Introduction

This chapter explores the characteristics, role and influence of the Scottish political commentariat. It develops previous research on this group into the terrain of the recent independence referendum debate.

A central concept in this research is the term ‘elite narratives’, used to give sense to a privileged and influential small group of participants in public life and the collective set of perspectives they deploy about contemporary Scotland. Mackenzie's concept of ‘the community of the communicators’ is also utilised, to place and understand the role of the commentariat in public life, the critical issue of who speaks and has authority, and who does not, issues of differential access and the marked gaps, and spaces and silences within public discourses.

The Making of the Commentariat

The concept of ‘the commentariat’ is of recent invention and importance. For example, it took Anthony Sampson, in his series Anatomy of Britain, the first of which was published in 1962, until the final update Who Runs This Place?, published in 2004, to use the term. Sampson presents a world where politics and public life have been remade by the media, and compares 1962 Britain with the present:

This edition has a section on the ‘Commentariat’, with Sampson writing, ‘Many are now more famous than politicians, taken more seriously, better paid and more in demand as dinner guests’. He continues, ‘Many columnists are conscious of being intellectually superior to politicians with first-class degrees which in earlier times would have taken them into academia. They can be more candid than politicians bound by party discipline and discretion.’

Sampson identified the commentariat's characteristics: ‘Its members come from a more limited background than politicians: most were educated at Oxbridge, live in Islington and Kensington, and frequently attend media-political parties where they meet other communicators within the Westminster bubble.’