The battleground

I KNOW, I know - it becomes wearisome having to watch this political farce that has been running for so long at the Palace of Westminster. The current set has been designed entirely by economists, which means, of course, that it looks nothing like any place where human beings could actually live.

It is pure theory not given flesh but denying it. In and out of this totally imaginary and impossible terrain move the actors. The acting is awful. The man playing the part of the Prime Minister could be a cardboard cut-out. He is fairly new to the role and has not yet learned his lines. But since the lines are so dreadful, that is perhaps a blessing. He took over from an actress of cosmic egotism, a woman sometimes known to refer to herself as ''we'', as if everybody else in the world were just an extension of herself. This has left the present performer puzzled as to whether he is her or is himself.

This means that he often says his lines as if he were an echo-chamber. The man acting the Leader of the Opposition is, shall we say, unconvincing. Since he is a small, uncertain man and his role demands some stature, he spends most of his time standing, as it were, mentally on tip-toe. But he still can't reach the part. The Cabinet is well named. They are merely items on display to impress - Toby jugs of complacency and mechanical wind-up toys that would repeat the same behaviour if they were at a wedding or a wake. The Shadow Cabinet is, well, shadowy. They look in the main like disembodied spirits who have not yet decided which body they wish to inhabit, except that it must be important.

But the present cast are merely the temporary symptoms of a permanent problem. The plot is hopeless, a series of ramshackle interconnections improvised over centuries. There is no substantive text, just uninspired ad-libbing: cliche upon cliche, repetition after repetition, countless words going nowhere but back upon themselves. What one character walks onstage to say with deep, spurious sincerity will be utterly contradicted the next moment. There is much meaningless shouting and badly acted anger and verbal sparring that might embarrass children in a playground.

But what is most chilling about having to attend this theatre is the almost total disjunction between the audience and the play. The man playing the Prime Minister is saying: ''The National Health Service is safe in our hands.'' A doctor in the house has recently seen a nurse sharpening and sterilising a paper-clip in order to take a sample of blood. Another actor is saying ''we are sharing in an inevitable recession'', and one man in the audience has just been paid £1,000,000 for doing nothing with his land and others have received obscenely high increases in salary and others have been offered £10 for a week's labour. While glib lies pour forth from ministerial mouths like ectoplasm, many in the audience are wasting away from their effects - the hopes of the young hardening into bitter enmity, the dignity of the old being taken from them, good women being turned into drudges, decent men being forced to live lives as empty as their pockets.

This can't go on. This is a farce to weep at, not to laugh. How to bring the curtain finally down? It will not happen. This is a farce massively subsidised by English votes. It will run and run. If we want to see a better play, we will have to leave the theatre. If we want a healthier audience, we will have to run a theatre for ourselves. Most of Scotland is agreed on that. So how to proceed? How do we take the mass of Scottish frustration and convert it into effective political energy? The next election will be a historic moment for Scotland. Like all such moments, it holds in delicate balance great opportunity and great danger - no achievement without risk.

If we get it right, we may win the means to realise a new sense of ourselves. If we blow it, we may erode even further the diminishing sense of ourselves that we have. Time is not on our side. The longer we allow ourselves to be governed by values so utterly alien to our deepest traditions, the greater the risk that we will be subverted by those alien values and lose our own. If those alien values were benign, I wouldn't mind. But I believe them to be malignant. We stand at a historical crossroads, debating among ourselves which road to take. That's as it should be.

At such a time let's listen to all opinions. This is mine. First, this is not a time for voting party but for voting country. The issue is how best to help Scotland realise the aspirations which the majority of her people have declared. The first step towards that would be to vote out of Scotland every parliamentary representative of the present government. This would not be an expression of rabid anti-Conservatism. This would be in part an effort to differentiate between traditional Scottish Conservatism and the virulent strain that has spread from the south-east of England in the past 12 years. The truth is that the present government has made no attempt accurately to represent the bulk of Scottish Conservatism, as it has made no attempt to represent any other part of our country. I can't imagine that this will make too many Scottish Conservatives vote against the government.

But these are reasons, in a democracy, why it should. Such an action of voting out the MPs of the present administration, would be no more than a just riposte to Margaret Thatcher's avowed intention of annihilating socialism. The stated purpose of this Tory government has been, by implication, to disenfranchise the majority of the Scottish people. This has effectively been done. For nearly 13 years, the wishes, the beliefs, the very identity of Scotland have all been ignored. When someone rejects utterly your beliefs and your identity, the only pride, the only pragmatism, is to return that rejection in total.

Those who live by the anathema should perish by the anathema. Further, the present British Conservative Party has reduced the complexity of political debate to one word: economy. This is an insult to our very nature and an insult which, if we continue to accept it, will come to define us - as all passively endured insult does. Economy is a part of politics, not the whole. It is a human invention, not a god. But, weekly, countless lives are being sacrificed to its graven image. The present political climate at Westminster dehumanises all of us. It reduces us merely to figures in some cosmic bank account.

We are much more than that. If we wish to prove it, we had better find a way to enlarge the debate outside of Westminster. And even within the narrow and inhuman parameters the government has set itself, it has signally failed. The economy is a disaster. Even when there was no official recession, it was still a disaster. National prosperity is not measured by how much money resides in how few wallets. It is measured by the quality of life of an entire people. Judged by that criterion, Britain has been in continuous recession for at least 12 years. You only have to look around you to see its effects: the disheartened inefficiency of so many service industries, areas the whole fabric of which is crumbling, anomie and apathy and increasing violence.

This government has crippled the United Kingdom. It will be a long time recovering, if ever. The feeble cosmeticising of this process by gestures like the Citizen's Charter can't be taken seriously. Having created a legislative Frankenstein's monster, you can't just pluck his eyebrows and say: doesn't he look nice? No, he doesn't. Utter indifference to Scotland has merely been a part of this grand plan. The extent of that indifference is paradoxically emphasised by the patronising nature of current attempts to show governmental concern. John Major declares that Scotland is crucial to the Union, rather like a husband writing to the wife he has abandoned years ago to tell her he still loves her. Burn the letter. Douglas Hurd has gone public on being half-Scottish. Are we to construe this as a compliment? A cabinet meeting may be held in Scotland.

We must assume this is a promise, not a threat. Soon Norman Lamont may begin to use his Scottish name. Isn't it all so exciting? The Conservative Party seems to be so concerned these days for the welfare of Scotland. Of course, it is. And the Visigoths defended Rome. So how? If our most pressing need is to dissociate Scotland as fully as we can from the present government, how do we do it? My plea is for passionate pragmatism. It is for each of us to take our part of the immense anger that is widespread in Scotland and to deploy it in the coldest blood. It is to vote coolly and calculatingly across party boundaries to ensure, as far as we can, the return of MPs who favour some form of Home Rule.

The Conservative government has deliberately and cynically tried to polarise the choice between Independence and the Union. It is their only hope of significant survival in Scotland. But until this election happens, that is not the choice. That is the choice for after the election. Until this election is over, the choice is between Home Rule and the continuation of things as they are. We must vote for whichever Home Rule candidate we believe is most likely to win, regardless of party. This will cut across old loyalties, and so it should. All the old loyalties have failed to a greater or lesser degree.

No party standing in these elections has earned the unquestioning allegiance of the Scottish people. For example, several generations of Scottish socialists have kept faith with the British Labour Party. But has the British Labour Party kept faith with them? They know it's been screwing around, finding strange bedfellows, pouting at the City, smiling seductively at south-east of England Tories. No wonder so many of them think it's time to sue for divorce. I have my own disenchantment. I believe in socialism. I sometimes wish the British Labour Party did.

No honest observer of the political scene over the last decade or so can pretend that the Labour Party has not compromised the principles with which it set out to an extent that would affront its founders. On the specific question of Scottish Home Rule, it has - as in most other things these days - been coerced by events rather than seeking to bring them about. It role has been less that of driving force than that of hitch-hiker, thumbing a lift.

ANYONE who sees Neil Kinnock as a credible devolutionist may yet buy an all-wood compass. The man who could justify his failure to deal effectively with Scottish affairs during a speech made in Scotland by saying: ''I didn't mention the weather in the Himalayas either,'' is an interesting champion of the country. If he's a devolutionist, you have to ask yourself why. I think you wil find the answer not in a desire to set free the will of the Scottish people but in a desire to keep captive their votes. Otherwise, the door to Number 10 becomes even more of a mirage than it has been for him so far, shimmering across the Sahara of a failed career.

Given the expediency of the leadership, it is perhaps not too surprising that Labour's devolutionary promises seem rather insecurely packaged with loose ends hanging out. But they have to some extent been strengthened by the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention. The issue of devolution remains a crucial factor in the equation which Scotland must work out before it enters the polling booths. The SNP are enjoying a less critical upsurge in popularity, as they do from time to time. Who can grudge them it? They have for many years now protected the flame of Scotland's desire for self-determination against a lot of wind from the south. They deserve our measured respect.

But I don't think we should allow them to do this time what they have sometimes done in the past: take a promissory note for respect and cash it as euphoria. Their refusal to join the Constitutional Convention worried me then and its implications worry me now. Those who spend a long time in the wilderness can be subject to recurrent hallucinations. They're always looking for the advent of the Big One. He, as you can imagine, will not appear dressed in a patchwork of cross-party votes but splendidly apparelled in the seamless will of a nation. Some see in this election that His time has come. Maybe. But don't book me a seat.

I've wandered this wilderness too long to believe in prophets. Ain't nobody leading us out of here but ourselves, en masse. Scots have a weakness for dramatic gestures, especially ones that fail. I'm sick of them. It's time to fire Moses, or at least ask him to step down in favour of a committee. He can be a member. I've writtten before about the highly developed Scottish ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Let's not do it this time. A vote for the SNP is a great idea as long as it occurs in a context where the candidate is likely to win.

Outside of that, it's a waste. A vote for the SNP is not the complete statement of what Scotland needs at the moment. It's just one clause in a much more complicated statement that must be rendered coherent. Subordinate it accordingly. A vote for the Liberal Democrats may be another necessary clause. These three parties in this election are not an end in themselves. They are the only instruments we have to achieve that end. The end is the expression of national will. We have no means at the moment to effect the direct implementation of the national will.

We must earn the means. The coming election will be how we earn the means or fail to. The biggest danger to us in our attempt to perform this tricky voting operation is that the passion may blow away the pragmatism. Recently I sat in a room full of angry people. It was a kind of cohesive anger - shared, just outrage about what has happened to Scotland.

They were writers and painters and musicians and actors. They were serious intelligences, significant talents. Agreeing with their anger and admiring their energy, I was dismayed at feeling myself distanced from them. They were forming a group called Artists for an Independent Scotland and I suspected even then that I wasn't likely to be joining them. For they seemed to me to be making an essentially apolitical gesture in a political situation and that is fodder for oblivion. Someone spoke of our purposes being ''above politics''. If you're above politics, how can you participate in politics? What troubled me most was the use of the word 'Independent'. I think that ultimate independence may be the only satisfactory resolution of the unrest in Scotland.

But I felt that to adopt the word in the volatile situation leading up to the election was to use a blunt instrument in place of a scal pel. We have a common enemy. This is not a time to divide among ourselves. I think at the moment the word 'independence' will divide us. I appreciate the anger that leads to it. I should do. It has come into my own family. My daughter and my son, both doing doctorates at Oxford, have been on the phone to me for long sessions - Siobhan puzzled about what to think about it all, Liam disagreeing that we can vote anything but SNP. He and I had one of those cleansing quarrels that I think cement a family rather than sundering it.

Since he is a student, I had to phone him back after a short time so that I could pay for him to shout at me some more. I seem to remember that I was shouting as well. A letter explaining the error of my ways is now apparently in the post for me.

But my choice is made, difficult as it has been. He sees a vote for the SNP as the strongest protest Scotland can make. But it would have to be massive.

If it were less than 50%, it could be ignored. I think the most effective way to change political situations is to use the machinery of politics as exactly as you can. If you're in a locked room and you're 10 storeys up and you must get out, what do you do? You don't jump out the window. You don't try to punch your way through the wall. You pick the bloody lock. And that requires the nerve not to panic and, most of all, it requires precision. There is a lot of understandable passion abroad in Scotland these days. But I hope this younger generation don't think they've invented outrage. And I wouldn't like them to be feeling contempt for those of us who're still finicking around, trying to engage in meaningful political action.

I've been outraged by the state of this country for all of my thinking life (and that's longer than I wish it were). I'll match anybody's outrage. As far as passion for this place goes, don't take me on. But true passion is about precision. If a man truly loves a woman, it is her reality he loves, not his fantasy of her. It is what she is he loves, not merely what she can be. If you love Scotland, your feeling will try to make you understand exactly where she is and what she needs and how you may help her to get it. There is no immediate independence for her. If you believe, after very careful thought, that you can vote in an MP in your constituency whose avowed aim that is, by all means do it.

But if you think that is going to happen right across the country, why don't you emigrate to Cloud Cuckoo Land and save us all a lot of bother? To suggest that a vote for Independence is the only viable Scottish tactic in the next election is to mistake a gesture for an action. It will be like making love to a centrefold. You may enjoy the feeling but don't wait around for the baby to be born. As I said to Liam, I respect his anger. I'll hope he'll respect mine if, come the day, there are, say, 15 Tory MPs in Scotland instead of five and we have thrown away minimal progress in order to go backwards. I'll show him anger then. Not that that will worry Liam - these days I have to stand on a ladder to give him a row. Life can be cruel. But I'll feel the anger just the same.

In the meantime, let's just vote as astutely as we can. This is not the time for indulging individual anger. This is the time for gathering the fuel for the rage of a country. That fuel can only come from a massive pro-Scottish and anti-Westminster vote. If we can, through the ballot-box, make a Scotland almost exclusively represented by Labour, SNP and Liberal Democrat MPs, we will have made a mirror in which there will be the visible reflection of a nation's demand for Home Rule. If - no matter which government is returned in the United Kingdom - the process for meeting that demand in some satisfactory form is not then immediately begun, let there be rage in Scotland - civil rage.

Vote carefully. Don't dissipate your anger. Hold it. It may be needed to generate the rage of Scotland after the next election.