US-style inequality, closed libraries and lots of potholes: What I found on two-year journey around Scotland
When I finished my travels, never in my lifetime had Scotland felt so adrift and cut off from itself, writes Dominic Hinde
I was sheltering in my car outside a closed library in a gale in Aberdeen when the injustice of it really hit home. Aberdeen should be the most affluent city in Britain after more than half a century of oil and gas. Yet as I cowered in the back seat with a laptop balanced on my knee I felt – to paraphrase George Mackay Brown – like a bit of paper blown on the cold wind. Even something as basic as a heated local library with someone to run it was beyond the means of the council in the self-proclaimed energy capital of Europe.
I had set out to write a book about climate change and energy, but on the road I found a much larger story of a country straining under the weight of indifference. On a tight budget, public libraries were always my refuge: warm, with internet and desk space, and no obligation to buy anything.
Increasingly I found myself huddled in the car, but it wasn’t just the libraries and community centres I relied on that had begun to disappear, it was everything else as well.
A broken down ferry, a cracked harbour wall
Across Scotland, everywhere I went, I found public infrastructure in quiet disarray. My car needed new suspension after a year of crashing into potholes across the Highlands and Islands. I was stranded in the Outer Hebrides when a ferry broke down, forced into a seven-hour detour from Uig on Skye back to the Central Belt.
In Wick, a huge winter storm had left a crack in the harbour wall with no money to fix it, and in Lanarkshire, a former miners’ welfare club had pivoted towards paying for local facilities because the council could not.
When you sit down with a microphone, people answer the questions you ask them. But it’s the moments before and after that reveal the truth – their worries, their own journeys, and the small details of everyday life. A parent reveals his child can’t get autism support at the local school, someone tells you there’s no local GP, or that the trains are off again.
In the Northern Isles, people were fundraising for a hospital scanner; in Aberdeen the food banks down the road from the shuttered library were doing a steady trade in parcels.
In Grangemouth, I saw hundreds of workers protest as their jobs evaporated overnight, climate activists marching beside oil-industry veterans to demand leadership from above for abandoned transitions.
In Shetland, the abandoned helicopter terminal at Scatsa was a ghost town that should serve as a warning to places in Scotland and beyond. Each year the ghosts loom larger. Quality of life in Scotland for many people is flatlining or going backwards.
Leafy streets of Kelvinside
There are still parts of Scotland where life feels charmed: the secluded luxury homes of Argyll and Perthshire, the golf clubs of suburban Aberdeenshire, the booming property markets around Edinburgh and Lothian, or the leafy streets of Kelvinside, lined with luxury cars.
Look at the country in cross-section, however, and Scotland is becoming a kind of miniature America. We are a three-class nation of the genuinely wealthy, a credit-sustained middle class of car payments and long mortgages, and everyone else trying to keep their head above water.
You can map class in Scotland by where the best bookshops are: Bruntsfield, Hyndland, Linlithgow, Portobello, Milngavie, and Dollar are all blessed with home-owners with disposable incomes and the time and space for culture.
Between them lie the gaps: towns where libraries survive only because volunteers keep them open or where particularly passionate politicians have fought their corner. It tells larger truths about what we value collectively and how we understand ourselves.
Talking past one another
Recently BBC Scotland and STV both announced cuts to their current affairs coverage. In an already threadbare media landscape, this felt like another unravelling thread in the national story. Scotland has no major dedicated national cultural or current-affairs magazine, no domestic factual radio network, and no coherent national plan for its creative life. Whether you’re a writer or a reader, a journalist or a viewer, this absence makes us all poorer.
With nobody to say the truths that need saying, we risk talking past one another and drifting further apart. It’s through shared spaces and assets, through commonality, that Scotland comes into existence as anything more than disparate bits of paper blowing on the wind.
The irony is that all this decay unfolds against a quiet economic revolution. Renewable energy is not just about fighting climate change. It generates billions, most of which flows out and away to shareholders and investors, rather than the places that host turbines and solar panels. Scotland is not a poor country in the grand scheme of things, but it has started to believe it is.
There are stories of hope in all of this. On Yell, in Shetland, locals built their own wind farm to fund community services and fight depopulation. In Uist, community trusts are building houses for people who need them using income from their shared assets.
Ways have been found to enrich rather than drain places of their collective wealth. This shows what intervention looks like, that it can be done.
A time of transition
When I finally closed the car door for the last time and took stock of what I had witnessed through one summer and two long winters on the road, the enormity of the moment sunk in.
Never in my lifetime had Scotland felt so adrift, so cut off from itself, waiting for something to happen. We are in a time of transition, but not just in energy. What happens next depends very much on our ability to understand the moment in which we live.
Dominic Hinde is an author, journalist, and lecturer in sociology at the University of Glasgow. His book Drifting North is out now.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.