BROADCASTER Lesley Riddoch made a most persuasive case at the Edinburgh International Book Festival for a meaningful kind of participatory democracy in Scotland.
“We need a vigorous debate happening to pull resources out of Holyrood to where we live,” she said yesterday. “Ninety per cent of the services you’ll ever use will be consumed within five miles of your doorstep.”
People do not feel as if they can take control of their lives. It’s on the doorstep where democracy thrives or fails, yet ‘local’ is a pejorative term.
Nordic communities have power, Riddoch added. In Sweden, if you earn less than £35,000, you don’t pay a penny in tax to central government. It all goes to local government - “that’s how powerfully local and municipal they are.”
In Norway, one in 81 people stands for election; in Scotland, it’s one in 2,071. There, voting works. Here, “if you want to change something, voting hasn’t worked. It hasn’t changed things.
“You have to become a hero - you have to put 10 years of your life behind a project. You have to be prepared to see it fail, to lose your health over it, and potentially your relationships.
“And people still do it, despite all the structures of our democracy. The capacity of Scots is extraordinarily high and thrawn, because it has to be.
“Can you imagine, what would happen if we connected that kind of ability to do stuff despite all the odds, that energy … with a decent democratic structure that pulled a lot of the power and control and money down to our towns, which are dying on their feet? Can you imagine what would Scotland be like?”
Swedish author Johannes Anyuru spoke about his excellent novel A Storm Blew in from Paradise, prompted by his Ugandan-born father’s wrenching experiences of flight and exile and statelessness.
At the same Trading Stories event, Professor Dan Gunn read from his work, The Emperor of Ice Cream, about a fictional Italian family who resettle in Edinburgh.
Gunn spoke of the “pretty major injustice” that befell the Italian community here in 1940 were rounded up as “enemy aliens”; many drowned when the Arandora Star was torpedoed en route to Canada. He mentioned the “sense of sudden dislocation” when many Italians in Scotland became the “enemy within.”
Profound dislocation, statelessness, a helplessness in the face of superior forces: it was impossible not to listen to Anyuru and Gunn and not think of the situation facing tens of thousands of would-be migrants in Calais and Macedonia. This was a talk you wished could have gone on for longer.
The ugly Twitterstorm that greeted poet Craig Raine’s poem about a young woman he had encountered at Gatwick Airport may have died down, but its lessons have not been lost on Howard Jacobson.
The Man Booker-winning novelist alluded to the episode when, on Saturday, he touched on self-censorship and political correctness.
“An elderly poet admires a woman’s figure at an airport and this is ‘misogynistic’, while out there in the actual world of non-poets, men are going around and visiting as much violence on women as they ever did.
“There’s an odd disconnect here,” he added. We thought we had cleaned our society up, but we haven’t.
“There’s still violence from men to women, there is still racial violence, there is still anti-semitism.” Part of the impulse for his latest novel, the dystopian, Man Booker-nominated J, “is that how come, after the Holocaust, you can still find people wandering around carrying banners saying ‘death to Jews’, and ‘Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas’?”
Political correctness was dangerous because it makes us look as though we have improved in the way we behave towards each other, but “it would appear that we haven’t,” Jacobson said with some feeling. “The rats are making as much noise as ever, maybe more.”
Though he recorded three of his poetry collections, Philip Larkin did not give readings, believing firmly that “hearing a poem … means you miss so much” and that the speaker “may interpose his own personality between you and the poem, for better or worse.” He certainly had a point.
His words came to mind during Prolong the Talk, in which several poets read their favourite Larkin poems and responded directly to them.
A.F.Harrold boldly updated The Mower, in which Larkin accidentally killed a hedgehog. In a song blending Zappa and Kurt Weill, with pre-recorded musical backing, he began by repeating: “Hedgehogs are pricks…” Some eyebrows were raised: later, admittedly, he made us smile with a play on the line ‘They —— you up, your mum and dad.’
It all summed up the slightly uneven nature of the show. There was the odd insight, and there was no doubting the sincerity of the poets’ love of Larkin, but apart from Tim Cockburn’s amusing reading of Dockery and Son in the voice of Alan Bennett, there wasn’t much here that stuck in the mind. Chair Luke Wright said at the outset that Larkin had “quite a lot to do with spoken word”, but some of us remain to be convinced.
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