When Nicola Sturgeon resigned the team drafted a Common Weal tribute message. It was fine but it was perhaps a touch grudging. Obviously I’m no Nicola Sturgeon fan but I took the message and amped up the glowingness substantially. There are moments when decorum is key and there are moments when what counts is partly what your response says about you.
That’s what has bothered me about the aftermath of Salmond’s death and particularly the repatriation of his body to Scotland. What did it say about decorum in our politics? And what did it say about us as a nation?
Let me fire in a wealth of caveats. I don’t know what the family asked for and could understand if they felt bitter towards the involvement of this Scottish Government. I recognise the world of laws and protocol around the repatriation of the body. I am very sensitive to the fact that what for some is a heartbreaking bereavement has become for others a political football.
Also while I very much respect Alex Salmond and his contribution to Scotland, I am inherently averse to and don’t engage in hero worship. I’d be writing the same thing if this had been the body of Henry McLeish, Jack McConnell or any other former First Minister of Scotland.
All I know is that, to my eyes, official Scotland got this wrong. We, through our authorities, got this wrong. We did not deliver the kind of basic state formality, the pomp and ceremony with which a nation responds to the death of a very major political figures. These things matter.
I don’t know exactly what I’d have done. I’m not sure I’d politicise a circumstance like this and anyway I’m not sure it’s helpful to have politicians formally involved a this stage. But I would at least have made sure that there was a respectful number of people in uniforms at Aberdeen airport representing the civic respect you’d expect towards a major figure in Scottish political life.
Something. Something to make us look more like a nation and less like a local authority. Because in the end that’s what this felt like to me, a slightly provincial local authority confused over what to do and failing to rise to the moment.
To my eyes the weekend’s events looked like a nation trapped, unable to escape its local authority-ness
I can’t for the life of me understand why none of this was thought through in advance. Unless my eyes deceive me, the whole approach to this circumstance seems to have been cobbled together in real time. I again find myself scratching my head at the Scottish civil service – there is an entire protocols unit that prepares for exactly this sort of thing.
I had a family member involved professionally in some of the logistics around the death of Queen Elizabeth and I know just how fully they kicked into action. Why only for royalty? That’s not the extent of what you’d usually expect a government protocol team to be ready to respond to. As far as I can find out there was no pre-planned response to the death of a former First Minster abroad.
Why? How much protocol does a protocol team have to deal with? They would be all over a senior former foreign dignitary coming to Scotland, why not be prepared for an eventuality which was hardly impossible to predict? It is genuinely confusing to see what looked very like confusion.
Again, to be clear, I don’t favour over-the-top state-sanctioned activities on the death of senior politicians because it is just too hard to avoid unseemly politicking. Who gets one, who doesn’t, how big it is, how it compares to the last one… Politicians are divisive people and their legacy will always be contested. It is not for the state to lionise them if a sympathetic government is in place, or ignore them if the government at the time is hostile.
And so yes, I do get that the balance has to be right, which is why I’d have kept it as something like a reception of senior non-political officials dressed in mourning clothes or uniform there to greet the arrival of the coffin. Enough to mark the occasion as of national significance, not so much as to turn it into a political statement.
But this ended up looking to me simply like everything being handled adroitly and with grace right up until the plane landed in Scotland at which point collective official recognition of the significance of the moment simply melted away.
Above I wrote that this stuff matters – but why? Why do all these questions of protocol and pomp and ceremony and presentation matter? We can assume the do because literally everyone everywhere does them all the time. ‘All rise for the judge’, bowing at the end of a performance, the singing of national anthems, we are permanently surrounded by these conventions and practices.
The reason is simple; they are one of the glues that hold society together, that tell us collectively about the nature of our co-existence, of our shared expectations. We rise for a judge because we expect them to behave as above the fray of the courtroom, there to maintain order. We bow for the same reason we applaud – to share our feelings with large numbers of people at once. We sing national anthems so we feel part of the same thing.
It tells us who we are and what we expect. And to my eyes the weekend’s events looked like a nation trapped, unable to escape its local authority-ness. It is a democracy which feigns more stature than it carries. And it feels like it is getting worse.
Sometimes the message you send about your nation, the nature of your political culture – yourself – is the important thing
Say what you like about either Salmond or Sturgeon but they did make you feel like Scotland mattered, like we were serious. We can most certainly challenge the extent to which they followed through, but their confidence and sense of Scotland as a substantial historic nation in the world was clear. Now? We’re being sat down with the heads of some English local authorities and we’re appearing to say thanks.
The political stooshie after Salmond’s death was predictable. Strong characters bring these conflicts. But some of the political wars over the Salmond legacy let us down too. When the Queen died I specifically didn’t start writing anti-monarchy screeds when her body was still not cold. When Thatcher died I didn’t dance in the streets. On both occasions I just kept quiet.
Why? Because, seriously, what good would my disrespect have done? What is wrong with a bit of decorum when someone dies, just for a while? There is the rest of forever to start an arm wrestle over the meaning of their legacy. Can it not just wait?
Had I penned those anti-monarchy articles a day or two after Elizabeth’s death, had I written nasty things about Thatcher with her not even in the ground, commentators like say Kenny Farquarhson or Carlos Alba would have been screaming blue murder about it on social media and Neil McKay would be having one of his fits. I didn’t even write anything gloating about Sturgeon’s political demise for a couple of weeks. The media is supposed to hold people to account, not fizzle with personal hatred.
Sometimes the message you send about your nation, the nature of your political culture – yourself – is the important thing. I don’t want to be part of a left that gloats at the death of opponents or be a republican that has to cause offence during bereavement to make a point. Why could Scotland’s political hacks not just hold off a couple of weeks? Why are we so endlessly, endlessly petty in Scotland?
It makes me sad. At times in our political bubble we just seem unable to deport ourselves in the way we know we ought to, officially, unofficially, the whole thing. There is only a short two-week period or so before a person who has lost their life can be properly laid to rest. It takes so little effort to shut up. It takes so little effort to turn up and show respect in the ways you should.
It takes so little, yet in Scotland our establishment seem to come up short too often. It is I think fitting that in Scotland it is the football fans and the residents of what are probably Tory-voting towns and villages that have led the way in respect and decency. God, I wish we were better. Oh how I wish we were better.