crap voices on queen street
(938 words)

Last week, I was the recipient of the Runner's-up Prize in one of the most prestigious literary prizes in Scotland. A few days later, I was walking with my wife down Queen's Street in Glasgow. The pavement glistened with the rain which had just stopped. It was a busy Saturday morning and the distant drums of a summer Orange March were in my ears. Suddenly and with absolutely no provocation, whatsoever I was told by a magazine vendor, to 'go back to (my) country'. To go 'home'.

In a week when the composer, James Macmillan and the writer, Alison Kennedy in this paper have raised the debate about bigotry and intolerance in Scotland, the reality of what they had been talking about, hit home on a deep level. The experience of racism is not new to me. I received some kind of insult - whether verbal or physical - virtually every day of my childhood in Glasgow. I was shot, spat on, kicked and generally made to feel, inferior because of my ethnic origin and this was in a four hundred year old school where (at that time) entry was based solely on academic merit. The people who committed these acts are now doctors, lawyers, engineers and bank managers. Still, whenever it happens, it brings home the fact that bigotry and racism are alive and well in Scotland today.

Lest I should forget.

Racism and bigotry operate on many levels but all of the levels are inextricably bound together. The institutional becomes the personal, when it affects you personally. And since everyone is at some level, part of an institution - whether it be that of the aristocracy, of pulp novelists-cum-politicians or of the lumpenprol identity of an out-of-work, presumably homeless magazine-seller - then a racist attack emanating from an individual becomes indivisible from the institution to which that individual belongs. Statistics are important. In the case of racism, they clearly demonstrate that in spite of the advances made in the past thirty years, Scotland, my country, is still a racist society. However, there is more to this than numbers. Most racist (and, I suspect, religiously-bigoted) attacks go unrecorded, partly because the victims of those attacks are so used to being victims and partly because historically, when they have been reported, too often they have been swept under the carpet. And no-one wants to 'make a fuss' and be seen as unpopular. In all cases, it damages the victim internally. It destroys the fabric of their reality. That was why James Macmillan's attack was so important. Hatred, like love cannot be measured in numbers. Every day of my life I still fight the racism that was inflicted on me internally. Some people have said that Prince Philip's ludicrous comments were 'not maliciously intended'. That's not good enough. He is a public figure, a prominent symbol of the British aristocracy. So what he says, matters regardless of how inane it may sound. Likewise, Jeffrey Archer is the doyen of another class and his books are read by millions. Any political party would be envious of such an enormous readership. He should become informed or else, should shut up.

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The street-vendor was perched atop a stool, from whence he poured forth his tirade of abuse. He was neither drunk, nor insane. He knew exactly what he was saying. Apparently, according to a local café-owner, he had been spouting forth, against Catholics and others, for a good many months. His exact words were: 'I'll stay in ma country. You go back to yours.' No matter, that I had been born in this country. No matter, that my father worked for nearly forty years in the NHS, saving Scots' lives. No matter, that I had just won a measure of acclaim in the literary world in Scotland, as a Scottish writer for a story about a Scot. All that, even if he had known it, would have been of no consequence. He had objectified me into an object of hatred and derision, much like 'ugly, fat black women' or 'Indian electricians', or whatever. The alliance between aristocracy, capitalists and lumpenprol is the classic nexus of Nazism and all those other sewer philosophies which are based on the hatred of the one, for the other. I'm old enough to remember, with a sense of nausea, the days of Enoch Powell, that educated but ignorant man whose example gave real power to racists and bigots, the land over. But Powellism is dead. The tables have turned. The narrow-minded are losing, fast and they can't take it. Those among us (and I believe we are in the vast majority) who want to see an end to these moribund philosophies of the past, must never allow ourselves to become complacent. In that sense, James Macmillan is correct and I applaud his raising of this issue. Any comments or actions, made by anyone, anywhere which are bigoted or racist (from whatever quarter) must be fought, visibly and unremittingly if the new vision of Scotland evinced by the new Parliament is to take root in the consciousness of Scots.

The Orange drums had faded away. The rain had begun to fall, once again. I had answered the vendor back but really, I wanted to punch him out, to knock him off his stool. If I had been a boxer, or a karate expert, he would never have sold another magazine. But I'm a writer. I have mightier weapons. To paraphrase one of my early heroes, the Sixties film character played by Sidney Poitier, the cop Virgil Tibbs, there are other ways to knock those racists off their hill.

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