Alasdair Gray - The Ends of Our Tethers

MY PARENTS TAUGHT ME that getting attention by unconventional actions (they called it “showing off”) was bad manners. By pleasing teachers, broadcasters, publishers and others in authority I have become a noted author and Professor of Glasgow University. Why should I walk with many others through the centre of Glasgow, complaining about a government that lets me vote for or against it at least once every five years? I am not driven by esprit de corps , take no pleasure in feeling part of a crowd travelling in the same direction. Most goodness, truth and beauty has been achieved by people like Jesus, Galileo and Van Gogh who were out of step with crowds of people. Soldiers marching in unison appal me as much as a line of high-kicking chorus girls appals ardent feminists. I only take part in political demonstrations when I feel it wickeder to stay away: a state first experienced in 1956.

I was then a student who, twice a week on his way to Art School, called at a clinic for injections to reduce allergies causing asthma. As I bared my arm for the needle one morning a nurse treating me said, “What do you think of this war?”

“What war?”

“The war with Egypt. We invaded it two days ago — we and the French and the Israelis.”

“But … but what’s the BBC saying about it?”

“The BBC hasn’t said anything about it yet, but it’s in all the morning papers.”

This war is called the Suez war because Britain and France were fighting to get back control of the Suez canal which Egypt had nationalised the year before. Israel was fighting because Egypt had barred it from what had been an international waterway. Like the USA’s war with Vietnam the Suez war was never openly declared. The British public and Parliament only heard of it on the third day when the government could no longer keep it an official secret. I hurried out of the clinic, excited by my certainty that public opinion would drive that government (a Tory one) from office in a week. I was naïve.

Though fellow students at the Art School were excited by the news not all were horrified by what I considered a lawless action, even when the BBC broke silence and announced the RAF was bombing Alexandria, chief seaport of a nation without an air force. A friend who I thought was socialist said cheerfully, “The old lion is wagging its tail again!”

Like most of the popular press he thought the war a revival of imperial health. I heard an anti-war rally was being held in Glasgow University Union, rushed there and found it a rally against the USSR invasion of Hungary, which was happening at the same time. Like everybody else there I too decided to forget the bombed Egyptians in my sympathy for the invaded Hungarians.

The Suez invasion killed 22 Britons, 10 French, about 200 Israelis and 921 Egyptians, yet Britain and its allies lost that war because the United Nations, the Vatican and the United States condemned it — also the British Parliamentary Labour Party. Yes, I voted Labour then because Labour (I believed) had created a welfare state and abolished government by stock exchange (unlike the USA) and was part of a nation providing a democratic alternative to single party dictatorship (unlike the Soviet Union). I was grateful to the Labour Party for my healthcare, my further education and for condemning the Suez War.

I was happier still when a large majority of local Labour parties voted for Britain to abandon nuclear weapons: another good example we were giving to the world. But the Labour Party leaders rejected the majority opinion of the ordinary members who had voted them into Westminster. On this matter Labour MPs sided steadily with the Tories. By 1965 the London parliament’s ability to turn local Socialists into British Tories had moved me to vote for Scottish home rule, which we are far from having achieved in 2003.

Britain now has a government to the right of Mrs Thatcher’s, for hers spent more on social welfare than Mr Blair’s. So did John Major’s. Blair supports President Bush who has decided to break the Geneva Conventions by not just invading a country that cannot invade ours, but also occupying it in order to change the government. Bush declares that Iraq has acquired genocidal weapons of the kind the USA, Russia, Britain, France, India, China, Israel also possess, which makes us terribly nervous. To paraphrase Miss Jean Brodie, “Do not do as I do, little nation, do as I say.” Can anyone doubt that if the USA and Britain backed a United Nations plan to inspect and catalogue the dangerous weapons of every nation it would be implemented? Of course every nation would have to include the USA and Britain and Israel. Saddam possesses evil weapons because Britain and the USA sold them to him and the means of making them. In the 1980s he was our ally and used them to exterminate many innocent Kurdish people, but now, in 2003, Kurds are fleeing into Iraq to escape from the government of our ally, Turkey. Certainly he arrests people on suspicion and imprisons them without trial or legal advice, but since 11 September 2001 George Bush’s government also does that.

That Iraq contains more oil than any other single nation — that the USA would fall apart without cheap petrol — is one reason for this war. Another must be a widespread desire in the USA to see some brownish turbaned Islamic folk suffer for what happened on 11 September 2001. An internationally orchestrated police investigation would not look sufficiently dramatic on television. The invasion of Afghanistan was not enough. It killed more civilians than those who died in the World Trade Centre, but bigger explosions, larger troop movements are needed by a President whose cuts in social welfare funding have damaged his popularity without curing a depressed US economy. And of course USA businesses and military leaders want total control of the world’s oil wells.

A third of the British troops taking part in this war and occupation will be Scottish, though Scotland has a tenth of Britain’s population. The Scots were hiring themselves out to foreign armies many centuries before our union with England. I regret that tradition so I am going to Glasgow Green, and thanks for a sunny day, God.

Arriving with wife and lawyer friend I am amazed by the many crowds spreading from the triumphal arch before Glasgow High Court to the People’s Palace in the east and Clyde on the south. All demonstrations contain weirdly dressed people who delight the hearts of antagonistic reporters, but here they are so outnumbered as to be invisible. Yet this multitude is splendidly un-uniform, though I hear the women of the Euridice Socialist Choir singing a peace song and some vendors of the Scottish Socialist Party newspaper. There are people of every age, from toddlers in prams pushed by parents to elderly men like me. Some carry doves made of white polystyrene, there are many printed placards saying ‘ Make War on Want, Not Iraq’, ‘Not In My Name, Mr Blair’ ‘No Blood for Oil ’ and asking for Palestinian liberation. Some hand-made ones are less serious. A nice woman upholds ‘ I Trust No Bush But My Own ’, a stout bearded gent shows the ‘ Dumfries Ageing Hippies Against the War ’ logo. Two boys often or eleven walk carefully side by side wearing a single sandwich board made of card with slogans written in fibre-tip pen. They seem to have no adult presiding with them.

There seem no adults presiding over anyone, so we join the crowd at its thickest beside Greendyke Street where the procession should start, edging in as far as possible and looking around for guidance. It is provided, unexpectedly, by the police. They form a barrier between the crowd and the street and let us through in numbers that can start walking ten abreast, thus filling the width of the road without flooding pavements on each side.