The identity that can’t speak its name

Stories from Stockholm

It’s June the ninth, and a grey anaemic dawn fingers the morning’s headlines. I start my day in Stockholm with a second-hand copy of the Financial Times, filched from a drowsy colleague as we passed in the hotel lobby.

I’m in Stockholm at the invitation of both the Design Council and The British Council to discuss the importance of creativity in business with a group of forty or fifty small and medium-sized enterprises. My talk is one of six in a morning workshop that’s the last in a series of events focussed around Millennium Products, an exhibition of some of the one thousand and twelve “innovative and bright new solutions to old problems”. Each one of the exhibits is from the UK, all are excellent and seventy-eight are Scottish.

Between sleep and coffee I pick over the fall-out from the General Election graphically illustrated, ink on pale pink, on the pages before me. The FT puts a ruddy flush on the cheeks of those who decorate its pages, breathing colour and life into the grey faces of spent politicians and their well-worn words. I wish it would do the same for Scotland.

As the hungry arrive I gather what news I can find strewn about the breakfast room. What little there is lies buried within the pagan process of prediction and analysis that now passes for proper reporting. Two-in-a-row might be a first for Labour, but judging by the dismal turnout to vote, it’s come as a distant second in the lives and priorities of the Scottish electorate, which is not altogether surprising. This morning I’m asked to consider how Tony’s kids have grown, whether Blair dyes his hair and the significance of Cherie’s frocks. As if any of it really matters to those of us disinclined to ponder horoscopes, crystals, checks, florals or stripes in the relentless search for clues to Scotland’s future.

Only one paper has bothered to ask what the Election might mean for the nascent Scottish Parliament, and it’s published in Chicago, Illinois. That our future should be debated in the lofty pages of the Herald Tribune preserves my sanity and reassures me that I haven’t nailed my company colours to the mast of a sinking ship. I still believe I’m part of a place that can be bigger and better than the one I left last night. But Scotland’s media silence is a salutary reminder that Scottish issues might as well be written with invisible ink as far as the parochial London media, and most of our own papers, are concerned.

I decided some days ago that this would be the point when I’d begin to write. At that time I had no idea I would be in Stockholm. But being here, on the morning after the General Election, puts me at an advantage because it gives me the chance to place my impressions of Scotland within a wider perspective, not as I remember them from previous trips abroad, but as they actually are, here and now.

In the design business, distance is a precondition for achieving true focus and an understanding of how different cultures manifest themselves. Distance helps me to see more clearly. It helps me to understand and value the things that make me, and others, who’re not like me, look forward to the day ahead. ‘Design’ is a process of controlling creativity. It’s a process of understanding and manipulating the elements of culture: our languages, symbols, myths, rituals and values, in order to produce a specific outcome like a book or a building or the desire to walk down a particular street. It’s an inexact science, composed of intuition and underpinned with stolen methods, but it’s one that works. The hardest part of designing in Scotland is the impossibility of removing myself from the ebb and flow of my own culture in order to see it more clearly. While I try to keep my head above our rich broth of conflict, creativity, history and humour, the lessons it teaches make me quick and incisive when reducing foreign cultural brews to their constituent parts.

Designing is about more that just rearranging the furniture and Scotland is a good place to educate the creative professionals who need the mother of all laboratories in which to test and hone their skills and tools.

In order to understand why things are the way they are, in Scotland and elsewhere, we must view them from different angles. Like precious crystals we hold them up to the light, and slowly rotate them to see how they change shape from one second to the next, sparkling, reflecting and dissolving before once again becoming sharp-edged and diamond hard. It helps to see things close up and then very far away. To achieve maximum contrast and get a feeling for where the edges might be, because the most interesting things always happen at the edges, when something becomes what it’s going to be, or it dissolves and fades into nothingness; it’s the point of resolution or dissolution or devolution. Right now Scotland is in this interesting condition, teetering on the cusp of beginning or ending, and I’m a thousand miles away trying to find out which.

I drift away from the black and white certainty of the Tribune’s well-thumbed pages and towards my own frustration, anger and shame. I’m secretly pleased that somewhere in the world there’s a Herald that’s keeping up the broadsheet end of the business, helping preserve Scotland in the wider world while we prevaricate over it’s future, if we allow it to have one. Self-loathing washes through me like the premonition of certain failure. This is the Scottish condition, and it would stop me from helping myself, and keep those who would otherwise help me at arms’ length, if only I gave it license to rot from the inside out.

Charles Kennedy was right when he said that “There is still a poverty of ambition at the heart of this government”. But then, we probably get the governments that we deserve.

The Blair years, and those of Major and Thatcher before him, are punctuated by much talk of our ‘cultural identity’, and quite rightly so. The best description of ‘culture’ I’ve ever come across is “social glue”, the invisible stuff that binds society together in a special way that make us unique and distinctive. Culture isn’t just about ballet and opera and ‘high’ culture. Culture isn’t only the prerogative of the Arts, it’s everything we do: how we work and play and what we believe in. Culture is part of our economy and our politics, our strategies and our plans for the future. Those aspects of our culture that we choose to display to outsiders, colours their opinion of us and affects the regard in which we are held, which in turn influences our balance of trade and our economic growth.

In the past fifteen years I’ve attended dozens of international forums on the importance of cultural identity in countries as far apart as China, Egypt, England, Finland, France, Korea, New Zealand, North America and Spain. I’ve discussed Scottish culture in contexts ranging from creativity in cold climates to furniture manufacturing, innovation, packaging design, alternative arts, food and drink, marketing, sport and education. All of the countries I’ve visited are searching for new perspectives on themselves that will help them and their product and service industries become more distinctive, desirable and competitive. The message is simple; in the global marketplace Culture equals Cash. In that same fifteen years I’ve only once participated in a similar international conference in Scotland, and on that one occasion the agenda was set by the London organisers.

It’s not that I’m peeved at having not being invited to a party, there simply wasn’t a party to go to. Scotland has vast, unrealised cultural dimensions, but when it comes to working out how we use these positive aspects to our advantage we have no forum for their discussion. We don’t invite international specialists to help us and we don’t use our home grown experts either. Instead we subject ourselves to the kind of tartan and heather asset stripping that we wouldn’t tolerate from anyone else.

According the findings of The British Council’s 2000 report, Through Our Eyes 2—How the world sees the United Kingdom*, Scotland remains a land best known (where it’s known at all) for its men in skirts. Under pressure we undersell ourselves and opt for the lowest common denominator or the cheap one-liner because we have no plan to construct a more complex, valuable and modern image of Scotland abroad. Instead of promoting ourselves in any number of positive ways: as a teacher, healer or innovator we create ‘Scotland the Brand’. Which in a single brushstroke reduces Scotland to the same level as a tin of baked beans on a convenience store shelf. Without intelligent intervention Scotland will remain crystallised in nineteenth century commercial script; a faded tartan pattern that’s stuck on Marks & Spark’s shortbread and Autumn Breaks for the over-fifties.

When I’m abroad I’m from a place that may as well live only in my mind, or in the Brig o’Doon fantasy that persists in the minds of others, or I’m from ‘England’, which I’m not. So, when I should be selling my business, I take time to explain that Scotland is the part of the UK to the north of England. I don’t do this because I’m a rabid nationalist, but because it’s unlikely that I’ll get business from someone who doesn’t know where I’m from. There are times when I feel I may just as well be from a remote village in the Amazon basin rather than from the culture that gave us the oldest English language newspaper, telephones and television. Why, with our excellent network of international Embassies and Councils do we still fail to explain our location and the status of our constituent parts? Probably for the same reason that many Americans believe English was their language first.

The British Council’s Through Our Eyes 2* report sought to establish current perceptions of Britishness from graduates and young professionals from seventeen countries, with damning results. Many of those interviewed believed that Britain occupied much the same dank corner of the nineteenth century as London smog, Royal Garden Parties and clotted cream teas. Most had heard of the four constituent parts of the UK (85% named England, 80% Scotland, 72% Northern Ireland and 67% Wales) but, “almost no one (only 5%) spontaneously thought that the United Kingdom was the same place as Great Britain”*, which left me wondering what they thought about The British Council. What seemed obvious, not so much from the statistics but from the quotations of those interviewed, was that many confused Britain with ‘England’.

If you were from another place, you too might be forgiven for not knowing that Britain, Great Britain and the United Kingdom are different ways of describing the same place; the UK, which to give it it’s full name is: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Even Encyclopaedia Britannica states that “The names United Kingdom, Britain and England are often confused, even by U.K. inhabitants”**, and Great Britain can also refer to the UK minus Northern Ireland. It’s therefore not surprising that many people don’t understand that Scotland is a nation in its own right, not merely a sub-set of England or a district of London.

There can be little chance for Scotland to make itself truly known to the world if the old British Empire is allowed to continue its unnatural life. The name ‘Britain’ will continue to signify the past and the anachronistic, colonial values it represents, while all the time we mouth platitudes about equality, diversity and inclusion. Britain shames us all as well as allowing us to wallow in sickly Merchant Ivory sentimentalism when we should be getting on with the future of all of our Isles. Brits abroad are not an altogether positive force these days. Brits conjure images of insular Ex-Pat communities and English football yobs. As The British Council Chairman, David Green, points out in the Report’s foreword*, “I am more concerned by the high proportion of young people who associate us British with an arrogant and condescending view of other countries. Anyone who watched, for instance, the scenes at Charleroi during Euro 2000 can easily understand how these perceptions arise”. Needless to say, I am not a Brit when I’m abroad.

For now, Scotland remains a silent member of the foursome that makes up the United Kingdom. In law Scotland may be an unresolved entity but it’s a nation and a state and therefore deserves an unequivocal name.

There are many reasons I would get rid of ‘Britain’ not least of which is that it condemns Scotland to a living death on a dusty bookshelf in the British Tourist Authority shop off Trafalgar Square. But the simplest reasons are the best; that it’s hard to do business with someone who doesn’t have a name, and it’s still harder if you have several names and keep changing them, because no one will trust you. If ‘Britain’ wasn’t prefixed with ‘Great’ it would have dropped from use a long time ago.

However, meaningful change doesn’t happen overnight. So instead of talking about Scotland ‘going it alone’ we need first of all to get rid of ‘Britain’, if only as a prelude to the materialisation of Scotland and the beginning of a structured and informed debate about the UK. Only after we’ve hacked our way through the years of undergrowth and neglect that have obscured ‘Scotland’ will we be in a position to see what Scotland really is, and what it might become within the UK, Europe and beyond.

While it is difficult to discuss Scotland and the UK when the names keep changing, it’s impossible if there’s no forum for discussion. Parliaments may be great places for politicians, press conferences and postcards but they’re not where ideas actually happen; that’s in the homes, offices, school and colleges, factories, pubs and towns throughout our geographically challenging country.

What now seems like weeks ago I cast my postal vote, but not before I’d wasted hours trawling the Internet and the telephone directory in search of an address for the Returning Officer in my Ward. For the country that has managed to produce Bell, Baird and bits of Lara Croft, eGovernment is not yet virtually a reality; it’s a symptom of a much bigger problem.

Despite Scotland’s creative and technological legacy government can’t seem to arrange all of the bits in the right order. Content development, innovative science and technology, publishing and broadcasting should allows us to overcome the disadvantages of our geography and help to create a connected, proactive, informed forum for change. Instead we fund armies of middle managers to produce mountains of reports on ‘broadband’ and ‘sectoral clusters’ while the educational institutions and creative industries who can help turn change to our advantage remain an undervalued, often under funded and underused resource.

In the time it’s taken us to construct part of our Parliament in stone and mortar we might have laid the foundations of a digital democracy that would have been the envy of everyone.

Having survived, and even flourished, in the industrial revolutions of the eighteen and late nineteenth centuries, Scotland could quite reasonably be expected to be hustling for a chance to exploit the rich opportunities third time around. Uncharacteristically, Scotland the Brave, is nowhere to be seen. Some would say that we’ve transcended our geography and are busy doing business, selling Scottish power to the US or running banks in other countries. If this were really the case we’d have integrated, modern systems of communication and transportation, and we’d be much better off.

We’re now in the midst of a third industrial revolution, which has come to pass more quickly than anyone but the writers of science fiction could have predicted. Having spent the last fifteen years running a ‘design consultancy’ I’m now told that I actually run a ‘creative industry’. It’s funny but I had the feeling that something was up when phototypesetting disappeared overnight. My studio changed shape, out went typesetting rules, cow gum and line board, putty rubbers, registration marks, mark-ups and overlays. In the interior design part of our business, designers lost all but one of their drawing boards. Then Apple Macs appeared, so we dismantled the process camera that had been craned into our studio threw it in a skip—one day it had been worth £15,000, but six months and one Apple Mac later, it was worth nothing. Today the place looks less cluttered. I use email, a mobile phone and a laptop that conspire to make me work in corners of my life I never knew existed.

I work for companies thousands of miles away, with people I’ve never met. We correspond digitally and I get paid electronically. I keep the core business slim, light, flexible and adaptable because I don’t know what we’ll be doing tomorrow and neither does anyone else, including the government.

Why, when my life has changed so completely does the process of government still cling to monuments and wigs and a whole secular vocabulary of strange objects, words and rituals?

Speed, lightness and the ability to adapt to change are characteristics of this latest industrial revolution. In order to keep pace with progress, politicians, like businesses, must get closer to the aspirations and needs of the people they represent. In this Knowledge Revolution no Minister can hope to be master of their brief. They too must form partnerships with people and businesses that can broaden their knowledge and help them to take the decisions and risks that are a necessary part of keeping up with change. It’s the quality of our knowledge, and our ability to creatively use it, that will put Scotland in the driving seat of this new economy.

In the last year we seem to have lost our vision for the new Parliament. We, like it, have become heavy, weighed down by its gravity. But creativity, science and technology could deliver systems of communication that would allow us to pit our collective wits in designing our future in partnership with government, not in spite of it or in isolation from it. One thing is for sure, if Scotland is to progress, the people who lead it, and participate in every level the political process, must become connected, decisive, fast and virtual too.

Eventually I get to the best bit of the paper, the sports section on the back pages. I’m never sure if sport is relegated to the rear because it’s of lower value than the political news that hogs the front pages. I prefer to believe that they’ve saved the best for last in a final attempt to brighten the day with some worthwhile chat and pictures of healthy people.

Frankly, I’ve had enough of the post-electioneering. I’m more interested in how Iain Macpherson does in Sunday’s German World Supersport race, or whether Coulthard claims pole in the Canadian Grand Prix. In the absence of fast politics and real action nearer to home, Scots born motorsport stars grab the attention of the press. They sustain our reputation for daring-do and cutting-edge technical innovation while we blindly await the arrival of our saviour in the shape of a latter-day Bruce.

In Sweden, they ask me, “How is Larsson?” and, “How is your Parliament doing?” Mjellby and Miralles (another Swedish national treasure who plays for Celtic and the Spanish architect of the Scottish Parliament), occupy the same compartment in the minds of educated Swedes. Both are world class players capable of making competitor nations a little envious, and more than a little nervous. As Herald journalist William Tinning astutely pointed out (in an article about the Californian Lottery), the Scottish Parliament costs the same as four of the worlds’ most expensive football players. That’s not bad value for a building that will undoubtedly enter the international architectural premiership and last a great deal longer than the career of a football player.

Our dexterity in culture and sport announce to the world that ‘we’ve arrived’, that we’ve progressed from a hand to mouth existence and have the spare time and cash to invest in seeking strategic alliances and business partners, amongst those whose values and rituals complement our own.

Buildings and football, like music, dance and theatre are the corollary of nationhood. Not only do they help us appear distinctive and desirable in the global marketplace; they allow us to meet other countries in a civilised manner and on an equal footing. It’s for this reason that ‘culture’ is the first and the last thing on the menu at every international summit. It’s the starter and the dessert, the bread that holds the sandwich together and the metaphorical mayonnaise that binds society and stops it from falling apart.

Small countries, like ours, have limited cash and must put their money where they’re strongest to get the best value for their money. Scotland has historical and international credibility when it comes to both football and architecture, but when we want to display our technological and scientific innovation we turn to David Coulthard, Colin Macrae and Jackie Stewart. Mastery of speed celebrates not just velocity and control but also the teamwork and partnerships that are an essential part of modern life and a precondition for business success. Motorsport is an area in which we excel and another wise choice when it comes to signalling our Scottish aspirations and values in the international arena.

Instead of telling some of our best kept secrets, Dario Franchitti, Niall Mackenzie and Neil Hyslop continue to grow in popularity abroad but are known only by a tiny majority at home. Instead we collude with our most negative mythologies and with the press that feeds our predilection for the pernicious and singular vision of the ‘rags to riches’ winner; and the stereotype that favours the individual and the ‘privateer hero’ over most of the rest of us. As a result we prefer to hide amongst our vast army of self-condemned losers rather than risk the ridicule of failure that, in other cultures, is best pals with success. Other countries have many more competitors and chances of winning, while in Scotland we have few winners and lots of losers.

Scotland isn’t really a team player; we don’t like to compete unless we know we can win and that’s not a good message for potential business partners. It’s at times like this that I wish Jeremy Paxman would write a book about The Scots in the hope that it would save us, and our most potent symbols, from ourselves.

Clive Gryner from the Design Council in London kicks the day off by showing an amazing image of a hi-tech silver bridge that’s “somewhere in Scotland between the Firth and the Clyde”. Only later does it dawn on me that this is Falkirk’s Millennium Wheel on the Forth and Clyde Canal designed by Marks Barfield Architects. Clive then introduces the work of the Design Council; a Westminster funded machine with an annual budget of £XX. The Design Council works to transform attitudes to creativity and innovation in government, business and education throughout England and Wales, they also promote UK innovation abroad. If we have a similar organisation in Scotland, I haven’t yet discovered it. Thankfully, The Lighthouse, our long overdue Centre for Architecture, Design and the City, champions Scottish designers, technologists and inventors, ensuring that we’re represented abroad.

Other speakers at the event include Peter Horbury, who’s Head of Design at Volvo in Sweden, who tells me he’s originally from Renfrew, and, Carol Moore, a American expert in new technologies with IBM Global Services in Amsterdam. Carol’s heard about one of my ex-students, Julie Tierney (who’s also from Renfrew). Julie’s a product designer with IBM who graduated from Glasgow School of Art in the early nineties. Since IBM closed their Design Centre in Greenock (which once created and manufactured more computer monitors than any other company in the world) she’s based herself at their facility in Raleigh, South Carolina. Her international reputation is considerable and her products counted in millions of units, and millions of dollars.

For me, this ninth of June is just as depressingly familiar as it was ten, or even fifteen years ago. The day does not herald a bright new dawn and a golden second opportunity to finally, eventually get things right in Scotland. The products and the people may be different but the problems are just the same. It’s just another great exhibition with lots of good ideas. Some are in production but too many products and technologies are prototypes not yet fully developed, protected, licensed, manufactured or commercially exploited.

I’ve known the designers of some of the products on exhibition since they were students. Hamid van Koten and Ian Carnduff formed VK&C who designed and subcontracted the production of their multiple award-winning recycled paper lighting to a Scottish company. There’s One Foot Taller, founded by Katarina Barac and Will White. They won the coveted Peugeot Design Award at the Milan Fair for their rotationally moulded Chasm chair, which was manufactured by a company in East Kilbride. After several years in business Will White has left One Foot Taller to gain experience in plastics manufacturing that might move the company forward. Ian Carnduff is now in the USA, taking a break from his business and earning some decent cash. I hope they come back, but the sad thing is they’re not the only ones.

The economic and social potential of Millennium Products is limited by our inability to exploit our would-be winners. We invest in the education of amazing people with great ideas, but we have no strategy to support them or their businesses as they progress. We’ve no infrastructure, no vision, no management skill or experience to pass on to them. We even fail to help people convert their ideas into intellectual property; the core asset and currency in the new economy.

Scotland simply doesn’t see the bigger picture; the need for infrastructure and the partnerships that can deliver it; and the need for the mentoring, development and investment that will strengthen our hand. We often can’t tell the difference between riches and rubbish. We also confuse ‘money’ with ‘means’ not realising that cash isn’t always the solution. We’ve got plenty of cash; half a billion in Scottish Enterprise alone. What we lack is the means to put our cash to good use, and the will to ask others to help us.

In this third industrial upheaval creativity is our greatest natural resource, our primary industry and our richest national asset. Our history clearly shows us that it takes only takes one good person to start a revolution. It therefore makes sense to play tai chi, not with ‘theoretical sectors’ but with the creative individuals and institutions that can help us live up to our greatest myth, that of Scottish innovation.

At a time when green issues, small countries and cities, unspoiled landscape and quality-of-life are viewed as advantages, why are we still losing jobs, investment, our best people, our international presence and our credibility? Why are all of these things that mark our country as a probable winner in this third millennium not exploited by our politicians, who continue to argue in analogue while the rest of the world deals in digital?

As every business undergraduate knows, in order to make the most of change and the opportunities it creates you must first of all know who you are, your strengths and weaknesses. If Tourism is our biggest industry it’s madness for us not to have a Minister for Tourism. If our future depends on creativity, broadcasting, publishing and new media technologies, we need Ministers who can focus on these issues and get the job done.

How, when the world has changed so completely, have we failed to change the methods and manifestations of government? What hope do we have of inhabiting the modern era or of making tomorrow’s politics relevant for young people if we still have ‘Ministers’, ‘Lords’, ‘Chancellors’, ‘Chambers’ and a feudal confection of archaic barriers to understanding, inclusion and progress?

Instead of seizing the opportunity to modernise government, we appear to have crammed Scotland’s unique characteristics into a proprietary structure of departments, offices, ministries and agencies, as if one size fitted every country, hot, cold, large or small. We’re coasting along on autopilot; going through the motions and rituals of government in much the same way as we have done for hundreds of years, in a place four hundred miles away.

Through this transplanted, and often anachronistic, system we continue to perpetrate our own brand of repression on ourselves, ensuring that we have our age-old excuses for our poor performance, and someone else on which to pin the blame.

It’s not every day that a country is given the chance to reinvent itself, but as Westminster slackened our moorings, Devolution, far from launching us into a bright new future, has merely allowed us to discover what we’ve become, which is probably much the same as we were in 1707.

We must break away from our old habits, have the courage to change our behaviour, invent new and relevant rituals and fast forward three hundred years.

For the time being let’s forget about Scottish independence. We don’t yet know who we are. We haven’t decided what to believe in, so we’re not sure what to throw away and what to keep and value. Only when we’ve managed to pick the diamonds from the dross will be able to show the world what they’ve been missing.

“The British are one thing and the Scottish and Welsh another, and let’s not even talk about the Irish. There are marked differences; in fact, the Scottish are really nice, but it’s hard to understand them.”

Argentinean interviewee, Through Our Eyes 2*

* Through Our Eyes 2 – How the world sees the United Kingdom, Robert Ratcliffe, The British Council, October 2000, ISBN 0 86355 467 9

** Encyclopaedia Britannia, Britannica.com/eb/article?eu=120033&tocid=0