MOUNT Florida Books is one of those small, still-forming independent book shops, run by Katia Wengraf, that just makes you feel instantly at home.
The Glasgow venue was perfect for a standing-room-only launch of Gerry Hassan’s latest book, Scotland Rising: The Case For Independence. Sandwiched between a brilliant new poetry release, Alycia Pirmohamed’s debut collection Another Way To Split Water, and some mouth-watering cookery books, the new publication was launched.
For those of you who know Hassan from the media, and his focused, forensic, glorious love of debate about all things political, you will know that listening to him is like listening to a beehive mind-hum. Ideas and angles keep dashing off into different corners of a fascinating garden to come back laden with new fruitful potential. You could have heard a pin drop in Mount Florida Books on Wednesday night, and yet this was not the Hassan of rightly combative talk shows or the commentariat.
Instead, and befitting the tone and depth of his new book, this was a gracious, humbly offered and softly incisive presentation of a rich array of doubting possibilities and possible doubts about the case for Scottish independence.
Scotland Rising does indeed make the case for independence, or rather for “Independences” for the “peoples”of “Scotlands” (sic). The plurals are important for this is book celebrating the diversity of possibilities that might unfold for a people mature enough to consider many different and better possibilities for the governing of their collective lives. And for peoples mature enough to listen to alternatives, and different angles on “well kent” stories.
Hassan goes where many in the independence and in the Unionist binaries have feared to tread, empathising with the viscerally emotive connections that exist within the Britain that has moulded our cultural and intercultural existence over centuries now.
He does not shirk from digging into the past with dates and hard facts spinning like plates across his prose to land on softer ground – the ground of interpretation, of possibility, of alternatives which might grow on the granite bedrock of the land. In particular, and with compassion, he looks at the appalling democratic deficit that besets England – or Englands – and those living in different parts of England, minding me of my days growing up in the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, before I moved to Glasgow 27 years ago.
This compassion, care and concern for neighbours is felt by those of us who have migrated from neighbouring lands, but is also necessary for reasonable, sensible, conflict-transforming relationships. It’s the opposite of the accusatory question: “where are you from?” and allows us all to be fae somewhere.
As he presented his book to the attentive audience, Hassan told a story about being asked “what is Scotland?” by a group of Germans. His response – incredulous and almost affronted – “What? Do you want geology?”.
I’m minded of the singer-song writer Karine Polwart’s brilliant, muted anger in her speech-song I Burn But I Am Not Consumed as she issues her rebuke of the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, in the voice of gneiss, the metamorphic rock that forms the Isle of Lewis. The metaphor is apt, for part one of the book is entitled The Terrain Of The Debate. In it Hassan asks the Scottish Question(s) – that insistent plurality again – and insists on the storying of both nation and voice, setting this alongside the facts as found. We find in this first part a Hassan writing Scotland Rising upon the softer Silurian and Ordovician shale and carboniferous stones of Kirkcudbright, his new home, which in turn have brought, it would seem, a softness to the prose and a wider variety than Hassan has found in the political atmosphere of the Central Belt.
THIS is, indeed, his aim, well stated in the introduction, “to offer some of the leading arguments for independence and to consider the choices and difficulties involved, with honesty and a respect for facts and all shades of opinion”.
The book is structured conventionally in the way it offers a dissection of a nation’s prospects of nationhood. Hassan takes us through the story of how we got to the independence debate itself, how the case was made and, importantly, gives significant room to understanding, seriously, the case against independence.
As a political scientist and generously wide thinker, he reserves the heart of the book for a full coverage of what he sees as Scotland’s Choices And The Divided Kingdom, with six chapters covering Empire, The Democratic Argument, Economic Injustice, Social Justice, Cultural Change and Self Determination And International Relations.
These are weighty matters and many a PhD has been written on each since 2014. At times the arguments in the chapters feel a bit compressed, not least to those of us who have been supervising or examining those many PhDs. In my own areas of specialism – culture, language, narrative, art, refuge and migratory politics – I found myself noticing lacuna, but not, importantly, being overly bothered by this. The book is not a PhD thesis and though it is well referenced, evidenced and argued, it is seeking to do something very different – to identify common ground and insist on a better level of debate and intelligence which is in essence conflict-transformational.
Hassan is absolutely clear that the discussions must begin from what the common ground is that we can agree and lists these as follows (summarised): l UK is in domestic crisis of political and public trust; l UK has become a harsh, unequal country; l Divisions affect nearly all public life, with an unaccountable wealthy elite; l Brexit has done untold damage to fabric of UK and also our international relations; l The UK’s geo-political influence is now seriously weakened; l Scotland’s own institutions and politics do not show the same levels of atrophy and decay but do need serious remedial work; l None of the mainstream political traditions has answers to the huge challenges of our age: climate change, corporate capitalism, the march of AI and global and national imbalances.
During the launch one especially astute question come from the audience: “In the search for common ground might we also be able to agree that we can always be making the country better?”
DRAWING on the rich textures of the book, Hassan showed his compassion and his determination to raise the level of the debate from one of divisiveness to one of a search for common ground and better questions; and uncomfortable, messy ways forward, which will be better for their honesty.
Hassan regularly cites Fintan O’Toole’s books and commentary, drawing parallels with Ireland, raising prospects of different unions, such as a Celtic Alliance and as part of “the art of growing up”. This is at the heart of what conflict-transformational propositions require – the art of reasoned, critical balancing of what is possible and what must, for the sake of preserving human rights and human dignity, peace and justice, be ruled out of court. As he said at the launch: “I don’t want to give in to haters.”
The final two sections of the book show how this might be effected – and not giving in to haters is a serious business, needing serious, practical methods. For Hassan this is all centred on “how” this is done.
In the initial and somewhat weird euphoria of defeat post indyref 2014, when those who won seemed miserable, and those who lost buoyed up with an energy that has morphed and endured but also solidified into many different forms, there was a sense in which the early days of a better nation were with us. But we are older, tired and in need of healing, according to Hassan, and this may be no bad thing. Whatever is next will make different movements, less strident perhaps, more realistic, more interconnected and relational. Trusting.
The final two parts of Scotland Rising, are on the shape of things to come and the route to the next independence referendum, understood within a context in need of collective rest, healing and maturity.
Indyref 2014 was an epochal moment. It was political education of a mass of people who discovered an incredible new thirst for social justice, for future thinking, for a way of going about politics and culture and community life that meant the body politic was changed and was a force to be reckoned with.
Hassan is wider in vision than simply indyref Yes/No or a rerun of 2014, but considers other options and finally he looks to future visions, for which he takes the work of institution building – media, education, international relations – way beyond a centralising, logistical funding mechanism as is often the way in the Scottish Government today.
THAT Creative Scotland, for instance, is more about how to distribute funds than how to the renew the narratives of Scotlands (sic) comes in for special criticism in the book. But other institutions are tiring in the their devolved, post-Covid forms and, as such, Hassan’s is indeed a passionate call for renewal, said softly, but with such verve you know the fabric of his life is in the heartbeat of the book.
Scotland Rising is a deeply thought through weighty gift whose time has come. Hassan offers a chance of some deeper thinking about what it means to be human, to be liberated, to defy, to obey, to be ruled, to know justice, to be of stature, to be fierce yet softly. Softly. Softly.
Scotland Rising: The Case For Independence by Gerry Hassan is published by Pluto Press (2022) and available from all good book sellers, especially independent ones like Mount Florida Books, Glasgow Alison Phipps is Unesco Chair and Professor of Languages and Intercultural Communication at University of Glasgow
