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.
We await our turn in this good-natured, very patient crowd. I can see none of the friends I had arranged to meet on the Green, see several others in my line of business: novelists Bernard MacLaverty, A.L. Kennedy, the poet Aonghas MacNeachail, several teachers and lecturers. Some senior citizens carry a banner saying THE TAYSIDE PENSIONERS’ FORUM. My lawyer friend tells me Blair proposes to abolish old age pensions because workers’ contributions are now too small to pay for them, I suppose because of inflation. This steadily reduces the wages of the poorest paid while used as a reason for taxing the wealthy less, thus letting them invest more in private businesses of global extent. So New Labour may undo the main achievement of Lloyd George’s Liberal government in 1908! We talk about the arms industry: how the 1930s depression only ended when Britain and the USA prepared for war, how both nations have been preparing for war or fighting it ever since, how the making and export of weapons is now Britain’s main industry and trade. Then I remember that the Principal of my University, Professor Sir Graham Davies, is chairman of the Universities Superannuation Scheme, a pension scheme of which many British academics are members and which (a handbill tells me) has £60 million invested in British Arms Enterprise. Some students a month ago were threatened with expulsion from Glasgow University for protesting against such investments. Should I not have supported them? But I have eaten, drunk and conversed with Principal Professor Sir Graham Davies, a cheerful, friendly soul who has been very supportive of my university department. It would embarrass me to criticise him publicly. Yes, at heart I am an arselicker.
I often get letters nowadays from people keen to discuss or discover views of Scottish identity, as if more than five million folk could possibly have a single identity. But if asked what chiefly characterises my nation I will repeat what I wrote in 1982: arselicking. We disguise it with surfaces of course: surfaces of generous, open-handed manliness; surfaces of dour, practical integrity: surfaces of maudlin, drunken defiance: surfaces of quiet, respectable decency. The chorus of a Scottish national anthem proposed by a Dundonian poet comes to mind —
Hermless, hermless, naebody cares for me. I gang tae the libray, I tac oot a book And then I gang hame for ma tea
— as I usually do. There have been many eminent Scots with strong independent minds but now the most eminent are the worst arselickers. Scots Labour MP’s lick Tony Blair’s bum. Tony Blair licks the bum of the US President. Any US President. It’s a British Prime Ministerial tradition.
At last the police are letting us through and, roughly ten abreast, we process down Greendyke Street then up the Saltmarket to Glasgow Cross. Occasionally those around us burst into wild cheering, seemingly inspired by folk waving encouragement from upper tenement windows. Our stream divides neatly to pass the gawky clock tower of the Tollbooth, all that remains of Glasgow’s seventeenth-century Town Hall, magistrates’ court and city jail.
In John Prebble’s book about the Glencoe massacre I read that two British officers were imprisoned there in 1692. They had opened their sealed orders before reaching Glencoe village, and found themselves ordered to put men, women and children to the sword. They broke their swords and told their commander at Fort William that no decent officer should obey such an order. So they were sent south by ship and jailed for a while in this Glasgow Tollbooth. Prebble says there is no other record of them so they may have escaped further punishment. I would love to see a big plaque on that tower commemorating these two brave soldiers. Scotland’s castles, cathedrals, public parks, city centres contain many many war memorials, some of the most elaborate commemorating a few officers and men who died in Africa and Asia while killing hundreds fighting on their own soil without the advantage of gunpowder. Are these two officers the only British soldiers to disobey a dishonourable order? Then I remember hearing that in the Gulf War authorised by the last President Bush, four British officers resigned their commissions in protest against dropping those cluster bombs which “mince up everything that lives within a three-mile strip” onto Iraqi ground forces, though most UK and US airmen queued up enthusiastically to airstrike such folk, who could not strike back. One bomber said they looked like swarms of cockroaches.
From the helicopter that sometimes passes above us we too probably resemble cockroaches as we ascend the High Street, turn left down Ingram Street, turn left then right again. Our biggest roar goes up as the Civic Chambers come in sight. Why are there no Glasgow Town Councillors waving from those upper windows? My wife reminds me they are on holiday because this is Saturday. Why are there none in our procession? (I am delighted to learn later there is one, at least.) Approaching George Square on the St Vincent Street side we can now see a silhouette of the procession crossing the summit of Blythswood Hill a quarter mile ahead.
Coming abreast of an Irish pub we call in for a refreshment, emerging half an hour later to join the procession behind the banner of Unison, the local government employees’ union. A small brass band is playing a melancholy Scots ditty and I am astonished to find myself on the brink of tears. This sentiment owes nothing to a recent sup of lager. Our huge movement is composed of Scottish workers, tradespeople, professional people who identify with them — all people I feel at home with. These folk will suffer most if our businessmen take the advice of an expert in Scottish Enterprise, formerly known as The Scottish Development Agency. He has advised Scottish businesses to have their goods made by workers in Eastern Europe or Asia.
We arrive in a desert of car parks covering the site of the former Princess Dock, a vast basin surrounded by huge cranes where giant ships unloaded cargoes and took them aboard during the Suez War when Glasgow was a great international port and centre of manufacture. The huge car parks are more crowded with multitudes than Glasgow Green. Beyond them I see some big arched metallic structures that seem to have slid out of each other, a building locally nicknamed The Armadillo. I realise for the first time that this Armadillo is the Glasgow conference centre. A line of yellow-jacketed police is looped protectively around it. From the height of an open-topped double decker bus near the river someone is making a speech, but loud speakers are banned so few phrases are audible. Some storms of applause are heard and we hope the Prime Minister hears them and sees how many we are. We later learn, however, that —