ABSTRACT
On 6 May 1999 the most fundamental reorganisation of the administrative apparatus of the British state took place with the election of the first separate Scottish Parliament in almost 300 years. While it is too early to predict the full implications of devolution for the continuing survival of the Union, this moment clearly marks the dawn of a new degree of national self-determination for Scotland. The outcome of the 1997 referendum can be related to developments in the 1980s. During that decade many Scots came to feel a profound sense of alienation from the British political process, with Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative administration pursuing policies that seemed to represent the interests, and more crucially the political culture, of the south of England. Ironically this political dislocation was accompanied by a bold new affirmation of Scottish cultural creativity and self-expression, particularly in the fields of literature and painting and epitomised by writers like Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Iain Banks and Liz Lochhead and artists such as Ken Currie, Peter Howson and Stephen Campbell. The 1990s witnessed, if anything, a broadening of this cultural renaissance with the explosion of a vibrant new generation of young writers spearheaded by Irvine Welsh, A.L.Kennedy and Alan Warner. The other sphere in which excitement began to be generated was filmmaking, providing the first glimmer of the possibility of an identifiably ‘Scottish’ cinema.
