Sing the nation you want to be

Robin McAlpine

It's a funny thing, humanity. When things get tough we... sing. Not so much rebel or revolt or run. We sing. From soldiers in trenches to protest songs, whistling to distract us to defiant torch songs, the act of singing is like putting two fingers up at the fates. 'You give us this shit? Well we'll show you how little you're breaking our will by singing a tune. Together.'

It's not just signing, it's basically all the forms of human creativity – from Picasso's Guernica to Shostakovich's seventh symphony ('Leningrad', written from inside a medieval-style siege) to Dickens' Little Dorrit, great suffering has created great art.

This is why, despite having rather avoided the 'what should Scotland's national anthem be?' question in the past, I found it high up on my mind at the weekend. To say that Dougie McLean's rendition of Caledonia at Alex Salmond's memorial service was moving is an understatement. It was very moving indeed. 

I want to be really clear; I love Flower of Scotland and have little patience with the usual criticism of it. These tend to be 'it's backwards-looking', 'it's too militaristic' and 'it's a bit of a dirge'. I would take these criticism more seriously if those concerned were kicking off regular debates about replacing that most backwards-looking militaristic soul-sapping dirge which is God Save The King.

If your mission is to rid the world of crap national anthems and you're starting with Flower of Scotland, I rather suspect your motives. Yet for all that, it is an anthem which tells a story about Scotland I'd be happy to move on from. I'm tired of Scotland being a reaction to or side effect of England. Scotland will finally be rid of its chains not when we 'throw off English rule' but when we realise that 'rise now and be a nation again' is a challenge to us and to no-one else.

It is us who must rise and be a nation worth being. It has nothing to do with England or the English. Those days are past now. I wish they'd remain in the past.

I will sign Flower of Scotland with passion and pride until my dying days, but I'm not sure it is the story I want to tell the world any more. I don't want to live in a defiant Scotland, I want to live in the Scotland we can become once we've completed our defiance. That the tune ends with a modal shift to a flattened seventh on 'think' of 'think again' (or modulates to the relative minor, depending on your read of it) which bagpipes can't play, is my real bugbear – but I'm picky that way.

So what is the story of Scotland our national anthem might tell? A brave one sure, but perhaps not represented by the jaunty melody of Scotland the Brave which often seems to me to sound like a leitmotif for a comedy character in a Verdi opera. Scots Wha Hae is a fine poem and a good singalong but there's too much bleeding and dying for my liking.

Highland Cathedral? A lovely tune and some suitably sentimental lyrics, but I'm not sure it is a rousing national anthem. Plus my kids' primary school adopted he tune as the school song so now I can no longer hear it without thinking of sitting in a gym hall waiting for another nativity play.

What do I want from a national anthem then? I want a rousing singalong that everyone knows and already sings because they like it. I want harmless national sentimentality where no-one dies and neither traitors nor knaves make an appearance. I would imagine it should be about our silly pride in our chunk of land. I think something modern seems appropriate for a new nation in waiting.

And above all I'd like a national anthem which literally no-one could find offensive and not a single person in Scotland could think 'this isn't for me'. If the world thinks of us as sentimental dreamers who like nothing more than a good drinking song to share late at night on the late bus home, I have no problem with that.

Just as long as we don't invade anyone. Or provide weapons for a genocide. Actually, perhaps that's my ultimate criteria for a national anthem; 'it just shouldn't sound like the sound of a nation that might even accidentally get involved in a genocide'.

So how is it not Caledonia? Perhaps it doesn't get your blood pumping before facing off to opponents on the sporting field, but it screams out the kind of shared unity which trumps chest-beating in my mind. I will not be starting a protest if we end up with any of these options – or any of the other many wonderful tunes the Scots have produce. But I would smile contentedly if the last thing our footballers and rugby players hear before the kick-off whistle is 'Caledonia has been everything I ever had'.

Yet this article isn't really about national anthems at all. It is about our (metaphorical) singing voice as a nation. What is the song we're singing about ourselves? What is our national debate telling the world about who we are? What is our arts sector doing to untangle our hopes and fears in this confusing new world? 'Not enough' and 'not nearly enough' are my answers.

I wasn't a very big fan of Nicola Sturgeon but I did admire her efforts to present Scotland as a serious nation on the international stage. While I wish it was more substantial in its reality, even the slightly tokenistic contribution to a loss and damage fund for the global south was significant. Humza Yousaf over Gaza also tried to forge a story about Scotland internationally. Not enough to suspend funding for Scottish-based arms companies currently arming a genocide. But still...

Right now I get the impression that a successful foreign outlook for Scotland is seen as 'if no-one notices us, we've probably not done anything wrong'. Agreeing with America a lot isn't a foreign policy but an absence of one.

And what about our arts? Blackwatch and Sunshine on Leith apart, and beyond state of the nation novels like James Robertson's And The Land Lay Still, the last time I felt the thrill of Scotland's essence being challenged in the arts was Renton's 'colonised by arseholes' monologue in Trainspotting.

Naturally, Scotland's culture is no longer shaped by artists but by arts administrators. They seem to think success is slotting Scotland into a kind of transatlantic amorphousness by pursuing a kind of nomadic liberal metropolitan anti-national arts policy which seems to revolve around 'person from identity group X explores the journey to that identity'. A lot of this seems blandly internationally transferrable. Perhaps that's the point.

What it isn't is about Scotland now. We are a nation whose crisis is perhaps less explicit than in the US, or France, or Germany, or South Korea, but it is certainly not a nation without crisis. It is a crisis which cannot be understood in terms of the individual journey of identity groups through an environment of prejudice.

Those kinds of questions must be explored as well, but we're hardly short of that sort of content. Chuck a stick at a one-person show at the Edinburgh Festival and you'll hit one. (No, really, don't chuck sticks at one-person shows...) It just shouldn't be happening at what feels like the exclusion of everything else.

An arts sector curated by the liberal elite for the liberal elite is insufficient, yet that's what we have. We don't talk about what song we're singing about our nation. We don't think about the place our arts have in our society, beyond the soul-crushing neologism 'creative industry' (because poems are about profit, right?).

I'm a Trustee of Brownsbank, the cottage in which Hugh MacDiarmid spent the latter part of his life. It contains all his possessions, as they were when he was there. It is A-listed and it has nothing to do with the building. Except his possessions aren't there because the cottage is in urgent need of serious repair and its contents are being damaged by damp.

Yet we can't get a single arts or heritage body or senior politician to take this seriously. As best as I can tell, you could save the cottage for all history for a fraction of the public subsidy given to Edinburgh's winter festival. Why does it get the cash? Perhaps it's the fact that my son came back shocked that a friend's parents took him to the Edinburgh Christmas Market and a minute and a half on a chairoplane for four of them cost £50. That's not a typo.

I started to think about this on the steps of St Giles. Why did I feel so proud to be part of a nation which has a tune like Caledonia to sing? Because it was written about this nation, for this nation, by this nation. Yet with each passing year it feels like less and less is written about this nation, for this nation, by this nation.

A country which can't sing, write and paint itself into a world tapestry of art and culture and history is truly a small nation. A country which thinks the arts are a merchandising opportunity will fade into a cliché of itself. A nation which suspects that a good outcome internationally is for no-one to really notice unless they have money to invest becomes invisible.

How on earth did a nation of Burns and MacDiarmid turn into this? Why do we tolerate it? When will we raise our voices – in anger, but also in song?