Ringing the Changes
The penny is finally beginning to drop amongst journalists south of the border that Scotland really has changed as a result for the independence referendum.
The old Westminster elite, the ancient regime, that has been used to running the country for so long is on its way out, the Labour Party is completely discredited led as it is these days by someone, Johann Lamont, who is a self-styled feminist and gender equality champion.
Yet has had nothing of substance to say about the the fight for equal pay in Scottish local government for the past 15 years.
So if you ask me it's no wonder that so many people are voting with their feet.
In Scotland the old politics have crumbled, as they once did in Ireland
In the recent referendum young voters opted for independence. As with Ireland in 1916, a new mood has taken hold and change seems inevitable
By Martin Kettle - The Guardian
'Éamon de Valera, who retired as Ireland’s president at the age of 90 in 1973, managed to shape national life and politics for half a century and beyond.' Photograph: PA
Sometimes a history book prompts one to reflect on the past and present alike. RF Foster, professor of Irish history at Oxford university, has just published such a text. In Vivid Faces, Foster delves into what made the Irish revolutionary generation of the early 20th century tick. Yet at the core of his richly nuanced inquiry into the radical nationalist mentality is an analysis with implications that stretch beyond Ireland to this day – notably to 21st-century Scotland, but also elsewhere in these islands.
Generations make a difference in history. The men and women who transformed Ireland between 1916 and 1922 were strikingly young, even by the standards of today’s callow politicians. The average age of the executed leaders of the Easter Rising was 37. Michael Collins, effectively the first leader of independent Ireland, was killed when he was a mere 31. The corollary was that those who survived, embodied by Éamon de Valera, who retired as Ireland’s president at the age of 90 in 1973, managed to shape national life and politics for half a century and beyond, until they in turn were peacefully supplanted by a very different, more Europe-centred Irish generation.
As Foster crucially argues, these young revolutionaries of the early 20th century were in revolt not just against the British government – the traditional nationalist narrative – but against the previous generation of Irish nationalists too. The active 1916 generation tended to be urban not rural people, for whom religion was not always a defining characteristic. They often came from comfortable, and in some cases privileged, backgrounds. A significant proportion were in white-collar jobs: teachers, writers and civil servants. Several wrote poems. But they had a common revolutionary awakening, and the first world war presented them with a shared opportunity, which they grasped.
In Foster’s account, the revolutionary generation underwent a crucial change of mentality in the years before 1916. Foster calls it “the quiet revolution in the hearts and minds of young middle-class Irish people from the 1890s onwards.” One, the well-born Muriel MacSwiney, and by then 28-year-old widow of the hunger-striker mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, put it this way in 1920: “You see, my parents are not quite like myself. I think I am rather characteristic of a certain section in Ireland. The younger people of Ireland have been thinking in a way that some of the older ones have not.”
These young radicals were alienated not just from British rule but also from the values, lifestyles and ambitions of their parents. They disliked the forms of schooling, entertainment, writing and politics of the previous generation. They rejected the powerful established alternative offered by the constitutional Home Rule party under John Redmond, which in 1912 it appeared to be on the verge of delivering. By that time, the new generation was hungry for something more than that.
Fast-forward to the present day and look around. Are there modern signs of a generation impatient of the political past and hungry for something new? True, there is no mass European war taking place today, as there was then. True also, there is a total absence, with the exception of Islamist jihadism, of the belief in politically motivated violence that marked 1916. And true, in addition, there have been other generational revolts since the early 20th century that have been absorbed, including ones in Britain in the 1930s and 1960s.
Ask yourself nevertheless whether Britain today is marked by generational political ruptures that in small ways echo aspects of the Irish nationalist revolutionary experience of the last century as described by Foster and the broad answer, without pushing the parallels too far or too crudely, is surely yes. Those ruptures are particularly striking in the onward march of Scotland’s nationalist movement. In some very different ways, they are also discernible in England, in the rise of phenomena as apparently diverse as Ukip, Occupy and homegrown jihadism, and in the juvenile culture of Russell Brand’s narcissistic anti-politics.
No one who spent time in Scotland during the referendum campaign was in any doubt that they were witnessing something new. Partly, this sense of a generational break was magnified by the strength of pro-independence feeling on social media, all of which tended to reflect itself to itself with ever growing excitement. But the sense of a gathering generational rejection of past Scottish politics was palpable. And the defeat of independence seems barely to have slowed it. The sometimes malign incompetence of the victors may have fuelled it even more.
The figures show we are in new generational political territory now. Young voters clearly opted for independence in Scotland. The strongest pro-independence showing in the referendum was among voters in their late 20s and their 30s – which happens to be precisely the same generation that made Ireland’s break with the past a century ago.
It is not yet clear whether the surge in Scottish National party membership since the referendum – the SNP has more than tripled in size in the five weeks since 18 September – also reflects a surge of younger-voter support. But it may well also be the case. A TNS Scotland poll last week suggested 16- to 34-year-olds were twice as likely to expect to become more involved in politics in the future as Scots aged over 55.
This is emphatically not in any way to imply that the pro-independence movement is about to head off down the revolutionary blood-sacrifice road that the Irish nationalist movement once took so dramatically. But it does begin to feel as though a decisive break between generations is taking place in its own way all the same.
This time, in Scotland, it is potentially a break with devolution, with the traditional parties – Labour in particular – and with Britishness. It also seems inevitable in many minds, rather as it did to the Irish people who spurned Redmond’s party long ago. The insensitive stupidity of the official government reaction, though fortunately not as brutal as in 1916, is yet another echo. We may not be witnessing the birth of the terrible beauty that WB Yeats saw a century ago and on which Foster writes so compellingly. Yet under the pressure of generational change, our politics is stumbling, miserable, uncomprehending and barely self-aware, into a new form that, compared with even the recent past, has changed, changed utterly.
Sometimes a history book prompts one to reflect on the past and present alike. RF Foster, professor of Irish history at Oxford university, has just published such a text. In Vivid Faces, Foster delves into what made the Irish revolutionary generation of the early 20th century tick. Yet at the core of his richly nuanced inquiry into the radical nationalist mentality is an analysis with implications that stretch beyond Ireland to this day – notably to 21st-century Scotland, but also elsewhere in these islands.
Generations make a difference in history. The men and women who transformed Ireland between 1916 and 1922 were strikingly young, even by the standards of today’s callow politicians. The average age of the executed leaders of the Easter Rising was 37. Michael Collins, effectively the first leader of independent Ireland, was killed when he was a mere 31. The corollary was that those who survived, embodied by Éamon de Valera, who retired as Ireland’s president at the age of 90 in 1973, managed to shape national life and politics for half a century and beyond, until they in turn were peacefully supplanted by a very different, more Europe-centred Irish generation.
As Foster crucially argues, these young revolutionaries of the early 20th century were in revolt not just against the British government – the traditional nationalist narrative – but against the previous generation of Irish nationalists too. The active 1916 generation tended to be urban not rural people, for whom religion was not always a defining characteristic. They often came from comfortable, and in some cases privileged, backgrounds. A significant proportion were in white-collar jobs: teachers, writers and civil servants. Several wrote poems. But they had a common revolutionary awakening, and the first world war presented them with a shared opportunity, which they grasped.
In Foster’s account, the revolutionary generation underwent a crucial change of mentality in the years before 1916. Foster calls it “the quiet revolution in the hearts and minds of young middle-class Irish people from the 1890s onwards.” One, the well-born Muriel MacSwiney, and by then 28-year-old widow of the hunger-striker mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, put it this way in 1920: “You see, my parents are not quite like myself. I think I am rather characteristic of a certain section in Ireland. The younger people of Ireland have been thinking in a way that some of the older ones have not.”
These young radicals were alienated not just from British rule but also from the values, lifestyles and ambitions of their parents. They disliked the forms of schooling, entertainment, writing and politics of the previous generation. They rejected the powerful established alternative offered by the constitutional Home Rule party under John Redmond, which in 1912 it appeared to be on the verge of delivering. By that time, the new generation was hungry for something more than that.
Fast-forward to the present day and look around. Are there modern signs of a generation impatient of the political past and hungry for something new? True, there is no mass European war taking place today, as there was then. True also, there is a total absence, with the exception of Islamist jihadism, of the belief in politically motivated violence that marked 1916. And true, in addition, there have been other generational revolts since the early 20th century that have been absorbed, including ones in Britain in the 1930s and 1960s.
Ask yourself nevertheless whether Britain today is marked by generational political ruptures that in small ways echo aspects of the Irish nationalist revolutionary experience of the last century as described by Foster and the broad answer, without pushing the parallels too far or too crudely, is surely yes. Those ruptures are particularly striking in the onward march of Scotland’s nationalist movement. In some very different ways, they are also discernible in England, in the rise of phenomena as apparently diverse as Ukip, Occupy and homegrown jihadism, and in the juvenile culture of Russell Brand’s narcissistic anti-politics.
No one who spent time in Scotland during the referendum campaign was in any doubt that they were witnessing something new. Partly, this sense of a generational break was magnified by the strength of pro-independence feeling on social media, all of which tended to reflect itself to itself with ever growing excitement. But the sense of a gathering generational rejection of past Scottish politics was palpable. And the defeat of independence seems barely to have slowed it. The sometimes malign incompetence of the victors may have fuelled it even more.
The figures show we are in new generational political territory now. Young voters clearly opted for independence in Scotland. The strongest pro-independence showing in the referendum was among voters in their late 20s and their 30s – which happens to be precisely the same generation that made Ireland’s break with the past a century ago.
It is not yet clear whether the surge in Scottish National party membership since the referendum – the SNP has more than tripled in size in the five weeks since 18 September – also reflects a surge of younger-voter support. But it may well also be the case. A TNS Scotland poll last week suggested 16- to 34-year-olds were twice as likely to expect to become more involved in politics in the future as Scots aged over 55.
This is emphatically not in any way to imply that the pro-independence movement is about to head off down the revolutionary blood-sacrifice road that the Irish nationalist movement once took so dramatically. But it does begin to feel as though a decisive break between generations is taking place in its own way all the same.
This time, in Scotland, it is potentially a break with devolution, with the traditional parties – Labour in particular – and with Britishness. It also seems inevitable in many minds, rather as it did to the Irish people who spurned Redmond’s party long ago. The insensitive stupidity of the official government reaction, though fortunately not as brutal as in 1916, is yet another echo. We may not be witnessing the birth of the terrible beauty that WB Yeats saw a century ago and on which Foster writes so compellingly. Yet under the pressure of generational change, our politics is stumbling, miserable, uncomprehending and barely self-aware, into a new form that, compared with even the recent past, has changed, changed utterly.
