Reflections on Scotland's Political Culture (1/4)

On being a Scottish Londoner, and the need for meta-political praxis.

The Anglo-Indian activist Satish Kumar once gave a lecture to the economics faculty at the London of School of Economics. He asked the professors present if they offered students a chance to study ecology. They do not, and so he asked them if they knew what economics meant. To his astonishment, most of them didn’t know, and so he told them it means management (nomics=rules) of the home (eco) which can also mean country, habitat, planet etc. And since ecology means the study of (ology) the home and therefore acquiring knowledge of the home, he asked them: How can you teach management of the home without knoweldge of the home?

I like this anecdote because it gets to the heart of what metapolitical thinking is about: we should be awake to our premises, our language and our motivations, and they have to be revisited and renewed as contexts change.

Politics unites and divides people. In normal times the unity is functional and the divisions are healthy if they are mediated by stable institutions and civil discourse. In times of instability and transition however, it is less clear what we should unite over, disagreements lose their moorings, shared reality is lost, and then all you have is noise. In most parts of the world, that’s how politics feels today.

Whether your premise is Maria Ressa saying that “An invisible atom bomb has exploded inside our information system” or Bruno Latour, reflecting on climate collapse, saying “We do not understand the stunning extent to which the situation is unprecedented”, or one of many technological developments - AI, synthetic biology, drones, gene editing, virtual reality, quantum computing - that call our social futures into question, it is not a time to carry on as if we know what we are doing. The future is not what it used to be.

In a political context that means it’s a metapolitical moment, a time to question what politics should be about from first principles. Is it about the stewardship of technology, a new money supply, a sacred relationship to nature, a new praxis of peace; it is more deeply about epistemology and metaphyics, or is it still about inflation and interest rates, ‘growth and jobs’ and who wins the next election? And what is the optimal unit of analysis? Should politics now be mostly local, regional, national, supranational; or is something else entirely called for like ‘polycentric governance’, ‘cosmolocal production’ or ‘bioregional design’. These are the important metapolitical questions we need to be asking ourselves.

Admist global transition, my home country of Scotland is currently in a moment of transition to a new political leader and perhaps a new chapter in Scotland’s constitutional journey. There is no obvious sign of metapolitical thinking in the debates yet, so I felt obliged to try to create some.

Before plunging in, some perspective. What follows is about Scotland and the UK, but it has relevance beyond those ideas and territories. If the personal is the political as they say, the metapolitical is especially personal, because it’s about perspective on priorities which requires reflection on the personal process of identity formation. In my political context, I am currently concerned with the very idea of nations, particulalry for Scotland, but also with Ukraine in mind. However, I am also keen to understand what metapolitical progress might look in other contexts, given the urgency of our shared and contested global context.

Nations are both profoundly important and utterly ridiculous. We live on a planet that twirls around the sun, and we are all going to die. It is a miracle we are here at all, life is precious gift, and all national boundaries are ultimately arbitrary. There was a time before Scotland, there are many places other than Scotland, and there will be a time after Scotland. There are urgent global collective action problems at a planetary scale that call for unprecedented levels of insight, cooperation and restraint. There is a part of me that feels thinking about Scottish politics is a waste of time. And yet we all need a personal place to stand to see and feel the bigger picture. There is no view from nowhere, so it’s worth familiarising yourself with your own particular somewhere.

Ultimately humans are one people, but the kind of people we are is myriad, plural, and we are often at war because we don’t really understand ourselves or each other. I feel it is our personal responsibility to crystalise our own political and metapolitical perspective as fully as possible, if only so that we can wholeheartedly understand the perspectives of others without emnity or projection. A healthy politics and therefore a viable future depends on this kind of work. So here’s my attempt to begin to situate myself metapolitically. I hope it will inspire readers to situate themselves too, wherever they are from, and whatever they identify with.

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I’m a Scottish Londoner. That’s the kind of Scot I am, and that’s the kind of Londoner I am. Scotland is my country, London is my city, and I love and belong to them both. They say when someone from Ireland lives away from Ireland they become more Irish. In recent years it has felt to me that if you’re Scottish, the opposite might be true.

The prevailing orthodoxy in Scotland is that to be part of the conversation about Scotland’s future, the Sine Qua Non is that you choose to build your life there. That focus on residency leaves the Scottish diaspora with political interests, including me, feeling as if our investment in the conversation might be misplaced. But is it? Why do I still feel like part of the nation from afar?

I am writing here as a kind of meta-political praxis, particularly with respect to the idea of nationhood. I seek to make better sense of what it means to be a Scottish Londoner who came to believe in the cause of Scottish independence to the surprise of some of my friends and colleagues (part one) and to suggest it is time to call into question the conventional version of the ‘best of both worlds’ argument about being Scottish and British. I believe today it makes sense (for me at least!) to be culturally British and politically Scottish rather than vice-versa, even while living in London (part two). If that’s so, we need a deeper appraisal of what nationalism means today in the context of other ideological frameworks including liberalism, and it becomes clear that civic nationalism has unacknowledged shadows that are just coming to the surface now(part three). Then, and only then(!) I want to speak to the challenge of the independence movement developing a more complex, post-progressive political psyche, and what follows for the current election for Scotland’s First Minister(part four).

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I was born and raised in Aberdeen, formerly the oil capital of Europe and known as ‘furry boots city’. When visitors are asked in the local dialect whereabouts they live, it sounds more like “furry boots dee-ye bide? I’ve also bided in Ferguslay park in Paisley which is a rough housing estate inside Scotland’s next city or large suburb of Glasgow, depending on who you ask; Edinburgh you’ll know about - and yes it’s beautiful; and Troon is a peaceful seaside town in Ayrshire overlooking the Isle of Arran, which is often thought of as a microcosm of Scotland and now has two whisky distilleries, though apparently I was conceived elsewhere of the island.

Chess has been a defining part of my life, as detailed elsewhere, and I have represented Scotland internationally with the saltire next to my name since I was nine years old. When I won the British Chess Championship in 2004, the main story was that I was the first Scot since 1946 to do so, and I held the title in 2005 and 2006 but came second in 2007 to Jacob Aagaard from Denmark in 2007, who was living in Milngavie at the time, and also representing Scotland (a curious detail given what follows in part three). Later that year, I represented the UK in a match against China on board three behind World Class English Grandmasters Michael Adams and Nigel Short with some pride (though I played terribly) and the UK still felt like ‘my country’, but doubts had been growing for a while.

Ten years previously, in 1997, through her work as Head of Educational Services at North Ayrshire council my mum received two tickets to attend a reception in Edinburgh for the opening of the Scottish parliament, took me along, and I felt excited about the devolution settlement. It was easy for a Scot to see themselves in the British state back then because there were plenty of impressive British political figures from Scotland; like Robin Cook, Gordon Brown, and Donald Dewar. (I met Scotland’s inaugural First Minister Donald Dewar when I won a chess event in his constituency of Glasgow Anniesland in 1996. He told me of his lifelong love of Antiquarian books, and that his book collection was so enormous that there were genuine concerns about the structural foundations of his house). More generally, around then independence felt in no way necessary or desirable. I have never been a conviction nationalist, and yet through the creation of a new political institution Scots had a new touchstone through which to orient their own political identity.

In 2002 I did a one-year Master’s degree at Harvard and I was in Boston when the decision was taken to Invade Iraq. I vividly remember the ‘not in my name’ feeling while I marched against it with lots of Americans, and for the first time, I thought: wouldn’t it be good to belong to a country that didn’t make such a stupid decision? Only then did it begin to occur to me that there was indeed that possibility in principle. Whatever the realpolitik might have been in this case, I felt a newfound empathy with those who saw it as self-evident that Scotland should be not just semi-autonomous, but independent.

This feeling grew through several changes in the UK government, in my view for the worse, not least due to successive and excessive privatisations of public assets and services and inequality of income and wealth growing to socially corrosive and morally unacceptable levels. The financial crash in 2008 was global but also somehow symptomatic of the ‘UKplc’ now being less like a ‘family of nations’ and more like a leading part of a global neoliberal empire (Will Davies offers two pithy definitions of neoliberal: the disenchantment of politics by economics; and the state-led remaking of society on the model of the market). Then there was savage austerity, creating the socio-economic circumstances that led many to feel politics was broken, and by 2016 Brexit appeared as the available but altogether wrong answer to the right question: how can we best change things fundamentally? And all this time there was no sign of political appetite for the necessary constitutional reforms to the UK’s antiquated and uncodified constitution, particularly its anti-democratic first-past-the-post voting system, vain parliamentary theatre to entertain a client media class, and obsequious pageantry to distract people from their real problems.

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So it took a while, but by 2014 (when I was 37) I felt the British state was probably beyond repair, and when the previously hypothetical possibility became real, I decided I would support Scottish independence. As a Londoner, I couldn’t actually vote and somewhat overcompensated. I made my case for why I still felt it mattered for Scots who couldn't vote to decide, and why I would vote Yes, in The Guardian. I also wrote several articles for Bella Caledonia as part of the movement, became very active on combatting disinformation about independence on Twitter and briefly advised the Yes Campaign at the most senior strategic level a few weeks before the vote.

That spring and summer in the build-up to the referendum was an exhilarating time. When giving a talk about the relationship between the spiritual and the political at the RSA soon afterward I noted that, at least for those few months, the movement stirred a combination of vitality, meaning, purpose, togetherness, and belonging that felt like a spiritual experience for many, including me. On the day of the vote the polls were very tight and on the train from London to Edinburgh I found myself persuading the man serving at the buffet car to vote Yes when we arrived. Lots of campaigners were high on the idea that every vote mattered.

I was never a supporter of the SNP as such, but for my services to the campaign, I was invited to the SNP would-be-victory party at Dynamic Earth near Holyrood. I had a few political contacts in the vicinity but I didn’t know anyone in the room and felt out of place; I identified much more with the civil society vibes and cultural figures of the Yes campaign, much less with the party machine. Yet the conversation at my table was lively enough as the hours went by. Mostly I remember the sinking feeling when the first result came in as a decisive ‘No’ to independence from Clackmannanshire at 1.30 am. And I was grateful when the catering came - there was something about the unexpected sight of salmon and boiled potatoes during the small hours that kept the spirits up, even if we were approaching breakfast time. I also remember seeing the Scottish icon, singer-songwriter Dougie McLean, around the time it was clear we were not going to win. He smiled sympathetically when I wistfully (and embarrassingly) said “thank you for your song”, by which I meant Caledonia, as if he hadn’t written or sung any others. There was jubilation when the Yes side won Dundee, and subsequently Glasgow (no less) but the aggregate numbers rarely shifted much from roughly 55% for No and 45% for Yes throughout the night.

I walked back to my hotel room via a deserted and drizzly Royal Mile at about 4.30 am. I was disappointed, but it also felt surreal. It’s not that I was pretending, but I was somehow performing myself to myself. Looking back, part of me was clearly swept up in a narrative much bigger than myself, perhaps I was even part of an Egregore. I do not disavow the thoughts and feelings I had at the time, but I can’t say with confidence that I really knew what I was doing. I took the train home to London the next day.

There was no subsquent depression for me, but there was an absence and a lingering sense of longing. On BBC Question Time a few days later the broadcaster Lesley Riddoch spoke for me and many others when she said she acknowledged the result but qualified that with a remark that went much deeper: “The level of activism, the commitment, the imagination, the friendship, the camaraderie…It was the best year of my life; from the point of view of the humanity and optimism that was generated. If you were a part of that… It’s so precious, it’s so unusual, that you really feel you do not want to see that go. Particularly younger people, older people, people in Estates, people who are not usually involved.” The campaign for Scottish independence can be seen in many ways, but I experienced it in terms of what Roberto Unger calls the need to spiritualise politics by ‘dimishing the distance between self and society.’

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I am in London mostly because I went down to study at Oxford when I was nineteen and near the end of my time there I met my future wife Siva (who hails from India and is a legal scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science), and we currently live in Putney with our sons Kailash and Vishnu. During Covid, when everything was up in the air, we were struggling to afford a home in London. Sensing that Scotland was on the cusp of a seismic political transformation and with lots of family support nearby, we wondered if we might become ‘willies’ - people Working In London, Living in Edinburgh. It made sense at the time of Brexit grief and radical remote working, and we made a serious effort to make it happen, including securing school places and three unsuccessful house bids, but we ran out of steam, the new school term began here and life moved on. I was briefly heartbroken, but also relieved.

I came to accept, gladly, that I really was a Londoner now, along with 100,000 or so other Scots and nine million others. When John Cleese said that London is no longer an English city he was criticized, but I knew what he meant. This global city has its shadows like everywhere else, but it’s a lively and lovely place, more verdant than you might expect, and a river runs through it. Some have called London a city of 600 villages and I feel happy to be here in one of them.

So that’s roughly what I mean when I say I’m a Scottish Londoner, and I hope I’ve given an indication of what meta-politcal praxis is about. In the next post I’ll explain why it is not as odd as it sounds to feel culturally British but politically Scottish, and why this feeling might even be prefigurative of a healthier politics in the British and Irish Isles; also called the Atlantic Archipelago, the Anglo-Celtic Isles, the Islands of the North Atlantic, or more simply, ‘these islands’.

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Jonathan Rowson is author of The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life and can be found on Twitter @Jonathan_Rowson