What’s the Matter With Scotland?

Novelist Allan Massie ponders how the birthplace of Adam Smith and Walter Scott declined into a depressing culture of dependence, passivity and stagnation.

By Barton Swaim. Excerpts:

"Scottish voters in the late 20th century, though culturally conservative, mostly despised Margaret Thatcher and found heavy-handed economic and social policies far more attractive than their English counterparts did. Why? “The Scottish economy at the end of the 19th century was a powerhouse, but it rested on industries that went elsewhere—shipbuilding, heavy machinery, iron and steel and so on.”

These industries largely collapsed after World War I, re-emerged during the next world war, then died again—leaving mass unemployment and a widespread suspicion of capitalism and deregulation. “From the 1960s or 1970s on, the only thought was of the collective” in Scotland. “Only the state could turn things around, only communal action,” Mr. Massie says. “Thatcher was all about individualism. Scotland was—this was the thinking—about the collective, the state.”

The consequence, decades later, was a culture marked by dependency. “A much greater proportion of people in Scotland in the 1970s lived in public housing—schemes they’re called—than elsewhere in . . . the free countries of Europe.” A lot of state intervention was understandable, given the economic realities, Mr. Massie judges, but “it did much to harm the Protestant work ethic that had once been so important in Scotland.”"

"there isn’t a single serious intellectual magazine or book review published in Scotland. An amazing fact, inasmuch as Scotland produced the first important book review: the Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802."

"modern European proponents of welfare-state liberalism likened to a dying class of 19th-century hereditary nobles, confident in their rightness and desperate to rest. The socialist outlook—I use the word in the broadest sense—may inspire struggle in the immediate present, but the practical goal is tranquility, perpetual rest in an equality of outcomes: an attitude not so different from that of a predemocratic, precapitalist European noble hoping to keep his subjects more or less content with little gifts from his largess."

"“Things are not getting better, they’re getting worse.”"