There was talk of standing up to the management – especially over a wage offer which didn’t come anywhere near matching inflation, running at nearly 20 per cent – but it remained just that, talk. Nobody wanted to lose a day’s pay when there was no real prospect of the offer being improved, and with the fear of unemployment lurking in the background. When it came to a choice between retaining a skilled job or idleness, there was no choice.
Don was the shop steward for his union. Byres Brothers had never directly negotiated with the unions over wages, but in some respects the presence of the unions had made discussions around pay and conditions easier for the business: if the union reps were satisfied that grievances were taken seriously and disputes settled by negotiation then there was a much-reduced likelihood of walkouts, slowdowns or other disruption. Auld Tam Byres had always thought he was giving too much away, but he was shrewd enough to see that open confrontation would cost him more. But Tam was dead. Wullie Byres was in charge now, and times had changed. The latest wage offer was very poor. Don, feeling both that he had to do something and that there wasn’t much to be done, went to see Wullie in his office at the back of the depot.
Wullie was friendly enough – he’d known Don for forty years – but he wasn’t in the mood for negotiation. ‘Ye’ll just need tae grit your teeth and let your politics stick in your thrapple,’ he said. ‘That’s what we had tae dae for years. It’s your turn noo.’
‘The boot’s on the other foot, ye mean?’
‘Aye, ye could say that.’
‘I dinna think the workforce has ever had that much clout, Wullie.’
‘Aye weel. I dae.’
‘The offer’s totally unacceptable,’ Don said. ‘Wi inflation the way it is, ye’re asking us tae take a cut. A big cut.’
‘Christ, Don, ye sound like yin o thae buggers on News at Ten. Ye’ll be banging your fist on the table next. If the offer’s unacceptable, dinna accept it. But ye’ll no get a better yin. Then what’ll ye dae?’
‘We could come oot.’
Wullie shrugged. ‘Dae what ye like. I’ve nae mair money for ye. Times are tight. If ye dinna want tae work there’s plenty men oot there that does.’
‘Ye ken I’m a grafter,’ Don said. ‘And the others.’
‘Some o them,’ Wullie growled.
‘This is aboot a fair wage for a fair day’s work.’
‘I’d agree wi ye on that. It is a fair wage.’
Don tried to imagine what was going on inside Wullie’s head. He’d been almost apoplectic in the last months of the Labour government, ranting about uncollected rubbish and unburied bodies as if he had to step over them on his way to work every morning, and now he was an enthusiastic supporter of Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe and the rest of them. He might laugh at their terribly English voices but he was in awe of them too. ‘The lady’s not for turning.’ ‘There is no alternative.’ Maybe you needed a voice like that to get things sorted. And by God Wullie thought they needed sorting. Mrs Thatcher was on his side against the barbarians – Communists, punk rockers, hordes of idle black bastards setting fires in the streets. If it was down to him he’d shoot the bloody lot of them – but maybe he didn’t have to, because Margaret Thatcher seemed to have the gumption to pull the country back from the brink. ‘She’s mair o a man than maist o her Cabinet,’ he’d said to Don a few weeks before. ‘Nae sex tae her, but ye dinna elect a Prime Minister tae be sexy, dae ye?’
‘Listen, Don,’ Wullie said now, ‘I could walk away frae this the morn’s morn if I wanted tae. I could sell the business and never hae tae lift a finger for the rest o my days. So ye dinna intimidate me coming in here and saying ye might come oot on strike. I’ve no done a heid count o your members recently but I’m no feart. The thing is, I’m no ready tae retire yet. I’m like you, I’m a grafter. I’m sixty-three. My faither was in here till the week afore he died, as ye ken. What age was he? Seventy-five. I’m no gaun onywhaur for a while, and there’s nae need for you tae go onywhaur either. But ye may as weel get used tae it. We’re in a new era. Either ye fecht it and lose, or ye work wi it. It’s your choice.’
‘We’ll see,’ Don said. He liked Wullie better than he should. Always had done. And he wouldn’t admit it, but he was pretty sure that Wullie was right.
‘Aye,’ Wullie said with a wink, ‘we will.’
§
A conference was held in Glasgow, in the theatre behind the Mitchell Library. A Saturday in July 1983. Three weeks earlier Margaret Thatcher had won her second General Election, routing the Labour Party under Michael Foot’s leadership. The conference organisers had a big question for those attending: ‘Which way now for the Scottish Left?’ ‘We have to go to this, we have to go,’ Adam Shaw said. So they went, he and Mike Pendreich and three hundred or so other disparate souls who might have been described as belonging to the ‘Scottish Left’. But on the day some were even unhappy about that designation. They felt that the adjective somehow betrayed the spirit of the noun it described. Someone was selling copies of a poster that said in big letters SCOTTISH WRITERS AGAINST THE BOMB. On it were the names of dozens of writers opposed to nuclear weapons on the Clyde. An argument started. ‘Oh, you can’t say that.’ ‘Can’t say what?’ ‘If you say “Scottish writers” you’re excluding other writers who are also against the Bomb. That’s parochial, that is.’ ‘Who are you calling parochial? We’re just saying we don’t want nuclear missiles here.’ ‘You’re pandering to nationalism.’ ‘We’re pandering to nationalism?’ A fight almost broke out.
Those who hadn’t come to trade ideological insults had come to lick their wounds after the election, and to see what, if anything, could be done next. Until about a year before, it had still been possible to hope that the Conservatives might only last one term. There was so much unemployment, such general misery and despair, that many on the left didn’t think ordinary people could stand any more of it. Even the extravaganza of Prince Charles’s marriage to Diana Spencer in 1981 had surely been only a temporary diversion. The opinion polls said there had never been such an unpopular Prime Minister or such an out-of-touch government. But then a fascist dictator in Argentina took it upon himself to invade the Falkland Islands, thereby saving the Thatcher regime and destroying his own. The steel-haired Britannia dispatched a task force to win the Falklands back. Some predicted, or longed for, disaster – Mrs Thatcher’s Suez. The predictions were wrong. If it was her Suez she turned out to be Nasser, not Anthony Eden. Suddenly, for millions, Mrs Thatcher was a heroine, the woman who’d put the ‘great’ back into Great Britain. Boosted by the ‘Falklands factor’, she won the 1983 election with a huge majority. Labour haemorrhaged support to the Liberals and Social Democrats, and in terms of the number of votes gained were nearly beaten into third place.
A deep depression hung over the Glasgow conference. It was hardly surprising that people bickered over the wording of a poster. There wasn’t much else to shout about.
Various pompous, contrite, humble and not-so-humble MPs, councillors and union leaders – almost all male – came to the microphone. Often they took the opportunity to attack the views of previous speakers. The main arguments focused on the question of ‘the Scottish card’. What was it, and how could or should it be played? Did the Thatcher government, rejected by three-quarters of the Scottish electorate, even have a mandate to govern Scotland? The Labour speakers could not entertain that proposition. To accept it would undermine the Union, playing into the hands of the SNP. And what if, at a future election, Labour won a Westminster majority that depended on their Scottish and Welsh seats? Where would be their mandate to govern England? The Communist Party representatives, who did not have to worry about the possibility of being in government, said that the Scottish Left had to come to terms with the concept of Scottishness. The SNP left-wingers present enthusiastically agreed, but they were badly out of favour with their own party, which had performed terribly in the election but was nevertheless sticking with the traditional independ
ence-and-nothing-less stance it had reverted to after the 1979 referendum. Left-wingers had little influence within the SNP, and ‘soft’ nationalists had none in Labour. There was a tension in the air: identity politics versus class consciousness. The one policy that offered some prospect of common ground, devolution, was once again being squeezed from all sides. Nobody loved it, and nobody had much of a good word to say for it. Only the representatives of the Campaign for the Scottish Assembly, the cross-party, non-party organisation that had been doggedly reconstructing the case for devolution since the failed referendum of 1979, seemed genuine in their enthusiasm.
Adam’s chin sank on his chest as he listened. Mike thought about taking a break and going to find a cup of tea. Then the next speaker stalked up to the microphone and he decided to wait. It was Robin Cook, his own MP, he who had been so fierce against the very idea of an assembly only a few years before.
‘I have not,’ Cook said, his red beard jutting out defiantly, ‘I have not been an extravagant supporter of the Scottish dimension.’ Where previous speakers had droned, Cook yapped, and everybody sat up. ‘But I’ve changed my mind. I don’t give a bugger if Thatcher has a mandate or not – I will simply do whatever I can to stop her.’ There was a stunned silence, then a smattering of applause. Cook carried on, but whatever else he said didn’t really matter. The rigid anti-devolutionist had moved – out of expediency, no doubt, but it was a brutal, honest kind of expediency. Adam nudged Mike. ‘If he can shift his position, anybody can.’
Adam’s brother, Gavin, the Politics lecturer, was also at the conference. Mike had met him once or twice before, and had found him very distant. He didn’t think Gavin took him or his opinions seriously. But they went for a drink afterwards, analysing the day and concluding that in a mostly bleak landscape the Cook movement had supplied the brightest glimmer of hope, and Gavin was different: friendlier, and as willing to listen as to talk. When they parted he grasped Mike’s right hand in his at the same time as his left arm went round Adam’s shoulder in a brotherly hug. It felt, a little, like being welcomed into a family.
§
It was the era of postcards selling sex. They filled the interiors of phone boxes from Euston to Charing Cross. When you went into some of them around Leicester Square you could hardly see out through the glass for postcards. That was good, as it meant no one could see in as you pretended to make a call to your wife or bank manager while you read the invitations. Every sexual service, every deviant desire you could imagine, was stuck up there, with phone numbers and photos, or with old-fashioned line drawings that David Eddelstane found more subtly enticing. And sure enough, when he looked, there were cards for what he thought he wanted. He picked them off and stuffed them in his coat pocket. His hand trembled as if at any moment the door would be forced open and the world would be outside pointing and jeering at him. Get a grip, he told himself, nobody cares. It isn’t anybody’s business but yours. But it was, because he was an elected representative of the people. It would be everybody’s business if they ever found out. In the Islington flat – which he’d held on to all through the 1970s and was now very pleased he had, as the street had become extremely desirable and the place was worth six times what he’d paid for it – he shuffled the cards in wonder and fear. There was one that kept coming to the top of the pile. It was inevitable that he would eventually dial the number.
‘I know what you want, love,’ the woman at the other end of the line said. ‘You come and see me and I’ll make you happy.’ He asked a question or two, and she supplied the right answers. She gave him the address and a time, and he went. Walked up and down past the door, round the corner, was he going to do this, was he really going to do it? If there was a newshound on his trail he’d be better off the street than hanging about like an idiot, so back he went, terrified, and rang the bell.
Terrified was what she expected. She was older than he’d assumed from her voice, but that was okay; in fact it was reassuring. Somehow he persuaded himself he could trust her because she was older. He felt the years falling away even as she invited him to sit down and tell her again what he wanted. Then she instructed him to undress. He was a little boy again. ‘You’re here and you don’t even know why,’ she said, ‘but I do. I know what you want before you ask for it.’ He thought he was going to swoon. ‘Relax,’ she said. ‘Deep breaths. This can take as long as you like. You and I are going on a journey together.’
§
Here is a situation: a country that is not fully a country, a nation that does not quite believe itself to be a nation, exists within, and as a small and distant part of, a greater state. The greater state was once a very great state, with its own empire. It is no longer great, but its leaders and many of its people like to believe it is. For the people of the less-than country, the not-quite nation, there are competing, conflicting loyalties. They are confused. For generations a kind of balance has been maintained. There has been give and take, and, yes, there have been arguments about how much give and how much take, but now something has changed. There is a sense of injustice, of neglect, of vague or real oppression. Nobody is being shot, there are no political prisoners, there is very little censorship, but still that sense persists: this is wrong. It grows. It demands to be addressed. The situation needs to be fixed.
So there are gatherings and debates. There are long arguments in pubs and round kitchen tables. People write discussion papers, and meet to discuss them. There are music sessions, poetry readings, lectures and political seminars. There are statements of principle, voices of dissent, angry walkouts. There are lines people will not cross, but which, on reflection, they will. There are conversations and compromises. People learn how to talk to each other and how to listen, because the alternative is endless defeat. Gradually it becomes possible for a kind of socialism and a kind of nationalism to exist in the same person, in the same room, in the same political party. And these locations, private and public, no longer have to be battle zones.
There were magazines recording and encouraging this process of self-exploration. They were small-scale, low-budget, sporadic affairs, and their sales were tiny – a few hundred, a very few thousand – but the people running them weren’t doing it for the sales. They were doing it to address that pervasive sense of wrongness. And the people who read them – culturally aware, politically active people – were hungry for what they provided. More than anything, perhaps, the magazines said: you are not alone.
Mike knew this because it was how he felt. He read the magazines from cover to cover. They filled the gaps of what he didn’t learn from Adam or from his wider reading. They gave him the sense that he belonged to a political community that was not being dictated to or managed by the mainstream parties. There was an undercurrent of desire for change, and these publications and anyone involved with them, even if only as a reader, were part of it.
Gavin Shaw was on the editorial board of one. Root & Branch, it was called. At the time of the Glasgow conference it had produced only a couple of issues. He came round to the Tollcross flat one evening, on the off chance, so he said, of catching Mike in. Mike made coffee and they sat in the kitchen turning the pages of the first two issues. ‘We’re trying to build bridges, open dialogues,’ Gavin explained. ‘What will this country look like in ten or twenty years? We take the view that any viable future for Scotland has to include a strong measure of self-government – let’s not be more specific than that – but otherwise we don’t have a fixed agenda. We’ll publish contributions from anybody if they have something interesting or innovative to say.’
Everybody involved with the magazine, he said, wanted to improve the general design and layout, and to make the covers more striking without increasing the costs too much. Also, they badly needed photographs – other than those they borrowed or stole from elsewhere, which tended to be of poor quality – to illustrate some of the articles with.
‘Adam’s talked to me a bit about this,’ Mike said. ‘He thought –’
/> ‘He thought you might lend a hand,’ Gavin said. ‘He helps out a bit, but he’s too busy with other things. And you’ve got some of the skills we need. There’s no money in it, of course. You’d be like the rest of us – doing it for the cause.’
‘For the cause?’
‘Totally.’
‘A lot of the work I do is like that.’
‘I know. That’s why I’m asking you.’
‘I can’t really afford the time.’
‘I know. None of us can.’
‘On the other hand …’
‘Yes?’
‘… can I afford not to?’
‘That’s how we all feel.’
‘Okay. Count me in.’
‘Brilliant. There’s an editorial meeting tomorrow evening. Are you free?’
‘What’s tomorrow, Wednesday? Yes, I can do that. I can’t do Thursdays or Fridays, I work in a restaurant those nights. That’s just for future reference.’
Gavin held out his hand. ‘We’ll bear it in mind.’
§
Mike has a complete set of Root & Branch on his shelves at Cnoc nan Gobhar. Because it was run on a shoestring budget, the magazine relied on income from sales of one issue to pay the printers for the next, and its appearance was therefore irregular. It also depended on the willingness of its contributors to write for nothing. To have produced twenty-five issues under these conditions seems now not far short of miraculous. Once every two or three months, armed with scalpels, steel rules and Tipp-Ex, the entire editorial team gathered for a weekend, and spent it cutting up the bromide sheets of typeset text, spray-mounting them and sticking them down by hand, page by page, before delivering the whole thing to the printer. Then, when the printed copies came back, another evening was devoted to sending them off to subscribers, and packing orders to bookshops, art galleries, health-food shops and other outlets. A meeting to plan the next issue followed hard on that, and the routine of commissioning, writing and image-gathering would begin again. Even then it was a process being superseded by new technological advances. Tw0 decades on, it seems antique to Mike, belonging to another age altogether.
And the Land Lay Still Page 62
