Christopher Harvie
Hamish Hamilton,
London, 1994
This is nominally the book of the Channel 4 TV series on NSO. TV is an entertainment medium, almost wholly useless for conveying detail or arguments. (An hour’s documentary viewing covers what you might read in ten minutes – or less.) So the TV series was interesting in small parts but painted most things with the usual broad TV brush and skipped the detail. Harvie is a Scot, now working and living in Germany, and it maybe is this which accounts in part for the breadth of his knowledge and his lack of interest in the usual boundary markers of academia. So this book is part history, part politics, part sociology – almost everything you could think of, in fact, up to and including little hints about possible parapolitical dimensions. Did the US oil companies help the SDP to ensure the demise of a Labour government which might have imposed more conditions on them? Did the US government help fund the Scottish National Party in the 1970s? These questions are not answered, unfortunately; but just the hint is more than we usually get in mainstream literature.
Harvie remarks on the almost complete lack of a literature commensurate with the scale of NSO in the history of the British economy. This is partly because it all happened north of the border, and the British media and wider knowledge industry is almost entirely based in London. But it also, I suspect, because in the story of North Sea Oil nobody in the UK comes out with much credit. A huge natural asset – maybe this country’s last chance – has been pissed up against the wall.
I got a copy of this book because I was interested in the relationship between Thatcherism and NSO. (See Lobster 27) Of that there is relatively little, but Harvie writes really well, and this is a terrific piece of work.
Now, if Mr Harvie would care to amplify his hints about the parapolitics of all this then we might really be getting somewhere…..