Critical Thinking

Is criticism in crisis? Spoiler alert: No.

Like winter flu or X Factor or the hawthorne blossom outside my window, rarely does a year go by without someone declaring that theatre criticism is in crisis. This time it was Mark Shenton of The Stage, who made an offhand remark about there being 'no jobs' for younger critics. Matt Trueman reprimanded him, so Shenton defensively called Trueman defensive then Karen Fricker weighed in and it all kicked off in the comments. Which is all a bit yada yada we've been here before.

The issue that Mark is raising is that so far, in the drift towards online reviewing and blogging, no very clear financial model has been put in place to make this work as well as it has done for the broadsheets. As far as I know, this seems largely correct. Matt Trueman makes his living as a critic, but lots of people don't, despite contributing to the new-ish world of theatre blogs.

What is less clear to me is why Mark suggests that, because of this, he fears for 'quality journalism'. It's true, of course, that if someone can't 'put food on the table', they won't ultimately be able to write reviews. But while having an income may be necessary for quality journalism, it's not sufficient (viz. Quentin Letts, Tim Walker). It's possible that the future's theatre critics will find some way of 'monetising their content', through partnering with theatres or publishers or newspapers or advertisers or maybe Web 3.0 will seamlessly produce flows of income in some as-yet unanticipatable way. It may be that theatre critics support their work by taking on day jobs, like resting actors. Either way, it seems to me very unlikely that theatre criticism will disappear; the evidence is, startlingly, that people want to be theatre critics and happily do it as a hobby.

More importantly, I'd say that it's the broadsheets that  are threatening the quality of theatre reviews and have been doing so for decades. For a while I've been editing new editions of Terence Rattigan's plays; whenever I call up those original reviews, no matter how many times I do this, my jaw always drops to see the space critics had in the 1950s; two, sometimes three columns to expatiate with complexity and at some length on the play they've seen. Tynan, Hobson, Trewin and others sometimes had over 1000  words to respond with wit, style, and erudition to the theatre. This has been cut back and cut back and now a critic is lucky to get 600 words on an evening of theatre, quite often 350. Once you've set the scene and complemented a couple of actors and the set, what do you have for analysis and discussion? 150 words? Critics rarely have the chance to think aloud, to speculate, to take an idea for a walk. They don't have the space.

They also don't have the time. We still seem to be obsessed with the overnight review and, yes, it's exciting if you're involved in a show, but actually, would it hurt to wait a couple of days? It's no surprise that the best critics have often been the Sunday reviewers, where they have a few days to let a performance settle in the mind and can build something more substantial in an essay that compares two or three shows.

Our best critics - and I think we have good critics - are good at quickly compressing large insights into tiny spaces and conveying the tang of a performance in a few words (look at Michael Billington on Maxine Peake), but at best these are hints and glimpses; they can't be developed into anything more. Everything is instant, capsule judgments.

On the contrary, the highest quality critical writing about theatre at the moment is on the blogs. While I do check out the Guardian reviews (because the theatre page is a bookmark on my computer) I more eagerly seek out Andrew Haydon, Matt Trueman, Catherine Love, Megan Vaughan, Maddy Costa, Dan Hutton, Exeunt, A Younger Theatre, and more. And I do it because the blogger now has the space afforded to the critics of the 1950s and when they want to they can use that space to really work through a set of ideas and in the best of that writing you can that vivid, thrilling sense that the theatre is something that matters. It has got inside these writers and they are trying to figure out how it has changed them. They can really take time to think.

It's also a matter of style. Again, because I did a lot of work on theatre of the 1950s, I can understand that excitement about what Tynan would say on Sunday but also how would he say it? He famously used his column as a space to explore different styles, often as opportunities to display caustic wit, but  it meant he would write rather wonderful reviews as dialogues; there was an famously acid review of Rattigan's Separate Tables (1954) in the form of a dialogue between Aunt Edna (middle-class middle brow theatregoer) and a 'Young Perfectionist', ending with the devastating couplet: 

A.E.: Clearly, there is something here for both of us.
Y.P.: Yes. But not quite enough for either of us. 

It's a stylistic conceit that maybe in 1954 only Tynan could have carried off or would have though to try.

But the bloggers have a different freedom. Just today, I find Megan Vaughan's review of Teh Internet is Serious Business; seriously, how great is that - marvel at what the internet has made possible in the form of a review. I haven't seen the show yet but it is so delightful and witty and smart and also incisive, I can't wait to go. And this has been happening for a while; one of the pioneer theatre bloggers, The West End Whingers, wrote a review of the shonky old play Fram by Tony Harrison in rhyming couplets. And more generally, you get a strong sense of style off each of these writers I've mentioned: Andrew Haydon's meticulously raging passion; Matt Trueman's sternly intelligent inspections; Catherine Love feeling her way empathetically through the turns of a production; Maddy Costa's tumblingly confessional intensities and so on. It's a pleasure to turn to these writers to get a sense not of a capsule review, but an unfolding project of cultural engagement.

Things flared up again a week ago at the ITC Conference, on 16 September, when Bryony Kimmings declared that, apart from Lyn Gardner of The Guardian,  UK criticism was rubbish. This, not surprisingly, caused a bit of a flap-doodle among the online bloggers who may have felt a little slighted. An interesting debate emerged on Twitter between what we might call the interested parties. My inclination with Bryony Kimmings is to agree with everything that brilliant woman says and in this instance, I don't think she was wholly wrong. I mean, as I've been saying through this article already, I think she's wrong in that there is some great criticism, but the whole model still seems to be wrong: that is, the review as a sort of one-off judgement-from-high for-all-time that places the critic on the other side from the artist as sparring partners - though with the artist unable, realistically, to fight back.

(Is that right? Can the artist not fight back? Well they can. The Guardian briefly ran a right to reply thing on their website. It never worked; artists always seemed petulant or pleading or arrogant. Mind you, anyone remember that documentary from the early nineties when a bunch of theatre critics were invited to direct plays at the Battersea Arts Centre? The sequence where Nick de Jongh read the review written of his show by Stephen Daldry was a remarkable demonstration of self-righteous petulance that I've rarely seen from an artist. The artist can only probably fight back through brilliantly unfair means. A playwright I know, tired of the pissy reviews they got from the Sunday Herald's Mark Brown - who, full disclosure, has also given me a couple of gloriously shitty reviews - toyed with the idea of introducing an off-stage character in their next play who would only ever be referred to as 'the cunt Mark Brown'.)

The shorter the review, the more pugnacious and unappetising it seems. Summing up what might be two years of work in 400 words with some condescending dismissal just doesn't accept the weight and value of people's lives and work. I wrote, very early on in maintaining this blog, a short piece explaining that I wasn't writing reviews, just things that looked a bit like reviews. By and large I've tried to maintain this jesuitical distinction. The fact I don't write about everything I see and that I don't accept press tickets helps me keep this distinction in my head. I try not to give summary judgments of the shows. (When I do post something very negative, I take great pains to show my working, so that I can be argued with, that I'm not descending on it from a high horse but struggling to make sense in the middle of it.) The aim with all these pieces is to engage with what they're doing and think about what it means to do things like that and to walk some of the way with the artist.

And this is where I think the blogging world is really changing things. There is a real move away from this one-shot smackdown in the online reviews. First, because of space; when you've got 1000 words or more it admits complexity and that allows for a much more complex response. Second, because of time: because when you're freed from the overnight deadline, you can reflect - not just on the show but on other reviews. A dialogue can be set up. It's brilliant that Megan Vaughan and Stuart Pringle and Aleks Sierz wrote the first wave of reviews of Little Revolution at the Almeida; then Matt Trueman and I were able to write reviews puzzling over those initial responses; and then Andrew Haydon writes his review where can reflect on our commentaries. Which might seem all a bit incestuous and getting further away from the work but it doesn't feel like it - it feels more like a really good conversation in the pub afterwards just with more time, space, maturity of response and reflection. I've had loads of reviews for things in my life: I'd far rather have a play of mine battered around in an argument between bloggers like these than have it exposed to summary execution in the inky fingers of the traditional critics. Or rather, I'd simply learn so much more from the former than the latter. The latter is marketing, the former is criticism.

And there may be something here for the economic model of the critic; the embedded critic, which seems to have taken off much more online than offline, that is, the critic who is invited into the rehearsal room - as Andrew Haydon was with Secret Theatre at Lyric Hammersmith, for instance - is someone who might not be paid by a newspaper, but by a theatre or by a publisher. (Actually, that's not new: one of my favourite theatre books is Jim Hiley's Theatre at Work [1981], a long account of watching the rehearsals for John Dexter's National Theatre production of Brecht's The Life of Galileo, a production I watched, aged twelve, standing at the back of the Oliver circle. Hiley was, to all intents and purposes, an embedded critic for that show.)  It might seem risky to have critics paid by artists because we won't get fearlessly objective commentary; true, but there will always be space for the short star-system review. This is a way of improving the quality of the critical culture we have around theatre and the blogosphere (yuk that word) seems to me more likely to be its salvation than its damnation.

Beyond the West Lothian Question

So Cameron has tricked Scotland, Labour and the Lib Dems. He got everyone to agree on an unspecified programme of further devolution to Scotland, which may have reassured voters enough to secure a No vote. Then, at the last minute, he bolts on a condition.  You can have further devolution in Scotland but only if we have English constitutional reform at the same time.

As I wrote on Friday, this is clearly just about trying to trap Ed Miliband and the Labour Party between the two unpalatable options of either accepting a reform that will wholly benefit the Tories or appearing to renege on the timetable for change promised to Scotland.

But let's look at the actual constitutional issue that Cameron claims to be addressing. He said:

We have heard the voice of Scotland - and now the millions of voices of England must also be heard. The question of English votes for English laws – the so-called West Lothian question – requires a decisive answer.

First, note the sinister rhetoric. Scotland has one voice; England has 'millions of voices'. What does this statement say except: Scotland, you've had your say, now England is going to drown you out.

But this West Lothian Question, what is it? It was first asked, in this form, during preparations for the last Scottish referendum, in the late seventies, by Tam Dalyell (Member of Parliament for the constituency of West Lothian) who wanted to know, if there is devolution, why Scottish MPs in the House of Commons would be able to vote on issues concerning England when England would have no vote in a putative Scottish Parliament. It remained a go-to argument for people who didn't like the idea of devolution; for some, it seemed to demonstrate the sheer constitutional impossibility of devolution. And then in 1998-1999 we went and had Welsh, Northern Irish and Scottish devolution anyway and it didn't seem to be a problem. Until now.

I want to explore why I think this question is a bad question, because it's based on a view of politics that most of us would disagree with. I want to show why this reveals the deep incoherence of Cameron's supposedly Unionist position and then I want to be personal and say why I think our politics badly needs change.

The 'problem' seems to me to break down into two distinct questions, with different answers.

1. The asymmetry problem

In other words, if they vote in our parliament, why can't we vote in theirs?

This is an argument which doesn't understand the idea of devolution. A devolved parliament is a subsidiary parliament with distinct powers handed down to it. It's not a symmetrical relationship. It's a different level of the Executive. In effect, the UK parliament can vote in the Scottish Parliament because it sets the terms of reference, the extent of the powers, the rules of engagement.

Also, this argument seems to me to be powered by petulance and resentment. You hear it in this suggestion that Scotland will have 'all these new powers' so why can't England have them too, as if the UK parliament isn't so dominated by England that it is in effect working in England's interests most of the time. Anyway, doesn't it sound like a child's argument? 'Why do they get that? How come I didn't get that??'

2. The representation problem

In other words, why should an MP representing a Scottish constituency have any say over matters that don't concern that constituency?

This is a more serious argument and it's where we see the fundamental incoherence of the Unionist position and also the sorry state of our democracy.

First, let's look at what this means. Why shouldn't a Scottish MP vote on English issues? Surely a Scottish MP could do the reading and thinking, research, consult, and make themselves competent to express an opinion? There's no obvious bar there, unless you believe that a Scot simply cannot understand an inherently English issue, in which case you are an English Nationalist of such demented extremity that we have nothing to say to each another and I suggest you stop reading now. Actually, I think the thought underlying this argument is that a Scottish MP cannot be trusted to vote on English issues. The thought is that MPs represent their constituents and therefore they can only act in the direct interests of their constituents. So if there's an issue that does not directly affect their constituencies, their views will either be empty or perverse.

Last week, David Cameron was moist-eyed about the United Kingdom, how we have all worked together to create this great nation, that we have these shared values, history, culture, and so on. This week, he seems to think that the voters of Linlithgow can have no interest whatever in the affairs of Braintree, that nothing links the elected representative for Banff and Buchan with her counterpart in Folkestone and Hythe.

Suddenly, everything is atomised, everything is torn asunder. Cameron was full of dire warnings of the dangers of tearing apart the United Kingdom; but the view of Britain expressed in the West Lothian question fragments and fractures our common life much more profoundly and completely than any Yes vote would possibly have done.

And it's not true. Let's look at the case of George Eustice. George is the Conservative MP for Camborne and Redruth in Cornwall, a new constituency brought into being during the 2010 election. It's right near the south-western tip of England. Only St Ives and the Scilly Isles are between it and the Celtic Sea. At the end of April this year, MPs voted on the High Speed Rail (London - West Midlands) Bill in the House of Commons. This is an enabling bill to permit preliminary works on a proposed high speed rail link between London and Birmingham. It's not a high speed rail link to Penryn or Falmouth; it's going to have minimal effect on his constituents. But who walked through the lobbies to vote Aye? George Eustice. And no one, to my knowledge, has raised a peep of protest about that.

(Of course, someone might say it's false to claim, as I have done, that HS2 will not have an impact on Camborne and Redruth. A high speed link between London and Birmingham will enable faster travel between the West Country and the Midlands, via London, thus helping tourism, business, etc. And yes that's surely true, but that also means that 'English votes for English laws' is meaningless: there is no law that can only affect the English because everything done in these islands ripples across these islands, and beyond.)

I don't know George Eustice, but I am sure he is an intelligent, assiduous, hard-working person who is more than competent to weigh the merits of HS2 without it needing to have a profound impact on the electors of Camborne and Redruth. In fact, having no particular dog in the fight, might he not have a certain valuable disinterested clarity that might be more difficult (but not impossible) to achieve if you are a Member representing a constituency directly affected? And if 'London-Birmingham-Corridor Votes for London-Birmingham-Corridor laws' is a stupid slogan, then so too is 'English votes for English laws'.

The assumption underlying the West Lothian Question is that we are all motivated wholly by our own interests, that we are fundamentally selfish. This idea is fundamentally incompatible with the arguments for Union that were expressed so emotionally by the three party leaders last week.

But more profoundly, the West Lothian question presumes wrongly that we cannot come together, in reason and debate, in a spirit of enquiry and active engagement, to consider questions for the good of the country as a whole. That is what government should be; that's what a parliament should be. The Executive should be a deliberative forum in which the future of this country, its values, its place in the world should be debated and made. It should be a place of high-level, open-hearted and imaginative change. And it still could be but that's not where we are right now. 

The West Lothian question does point to a something true. It believes that if we are acting out of self-interest we are unable to contribute open-heartedly to rational debate. And that's right. If we speak to someone on a topic and we begin to realise that they are not judging the situation on its own merits but are silently calculating what it means for them, we will treat their contribution with caution; at some point communication with them may break down entirely. We've had decades now of governments who seem to believe the Thatcherite line that selfishness gets results; small wonder then that the vision of an MP as a rational participant in a shared activity of debating and shaping our society has been replaced by the popular image of a corrupt, ignorant, dull, conformist careerist, out for anything they can get, constantly issuing a stream of that completely impenetrable politician's bullshit which is never about saying things that might be true, and only about things that might make them stand out without getting themselves into trouble. As Armando Iannucci has written this morning, 'It's no surprise that there is steadily building up a complete and utterly bamboozled look of awed incomprehension on the public's collective face about what on earth politicians mean by what they're saying'. 

Plato says, in the Republic, that the harshest punishment for smart people who don't participate in politics is they end up being governed by stupider people they are. Our politicians are not stupid but they seem to be, because they always appear unable to say what they mean and they aren't able to use their intelligence, empathy and understanding to make free judgments. Someone who can't talk rationally, who evades direct questions as a sort of instinct, always comes across as stupid or sinister or worse and that is the political class we have ended up with.

The West Lothian question takes it as read that the politics we have is the politics we will always have. It's a deeply conservative view of the world and it's the wrong question to ask and we must resist Cameron's bait-and-switch. 

I've never felt more strongly in my life that politics need to be renewed. This isn't just about getting politicians to 'reconnect with ordinary men and women', another soundbite which has ended up as a way of putting something in the way of the solution rather than a solution itself.

No, we have to take control of politics. You and me. I mean this. Politics can't be left to the politicians; they have manifestly failed for a generation to engage us. If the Right has one good idea it is that we shouldn't expect government to do everything for us; but not because we should become business entrepreneurs - we have to become entrepreneurs of politics. 

Scotland has just done this. The referendum debate animated the whole of Scotland. Why can't that happen in England (and Wales and Northern Ireland)? Are the Scots more intelligent than the English? Of course not. Do they care about their country more than we care about ours? I hope not but there's only one way to find out.

For instance, I feel strongly at the moment that we need proportional representation; what about you? I think we need to free politicians' ideas from overwhelming party control and create more collaboration, debate and discussion, something more free-floating than our sluggish, risk-averse, unimaginative system; I think we need to break the false connection between representative democracy and our constituency system. I think we need devolution in England, but not to some vast English parliament, but down to the metropolitan centres and regions. I think these should have tax-raising powers. This would break the absurd concentration of power, money and culture in London which is increasingly making our capital a place where only the super-rich can live and whose culture will increasingly come to express their views, to no one else's benefit. I think regional devolution would free the UK parliament to become a higher level deliberative chamber where the broadest questions about the values of the United Kingdom can be discussed openly and freely. I think we need to abolish the House of Lords; isn't it grotesque to have unelected religious figures and hereditary nobility striking down our laws? I think we might need to do something about our monarchy; I don't know what yet - there may be a role for all that ceremonial - but a constitutional convention should establish the primacy of parliament. 

But that's what I think right now. I could be wrong about all of these things. I want to have the argument, hear opposing views. I want to live in a country where we all think about these things. I want to discover I'm wrong.

Our debate needs to be completely open. It needs to be a politics of the imagination. I've been a Labour Party supporter and member for almost 30 years (with an Iraq-War-inspired break) but I'm not going to assume the Labour Party must be the focus for this. It could be the Greens. It could be a new party. It might not be a political party at all. Everything should be on the table; no nostrums, no shibboleths, in fact let's not use the incomprehensible vocabulary of conventional politics at all.

Let's meet in an endless variety of forums and think together, talk and debate, discuss, passionately and sedately, over coffee and over beer, in council chambers and pubs and online and offline and in old school rooms and front rooms and marquees. Let's sit in the park and talk about voting systems. Let's drink wine under trees and ask what Britain we want to see before we die.

Let's think visually and emotionally and rationally and let's put our hearts into this.

Let's put laughter and love and beauty into our new politics.

Let's not wear suits (unless you like wearing a suit, in which case wear a suit).

Let's start again, let's be naive, let's be hopeful.

Let's imagine anything is possible and let's remember that actually anything is possible.

Let's believe these things matter and let's remember that they actually matter.

Let's not tell ourselves that it won't work; let's ask, what if it worked?

Let's not ask: but what can we do? Let's ask: and what can we do?

I mean this. I want to have a meeting, soon, with anyone who thinks we need to engage with politics and not just snipe about it from the sidelines. I don't care if it's just two of us, you and me, in a pub, because that's a start. But maybe it'll be thirty of us. Or one hundred. Or a thousand. Contact me on twitter or email me if you want to be involved. I'll sort out a room.

What's the worst that can happen? We have an evening of drinking and talking and we meet some new people. What's the best that can happen? We start something.

Let's start something.

Dr Theatre

There's a slightly campy thing that actors say to each other if one of them is ill and has to go on: 'Dr Theatre will sort you out'. It's half a joke but half a way of talking about the strange thing that really quite serious debility can sometimes fall away when you step on stage. You feel sick, blocked up, headachey, fluey, but you step on stage and you feel powerful, clear-headed, energised. It tends to be explained as the rush of adrenalin, which is a pain killer and also by raising your body temperature and increasing your heart rate, clearing your head and giving your the feeling of energy. But can it be just that?

I'm very moved to read extracts from Kika Markham's forthcoming autobiography about he final years of her life with Corin Redgrave. In 2005, at a public meeting to protest against the Dale Farm evictions, he suffered a massive heart attack. He was saved by the swift action of a traveller who gave administered CPR but he had been without oxygen for several seconds and the trauma changed him. Markham relates mood changes, psychotic episodes, and - almost worst of all - he had forgotten their life together.

Eight months later, on 12 February 2006, he came to Royal Holloway for an event celebrating the work of Harold Pinter, organised by Michael Kustow (who also, sadly, died three weeks ago). Kustow had put together an extraordinary cast for a series of readings: Ken Cranham, Jane Lapotaire, Harry Burton, Roger Lloyd Pack, and Corin. Oh and Vanessa Redgrave turned up. It's certainly the starriest event I've ever seen at Royal Holloway, the sort of event only someone with the chutzpah of Michael Kustow could put together.

My only concern was Corin. He was frail, but not just frail: he was vacant, somehow. His eyes seemed not to be taking in what was around him. He looked without sight; he seemed infantile, to be frank. His movements were slow, imprecise. He seemed breathless. While the other actors stood in the improvised green room talking animatedly about recent work, he sat absently in the corner. Was he smiling? Or was it a grimace of pain? How, I wondered, was he going to perform anything? Would we even get him onto the stage?

We did, with some difficulty, get him up the three steps to the stage and he sat on the end of the line of chairs at the back of the stage, where the actors waited before they would step forward to perform their extracts. Corin wasn't due to do anything until very late in the sequence. Everyone was storming it; Harry Burton, wiry, sweetly menacing as McCann in The Birthday Party; Roger Lloyd Pack blankly troubling, Ken Cranham delivering Deeley's 'Odd Man Out' speech from Old Times with enormous relish: ‘it was Robert Newton who brought us together and it is only Robert Newton who can tear us apart’ he roared with an explosion of laughter. Jane Lapotaire gave one of Ruth's seductive speeches from The Homecoming with a tease of eroticism. And then it was Corin's turn. He was due to deliver a couple of Harold's poems. There was a pause. I think the actor next to him had to indicate to Corin that he was due on. Corin looked up. He looked round. He stood up, unsteadily.

it was honestly like the end of The Usual Suspects. We see Kevin Spacey's character limping awkwardly down the road, his crooked hands; the camera watches his twisted legs, his stumbling feet. And slowly his legs straighten, the steps stop dragging become purposeful. The hands untwist. Suddenly there's poise and decisiveness in his movements.

That's how it was with Corin Redgrave. He stood and I swear it was like the milkiness of his eyes cleared, suddenly he seemed totally in the room, he stepped forward with poise and command. His eyes swept across the audience; he appraised us. And he began to speak. I felt the hairs on my arms give a start. The quavering mumble backstage was now a deep crackle of authority. And he spoke the poems with conviction and a sense of confrontation reminiscent of Harold himself. He was funny; he was intense; he seemed twenty years younger. He twinkled. He seemed weighty and he seemed light. Can that just be adrenalin? Perhaps it can. But a man whose brain, damaged by oxygen starvation, seemed for a few minutes to heal itself in front of us.

The audience erupted in applause which he acknowledged with a half smile. He turned and returned to his seat and as he sat down he became vacant, baffled, distant, his eyes faded, his left arm hang limp by the arm of his chair. It was as though an actor had exited the stage, leaving only a man.

Tomorrow

In the 1870s, Gustave Flaubert compiled a series of entries for a purported Dictionary of Received Ideas. It was a guide to the platitudinous idiocies with which middle-class French people responded to their daily lives under the Second Empire. Here's a selection from the I's.

ICE CREAM: It is dangerous to eat it.

IDEALS: Perfectly useless.

IDIOTS: those who think differently from you.

ILIAD: Always followed by the Odyssey.

ILLUSIONS: Pretend to have had a great many, and complain that you have lost them all.

IMAGINATION: Always 'lively'. Be on your guard against it. When you lack it, attack it in others. To write a novel, all you need is imagination.

IMMORALITY: Properly enunciated, this word confers prestige on the user.

IMPIETY: Thunder against it.

INFINITESIMAL: Nobody knows what it means, but it has something to do with homeopathy.

INNOVATION: Always dangerous.

INSTRUMENT: If it has been used to commit a crime, it is always 'blunt', unless it happens to be sharp.

ITALIANS: All musical. All treacherous.

Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet with the Dictionary of Received Ideas. Penguin Classics.  Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, pp. 311-312.

It's a brilliant mixture of hearsay, commonplace, pretentiousness, self-importance, hypocrisy, and cliché. It's very funny but underneath it there's a deep sense of anger and despair. It's reminiscent of Schopenhauer's The Art of Being Right (1831), which purports to be a guide to rhetorical tricks to win the argument without actually being right, but expresses despair that these horrible unreasoning manoeuvres actually work. Flaubert's Dictionary articulates a kind of disgust at the way people so often seem proud to substitute proper ideas with mere Things To Say. We hear this all around us nowadays and I've never felt it more explicitly than in the last week of the Scottish independence referendum.

Not from the Yes side. In fact, not from the Scottish No side. But from the English. Not everyone, obviously, but, I've followed from afar the debates in Scotland on extraordinary websites like Bella Caledonia and National Collective and Wings over Scotland for a couple of years and I've been dazzled - I mean it, dazzled - by the wit, imagination, the rigour, seriousness and good humour with which the debate has been conducted. But then, two weeks ago, when suddenly Scottish independence was thrust into the centre of English political attention, it's been shocking how very intelligent people have been parroting platitudes about the debate, completely unaware that Scotland has been discussing this for years with all the encrusted complexity and subtlety that you would expect. It's been an unedifying, uninformed spattering of received ideas: why hasn't England got a vote? people have seriously asked; of course it's all about hating the English; the Yes campaign have just bullied the opposition; it's all about ethnic nationalism (Thunder against it); the Scots are just obsessed with Braveheart; it's just a short-termist anti-Tory vote; their sums don't add up; they're addicted to oil/subsidy/welfare; an independent Scotland would consign England to eternal Tory rule. All of these issues have been properly debated north of the border, but no one south of it seemed to care; far preferable to utter these bons mots, half-witticism, half-analysis, wholly useless.

This matters because of what is about to happen. Scotland has voted no. It was pretty decisive and this should be respected. (But let's remember, 45% of Scotland voted Yes in the face of virtually the whole of the media, the whole of the political establishment, a coordinated campaign by some big figures in the finance and business sectors, and a negative and scaremongering No campaign.)

This morning, David Cameron walked out into Downing Street and explained that he was going to honour the pledges about further devolution made late in the campaign. And we all - not just the Scots - have a responsibility to hold him to that. Already we've had that prick Farage on the radio disputing that the Scots deserve any more powers and there are numerous Tory MPs harrumphing about the Scots being 'rewarded' for 'losing' the vote.

But there's a catch. This is what Cameron said.

I have long believed that a crucial part missing from this national discussion is England. We have heard the voice of Scotland - and now the millions of voices of England must also be heard. The question of English votes for English laws – the so-called West Lothian question – requires a decisive answer.

So, just as Scotland will vote separately in the Scottish Parliament on their issues of tax, spending and welfare, so too England, as well as Wales and Northern Ireland, should be able to vote on these issues and all this must take place in tandem with, and at the same pace as, the settlement for Scotland.

I hope that is going to take place on a cross-party basis. I have asked William Hague to draw up these plans. We will set up a Cabinet Committee right away and proposals will also be ready to the same timetable. I hope the Labour Party and other parties will contribute.

This is very clever. He's going to offer devolution as Scotland would expect, but he's making it conditional on a kind of devolution to England too. It can't be separated; English devolution 'must take place in tandem with, and at the same pace as, the settlement for Scotland'. Scottish MPs won't be able to vote on English issues, which means that if they give tax-raising powers to Holyrood, implicitly Scottish MPs won't be able to vote on an English budget.

This is a serious matter for Labour, because, although, as I've said before, removing the Scottish MPs would not necessarily mean Labour couldn't get to power, removing the Scottish MPs from the vote would make them much more vulnerable to voting rebellions in power. But of course, if Labour try to resist these plans, Cameron can say to Scotland that he'd like to introduce devolution but Labour is blocking it. Given that Labour has emerged rather bruised from this campaign, it needs to build bridges with its Scottish electorate, so will be reluctant to put obstacles in the way.

This is why Cameron has so enthusiastically agreed this massively accelerated timetable. He got Miliband and Clegg in lockstep in the last weeks of the referendum campaign - that vow, signed by all three party leaders - and he wants the deal to be done before the election. He doesn't want the three main parties going into the election with three different settlements for Scotland which would expose their divisions. He wants to seal the deal to benefit the Tories and it's going to be very difficult for Labour or the Lib Dems to get in the way. (Note that the negotiation of Scottish devolution is being handled by Lord Smith of Kelvin - a crossbench peer - but the English devolution is to be overseen by lifelong Tory William Hague. So they can be separated, but only to let Hague ensure that the settlement works to the Tory benefit.) All my leftist friends who wished for a No on the basis that it would lead to eternal Tory rule: well what do you know? We got it anyway.

To resist this, several things would need to happen. I suppose Labour could do a backstairs deal with the Lib Dems and disaffected Tories to isolate Cameron and bump things beyond the election - but that's business as usual; that's the kind of stupid game playing that our current corrupt, fly-blown system produces. To respond genuinely, imaginatively to the situation it's in, Labour will need to look beyond immediate party politics and re-connect with its grassroots, but not just its grassroots; it needs to find a way of connecting to the disaffected working class that are drifting to UKIP or not voting at all, to the humane middle class who do not put money above people. This will never be done through branding or soundbites or warm words; it means rethinking the whole approach of the party to become a people's Labour Party, the kind of thing it hasn't really been since the mid-1980s.

Because the West Lothian question is a serious question. We shouldn't be vote-rigging parliament just to keep 'our' party in power. But there are many constitutional arrangements that we need to consider; we need to debate the nature of our polity, examine imaginatively the examples of other countries, and models not even tried; we need to look hard at our system and ask what is essential, what is traditional, and what we could just sweep away; to get excited about what our country could be; to take responsibility as citizens, creative people, democrats, prepared to believe, really believe, that anything is possible. In other words, we'd have to drop the received ideas and become a lot more Scottish. 

But we only have a few months to do it, where Scotland had two years (or maybe 35 years). There's not much evidence that we're prepared to make the effort; we rejected voting reform; we rejected regional assemblies; most of us don't even vote except at General Elections; we actually elected Boris Johnson, because apparently he's a bit of a character. 

There's little sadder than that feeling of possibility closing down, or the imagination narrowing to a dot. But that's just today.

Tomorrow - as democrats, citizens, progressives - we need to hold on, keep the possibility alive, force open the edges of our imaginations, work hard, dream harder, because if we don't take responsibility for our country, we deserve everything we get. If we can't imagine what being a fully active citizen would mean, we've already lost.

Bloomsday

'I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.'

James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922