“US v them, them v us, gadgies versus biddies, outies versus innies. I tell you I’ve had it with the vs. So please, please, please, gies, gies, gies peace.”
This is how the Scottish Government new awareness-raising film, We Are Scotland, starts – and I’ve got to say it’s a beautiful, clever piece of film-making that makes my heart sing and sigh with relief. But it also makes me uncomfortable, because it feels as if it’s made for people like me. It feels like it’s there for the people who already want to believe we’re halfway towards a warm, huggy Scotland in which inclusivity really matters.
Though it may be that quite a lot of Scotland feels that way, it’s not quite everyone. I’m not foolish enough to imagine that there aren’t those out there, in these times of social media antagonism and Brexit-era anxiety, who are going to watch that film and still see a “v” even in this declaration of peace. There are going to be at least some who aren’t going to fall for its tale of moving on and getting over old tensions, of appreciating diversity and loving those we live alongside. There are those who are going to see it as coming from the other side, the political tribe that is not their own.
Conservative MP Ross Thomson was a key voice – perhaps the only loud one – objecting to the film on it release last week. His complaint, primarily, was that this looked to him like an “an independence campaign by stealth at the taxpayers' expense". Now I’m not saying that the film might not have that side-effect – I myself was very much charmed by the inclusivity of the last independence campaign – but that’s clearly not the campaign’s chief goal. This is, after all, just one film in a longer project, which started back in 2002, when Labour First Minister Jack McConnell’s government created the One Scotland, Many Cultures campaign.
The SNP, in other words, don’t own this inclusivity. That we need to welcome others, to celebrate difference, is actually a conclusion that most politicians working in a country with a declining population tend to come to, whether they are seeking independence or not. The real question, therefore, should not be whether such a film is an independence pitch on the sly, but whether in fact such films work. Do campaigns like these play any role in reducing racism and hate crime and helping us all live together?
Sadly the evidence that they do is shaky. A review published in 2015 by the Scottish Government, What Works To Reduce Prejudice And Discrimination?, for instance, found that “at best, media campaigns might be deemed effective in relatively 'vague' ways”. However, it also observed that repetition would have more effect than one-off campaigns – and We Are Scotland is itself a repetition of an old One Scotland theme.
I suspect it’s going to take far more than the soft approach of campaigns like these to defeat racism. As Neil Davidson, author of No Problem Here: Understanding Racism In Scotland, has put it, there’s a bigger problem to address. Scotland, he observes, like many other countries, is exhibiting symptoms of “the capitalist system in crisis”. One of these “is a resurgence of racism, as people seek false solutions for their problems and identify the wrong targets for their anger”.
So, we can repeat as much as we like, but it will only take us so far. We can say please, please, please, gies, gies, gies, over and over and over. But when people feel loss and hurt, when they are under threat, the tendency to blame another is easily ignited.
A bad taste
PERHAPS there was a time when food writing was all about wholesomeness and comfort. But, no longer. The war of words over food is likely to either leave you feeling poisoned by politics, or suffering from heartburn from the indigestible doses of snobbery.
Hardly surprising, therefore, to learn that writer and former Great British Bake Off runner-up Ruby Tandoh had decided to quit her Guardian column because of the elitism of the sphere. “The circles of food hell are heinous,” she tweeted last week. “Rich people slagging off convenience foods all around, professional fatphobes at every level and not a scruple in sight. I really tried, but I’m out.” Tandoh has many complaints, among them being that “the stuff that makes the headlines again and again is toxic and elitist”.
You don’t have to struggle to find what she’s talking about out there. Food writing is where the febrile worlds of consumer politics and aspiration collide, and in which what was one month’s new experimental diet or ethical regime, becomes the next’s new fad. If we’re not being made to feel inadequate by the moralisings of clean-eaters, we’re being made to feel plebby because we bought a loaf of sliced, packaged brown bread from the supermarket, complete with extra gluten.
Tandoh has had enough – and her sign-off reminds of me comments that Michelin chef Angela Hartnett made recently n Desert Island Discs. She said British food culture didn’t really exist in any proper sense. “Our food culture is about money, if you have money you can afford good food in this country”.
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