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New Roads South Scotland's Employment Problems Power Sources in Scotland The Ancient Kingdom The Ancient University Butler Besmirched • JO GRIMOND, MP • GEORGE MIDDLETON • DAVID MURRAY • D. W. BROGAN • ROBERT TAUBMAN • MORAY McLAREN
New Roads South
By JO GRIMOND, MP BY a Political Gresham's Law the mediocre are driving the adventurous out of the House of Commons. Of those who are at all mentally active when they reach it few can stand the mix- ture of drugs and bludgeon-blows which it deals our: The grasshopper-minded find in politics a delicious hayfield. They can skip from subject to subject as topics bob up, occupy the House for a laY, then sink below the horizon. It is enjoyable but debauching. More conscientious Members suffer the death by a thousand cuts from the cor- resPondence which digs at them relentlessly on every subject from nuclear warfare to surgical ruts. And there is brutal smothering of the mind by ministerial jargon on footling Bills. if a Mem- ber succeeds in carving out a little oasis in the Welter of Parliamentary business where he can read and perhaps even reflect, he finds he is on a emilinittee, on six committees, worst of all on the Scottish Grand Committee. The dangers of Parlia- mentary life for anyone North of the Border who hopes to remain mentally alive are peculiarly terrifying. At the end of an endless vista of sleeper tourneys, the view of Westminster from Scotland Is not as attractive as it may have been in Dr. Johnson's day. Walter Elliot did not entirely escape these dan- gers. His quixotic loyalty and combativeness sometimes spurred him to his feet to attack such obvious windmills as only a hack politician, you Would think, could possibly mistake for dragons. But he had a mind, and he kept it, a capacious, Generous, articulate mind, containing interesting attics stored with all sorts of odds and ends. Fur- ther, what made him notable among his colleagues Was that, to the end, he received ideas. Instead of Setting him off at a canter down a well-trodden path, ideas thrown up in debate or conversation frequently sent Walter Elliot down new roads. So he withstood the drugs of politics. He re- trained faithful to a marginal and inconvenient Scottish seat and without bitterness he met shame- ful treatment by his party. It proves it can be done. Even Scotsmen can stand up against modern politics. But it is difficult. The change which has come over Scotland and politics in Walter Elliot's lifetime has made it very difficult. There were in Scotland when he was young a lot of men of hard, high intellectual gifts. They were a trifle rarefied, perhaps, and in modern eyes not very Scotch. But they maintained a high standard, they were interested—and were able to be inter- ested—in things outside Scotland. Much of this has gone.
Not unnaturally there has been a swing in Scotland away from the austerity of its pre-1914 life, and at the same time there has been a protest against the movement South and the decay of things specifically Scottish. The mingling of the two currents has led to some blether, too much toleration of the second-rate if only it can be called Scots, and an assumption that goodwill can make up for shoddy thinking. In spite of their reputation for silence, the Scotch are by nature long-winded. If given half a chance they will call a bus company a motor traction company, and they sincerely believe that if they say something not three, but fifteen times, it becomes true. They can be kept in order, but they need the discipline of academic and artistic standards and they need continual contact with people and events. They have always been bad at running their own affairs and rather good at interfering in other peoples': the reason is that their own affairs have never been set in a wide enough per- spective. The national movement in politics and literature should not be an ingrowing affair con- cerned to conduct parish-pump affairs with a Scottish accent. It should be, and at best is, an effort to bring a Scottish point of view to bear on European and world events.
There is a Scottish point of view, but it has little to do with tartan hose and cross-gartered shoes, lallans or tourism. There is a national view on politics in its true sense, on how you run a community. The method of running the Presby- terian Church is excellent—it is the one compen- sation for the break with Rome which cut Scot- land off from some of the wider contacts which she has so much needed. Hume and Adam Smith dealt with men and women; they had a philo- sophy which could be practised, and now it has become desiccated into logical positivism and mathematical economics. Scotland should and could have contacts with the continental coun- tries which England neither wants nor needs. St. Andrews should be a University for the Common- wealth and Europe. It has the situation and the tr.dition. But no one can think of it except as a glorified grammar school. The 'Scottish Renais- sance,' as it has been foolishly called, has had good moments; it has been humane in many ways. But not all the Edinburgh Festivals have made it the expansive, outward-looking movement which it should have been.
So we return to Walter Elliot, who proved that it was possible to represent Kelvingrove and think beyond Glasgow, who was always ready to give an opinion on national matters but refused to be silent about the world. Shall we see his like again? Shall we find other people of his calibre willing to face the trail up and down from London? Shall we find other people to surmount the dullness of modern politics—so incredibly illustrated at North Islington where only 35 per cent. of the electorate showed any interest in the Tory/Labour battle? I don't believe we shall find enough people unless Westminster and Edinburgh are shaken up. Our problems today are nearly all political, and they are insoluble because our political think- ing and our political institutions are out of date: out of date and repulsive to most men of intel- ligence. Scotland, denied the reality or the symbols of government, suffers particularly. She could give something very valuable to modern politics. She could provide more men with minds and not mere gramophones inside their heads. She may be full of mute, inglorious Elliots, but it will need a revolution to unleash them.
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