Ian Rankin: The Labour Party has always been a guddle

“You know I’m a fiction writer, right? I’m not a politician. I make stuff up for a living.”

There’s an obvious joke there about the relationship between politicians and the truth, but Sir Ian Rankin doesn’t make it. Instead, he tells Holyrood he “doesn’t always have a view” on political matters. “I don’t always have enough information at my fingertips,” he says. “I’m not a specialist.”

Perhaps not in politics, but Rankin excels at his chosen specialism – crime writing. His book sales run into the tens of millions thanks to a career spanning almost 40 years and 30 titles. His most famous creation, John Rebus, appears in as many as 25 novels, the latest of which is last year’s Midnight and Blue. First appearing in 1987, he has aged along with his readership and his author in a series which has continually reflected contemporary Scotland – trams, parliament and all. In one outing, Set in Darkness, a candidate for the inaugural Holyrood election is found murdered in the grounds of Queensberry House. In another, 2015’s Even Dogs in the Wild, there’s an allusion to Nicola Sturgeon, with one character said to resemble the then-first minister. It could be said, then, that politics punctuates Rankin’s work. 

Ex-SNP leader Sturgeon is amongst Rankin’s fans, and the pair shared a stage when she chaired his appearance at Stirling’s Bloody Scotland festival in 2019, even though their politics differ – Labour backer Rankin has said Rebus would have voted no to independence in 2014. And his connection to politics runs deeper still, with late chancellor Alistair Darling and former prime minister Gordon Brown, a fellow Fifer, longstanding friends. The association is such that Rankin was invited to dinner at 11 Downing Street when the pair were in office, with Brown showing the writer around his premises next door. When a public memorial service was held for Darling in St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral almost two years ago, both Rankin and Brown were amongst those in attendance.

Such is his connection to Labour that in 2019, not quite a decade after Brown’s administration left office in an election that would herald 14 years of unbroken Conservative rule, Rankin said he had a “dream that one day the Labour Party will get back in power”.

It’s been a year since that dream came true. So, is Keir Starmer’ government all Rankin thought it would be? “Oh jeez,” he says.

Taxes for the rich should go up, that’s a pretty basic thing

“In some ways yes, in some ways no. It hasn’t been as progressive as I would like to have seen it be. But, you know, Keir Starmer is a pragmatist – one of the reasons he got into power is that he was seen as a pragmatic change to the Conservative government, which was a shambles.

“He’s possibly not as charismatic as some would like, which means he can’t always take the country with him. He can’t always persuade the way Tony Blair could persuade people to go along with things that weren’t necessarily popular. But there are good people there. He has good MPs and MSPs, and Labour’s always been a bit of a guddle. Ever since the Labour Party was established it’s been a bit of a guddle. I was reading a book recently about the first Labour government, and that was a guddle. It’s going to take more time. 

Starmer, Rankin says, has “made some very basic mistakes”. Such as? Welfare is the immediate answer. Threat of a backbench rebellion saw the government make an 11th hour retreat on its plan to slash billions from the social security bill by bringing in new restrictions on payments for people with disabilities. Ministers aimed to save £5bn by 2030 through cutting disability and sickness-related support for existing and new claimants in a move that angered campaigners and some Labour MPs. A last-minute U-turn means the changes now only apply to those who make a claim after November next year.

“To be seen to be cutting benefits for disabled people, for a Labour government to be seen to be doing that is extraordinary and disheartening,” says Rankin. “I think taxes for the rich should go up, that’s a pretty basic thing,” he goes on. “I’m a high net worth individual; I wouldn’t mind paying more tax if I knew where it was going and it was going to the right places to do the right things. This fear that the government seems to have that they will lose high net worth individuals, that they’ll all flee overseas, I don’t know how real that is as a fear, but it would be nice to test it.”

Rankin ponders. “He’s not quite done what I wanted him to do”, he says of Starmer, “and I don’t know how much of that is down to cowardice – and by cowardice, I mean not wanting to upset the status quo – and how much of it is just pragmatism. I still think it’s better than what we had before though.” 

And there’s something else he wants the government to take action on – the harvesting of original material by tech firms to train AI models. According to a US court filing, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg approved his company’s use of “shadow library” LibGen, which runs to in excess of 7.5m books, all paywall-free. The tech giant has said its processes are “constituent with existing law”. A searchable LibGen database, published by The Atlantic, lists 200 entries for Rankin, including novels and short stories in English, Czech, German, Greek and more. 

The Society of Authors, of which Rankin is a member, has called on tech firms to be “held accountable” for the use of copyrighted material and made to pay creators. “There can be no question that the scraping of authors’ works for the purpose of generative AI training is unlawful in the UK,” the union said in a petition addressed to UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy.

Bottom line, it’s theft

“Authors are almost powerless given the enormous cost and complexities of pursuing litigation against corporate defendants with such deep pockets. We call upon you and the UK Government to take all action available to ensure that the rights, interests and livelihoods of authors are adequately protected. Failure to act without further delay will unquestionably have a catastrophic and irreversible impact on all UK authors given that from development through to output, creators’ rights are being systematically and repeatedly ignored.”

“Bottom line, it’s theft,” says Rankin. “You’ve got something you’ve created that is in copyright. If someone takes that without your permission, that is theft and it is a big deal because, you know, we’re already at a stage where novels, stories created by algorithms are appearing online for sale, and very soon people will be pretending to be Richard Osman or Ian Rankin and putting stories out there. I say people, I mean machines.”

There’s always a person behind the machine, though. “Oh, there’s always a person who owns the machine and is making money somewhere. 

“It’s hard enough for writers. The Society of Authors does research every year or two on the average earnings of authors across the UK and, I mean, it’s under nine grand. That’s the average earnings for an author, which is why so many writers need second jobs or main jobs.”

It took Rankin years of graft to turn what was a “paid hobby” into something that would pay the bills, and he had stints as, variously, a grape-picker, tax collector, swineherd and journalist at a hi-fi magazine before being able to go full-time.

Brought up in former mining town Cardenden, he and his sister were raised by dad James, who owned a grocer’s, and mum Isobel, who worked in a school canteen. Arguably the area’s most famous son, Rankin’s renown is such that he has a street named after him, Ian Rankin Court, and so if he has put his hometown on the map, it has done the same for him. But it is Edinburgh with which he is most closely associated, despite spells living in London and the Dordogne, where his sons Jack and Kit were born. 

My books are pretty popular in jails

Rankin studied in Edinburgh, made a home there, began his writing career there, and has made the city central to his novels – the home of that gruff, tenacious ex-detective inspector, Rebus. And, now well into retirement, Rebus has gone from law man to prisoner. In Midnight and Blue he’s an inmate at Saughton with a mystery to solve. And to put him there, Rankin himself went inside, spending a couple of days at HMP Edinburgh to bring a sense of the cells to his latest bestseller. 

The visit saw him sit down with a class of prisoners in the library to talk about his work. Were there fans amongst their number? “My books are pretty popular in jails,” Rankin says. I very occasionally get letters sent to me from prisoners around the world and I also – this is kind of an aside, but I sponsor a writing prize at Fife College, and until recently Fife College had the contract for all education in Scottish prisons, and so the writing prize competition was open to prisoners in Scotland as well as students, and we got some really good entries from prisoners. But sadly that contract has come to an end, so I think that might be the end of that.

“I meet ex-cons on the outside from time to time,” he goes on. “They come to readings, they come to signings, I meet them in the pub, I just bump into them. 

“There are very bad men who I have come into contact with, there are men who’ve made one mistake, and there might even be one or two who were found guilty without having done the crime. You know, a lot of people you talk to in prisons tell you they didn’t do it. And the most borrowed books, I think I’m right in saying, from the library in Saughton as in other prisons are legal textbooks, because a lot of the prisoners are looking for a means of appeal.”

HMP Edinburgh, he says, “has got the same problems every other prison has got”. “It’s got overcrowding issues. It doesn’t have enough money, which means the prisoners don’t always get the support that was offered to them a few years back. Whether that’s educational or training or guidance, it isn’t always there, and the staffing isn’t always available to make things happen, and the fewer staff you’ve got, the more time the prisoners have to spend in their cells, which isn’t good for anybody. I don’t think it’s good for society that somebody’s locked up and then brought back out into the world without having been given any chance of a second go at life.

“Drugs are a big problem. In Scotland, we used to say for years, ‘oh, there’s no drug problem in our prisons, drugs don’t get in’. Thankfully, we’ve stopped telling that lie, and that’s a huge issue because technology allows drugs easily to get into jails because of drones. We’re seeing drones being used more and more to drop drugs into prisons to the extent that little grilles are having to be put over cell windows because the drones are so accurate they can drop the drugs into the window. So yeah, there’s a lot of problems. 

Nothing comes in on budget. Nothing ever has

“And, you know, you get this debate a lot, because there are law-abiding citizens who think it should be about the punishment – ‘things shouldn’t be too soft for the prisoner in jail’. I mean, I don’t think things are soft in jail. As soon as you’re put in jail, you’re incarcerated. That isn’t a soft life.”

Given these reflections, does Rankin have a position on the £1bn jail planned as a replacement for Glasgow’s ageing Barlinnie, a Victorian prison described by inspectors last year as being in a “wretchedly poor state” in parts? The new, larger facility is scheduled to open in 2028 at a cost of £998.4m, a price tag justice secretary Angela Constance said had been subject to “significant increase” since estimates were made in 2022 due to broader hikes in the construction sector.

Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay has slated the inclusion of features like bat boxes, while Scottish Labour’s Anas Sarwar has compared the cost to that of a luxury hotel in Dubai. Both have accused the SNP administration of squandering public money on the project, and of failing to deliver on justice.

“Nothing comes in on budget,” muses Rankin. “Nothing ever has.

“It’s a lot of money to spend on a prison. What’s the alternative? The alternative is putting fewer people in prison. How would that go down with the public? How would politicians feel about putting that point of view across? ‘We need fewer prisons, which means fewer prisoners.’ I think they would see that as a potential vote loser.”

There’s a case for investment in the infrastructure, given that it’s “crumbling everywhere”, Rankin says. “We know it, we know that our schools and roads are not what they could be. And whenever something is proposed to make things better it either gets kicked into the long grass or the bureaucracy is such that it doesn’t happen for donkey’s years. Look at the A9, I drive up the A9 all the time. It’ll never be dualled in my lifetime – they’ll be lucky to get the next stretch finished in my lifetime. 

If you put a child in a library, it’s an extraordinary thing

“Politics is difficult. I read Holyrood, we all know politics is difficult and we all know there are good people involved, idealistic people trying to do the right thing. Which is great until reality bites. I’m just glad I’m not part of it.”

But Rankin is glad to be part of the Paper Trails project, a partnership between Edinburgh International Book Festival and the city council which repositions selected libraries as “cultural hubs” offering initiatives like storytelling circles and creative writing workshops and bringing authors and artists into communities. Of the five centres – Streetreads, a charity-run service for those experiencing homelessness and the mobile library along with sites at Liberton High, Muirhouse and Ratho – the latter is newly opened and was visited by the Queen in early July, with Rankin also on-hand in his role of Deputy Lieutenant of Edinburgh.

It was, he says, “an exciting moment”. “I mean, a new library,” he muses. “The staff were buzzing because until then they’d been having to use a mobile library. And it’s a great resource for the community – libraries always are.

“I’m always sad when I hear about libraries closing. Of course, I am. It’s a very easy cut to make for hard pressed councils because it’s almost an invisible cut,” he says of broader contractions in the public library network.

“It’s that reductive argument that, well, if you want a book, there’s plenty other places you can get a book, but a library is about so much more than that. A library should be and can be the beating heart of a community, and it brings the community together. And literacy is a huge problem. We know this in Scotland and elsewhere: kids not reading, kids growing up in households with no books, kids growing up never seeing their parents read or never having their parents read to them. And what a library can do is a stressed parent can take their wee ones along, there’ll be a reading group, there’ll be free books, there’ll be toys for them to play with, and it’s a place where the parent can de-stress while the kid gets on with reading. Then it might introduce the parents to the idea of reading to their kids. And we’re never going to solve the literacy problem if we don’t start at the very beginning, which is young children getting access to stories, and their parents getting access to those stories. So, I mean, a library is absolutely crucial.

“If you put a child in a library, it’s an extraordinary thing, because they’ll run straight to the books and start looking at them. And it’s a tactile thing, they’re learning motor skills, they’re not reading on a screen. Many writers have said it: a library is a universe in miniature. Everything is there. It was the most exciting place for me when I was a kid. I was going to the library in Bowhill, where I grew up, a Carnegie Library, and just devouring as many books as they would allow me to take home, because my parents weren’t big readers and we didn’t have that many books in the house, but the library was just an absolute godsend.”

You get asked all kinds of weird things

While Rankin’s published works can be found on shelves in libraries around the country, he’s also added to public collections by donating an archive of 50 boxes worth of manuscripts, letters and paperwork to the National Library of Scotland. Those seeking the secrets to his success could dig through for clues. Or they could always just ask him – and fans frequently do. 

“Every writer seems to get ‘how do you write? How do you go about it?’” Rankin says when asked for the most common question from readers. “People are very interested in the process – do you write longhand? Do you type it into a computer? Do you share ideas with somebody? Do you bounce ideas off anybody? I mean, you get asked all kinds of weird things. I’ve been asked what do the rings on my fingers mean? I’ve been asked what’s my favourite cheese? But I mean, I’ve never done the Holyrood magazine [Binary Politics] quiz, so I’ve never been asked ‘salt and sauce or salt and vinegar?’”

So which is it? “Salt and sauce. It’s just the tastiest option.”