Surveying the view from another crossroads

It’s how he begins his 1984 book Invisible Country, subtitled A Journey Through Scotland. Campbell, a long-time contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, is the author of several books on writers and literary culture (ie, James Baldwin and the Beats).

But Invisible Country was his first book and the one closest to home you might say of a writer born and brought up in Glasgow and educated in Edinburgh. Inspired by Edwin Muir’s 1935 book Scottish Journey, Campbell spent weeks visiting pubs and staying in unappealing-sounding B&Bs to take a sounding of Scotland as Thatcherism took hold.

The question he set out to ask all those years ago is “how can a politically disabled nation create a history for itself?” Nearly 40 years on, post-devolution, post-referendum, is that question still relevant? You will have your own answers to that.

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It’s been an interesting week to reread Campbell’s book, though, given the fallout from Kate Forbes stating that she held to the Free Church’s ideas on gay marriage and children outside wedlock. The Daily Mash drolly parodied the response to Forbes’s comments with a story headlined “Scottish man had forgotten his country’s tradition of fervent religious bigotry”.

But you could argue the intensity of interest in Forbes is a symptom of how much has changed since 1984. Would it have been such a talking point back then? At the time, after all, the SNP was a minority party. In the wake of the failure of the 1979 referendum, Campbell writes, “the prime of SNP life looked as if it might be over”.

Campbell was no Cassandra, but it made sense at the time. Even the then SNP leader Gordon Wilson was realistic about the party’s prospects when he spoke to Campbell.

“I would estimate that if there was an election tomorrow we could gain between three and five MPs,” he said. In the event, the 1987 general election saw the SNP win just three seats in all. Wilson lost his and stood down as leader in 1990. He lived long enough to see his party far outstrip his 1980s ambitions. In his later years he also joined the Free Church.

Gordon Wilson at the SNP’s 1986 conference – how much has Scotland changed since then? (Image: Newsquest)

And yet the declining influence of the church is surely one of the ways Scotland has changed over the last four decades. Religious bigotry hasn’t gone away, but I don’t think it is any longer true to suggest, as Campbell states on page one of Invisible Country, that “Scotland fears the Sabbath”. A good thing when you run out of milk on a Sunday evening.

Some of the other issues Campbell raises in his idiosyncratic, even eccentric, travelogue, remain with us, though. The importance of the oil industry, then still in its Wild West days, remains key to Scotland’s economy (oil and gas revenue jumped to £3.2 billion in 2021/2022).

And then there is the issue of land ownership with a large part of rural Scotland still in a small number of private hands. Those owning that land may no longer be the stereotypical laird. It’s as likely to be Danish fashion tycoons or the ruler of Dubai these days. But the concentration of land ownership remains.

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When Campbell was writing Invisible Country Scotland was only beginning to come to terms with the impact of Thatcherism. Bathgate no more, Linwood no more ... In 2023 we have arrived at another crossroads.

Is the idea of independence about to retreat? Will Scotland’s social progressives return to Labour? Can a Scotland hemmed in by a populist Westminster government and the stupidity of Brexit continue to assert itself? How do we embrace cleaner energy supplies and does it matter who owns Scotland when we are buffeted by the winds of a globalised economy?

Lots of questions. There’s probably a book in them if someone fancies writing it.