THERE is much to be said for Gerry Hassan’s commentary on Sunday (Broken Britain, December 8). He is correct to insist on the historic role of “benign elites not just acting in their own interests
but accommodating the views of working people and incorporating them in the existing order”.
One such was Willie Whitelaw, who was credited with restraining Margaret Thatcher from some of her worst excesses. But of course, Willie eventually retired to be replaced by others with similar (or worse) instincts as the PM. The consequence was what Hassan describes as “one of the most unequal countries in the developed world – a land of wealth and affluence with one of the meanest and least compassionate governments that oversees a parsimonious, punitive welfare state and paltry state pensions”.
However, Aditya Chakrabortty’s argument that our present discontents lie “in the context of the failure of the Blair-Brown years, aftermath of the banking crash, and decade of austerity” misdirects our attention toward the role of the banking crash, and away from the conditions that created the potential for that explosion. If the banking crash lit the blue touch paper, what contributed to that blue touch paper in the first place?
James Robertson might be correct that Britishness is “now, like M&S and other high street brands which mirrored/reinforced it, in decline”, but it is somewhat short-sighted to argue that “Britishness … managed to reinvent itself as a post-imperial identity in the 1960s”, for it was arguably in the 1960s that the rot set in.
As part of the Empire, Glasgow might have been the “second city”, and “the workshop of the world”, laying claim to a greater accumulation of industrial capital than any city in the world, but post-Empire all this came to an end. Children of the 50s and 60s were able to sing “from Glasgow to Greenock with yards on each side, the hammers’ ding-dong that’s the song of the Clyde” but Scotland’s stake in Empire has withered and died, as Charlie and Craig Reid powerfully point out in Letter from America – “Bathgate no more; Linwood no more; Methil no more; Irvine no more”. If culture holds a mirror to reality, the lesson is clear.
Like many I have lived through all of these, but I can also remember the “new start” promises made at the time, that Bathgate and Linwood, for instance, would be the first parts of Scotland’s share of the British motor industry, but by the middle 1980s both of these “new starts” had proven to be dead ends.
Gerry’s argument is perceptive and well argued, but the roots of “Broken Britain” were even longer entrenched than he and his contributors imagine, born in the years of promises made but broken or abandoned, creating an impression of being of lesser consequence in a state that had no answer to our struggles, and which instead became parsimonious and punitive.
Alasdair Galloway
Dumbarton
SOLOMON Steinbett may well have a case to make regarding the bad effects which a “two-nation theory” – that is, the division of what had been a unitary polity – has had in certain cases, but I am literally astounded at his statement that “India was one nation for millennia, until being invaded and then partitioned by the British.” The history of India is by no means a field in which I can claim expertise; but surely it is common knowledge that the sub-continent throughout recorded history has been a veritable kaleidoscope of diverse languages and cultures, within which empires rose and fell (none of them ever including the entire sub-continent) long before the British were ever near that part
of the world. Contrary to what Mr Steinbett imagines, it was the British who, for good or ill, made India into something like a politically unified state; and to this day one of the strongest factors in maintaining this unity is the official use of the English language.
Derrick McClure
Aberdeen
COULD I make a comment on Ms M’s call for Scotland’s not proven verdict in to be scrapped (Rape survivor’s ‘not proven’ appeal to PM, December 5)?
When I was in high school, some 50-odd years ago, our class attended part of a trial at Linlithgow Sheriff Court. It was a case against an employee for allegedly stealing items from the now-defunct BMC at Bathgate. These items included a wheel for a tractor, not the small front one, but the very large rear one. The jury’s verdict was “not proven”, all because the bright spark from head office forgot to bring the lists of serial numbers relating to the items stolen with him. That is, the jury thought he was guilty, but accepted that the prosecution failed to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
I would suggest that a not proven verdict would give a claimant a much better chance of success if they then raised a civic against the accused. I vaguely remember a fairly similar case to this being won recently.
George McKnight
West Calder
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