The country’s official embrace of literature reveals much about its comfortably stuck political culture, cosily immured from an increasingly illiberal world.
Nicola Sturgeon loves books. It says so on her Twitter bio, with her picture against a wall of colourful hardbacks. It could be an upmarket bookshop, but it’s actually the First Minister’s home library, easily recognised from newspaper profiles and internet sleuthing. (Scottish authors have been known to squint at these shelves in search of their own names.) It’s hard to recall a leading politician whose personal brand is more strongly invested in bookishness and reading. I don’t mean the consumption of books, but reading in its most mindful and exalted form. This tasteful pastime is about the enriching qualities of literary experience, quite different from the image of Gordon Brown devouring information (and then churning out books of his own). Sturgeon’s kind of reading represents moral attentiveness and curiosity, the tact and connection of the evening book group, and has nothing to do with facts or phrase-making. The current UK government has a number of crowd-pleasing authors on the front bench, but none would look half as comfortable discussing poetry at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, or interviewing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The virtues of reading are also key to the government Sturgeon leads. There is a First Minister’s reading challenge, a nationwide project to “develop reading cultures” and encourage reading for pleasure. The signature social policy of Sturgeon’s government, the “baby box” introduced in 2017, presents every newborn in Scotland with a free crate of “essential items, such as clothes, nappies and books”. Bundled in with the stories, muslins and footed leggings is a specially commissioned poem by Scotland’s then Makar (or national poet), Jackie Kay. With more than 200,000 boxes now delivered to new parents, “Welcome Wee One” is probably the most widely read Scottish poem published this century. Kay also wrote a lyric to celebrate the opening of the new Queensferry Crossing, a gleaming bridge over the Firth of Forth. Whether steel or cotton-based, weaving poetry through these forward-looking infrastructures is an apt symbol for Sturgeon’s progressive vision.
Being governed by an Ali Smith fanatic is nothing to grumble about. It’s depressing to compare the ruling passions of other national leaders, or indeed the place of literature in public life. There is an “unprecedented surge of book bans” sweeping across school libraries in the US, with classic works by Toni Morrison and Harper Lee suppressed in “an assault on student reading”, according to the Times. Texts exploring racial justice and gender identity are a prime target: in Hungary, the Viktor Orbán regime actively suppresses LGBTQ-themed books, imposing restrictions on where and how they may be sold. In the UK, too, the “creep of far-right rhetoric and conspiracy theories into mainstream politics” is well advanced, and university English departments field regular media enquiries chasing phantoms of woke madness. (No, Shakespeare has not been cancelled.) A Yale professor recently went on television to explain why books are good, “refreshing our minds and allowing us to be citizens”, and not a threat to American national cohesion. The need for such homilies tells a grim story of its own. Against this backdrop it’s easy to feel smug about Scotland’s enlightened literary scene, a sturdy shield against culture war rather than its battlefield. As Britain’s columnist-in-chief entered the sewer of Jimmy Savile smears, Scotland’s most coveted blurb-writer posted a glowing appreciation of the new Douglas Stuart novel.
Drawing these comparisons from inside Scotland’s bookish bubble feels a bit like an outdoor hot tub in winter, marvelling at the icy darkness while impervious to the storm. This sense of cosy apartness goes to the heart of the nation’s political culture, and tells us something about the role of literature – or at least the image of literature – in maintaining a comfortable temperature. This is not a critique of the First Minister’s bookishness or book-related policies, but an exploration of their political meaning in adverse conditions. The prominence of its book culture can tell us a great deal about Scotland’s untimely high liberalism, and its future in an increasingly illiberal world. Under the tasteful digital PR, Scotland’s cosmopolitan self-image embodies a set of mid-20th century dreams whose lustre has been artificially protected by devolution – the set of governing arrangements Sturgeon has pledged to end.
If we revisit the growth of self-government that made Makars and baby boxes possible, we find that the nurturing social democracy Sturgeon stands for is the result less of Scottish progress than British conservation. As Neal Ascherson has observed, since 1999 devolution has allowed Holyrood administrations, both Unionist and nationalist, to “barricade the welfare state – higher education, free social care and the Scottish National Health Service above all – against the tide… washing away the British postwar social settlement south of the border”. Holyrood’s nationalist government is the inheritor of pre-Thatcher Britain’s most progressive impulses and its accompanying rhetoric of transformation. The work of David Edgerton highlights how the UK’s post-1945 “developmental state” focused its vast powers on “building a new national future”, with a completely revamped economic and social model.
