Christopher Silver
Edinburgh
As seen in:
openDemocracy,
Bella Caledonia
Covers:
Scotland, politics, culture, social movements, media, digital, music, history, literature
Writer (left-handed). Exploring media, culture and #JustTransition in Scotland and beyond.
He/him.
Articles by Christopher Silver
A Country of Independent People
A country of independent people – who truly know themselves – is, and always was, the real prize, argues Christopher Silver. I imagine my friend Roddy driving back up from RAF Prestwick in the summer of 1989; the wide Ayrshire coast blue and broad on a day of freedom; a Silly Wizard tape blaring out, thoughts of the weekend and the hunt for music. I imagine Roddy registering a change in the evening air on the sure path to his local.
Work as if you were in the Early Days of a Creative Republic
Over the coming weeks over the holiday period we’ve commissioned a series of writers and activists to reflect on where we are and review not just the year but the time we find ourselves in. This is the second of a series reflecting on the State We’re In. In 2022 I spent a fair amount of time talking to friends, family, and colleagues of Alasdair Gray about his life and practice.
COP26 Resistance Report 5: Welcome to the new world of Govan
‘I, Ana Laide Soares Barbosa, great granddaughter of the enslaved, Granddaughter of peasants and fishing people, fisherwoman, accept the invitation to this new world of Govan, and declare myself welcome.’ Cultivating resistance and hope between Amazônia and Caledonia, Govan Free State, 3 November 2021 ‘Yesterday the Caledonian forests fell to the speculators from the south, today from Amazonia to the Siberian forests, the seemingly unstoppable encroachment of market forces continues to wreak...
Time, travel and the fading magic of Edinburgh
There’s something magical about living in Edinburgh as the festival draws to a close – something far more poignant than mere relief that the bins will stop overflowing, or that you’ll no longer have to factor in an extra 20 minutes to cross the span of Hunter Square. Having worked several odd jobs at the festivals over the years: I recall them winding down, as autumn is tasted on the breeze for the first time, and with it the feeling of a more familiar city returning.
More than politics? The SNP/Green deal can be a victory for social movements
Marked by the emergence of a diverse social movement, mass political self-education, and panic at the pinnacle of the British state – the heady days of 2014 are now a far distant memory. Yet an echo of the strange final weeks before the referendum could be heard amidst the howling from unionist and conservative commentators in response to the SNP/Green deal, published in draft form yesterday.
Scotland’s choice: oil or freedom?
By the end of 2021 the city of Glasgow will become shorthand for a landmark moment in human history; one way or another. As things stand, it’s all too likely that it will become a verb. ‘To Glasgow’; to defer, to fudge; to pass the buck, to shirk responsibility. Or Glasgow may simply come to be cursed like Munich; a cheap promise to change your ways by signing a meaningless scrap of paper. There’s a third version, which many view as extremist, impossible, a fairy tale. It goes something like this.
Tiny Universities of Solidarity
In a recent analysis of ‘Generation Left,’ James Meadway pointed out that, with 50% of 18 – year-olds attending university, ‘education is no longer a marker of class in the way that it was two or three generations ago.’ As political scientists continue to puzzle over the generational divides in our society: the old tools for understanding political tendencies are becoming blunt.
Good COP Bad COP: Big Oil, Cambo and Media Climate Lies
Christopher Silver on the extreme weather of the climate crisis and the spectacular media failure of the Scotsman newspaper in covering the new Cambo oil field. This week they published an article claiming that the new Cambo field will ‘help the UK cut its carbon emissions.’ The reality is that the new oil field alone will produce 10X Scotland’s annual emissions.
A Miner’s Life
Christopher Silver reviews ‘Coal Country. The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland’, by Ewan Gibbs. In 2019 I traveled to three European mining regions: Silesia in Poland, the Ruhr Valley in Germany and Limburg, in the southern corner of the Netherlands.
At Least We Won’t Be Bored
Review of Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics, by Peter Geoghegan, Head of Zeus. Democracy for Sale has been our Book of the Month, see also our interview with Peter here. I suspect I’m not alone in never having heard of Richard Cook. In Democracy for Sale we learn that the Clarkston based businessman channelled unprecedented sums of money to the DUP in the weeks leading up to Brexit.
Back to the Land
Huts: A Place Beyond – How to end our exile from nature by Lesley Riddoch, Luath Buy here. Riders on the Storm: The Climate Crisis and the Survival of Being, Alastair McIntosh, Birlinn Buy it here. In 1935 Edwin Muir warned that the collapse of the labour movement in Scotland would represent an all-out catastrophe: ‘If capitalism manages finally to smash these unions it will be a loss to civilisation greater than the loss that would be brought about by another world war,’ he noted.
You Don’t Get to Grow Up in the World You Imagined
We all felt a pang of the immediacy and excitement of youth when lockdown came around, in those first days when it seemed like everything was closing. The sweet thrill of departure and ending; of leaving the normal drudge, mixed up with all the anxieties of the unknowable and unprecedented. So many last days at school, as it were, collided at once.
The Capital of Amnesia
“Nostalgia doesn’t create good policy. Nostalgia dragging you back to a year that is gone and a place and time that is gone doesn’t give you a good way of looking to the future.
Why the reaction to Extinction Rebellion reveals the scale of climate conflict to come
I’d like to spend a few hours inside the head of one of those commuters who faced some kind of disruption to their schedule due to the Extinction Rebellion protests last week. The sheer venom provoked by many of the reactions — cries that the protestors were alienating the very people they should be persuading — reveals the scale of the challenge, but also some of the core features that make climate revolt so worthwhile and necessary.
Salmond and the shadow of Scottish masculinity
The topic of Scottish masculinity has been done to death, its every whim shaken down to be scrutinised in minute detail. Post-industrial or old romantic, the slighted Scottish male stares at you from a thousand well thumbed set texts on the Scottish curriculum. He croaks for attention in ever more decrepit op-ed columns. He asks obtuse long-winded questions at public events. He is easily offended, monumentally self-indulgent, and ever present.
Beyond the normal: why the technocrats won’t set you free
“Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on” is an odd rallying cry for a national movement. It is not a “free or a desert” demand to cast off oppression, and it doesn’t contain anything of the claims to blood-right and purer heritage that have coloured the character of nationalisms the world over. It certainly does not imply a revolutionary moment of liberation. It is simply a claim to the right to be normal.
In Search of Post-Carbon Scotland
Christopher Silver on how the politics of geology have helped define a post-industrial Scotland that awaits a clear alternative. In October 2017 the Scottish Parliament voted overwhelmingly to support an indefinite ban on fracking. The move was, correctly, deemed historic. For the first time after centuries locked-in to the business of a carbon-based economy, seams of fossilised wealth were to be left in the ground. The landscape would be unaltered, its hidden riches untouched.
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