Alan Bisset ‘Vote
Britain’
Take a listen!
Professor Alan Riach writes of how brilliantly many of our Scots poets
and writers use both satire and extreme scorn to consider very serious issues,
and he mentioned Alan Bisset’s Vote Britain - in his recent article in the National,
‘A
Flyting philosophy distilled from books’ : Alan Riach
Vote Britain” begins: “People of
Scotland, vote with your heart. / Vote with your love for the Queen who
nurtured you, cradle to grave, / Who protects you and cares for you, her most
darling subjects, to whom you gave the glens she adores to roam freely through,
the stags her children so dearly enjoy killing. / First into battle, loyal and
true. The enemy’s scared of you.”
“It moves
through very serious issues indeed and uses extreme scorn and satire and
ferocious comedy to prompt us to consider them. That combination of humour and
seriousness is a literary skill, an approach or technique that runs back
through MacDiarmid to Burns and Fergusson all the way to Dunbar, and is another
example of the democratic strain that characterises Scottish literature.”
“I have no use for any measure of
devolution. I want complete independence and the complete disjunction of
Scotland from England. The Westminster Government can never give us independence.
Independence is not given but taken.”
This time we
will be prepared for a new vote – far far more than back in 2013. We’ve now had
5 years to gather arguments and to look at both sides. And for us to consider what the union has
meant and to question if it is really a “union” at all? We must be more radical too – after all why
have independence at all if its not for something new?
It’s too
soon right now for the IndyRef 2 vote – but we need to be ready. Brexit appears
to be leading us all off a cliff edge by those in Westminster who appear to not
know what they are doing. It’s quite scary. What are they doing?
We need to
focus on invigorating debates, open hearts and minds, investigate what
democracy really means, examine creatively, listen and read widely,
He writes about how important it is for all of us to
read – and to read a variety of materials. And how that will effect change to a
more democratic Scotland. Flyting is when poets get together and try to out do each other in words!
“If folk are to be open to the big
questions and have some fun talking about them, the discussion needs to be
snappy and sharp, and the whole world is the location in which the debate needs
to take place, in popular culture and also in the entertainment world as much
as in the most serious, esoteric or difficult arenas. Politics has for so long
normally been the provenance of slippery, sneaky, snaky evaders of direct
questions, the organised and impenetrable self-congratulators or the
unapproachably smug and affluent. Radical thinking makes a different politics,
informed by irreverence, imagination, honesty and respect for what matters. It
gets us to the fundamental things. This is what close reading helps us to do.
Or close listening.
When we open the
maps to find the destination of a different Scotland, more democratic and less
institutionally dominated, we know that even if the cartography is mistaken
today, at least the maps show that the land is there. Whatever actually
happens, or can be made to happen, change starts happening in the way you think
about what might happen.”
Extract from A Flyting philosophy distilled from books : Alan Raich
- http://www.thenational.scot/culture/14927143.Alan_Riach__A_flyting_philosophy_distilled_from_Scottish_literature/
We need to
focus on invigorating debates, open hearts and minds, investigate what
democracy really means, examine creatively, listen and read widely,
