ALBA - Unofficial Forum

Those with power will seek to delegitimise those who challenge them. They always have, they always will. Please, please, don’t help them.

If you’re going to criticise a senior woman in politics can you go out of your way to double check that none of the words you use are words you couldn’t also use about a man? Surely by now you’ve realised that they will absolutely relish the opportunity to utterly avoid the criticism and instead turn it into a two-day Groundhog day of pseudo-sociological discourse theory.

I want to hear what Rupert Everett has to say about Scottish art. Intellectual discussion in Scotland is so rare that it needs to be protected and nourished, not suppressed. I want to hear and explore his argument more. He believes Scotland’s arts have lost their international perspective. I think they have – but not for the reason he suggests.

He seems to think art won’t get funded unless it can demonstrate its ‘Scottishness’. I instead think we’re commissioning safe but dreadfully bland ‘forced progressiveness’ which amounts to a kind of stodge of globally-interchangeable crap no-one wants to watch because it is all funded to pursue narrow sociopolitical goals rather than artistic ones.

In fact I wish with a passion that Scotland was making art about Scotland. Because producing good art which explores the specific in ways which speak to the universal is exactly, precisely what truly international art is about.

But I can’t hear any of this because instead I’m being forced to listen to icon of anti-homosexual hatred Kate Forbes, wife of leading war criminal Cherie Blair and Alison Rowat who only this week was caught up in a misogyny scandal. They think we should focus on Everett’s use of the word ‘witch’ to refer to Nicola Sturgeon and see this as very, very important. I won’t listen to these hate mongers though.

Let be rush to point out that I’m kidding to make a point. While Kate Forbes’s opinions on homosexuality are pretty awful, it’s not hatred and she is a young woman with much to say that is worth listening to. Alison Rowat is a good journalist and I’m on her side in the high heels-misogyny debate. Cherie Blair is an accomplished lawyer. She is though married to one of the world’s leading war criminals…

I would not force them to be silent based on their misdemeanours. Why are they so quick to silence others? Why does this keep happening and why do we let it? Why does the media go along with it? Why will no-one ever get back to the original question and instead spend time fighting over whether it was or was not misogyny – because yo know that’s the damned trap.

Language has to change. It always has to change. Our sense of social acceptability changes and when it does the old vocabulary is stuck describing the thing we no longer find acceptable.

We had to stop saying ‘poof’ and ‘paki’ and ‘slut’ because they were the vocabulary of a mindset almost all of us now find shaming. I have been at the front of the queue calling for this since my university days – it was the subject of one of my main dissertations.

I personally have excised almost all of this language from my vocabulary. The last big monster to slay was ‘stop crying like a wee lassie’ which is so ingrained in my culture that I am still halfway through the sentence before I remember to change it to ‘bairn’. I do still use ‘bitching’ to talk about people being unpleasant about each other because there isn’t a better alternative. But that’s about it.

So we needed to change and I certainly wouldn’t encourage anyone to say ‘witch’, but I am no longer willing to accept that it is a word so verboten that it invalidates everything else you say. Do you have any idea the ferocity of language I use when I talk about Keir Starmer? Is there a legitimate reason why I can’t direct the same fury at an equivalent women?

There is and has always been an argument that we can’t criticise Sturgeon in the same way we would a man because… something to do with social media and people saying things. Sure, you’ve had threats, I’ve had threats, my ducks have had threats. Social media you guys. There is a reason I boycott it all.

There is no political figure who has done anything like as much damage to Scotland as Nicola Sturgeon. She got a very easy run of things from our media, screwed everything up, did a runner before being arrested by the police and still we’re debating whether criticism is legitimate. You all know there is barely a person in the country with a good word for her?

But while she has not paid the price she should for her actions (I maintain absolutely that she sought to imprison a man for ‘offences’ she had people make up), Sturgeon is a shrunken, diminished no-one that no-one greatly cares about. For an egoist like her that is much more punishment than an ordinary person like you or I can imagine. If you feel negatively about her and want to hurt her, ignore her. That is true pain for Sturgeon.

And when you do feel the need to remind people that she is the architect of the Scotland that is falling apart in front of our eyes, do so without fear and don’t let them put you off. But just don’t use words you couldn’t use about a man.

It won’t entirely protect you. I was a lone critic for the longest time and her goons were never done with trying to end my career through an insidious onslaught of accusations of misogyny, a campaign which did me and my wellbeing infinitely more harm than Rupert Everett calling her a witch.

But you can make it harder for them. If the ruling classes had their way you would never speak unless it was to cheer them. They’re so concerned about your lack of respect for them they’re toying with having a war to get you back in line like the old days. Until then they will feign Jane Austen-level swoons of shock at every swear word they can claim you said. Don’t help them.

Scotland has rotted from the head down in two ways, which is inevitable for such a top-down country. We rotted from the head down because we had an egomaniacal leader who effectively turned our system of parliamentary democracy into a presidency and then, having accrued total power, made a complete mess of wielding it.

But we are also rotting from the head down because our ‘intellectual leaders’ have nothing to say, we have no serious debate and the media just trots out stuff that gets the page filled. There is a conference coming up called ‘Scotland 2050’ which defines the problem. It hasn’t happened yet and everyone has already forgotten it because it is just more of the self-satisfied ruling class blah.

We have a tiny number of people who write with an incisive mind, ask difficult questions and do what great though leaders do and make you think about things in a new way. For example Mark Smith in the Herald, Assa Samake Roman in the National, a sprinkling of people across the arts and academia – I will learn something worth learning when I read them. We need so, so much more of it. There is such an overwhelming mass of Scotland which goes unexplored intellectually.

So when someone from outside Scotland who knows our history wants to look at us now, draw on the lessons of what people recognise to be a theatrical golden era he experienced, wants to compare that to what we are doing today, to explore what it means, I want to hear that, not more undergrad boilerplate about the patriarchy from people who have nothing new to say about it, nothing new to add, no light to shed.

The powerful will always silence you. If you challenge them you will be called a misogynist, antisemite, a bigot, a racist – you know the litany. If we are to stand up to them then we must give ourselves the firmest ground to stand on. And then we need to ignore their whining and go through them like a dose of salts.