Gerry Hassan questions the purpose of two constitutional debates
The idea of a ‘national conversation’ sounds deeply attractive, overdue and a timely concept.
Who could oppose such an idea? Sadly, the ‘national conversation’ is a conversation in name only, while the Scottish Constitutional Commission is an equally controlled and contrived enterprise.
These two initiatives are failures in content and process. In content, the ‘national conversation’ seems an exercise in window dressing by the SNP Government, keen to be seen to be doing something, while the commission is based on the unionist parties responding to the SNP and avoiding being perceived as defending an unchanging constitutional status quo.
In process, the ‘national conversation’ has made no attempt to develop a series of structured, facilitated exchanges or real dialogues; a website and people with too much time and various chips do not a dialogue make!
The commission is just as bad in assuming that bringing together politicians and elite opinion will be enough to fine tune the system and off we go with a few more powers and the separatists routed!
Clearly something more imaginative is needed, but why has this paucity been allowed to take hold? Part of this is due to the story of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, part mythology, part Canon Kenyon Wright believing his own hype. The convention was a talking shop made up of politicians pretending to be ‘civil society’ plus a few institutions – local government, trade unions and wannabe politicians.
The convention mythology is that it led to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament. This is fundamentally wrong. A whole host of movements and institutions contributed to the birth of the Parliament including Labour, SNP and Lib Dems, as well as a wider, diffuse cultural nationalism. We have a mongrel Parliament in terms of its parentage to suit our mongrel nation
We have a mongrel Parliament in terms of its parentage to suit our mongrel nation 
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However, the convention has come to be seen as the midwife of the Parliament by some – because it was an institution and a relatively successful cross-party one – so people want to revisit what they see as a success (in the way some people never get over their teenage music heroes).
A genuine national conversation is needed which people control, not the politicians or institutions. Incredibly across Scotland, such activities have already broken out and shown what can be done.
For the last four years I have had the pleasure of leading the Demos Scotland 2020 and Glasgow 2020 programmes. These were two projects which engaged in futures thinking, the second a mass imagination project which involved a significant and representative cross-section of the city, posed questions about cities and how we think of the future generally, and was a first anywhere in the world – being the first futures project about how you re-imagine a city through the stories people tell.
What do these projects show which is relevant to a genuine national conversation? First, processes and methodologies matter. In Glasgow 2020 we used a range of processes of engagement to aid deliberative discussions including the use of philosophical inquiry and asking people the open question, ‘will Glasgow be a better or worse place in 2020?’.
This takes people into discussions about what they mean by ‘better’ or ‘worse’, about material versus non-material progress, and about who benefits and does not. Activities such as play, fun, imagination, painting, creating: all of these things matter in how you involve people!
Second, where you hold events is crucial. If you hold events in ‘official’ places they have an ‘official’ ethos. We chose to run events in all sorts of nooks and crannies and to use public spaces in a disruptive way.
Thus, we took over parts of Glasgow-Edinburgh trains for two days, sailed up and down the Clyde in the ‘Pride of the Clyde’ boat and hired Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum on a Saturday where a mix of Glasgow folk came and participated in events.
Third, you have to go beyond institutional opinion and how people are conventionally seen by the system. We held events with sexual health workers, artists, taxi drivers and hairdressers, the latter ending up a news item in the New York Times. When we listened to people, we didn’t listen to them as single parents or creative entrepreneurs, we just listened to them as people with all the multi-faceted characteristics people have.
Fourth, increasingly, ‘consultation’ is not trusted by more and more people. Instead, new methods are needed. Glasgow 2020 was a mass imagination exercise, aided by sitting outside the system while engaging with it - with twenty project partners from the city council, to health boards, police, fire service, universities and more.
Moreover, people do not think about their lives in policy terms or in relation to government and public institutions. Instead, they think about themselves, their families, friends, neighbourhood and city, and do so in a very broad way that addresses the meaning and purpose of life.
Both Scotland 2020 and Glasgow 2020 used the power and resonance of story to imagine very different futures from that offered by ‘the official future’ of government. This is a nuanced point which is easy to get over to some and not to others. The way we live and feel and make sense of our lives is very different from how institutions plan and conceive the world.
The economic determinism of ‘the official future’ is a very dogmatic, intolerant, profoundly anti-democratic mindset and it is, of course, one that despite their differences on the constitution, both SNP and Labour leaderships seem wedded to.
Any genuine exercise has to start with a set of open questions and assumptions, rather than the ‘national conversation’ and commission, which both start off from where they want to end. We really need to engage in a deep, discursive set of conversations about the kind of Scotland we want to live in. This has to explore what kind of society we want to live in and what values and relationships we want to embed between government, citizens and society. It would ask where do we think we are, where do we want to go and how can we map out a route?
This is a very different exercise from positing an independent Scotland or the union as the answer from the start. We may end up seeing an independent country or a reformed, democratised union as the answer, but the journey will have been very different, and one which has avoided going down cul-de-sacs and closed conversations.
In short, exploring what kind of Scotland we want to live in ahead of black and white options about our constitutional status, and then addressing what kind of nation and polity best aids that, is a thoroughly participative project. It would address the yearning Scots have for asking deep questions and reflecting on the meaning of life. And it would answer the bigger geopolitical questions about what is the place and location of Scotland as a society and nation.
Democratising the future, by telling our multiple, varied, complex and compelling stories and thereby giving articulation to our different Scotlands and voices.
The beautiful thing is much of this is already happening under the radar under the noses of the institutions. Apart from Scotland 2020 and Glasgow 2020 numerous projects have sprung into life up and down this land, which show the capacity and interest people have for shaping their own future and imagining a very different future - from Sullom Voe 2039 to Fallin Futures in Stirling, and Voice of My Own, Heart of Hawick, part of Scottish Borders New Futures programme.
These activities and initiatives point to a very different ‘national conversation’ already going on. It shows the potential of a very different kind of Scotland and a very different kind of society and state, in which the latter is a much less omnipotent, over-reaching centre, but one which is facilitating, supporting and encouraging people across the land to take more power and self-responsibility into their own hands.
This would require a fundamentally different philosophy and practice at the heart of Scottish government. It would see the institutions of our new political system as bringing about a wider sense of self-government which diffused and spread power across the country. It would involve a very different concept of the centre – one that was turned ‘inside out’ – and was smaller and more strategic.
Bodies which have a national remit would act in a different way. An example is the Scottish Parliament Futures Forum, which seems to see itself as a body of the Scottish Parliament more than the nation. This body should be holding events all over Scotland, rather than asking people to come to it. It should be a crucial part of any national conversation, nurturing, nourishing and entering into dialogue with the array of futures activities which are taking place all across the nation. That sounds like exciting work, pointing to a very different centre and country.
Such activity would be a threat to the narrow bandwidth of large parts of our political classes and the centre, offering the prospect not only that they might lose control, but that a very different version of Scotland might arise in the process.
Gerry Hassan is Honorary Research Fellow at Glasgow Caledonian University and was Head of the Demos Scotland 2020 and Glasgow 2020 programmes. His latest books are ‘The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination’ (Demos) and ‘After Blair: Politics after the New Labour Decade’ (L&W in association with Compass).
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