Independence. Alasdair Gray

      British GQ is a similar fashion magazine intended for men. It has as many pictures of women, but they wear less, because women desire the clothes and appearance of the models in their magazines, but men desire their bodies. GQ articles never refer to marriage and home, and deal more obviously with money and politics. The cover shows a stunning blonde wearing nothing visible but an earring, and announces that inside we’ll be told why ELVIS LIVES! and why REAL MEN DON’T WEAR SHORTS, and HOW TO STAY SHARP AND COOL THIS SUMMER, and also (EXCLUSIVE) WHY GREED IS STILL GOOD by Michael Wolff. In the 1987 film Wall Street, the central character yells, “Greed is good!” to a roomful of cheering shareholders. He is a company director who acquires wealth through buying productive companies, removing their saleable assets then closing them. He is cheated by a young protégé with a conscience who brings in a richer asset-stripper. The film’s moral is spoken by a minor character who tells the young man to “Get a job where you make something” – by which he means essential manufactured goods, not just money.

      Michael Wolff’s GQ article is headed YOU ARE WHAT YOU MAKE, by which he means nothing but money. His sub-heading says: The Eighties changed the way the rich get richer. Now, despite financial apocalypse, we still have an appetite for incredible wealth – and it has become insatiable. He does not say widespread appetites for incredible wealth can cause only frustration for a large majority, because he says that for some people it will always be possible. He has a full-page photograph of a well-dressed handsome hunk of a man surrounded by eager reporters, for he is on the way to jail. It is captioned: Michael Milken made, in a year, as much as $500 million. This made him much closer to folk hero than criminal.

      Yes, we have always enjoyed stories about highwaymen, pirates and successful train robbers. How many have wanted to become one of them? Do many fantasize about being fraudsters and pension-fund robbers like a former director of the Guinness company and Robert Maxwell? I doubt it, but without admiring them folk in national and local governments emulate them, selling to each other and associates the public properties and organizations decried as the Welfare State. If less than half GQ’s readers are in these governments, the majority must also use it to foster fantastic daydreams alternating between frustration and disappointment. What a lot of imaginary living headlines invite us to do! On a Times supplement cover I read:

       THE RISE OF THE £100,000 HOLIDAY

       Yachts, private islands and a plane for your luggage:

       inside the wild world of the six-figure getaway.

      One or two millionaires have started a company which now sells the kind of holidays they enjoy to people equally rich. This may stimulate some to become richer by working harder for promotion in banks or by juggling investments through the Stock Exchange, which Michael Wolff says is the one sure way of doing it. I cannot be the only visitor to NHS surgeries angered by so many magazines enthusiastically boosting incredible wealth. My doctor’s waiting room has no information about Glasgow’s ruling Labour Party, which is funding a Commonwealth Games event by shutting centres that help disabled people.

      My doctor’s surgery is too respectable for magazines that advertise the sexual adventures of the rich and famous, nowadays called celebrities, and which would be shortened to slebs if that did not resemble plebs. Pleb has recently been publicized as a curse word. Since style magazines have also articles about food they certainly promote gluttony, lust, pride, greed, jealousy and (in jealous folk like me) anger, all of which were once thought deadly sins. The only one missing is sloth, unless holidays costing £100,000 are opportunities for that. But the MoD advert for the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence quango disturbs me most, though I know the sale of weapons is the UK’s biggest export industry. Many pension funds are invested in that. In 2003 the principal of Glasgow University was a trustee of the British senior academic fund whose monies were mainly invested in the British arms industry.

      Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday is a French film I enjoyed as a child. It has a gloomy radio broadcast which, according to the subtitle, asks, “Is there, upon the horizon, one ray of hope?” On my horizon the ray of hope is a Scottish government as separate from the

      United Kingdom war plans as New Zealand,

      Holland or Norway.

      2: The Naming of Britain

      In three hundred and thirty BC

      when ships always tried to sail within sight of land

      at the west exit from Earth’s middle sea

      don’t go through was carved. That small strait led

      to the Atlantic that keeps moving its bed,

      drowning beaches twice between noon and noon

      and twice uncovering them, pulled by the moon.

      It was hard to sail by Atlantic coasts

      without splitting keel on reef or running aground

      but possible, as traders from Carthage found

      who sailed out with bolts of cloth, returned with tin,

      carved don’t go through to keep competitors in

      and stationed warships to make their command obeyed.

      The galley of Pytheas slipped through that blockade.

      He was a Greek when Greece had markets

      on every Mediterranean shore,

      and learned from neighbour-nations more techniques

      than discussed in one language before.

      Greeks thought all knowledge theirs to explore,

      enlarge and record for their extrovert civilization,

      a thought that drove Pytheas to Atlantic navigation.

      His boat, moved by oars and one square sail

      like those in which Vikings cruised to America,

      found an archipelago. From a tribe there he took

      a name for it used in a Greek geography book,

      a name that Romans spelled Britannia,

      but during and after the Roman occupation

      Britain was never the name of a single nation.

      Only Wales could claim the old British name

      when Angles, Saxons, Danes and Norman French

      conquered south Britain, fighting until they became

      one kingdom, England, which they fought to subjugate

      every adjacent state. Ireland was the first colony

      of her empire over sea. She conquered Wales.

      France and Scotland won free.

      Scotland was free till King Jamie the Sixth got news

      that he could inherit England’s crown too

      if he lived there, an offer he did not refuse.

      Like many Scots he went down to London town where,

      Britain’s chief landlord now, he signed parliamentary acts

      to make these islands one kingdom

      despite contradictory facts.

      England and Scotland’s clergy held

      different kinds of Protestant creed –

      hating Papists was the one point on which they agreed,

      while Catholic Ireland constantly rebelled

      against