{"id":6624,"date":"2014-02-12T13:47:06","date_gmt":"2014-02-12T13:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=6624"},"modified":"2023-12-21T20:45:38","modified_gmt":"2023-12-21T20:45:38","slug":"a-review-of-jim-sillars-in-place-of-fear-ii-by-gerry-hassan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2014\/02\/12\/a-review-of-jim-sillars-in-place-of-fear-ii-by-gerry-hassan\/","title":{"rendered":"A Review of Jim Sillars’ ‘In Place Of Fear II’ by Gerry Hassan"},"content":{"rendered":"

If much of the Left in England has become all nostalgic about Old Labour following Ken Loach\u2019s The Spirit of \u201945<\/cite>, then much of the Left in Scotland, both in and out of the Labour Left, look back to Scottish Labour\u2019s \u2018glory days\u2019 in the 1970\u2019s. Here Gerry Hassan reviews dissident SNP member, Jim Sillar\u2019s In Place of Fear II<\/cite>, and points out its parallels with the Scottish Labour Left, Red Paper Collective\u2019s thinking. The E&L<\/cite> Editorial Board would like to thank Gerry Hassan for giving his permission to publish this article, which first appeared in the Scottish Review<\/cite>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Jim
Jim Sillars in a pensive moment at his book launch \u2013 \u201cAh, I can remember the glory days of the 1970\u2019s\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Scotland\u2019s current debate on independence comprises many conversations. They centre on what we were, are, and could be, and who did what to whom in the past, and what it means about where we are now, and what we could become in the future.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Many of these aspects were to the fore last week at a Jim Sillars-Alex Neil event to launch Jim\u2019s new book, In Place of Fear II<\/cite>, under the auspices of \u2018Yes Airdrie\u2019. On a cold Thursday night, nearly 300 people attended, a five-member men-only panel (with David Hayman, Pat Kane and the chair), and for two hours of discussion in which every question from the floor was asked by a man. Pat understandably baulked at this, apologised and after his contribution, gave his place to a woman in the audience (who got to make a one-minute intervention over the course of the whole evening).<\/p>\n

Mr Sillars\u2019 book is fascinating. It is a real curate\u2019s egg, buzzing with ideas, eclectism and frustration (both about Scotland and personally). Many of the suggestions are a bit dotty (the Robert Burns hospital ship), but many are interesting, and some even heretical (such as self-governing state schools). It is in a deeper sense a sign of the Scottish times: of a culture, which has awoken to the power of the pamphleteer, both old and new, and the floating of numerous vessels and platforms.<\/p>\n

Yet this was a revivalist meeting of the left of a certain age, wanting to believe in a pre-Thatcher Scotland and have it re-affirmed who the villains were, and that despite everything, it was all going to be all right in the end.<\/p>\n

How this was going to happen was through that magical formula: left leadership and \u2018men of steel\u2019 and \u2018men of iron\u2019 (with the occasional woman, perhaps). In Mr Sillars\u2019 speech and exchanges, it seemed that no problem was too difficult to be surmounted. There is something inspiring in that, as he talked of the philosophy of In Place of Fear II<\/cite> \u2013 the importance of confidence and how \u2018Project Fear\u2019 invited us to be feart of ourselves.<\/p>\n

Yet, the cumulative effect was the opposite, as problem after problem could be solved by human will and diktat: the crises of housing, easy; of the construction industry, no bother; of young people, unemployment and alienation, he had a handy scheme based on an American-style Scots environmental corps; even the issues of state investment could just be solved by borrowing ideas from Islamic finance.<\/p>\n

There was, for all the references to change and a different Scotland, the constant invoking of the 1970s, and a feeling that the whole evening was living in the past, and happier there than in the present day. Jim Sillars and Alex Neil batted away points about 1974 and 1979, and cited research called \u2018Born to Fail\u2019 published in 1973.<\/p>\n

The prism through which social change was understood matched this. \u2018Thatcher\u2019 carried out this and that evil to Scotland, killed industries and communities, only matched, Mr Sillars said, by Tony Blair who \u2018killed the Labour Party\u2019. Missing from all of this were the failures of the world pre-Thatcher, and the Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan governments. \u2018The socialist movement has stopped retreating,\u2019 said Mr Sillars, and \u2018the long retreat of socialism reversed\u2019.<\/p>\n

Alex Neil\u2019s comments over the course of the evening were populist and playing to the audience\u2019s comfort zones. He recited numerous facts, nearly every one incorrectly, for example claiming twice that London has a population of 15 million (it is actually just over eight million). He even got wrong things he was involved in, bizarrely claiming that Labour didn\u2019t win an overall majority in the October 1974 election (it did; narrowly).<\/p>\n

Worryingly, Mr Neil \u2013 who is health minister and responsible for the NHS in Scotland \u2013 got nearly every health fact he cited wrong. The most alarming of these was when he completely misunderstood and misrepresented \u2018the Glasgow effect\u2019: a phrase used to denote how worsening health inequalities developed post-1979, claiming it showed that our deteriorating health record was all down to Thatcher and unemployment (which the research does not show). He also said that the research was undertaken by Harry Burns, chief medical officer until recently, when it was actually done by researchers at Glasgow Centre for Population Health.<\/p>\n

The Sunday Post<\/i> had a field day when it found this out, declaring in a headline that Mr Neil had said that \u2018Thatcher Drove Scots to Drink\u2019. But he also misrepresented lots of other things in his brief: claiming that the health divide in Glasgow life expectancy is 20 years, when it is 28; claiming that Scotland had gone from having the lowest rates of cirrhosis of the liver in the world (not even the developed world) in 1986 to now having the highest (when it isn\u2019t even true of the developed world). It was a worrying insight into Mr Neil\u2019s grasp of his multi-billion pound brief.<\/p>\n

Jim Sillars and Alex Neil pinned their hopes of change in the future on a revitalised and radicalised Labour Party. This was continually stated to the point of becoming a mantra, with Mr Sillars observing that Labour would have to change post-independence when all its Westminster MPs have to come home \u2018and live with us\u2019. That seemed a bit simplistic, and led one member of the sympathetic audience to ask where the new leaders of this bold new Labour would come from.<\/p>\n

This outlook seems to view independence not as an end in itself or even a way of changing Scotland, but first and foremost as the best way to resuscitate the Labour Party and its wider movement. It does seem a bit of a long shot and diversion of energies, to put it mildly.<\/p>\n

All evening we had talk of the need to appeal to the \u2018organised working class\u2019, a \u2018well-educated political community\u2019 and \u2018political education\u2019, and it seemed the two men were still living and evoking the South Ayrshire of their younger days. It made me realise that we have been here before, with the Sillars-led Scottish Labour Party of the 1970s.<\/p>\n

In his pre-1979 study[1]<\/sup><\/a>Breakaway, The Scottish Labour Party<\/cite>, Henry Drucker (1978)<\/span><\/span>