Christopher Harvie, professor of British and Irish Studies at Tübingen University, holds honorary chairs at Strathclyde and Aberystwyth. Scotland: A Short History, published by Oxford in July, is about to go into its second edition.
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Vol. 24 No. 17 · 5 September 2002
pages 19-20 | 2760 words
Devolution Doom
Christopher Harvie
‘You don’t hate us in Scotland, Master?’ said Professor John Stuart Blackie, the Teuto-Gaelic classicist, to Jowett of Balliol. ‘We never think of you at all,’ came the lapidary reply.
Drafting a sketch for a BBC radio programme on devolution, I was rung by Professor Phil Williams, a colleague at Aberystwyth who is also Plaid Cymru’s spokesman on energy. ‘I’m on it with Jack McConnell,’ I said.
‘Who’s McConnell?’
‘Scottish First Minister.’
‘Well, I never . . .’
This was a benign version of the Jowett syndrome but serious enough: Westminster, Holyrood and Cardiff have become places apart. As the days tick away before the Holyrood elections on 1 May 2003, Labour seems in better shape than the SNP: John Swinney lacks the lethal charm of his predecessor, Alex Salmond, and his members went out of control when selecting candidates for the regional list system, ditching the best and brightest. But the polls show that McConnell is far from being out of the woods.
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Letters
Vol. 24 No. 18 · 19 September 2002
From David Walker
What's with Christopher Harvie's analogy between Scotland and Baden-Württemberg (LRB, 5 September)? If he is right about economic implosion in the glens, then a better comparison would be with Thuringia or Calabria. Perhaps he avoids them because both regions are hugely dependent on money from a central or federal government. It wouldn't do for such a sublime Scots aspirationist to admit a fiscal truth. Scotland is needy, and since the money won't be coming from Brussels (why are the Irish so unenthusiastic about enlargement of the European Union?), London is his only hope.
David Walker
London EC1
Vol. 24 No. 19 · 3 October 2002
From Andrew Burnside
It wouldn't be hard to throw together a piece like Christopher Harvie's (LRB, 5 September) on 'crises' in England. In place of the overburdened social services in Scotland, and the crises in Scottish public agencies, one might refer to the recruitment haemorrhage in health, education and emergency services in the South-East; the racial tensions in the North; the lack of vision behind the Dome; and the vulnerability of land too densely settled beside rivers as a result of short-sighted planning policies. Every reader would observe – rightly – that such a piece ignored everything good about England.
Andrew Burnside
Falkirk
Vol. 24 No. 20 · 17 October 2002
From Christopher Harvie
David Walker (Letters, 19 September) suggests that Scotland is more spendthrift Hyde than canny Jekyll, and can't, therefore, transform itself into a bourgeois region like Baden-Württemberg in a oner. I agree, but I think that the purpose of devolution was to create a framework within which new policy priorities could be made. This need not mean more cash but ought to require efficient and rational appraisal of alternative expenditure patterns. Six billion pounds are blown annually on cars and roads. Best practice in transport need not cost more: indeed, the pressure to economise may accelerate environmental reform rather than requiring the rattling of a begging-bowl outside 11 Downing Street.
Christopher Harvie
Tübingen, Germany
