[Robin McAlpine Blog] An elegy for Scotland’s Dark Age

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An elegy for Scotland's Dark Age

Can you remember what Scotland was like? It takes a bit of effort now. I started high school in 1984. That was when the ‘Glasgow Smiles Better’ campaign was just launched, a couple of years before the Garden Festival with all that infrastructure development in Glasgow and a couple more before the Year of Culture. Hell, there were even adverts for Cumbernauld on the TV (what’s it called?). Something was happening.

We were still in the depths of Thatcherism but the fight-back had galvanised Scotland. The Year of Culture was a big deal for me, coming as it did just when I was discovering the arts as a young adult. A couple of years later the Third Eye Centre turned into the Centre for Contemporary Arts; you know, just up past McLellan Galleries.

It was the year of what felt like the groundbreaking Glasgow Girls exhibition at Kelvingrove, which itself was part of a rediscovery of a number of Scotland’s art movements, and obviously not least the work of Charles Rennie Macintosh. Yes, the ‘Mockintosh’ phenomenon became tedious but it felt to me like we were an important player in the world’s culture.

The Glasgow United rally in George Square after the 1992 election may well have been a false start, but it was part of the momentum that was driving us inexorably towards a new parliament, and you could feel it in the air. The launch of the final report of the Constitutional Convention, the sense of a Glasgow that was flourishing, a Scotland that was changing – it was everywhere.

Then there was the 1997 referendum and we knew something was going to happen. In a funny way, having priced in that devolution was coming, the thing that really made me feel like we were on the cusp of something was in 1999 with the launch of the Sunday Herald. It was exciting, vibrant, youthful, new. A proper Scottish newspaper for a new era.

There was even an early flurry of purposefulness from the Scottish Parliament, mostly because of Henry McLeish’s short reign. Edinburgh was kicking off now that it was a seat of power, and at that early stage it was almost exciting that the Royal Bank of Scotland was starting to look like a serious player. The new Museum of Scotland extension had arrived in 1998. The Scotsman was building a new purpose-built centre at the new Holyrood.

And not a fucking single bit of any of this exists any more. Well, Kelvingrove will always be a beacon of light in Scotland for me, the museum is still there and Cumbernauld is just about getting by (though who needs a theatre, right?). But the rest is gone, and I’m damned if I can put my hand on my heart and say that it has been replaced with anything of equal stature and ambition.

This is why the burnt-out husk of the Glasgow School of Art Macintosh Building is such an on-the-nose metaphor for everything that has gone wrong. It is a case study – an unelected ruling class removed proper democracy in the higher education sector, so the unelected ruling class expands, creeps outwards, colonises, takes over the Glasgow School of Art.

I kept thinking that the shame those involved must feel might push them to pull out the stops and fix their horrendous mistakes, but that was just silly of me

Which means three things for certain. First, every hope and objective for the institution will sound like an extended advertisement for ‘inwards investment’, a consultant-speak hodgepodge of neoliberal economics and sprawling adjectives that normal people don’t say, all measured by performance indicators.

Second, nothing will now happen under any circumstances unless first it generates a complex web of contracts and consultants and financiers and corporations. This is what the ruling class do – they distribute contracts to private sector bodies they hope will one day offer them a lucrative Board position.

Third, you will be allowed to know nothing about this. Every effort will be made at every stage to ensure that the ruling class is not exposed to proper scrutiny, that you will not have the full information, that things will suddenly be pronounced ‘unknowable’, and if something really bad has happened, they will delay the release of information until everyone responsible can get a new gig outside the blast radius of the eventual catastrophe.

Looking back, after the second fire, I guess I knew the Macintosh Building was over, destroyed, done for. I kept thinking that the shame those involved must feel might push them to pull out the stops and fix their horrendous mistakes, but that was just silly of me. When we heard last week that it is basically over, I should have realised that this was just the end of the seven years during which they were all digging escape tunnels. Good luck guys!

And to this day I don’t understand any of it, partly because of all that secrecy. There is much made of the fact that the sprinkler system hadn’t been installed. But is this not a massive misdirection (oh how the ruling classes love a misdirection…)? The sprinklers that everyone keeps telling you were not yet installed were the final installed fire suppression system that was going into the final building.

Was there no fire suppression system on the building site? Should a historic building of this nature which had burnt down once and which was being rebuilt in wood not have risk assessed a second blaze? I’ve read what I can on this but I cannot understand how everyone has shrugged and walked off the field. This fire was not just one of those things.

If you have a historic building that you’re trying to save and there are workers and construction tools everywhere, how do you not have enough insurance properly to ensure a full reinstatement in event of disaster? And since we know Keir Construction has a track record that contains shockingly poor work, how are they not being pursued relentlessly here? Are they blameless?

Scotland’s bean counting ruling classes have torn the heart out of Scotland again and again, always at the behest of one of the four big consulting firms, always in a way that benefits the Edinburgh financial managers and corporate lawyers. They destroy something with one tool (let’s call it ‘consultantism’) and then reach for the same tool to repair their grievous error.

No-one must be able to say lessons will be learned for the future; we must see some fucking lessons being learned in real time, right now

Look around you Scotland. The ruling class are gutting our arts infrastructure. They are destroying our universities. They’ve spent £45 million trying to keep one single road open and they can’t do it. Norway can build you five miles of first-rate undersea road tunnel for that. They can’t create a Deposit Return Scheme, can’t build a ferry – they can’t even give away our renewable energy to foreign investors efficiently.

They are the Kings of Devolution and what they have presided over is a dismantling of Scotland’s sense of self confidence. I am trying to think of what we have build of scale since devolution that isn’t a road or a (badly-designed) hospital. I can only come up with the V&A in Dundee and the Riverside Museum. In quarter of a century.

The politicians aren’t even part of this any more. They’re not the ruling class, they’re sitting in one of those clown cars you find outside supermarkets which desperate parents feed with coins to stop their toddlers rebelling while they do the shopping. ‘Great driving John!’ say the ruling classes, stuffing another 50p in the slot, ‘you’ll end child poverty and achieve independence any minute now’.

(Neil presses the horn. It doesn’t work. They look blankly at each other. Shirley-Anne makes a kind of horn noise. John gives the her the thumbs up and turns the wheel to the right. Nearly there.)

That period where something was happening in Scotland, the Scotland of my youth and early adulthood, was sometimes known as the Scottish Renaissance. If so, this is the Dark Age, an era devoid of hope, ambition or competence. Europe’s least-competent ruling class have created Europe’s most centralised democracy, one in which almost everything except one vote every five years has been de-democratised altogether.

When Edinburgh University’s staff opt to exercise their constitutional right to select people for roles in the university that are theirs to choose, the ruling class tells them they aren’t allowed. When a Councillor discovers senior officials are hiding information they are duty bound to reveal, she is suspended (more on that later in the week).

I don’t really know where to start with this now. It isn’t a renaissance we need any more, it’s a rebellion. Someone is going to have to take power from these people by force because no matter how poor their performance, power certainly can’t be shamed out of their hands.

And since we’re dealing in metaphors, let’s extend our core metaphor further. The destruction of the Macintosh Building is the emblem of the ruling class’s failure, so let its reinstatement be the start of their punishment. Let the Scottish Parliament compel them to entirely reinstate the building within a decade or ban every single person involved from public life.

Yes, I know the arguments against faithful reinstatement, and I usually have sympathy with them. I do not like a Disney reconstruction of a historic building, but a crafted one is different, and there are bigger reasons why this must be saved. Pat Kane asks here what Charles himself would do about his building if he was alive just now. I think that’s the wrong question.

I think the question is what would Macintosh have done if the Acropolis had been knocked over during his life? Would he have advocated its reinstatement or would he have called for the site to be replaced with a "creative and performance supercluster" with the "convening power" to drive forward a "designated innovation district"? I really hope not.

This building is capable of being reinstated in a faithful manner and anyone who refuses to do so should be removed from post. There should be an endless, relentless daily focus on them until they repair what has been done. No-one must be able to say lessons will be learned for the future; we must see some fucking lessons being learned in real time, right now.

I’m sorry if I sound angry but I am. This is my nation, my home, the place where I will die and be buried. This is the point at which I can no longer sit still while our ruling elite tell us what we can have, because it will be data centres.

The Scotland of my youth is gone. The hope, briefly rekindled during the indyref, is gone. Our cultural and social infrastructure is gone, being replaced with the ‘business incubator’ of a consultant’s dreams and the student flats of equity property investor’s fantasies. Our towns already died and our cities are chasing them to the grave.

So this is my elegy, my slow, painful song about what we have lost. My fury follows close behind. My determination to do something about this grows monstrous inside me. We cannot go on like this Scotland.

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