I RECENTLY retired, which makes me of a certain age and, given the world we now live in, somewhat fortunate. Many people of my age and younger will have to work for many more years before they can afford to step away from the workplace. We’re all living longer, so we can’t afford for people to become a burden too soon, don’t you know?

With all this free time on my hands, I’ve been looking around at the world I now live in. To be honest, I’m finding it kind of hard to recognise. Now, every generation has to come to terms with the fact that the world has changed from when they started out. The issue is, of course, has it changed for the better?

Nope. Sorry, bit abrupt, I know. I’m not denying the vast improvements in social attitudes, the advances in technology and the steady progress of medical research that have all taken place since my youth in the sixties and seventies. It’s just that the context for all that progress was a social contract in this country that has now been torn up and scattered to the four winds.

As a young man in the UK of the seventies there existed a central assumption that although our world was hierarchical with people’s life chances defined by the class they were born into, that should and was changing with an agreement that class barriers must be removed and that success in life should depend on the efforts of the individual, not on an accident of birth. Along with this was a feeling that the role of the state was to ensure that all citizens were supported in their journey through life and that those facing the greatest challenges should be assisted to meet those challenges and protected from the worst that life could throw at them.

Underlying all of this was a fundamental principal that seemed to be generally accepted, that everyone was equal, deserving of respect and consideration.

Now, those of you who have shared my journey through this period might laugh at this. “That’s not the reality of that time, at all” you might reasonably say. And you’d be right. But it isn’t the reality I’m talking about, it was an aspiration, an agreement about what we should be; a set of underlying principals which would guide us in making decisions about our collective future.

And then there was Thatcher.

Okay, it’s a comic cliché for those of us of a certain age, “I blame Thatcher” and yet… Clichés become clichés because there’s a central truth to them. Without undertaking a detailed social analysis of the time, it’s probably sufficient to say that the assumptions I’ve mentioned started to change from the Thatcher era onwards.

In our brave new world the ruling class battens onto the wealth of the country, benefiting from obscene amounts of money, sending their children to the right schools and into the right jobs, secretively hoarding their money in tax-free offshore accounts while telling everyone else that we can’t afford pensions, or help for disabled people or assistance for poor benighted folk fleeing the horrors of war. Don’t you know there’s an austerity on?

We’re an equal country where anyone can do anything, although it does help a bit if you went to the same school as the son of the chap who’s interviewing you and if daddy can afford to support you in the unpaid internship. And day by day the state is dismantled bit by bit until all that will be left is an Army to protect those in charge and a threadbare welfare system to ensure that the Undeserving Poor don’t start to smell up the streets or start to get ideas above their station.

I make an unlikely revolutionary but ... Pull down Oxford and Cambridge, brick by brick. Blow up the Houses of Parliament. Open Buckingham Palace as a care home for the elderly. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Robert Cassells, Glasgow

Housing must be more than a ‘numbers debate’

THE Scottish Government recently consulted stakeholders on Draft Planning Delivery Advice for housing and infrastructure.

As organisations representing those who build new homes in Scotland, we share the Scottish Government’s desire to see more effective delivery of housing and infrastructure across the country.

However, while the draft advice provides many positive ideas that could assist local authorities and others to increase home building to a level that better reflects the huge, unmet demand for homes of all tenures throughout Scotland, both collectively and as separate organisations, we have strong concerns about some of the details contained within.

Changes to the detailed advice on housing supply will be needed if it is to have a positive effect rather than a negative effect on delivery.

Our suggestions are outlined in full in our respective representations, and both our organisations believe there would be merit in providing a standalone advice document on housing supply issues, separate from the wider advice on other areas of policy.

Another point on which we firmly agree is the need to ensure market realities are given proper consideration in looking at where new homes are likely to be delivered, given the central role that private sector home builders and investors play in building and funding new homes.

Local authorities must not be discouraged from planning to meet housing need in full and informed consideration of what the market can realistically bring forward. In a delivery-led planning system this is essential.

For too long developers, communities and local authorities have found the practical application of the planning system to be complex, hard-going and adversarial.

We support the aspiration of the draft Planning Delivery Advice to address this, and to enable debates on planning for housing to move beyond the “numbers debate”.

It therefore offers useful food for thought on what could be done now – long before any game-changing reforms that might flow from the wider review of the Scottish planning system.

In recognising that there are many challenges to addressing vital housing and infrastructure requirements, we stand ready to work collaboratively with the Scottish Government, infrastructure providers and strategic and local planning authorities to identify solutions.

Nicola Barclay, chief executive, Homes for Scotland

David Melhuish, director, Scottish Property Federation

THERE is a deal of expert/academic writing on the “political” use of subaltern/marginal “nation” languages as an act of cultural resistance in the face of a dominant-class written code.

There is also the essential sense of taking class and cultural pride in using a language that is “ours” rather than “theirs’.

This is used with considerable artistic audacity by Jim Kelman and others while offering a kind of autonomous counter voice to the hegemony of the standard Anglo-British version (often seen as the historic voice of authority.)

There is another attribute in seeing our ain tongues in print (apart from cultural/class pride) in that all indigenous cultures have their own distinctive opacity –“aye right”.

This “opacity” too can be adopted as a political cultural tool, a kind of “insiders” cultural code that speaks with clarity and confidence to only those that ken.

One of the social features of the persistent near absence of a visual “nation” language (save for the Scots and Gaelic in The National) is that it can produce negative repercussions on the confidence of self, as a legitimate nation viz the cringe.

A state-less nation in transition, like Scotland, needs to vigorously encourage the use of the plural linguistic codes available in Scotland and so by enriching and empowering our popular culture we may defeat the ubiquitous cringe.

Fitt says it better: “The writers, readers and publishers o this column demonstrate there are folk that arnae ashamed o oor unique Scots language.

And it says loodly and articulately we arenae feart to be oorsels.”

Thom Cross, Carluke