debate - four Scottish party leaders hammering out the political options in Edinburgh's Usher Hall - was heard by hundreds of thousands live on radio and watched by even more on BBC Scotland's edited highlights..." (Pat Kane in The Guardian, ,6/2/92) "Hammering out the political options" has a tone of the craftsmanlike, a feeling of something tangible being beaten into shape. History was assumed to be on the side of the constitutionalists. The Disruption in the former Soviet bloc has encouraged intellectuals' beliefs that they express a general interest. Positioned around local media centres, they began to see regional tv opt-out programming as providing something other than lip-service to public interest provisions. For Kane, the media "have been practising this kind of tele-democracy north of the border for years, arguably laying a ground of self-understanding that had to be transmuted eventually into a popular concern with power and democracy..." . He announces "a general elision between political and cultural representation; that cultural autonomy has been a crucial substratum for political autonomy". If Dr. Kane's examination produced an over-optimistic bill of health, it was partly due to a confusion with the state of his group practise. The past decade has indeed brought a form of "cultural autonomy", in that material success for Kane, Deacon Blue and Runrig within Scotland would have been unlikely before then. But any valuation should take account of the particular market segments to which they play, in a not dissimilar way to big-gesture groups elsewhere, as well as the extent to which the breweries (whose political allegiances are well known) have formed and re-formed the vocabulary and concept of home to which they refer. Why should the political allegiances of that group of flag-wavers be given any more credence than Moira Anderson (signatory of an advertisement supporting the constitutional Union) or the more reticent Jimmy Shand? Nor was accomodation with constitutionalism limited to the liberal-left. Such inflamation is the everyday ailment of revolutionary groups, in the absence of real social movement. When the infection speads to the liberal-left, revolutionaries' immune systems even succumb to belief in a "national revolution". For example, the articleScot Free inClass War sought nourishment under the constitutional froth. It too had to be selective about what it found."In Scotland, the posh Scots of Glasgow and Edinburgh speak in strange, strangulated accents and send their kids south to English boarding schools" .True, some aristocratic children are sent to English public schools,but the private day schools of Glasgow and Edinburgh are more fertile sources of future leaders of the Faculty of Advocates, etc. The writer follows the tradition when radicals try to deal with nationalisms, and tries to export the ruling class in a way which can render them less Scots than the rest of us - a sleight-of-hand always needed when creating the illusion of national interest. In the pre-election New Left Review (no.191) Robin Blackburn scavenged around what were anticipated to be "The Ruins of Westminster". He emerged holding aloft the unique failure of the British New Left to institutionalise itself, a victim of the terrible British political system. But where, unless in a few tenured academics' seminar rooms, can the vibrant and victorious New Left be found? Presumably not in France, Germany or Italy. GLC socialism may even be one of that New Left's highest actual and possible achievements. The NLR presented the left-liberal consensus around electoral reform as encouraging diversity rather than conformity and hoped that it might provide a safe haven for shell-shocked socialists. Isobel Lindsay, the convenor of the Scottish Constitutional Convention was allowed to roam freely over the space claimed by the Convention. Once again, the list of parties and interest groups vouched for the Convention's legitimacy, and Lindsay could rest assured that "the project has been a classic example of civil society at work". What is this "civil society"? It is less the formal and informal life-experiences of the population than particular interest groups oriented around the State. David Marquand admired the Convention's "roots in the autonomous institutions of a civil society on the march" and the Scots ability to "fashion a participatory constitution in a participatory manner" (in The Guardian, 28/2/92). But "civil society at work" amounted to almost nothing. Its crutch was electoral (not through referendum but through party consensus) and needed one or two Conservative MPs to lose their marginal seats. They didn't, and by the early hours of 10th April, the edifice of the Constitutional Convention was crumbling. Before the election, suspicion of hyperbole was a matter of belief and argument, but a post-mortem is obviously now required. The Convention's pretense was to present itself as representing the people of Scotland "through their institutions". This was accepted across the spectrum of non-Conservative political parties and a stratum of celebrities came to believe in such a tele-democracy in which their voices supplied the self-understanding. Long-distance radicalism had repeatedly mistaken cadres for the general population (such as the vicarious support for the Sandinista Stalinists). Now the fatted calf had being prepared for the returning radical sons and daughters. A warm light in the window beckoned them home for their appointment with history. "A false radicality had scattered us into centrifugal spaces; a vital leap will bring us back to reality. Everything becomes real and takes on meaning again once this spectre of historical unreality, this sudden collapse of time and the real, is conjured away". (Baudrillard ,Fatal Strategies,) The Convention play had depended on position. Now the positions began to drop away. Within weeks, many of the Convention cast were "resting". Out went Malcolm Bruce (Scottish Liberal Democrat leader). Out went Charles Gray (Strathclyde Regional Council convenor). Labour splinters joined with the SNP in Scotland United - once more, the presentation of unity rather than diversity. Several weeks after the election, Lindsay could be found trying to salvage something of the failed promise: "Whatever its other faults, the SNP has been non-violent, constitutional and non-racist. Like the other opposition parties and campaigning groups in Scotland, it has tried to channel the substantial frustration which exists here into positive political activity. There was no violence in Scotland over the poll tax which was not the case in the south. Credit should be given for this commitment to the democratic political process despite the unfairness of the system" (Letter in The Guardian, 19/5/92) The article Devolution: The Chance of Unity in the June 1992 issue of Labour Research. projects itself on the facade of unity. Lack of unity is portrayed as the reason why the 1979 referendum failed. (In so doing, the article falsely projects Conservatives in 1979 as being "firmly against the idea of a Scottish Assembly" ). Clutching at unity as a chance for recovering position, the article degenerates into a list of trade unions which have endorsed the Convention documents. Optimism then lies with the "strength of feeling that... has seen thousands of people on the streets calling for self-government and a new political unity for all opposition parties". Does all this matter? Does it amount to no more than a frenzy whose passing leaves the sufferer wiser? However, the loss of an illusion tends to take the form of contempt rather than disenchantment. Failed by their compatriots, the patriot tendency may deplore others for finding something better to do than join the 5,000 on a Scotland United march. Like the Convention before it, Scotland United survives only as long as its demand is ignored. It is almost certain that no constitutional referendum could produce a definite consensus. As long as the demand is not granted, Scotland United may appear as a rallying point for particular campaigns, for example against water privatisation. But for as long as "the distinctive Scottish experience of citizenship" can be written in terms of "the law, the kirk and the educational tradition" (John Forsyth in The Guardian, 7/2/92), constitutionalism remains a search for the good side of political representation, a number play which fails to add up but succeeds in hiding sectional interests. From Here & Now 13 1992 - No copyright