Rory Scothorne

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Articles

A triumphant Labour in Westminster, a humiliated SNP in Holyrood: Scotland is entering interesting times | Rory Scothorne

Jul 5, 2024 | theguardian.com | Rory Scothorne

Scotland’s voters used to be a dependable bunch – until we were rewarded for it with a parliament of our own. These days we can only be relied on to be either indecisive or disloyal. Sometimes we are both. In the 2007 Scottish parliament elections, we gave the Scottish National party (SNP) one seat more than Labour, ushering in the first pro-independence government (albeit a minority) in Scotland’s modern history.
Scotland’s renaissance

Jun 19, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Rory Scothorne

Towering over Stirling, 220ft tall, is a Victorian monument to William Wallace. Despite Wallace’s Bravehart reputation as a symbol of Scotland’s independence struggle, many of the monument’s sponsors and supporters were not separatists but what the historian Graeme Morton calls “unionist-nationalists”.
Labour or the SNP?

Jun 12, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Rory Scothorne

This time ten years ago, Scotland was gearing up for its first, and as yet only, independence referendum. The ‘Yes’ campaign was noisy, lively, inventive – a ‘political carnival’, as Lynn Bennie, James Mitchell and Robert Johns describe it in their new book, Surges in Party Membership: The SNP and Scottish Greens after the Independence Referendum (Routledge, £135). Its ‘innovative campaigning methods’ included ‘campaign stalls, impromptu flash mobs, city marches and creative, cultural events.
Humza Yousaf’s clumsiness meant he had to jump – but Westminster gave him a push

Apr 29, 2024 | msn.com | Rory Scothorne

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Humza Yousaf’s clumsiness meant he had to jump – but Westminster gave him a push | Rory Scothorne

Apr 29, 2024 | theguardian.com | Rory Scothorne

You’ve seen it posted on office walls and Instagram feeds: diamonds are formed under pressure. Well, so are career-ending mistakes. Hopefully Humza Yousaf, who last week collapsed his own government’s majority by ending the SNP’s cooperation agreement with the Scottish Greens and then resigned before a probable no-confidence vote at Holyrood, can find clarity and respite after what must have been a personally horrible year.
Scotland's old order plots a restoration

Apr 27, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Rory Scothorne

In 1985, Neal Ascherson compared the different attitudes which the English and the Scots have to their national histories. When the English think of their past, he argued, they “are gazing from the terrace of a country house down carefully-landscaped perspectives of barbered lawns and positioned trees”. The eye is carefully guided towards a clear focal point: a single, national story, leading neatly up to the present and keeping the past safely organised in the past.
Edinburgh’s Festivalisation

Dec 20, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | Rory Scothorne

The first humans settled in Scotland around 14,000 years ago. They must have arrived in summer; nobody in their right mind would choose to live here during the winter. Even as far south as Edinburgh, the sun emerges late only to disappear before 4 p.m., the rain eats umbrellas for breakfast and the Arctic gale is as rough as sandpaper.
Unintended Consequences

May 10, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | Malcolm Petrie |Rory Scothorne

‘My only country/is six feet high,’ Norman MacCaig wrote in 1973; ‘and whether I love it or not/I’ll die/for its independence.’ This sort of muscular individualism, teetering on the edge of satire, is now unfashionable in MacCaig’s country. Scotland styles itself instead as a place of co-operation and the commonweal.
What is the most important lesson from Nicola Sturgeon's time in power?

Feb 16, 2023 | newstatesman.com | Rory Scothorne

Nation-building ought to be a slow process, expanding gently from a solid core, carefully absorbing any pockets of scepticism through compromise and respect, without ever losing its central, mobilising energy. Nicola Sturgeon was part of that solid core for decades: a member of the SNP‘s “gradualist” faction who were committed, for reasons of both practicality and principle, to a long and inclusive march to Scottish independence through the institutions of the British state.
Tom Nairn: the detective of world history

Jan 24, 2023 | newstatesman.com | Rory Scothorne

“There has to be an end to elegies for the dead,” wrote Tom Nairn in After Britain (2001). In the epilogue to that book, Nairn, who died on 21 January aged 90, gave his own account of polling day in Scotland on 11 September 1997: the day the country voted for its parliament. It is one of the most personal essays by a great political thinker. He describes driving across the Firth of Forth to visit a terminally ill friend in hospital.