The Fight for Scottish Democracy
by Murray Armstrong
(Pluto Press, £14.99)

FOR the last year, those who approach the Salisbury Crags in Edinburgh are met by a sign that bluntly declares: “Radical Road Closed.”

Given the recent electoral defeats of the left, it is difficult not to read this as a damning statement on our current political impasse. The story goes that this thoroughfare was laid at the suggestion of Walter Scott by unemployed weavers who had been part of the insurrection of 1820, a thwarted attempt to overthrow the government.

It is certainly a neat allegory — the author of Scotland’s romantic self-image reducing workers’ history to an almost literal footnote. To coincide with the 200th anniversary, Murray Armstrong expands this footnote into his book The Fight for Scottish Democracy, an exhaustively researched account of the events leading to the 1820 uprising, hitherto a lacuna in the Scottish popular imagination largely filled by myth.