Scotland's New Age of Stupid.
If you want to see what the arts might be like under a Labour government look at Scotland where the Far Left rewrites history and cultural institutions are hollowed out by philistinism and porn.
Many observers of Scotland express wonderment that its government is so performatively woke. Aren’t we Scots famed for our macho swagger? And that’s just the women. Don’t we delight in expressing robust commonsense, spiced usually with as many four letter words as possible? So how then did we end up pioneering the insanity of Gender Self ID and passing a Hate Crime law that can see you arrested for cracking a joke in the privacy of your own home?
One reason is that in a country as small and relatively poor as Scotland the devolved government, which is responsible for spending £59 Billion a year, dominates the cultural as well as the political landscape. When Labour was in power in Edinburgh it ensured its friends and supporters got plum jobs. The SNP has perfected this process and after 17 years in control has turned much of Scotland’s civil society into a client state, where nominally independent organisations, campaign groups and charities merely amplify the government’s message.
After the SNP morphed under Nicola Sturgeon into a bizarro identitarian cult championing race hatred, gender extremism and eco-catastrophism its ruthless intolerance was made crystal clear.
This has led to a purity spiral in which many of the country’s most prestigious organisations compete to sing enthusiastically from the approved woke hymn sheet, of BLM, Palestine, Extinction Rebellion and last and certainly not least….all things Queer.
Nowhere is this more blatant than in the arts. Any organisation that dares to stand up for the right to hold differences of opinion has found itself assailed by the usual misfits. When the Scottish Poetry Library defended freedom of expression online mobs called for its funding to be removed and its leadership fired.
Bigger organisations have been much more cowardly. One way they have kept their noses clean with their SNP overlords has been to invite in an army of Far Left activists who have been fast-tracked into roles they should never have been let within a mile of.
The fruits of this surrender are now being unveiled in galleries and museums across the country and it’s not a pretty sight. Historical knowledge is rapidly being junked in favour of dumb sloganising. Welcome to Scotland’s New Age of Stupid.
The most important museums in my home town of Glasgow are perfect examples and offer a terrifying glimpse of the world the Identitarian Far Left wants us all to inhabit.
Take the magnificent Kelvingrove Art Gallery where a new exhibition called ‘City of Empire’ warns us some of the objects on display might “cause discomfort and pain”. It is all to do with race and colonialism. Yes those old chestnuts.
The thing is if you want discomfort and pain in Glasgow you don’t have to traipse round a gallery. A few wrong looks will get you some almost anywhere. The sign urged gallery-goers to “sit with this discomfort”, which sounds like something Beggsy, the psychopathic gangster from Trainspotting, might growl.
The exhibition’s thesis is that Glasgow was a Deathstar of rapacious racism but its evidence is so threadbare it doesn’t survive a second thought.
A sign beside a huge carved wooden door from India declares that the object is “symbolic of imperial exploitation” and bemoans the fact “the expert craftsmen from Bhera Shahpur are unknown and unacknowledged.”
But before you break down and weep for whatsisname and his mate whatsisface from Bhera Shahpur (me neither) it’s worth remembering there’s no acknowledgment anywhere at Kelvingrove Gallery of any of the hundreds of equally anonymous working class white blokes who built its own elaborate edifice.
And you’re not going to tell me they weren’t craftsmen as well.
This is the first hallmark of the New Age of Stupid. Only people outside Britain and preferably those who were not white can be honoured without guilt.
The second hallmark is that any episode in our own British history is filtered to ensure it is unrelentingly negative. A perfect example of this is the exhibition’s treatment of the Scottish plant collector, Robert Fortune. There’s hardly a garden in America or Europe that doesn’t host a plant he introduced to the West, from Mahonia and Bleeding Hearts to Japanese Anemones and Winter Jasmine. Not that the display about Fortune tells us that. Perish the thought.
Any pride in the achievements of people from our own country is now deeply suspect and probably blood-soaked. That’s no doubt why we are not told that Fortune was one in a long line of great Scottish plantsmen. Such was their reputation that Joseph Banks, the great English naturalist, only employed Scots to do his plant collecting. Marie Antoinette bid against the wealthiest French aristocrats for the services of Thomas Blaikie from Edinburgh.
He designed much of the gardens at Parc Bagatelle for her including its gorgeous grotto.
Fortune’s story might easily have been a way to introduce us to that storied past. Instead all we learn is that Fortune was an agent of colonialism who was commissioned, “to steal the secrets of Chinese tea production” and this “damaged China economically”.
Well yes, Fortune did indeed engage in industrial espionage. But that’s only half the story.
The exhibition fails to mention that other countries benefited from China’s monopoly being broken. India, Ceylon and Kenya now have tea industries worth over $1Bn each. Indeed tea is Kenya’s biggest export, bringing in a third of the country’s income and employing three million workers. You might think that would be worth a mention in an exhibition about race and empire.
The exhibition also withholds a rather important piece of information. The main reason why Chinese exports collapsed was that Fortune’s spying uncovered a massive and potentially dangerous fraud. Chinese tea merchants were secretly using toxic pigments including potassium ferrocyanide and a type of plaster to dye their tea leaves so they looked fresh and green. Whoops.
How could a major Scottish cultural organisation offer such a one-sided and lazy account? The exhibition turns out to be the work not of an actual historian but Nelson Cummins ….who graduated in Equality and Human Rights in …er…2020.
His qualifications? His LinkedIn profile suggests that since graduating Cummins has bobbed about from one racial equality outfit to another.
Yet remarkably the young Mr Cummins is now Glasgow Museums’ Curator of Legacies of Slavery and Empire; earning almost £40K a year to lecture hard-pressed taxpayers and ordinary working class Scots on why they need to sit with their discomfort. To be fair to Cummins his profile also lists a couple of certificates in Customer Services including one for Managing Customer Expectations. My expectations didn’t feel very well managed I have to say.
I have no problem, and neither do the vast majority of Scots, acknowledging and exploring colonialism or the horrors of slavery. But dumbing history down to the depth of a cartoon does justice to neither.
I decided to walk the short distance to another of Glasgow’s cultural gems, the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University. Surely here, at the oldest museum in Scotland, I would be able to relax and briefly forget my personal responsibility for mass murder.
If only.
As I entered the main hall I was greeted by a wall display devoted to the Museum’s new priority, ‘Identifying and Dismantling White Supremacy’ .
You and I might think it is a little outrageous in a city as poor as Glasgow in a country that is 96% white to argue dismantling white supremacy should be its priority. But then the thoughts of you and me are probably suspect for, as the display points out, ….white supremacy is “unseen and ever-present”.
As the first stage in its effort at dismantling white supremacy the Hunterian currently has an exhibition devoted to, and I kid you not, Curating Discomfort.
Take a chair…it’s time for more of that discomfort stuff as we plumb the depths of Far Left identitarian philistinism. Let’s discover just how much vandalism our cultural elite is willing to inflict on institutions of which they are supposed to be the custodians.