Pat Kane: Never mind soft power, Scotland must embrace its fizzy power

It may already be snorting through your nose, as you read those opening lines. But the rise of Irn-Bru as one of the global media symbols of this year’s Conference of the Parties is worth some mapping. It’s a fascinating combination of the media-savvy and the atavistic, of humour and despair. Of Scotland firmly affixed to the world map – but in a sticky, messy way, like an overflowing tin-can.

To begin with, and as a old cultural industries hack myself, I can’t help smiling at the opporchancities that were taken. I don’t know whether UK Government or the Scottish Government arranged the exclusive (and Coke-excluding) sponsorship deal with AG Barr, which made tottering displays of Irn-Bru the only available soft drink (apart from water) in the executive-level COP zone.

But that deal has generated a gingery tidal wave of media coverage. Stressed-out environmental activists from the North and the South reached for the Bru as their pick-me-up, as they wrestled with the timidity of governments and the avarice of corporations.

READ MORE: The REAL Scottish Politics: Nicola Sturgeon has expertly wielded soft power

Florence Baker, an organiser with the Sierra Club’s British Columbia chapter, said this to the Washington Post, in the COP26 cafe. “Irn-Bru is one of the few silver linings of this disastrous COP… It would be better if everyone had an Irn-Bru rather than locking in carbon markets into the text.”

It may be one of those strokes of memetic luck that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the luminant hero of the American left, started asking on her Instagram account for help in tracking down Irn-Bru. (Though as an avid social media user, she may well have come across the clip where US ambassadors in the UK do a taste-testing of Scots food – “not a bad soda”, says the Chargé d’Affaires of the Bru).

But Nicola Sturgeon is also avidly on social media – and she was ready to start a narrative about ensuring AOC got her sweet hit. Not only did it occasion another can-holding selfie with Ocasio-Cortez, to place in Sturgeon’s diplomatic diadem (alongside Joe Biden and Angela Merkel).

READ MORE: WATCH: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gives verdict on Irn-Bru after trying it for first time

But AOC then produced a joyful taste-test on her Instagram account – AG Barr couldn’t have paid for that level of commendation – which led us into a whole new cultural niche. “This tastes like just like a Puerto Rican soda, Kola Champagne…Oh my god. I just love it”.

(If you want a Saturday rabbit hole, search Kola Champagne, and start diving into defeated generals in the Spanish-American war, becoming fizzy drink entrepreneurs at the beginning of the 20th century. Also, put your kitchen timer on, for Barr’s Puerto-Rican Special Spicy Flava Bru will doubtless be along shortly … )

My left pals have been harrumphing about this Bru-mania all week. “The best thing to come out of AOC trying Irn Bru would be if we found out that Barr had stolen the recipe from Puerto Rico and Scotland entered some kind of death spiral of inauthenticity,” said the scholar of nationalism Rory Scothorne.

As I wrote here in 2019, it’s hard to tie Irn-Bru to any kind of authenticity. The first “Iron Brew” was trademarked and patented as a “medical tonic” by Maas & Waldstein, a US chemicals company, on January 5, 1901. The spelling of Irn-Bru was possibly a way for Barr’s to avoid litigation. One must also note that the drink used to have “Ba’ Bru” on its label – a happy, turbaned Indian boy.

Also, from the 80s onwards, Barr’s brand strategy has set up the drink as satirical and taboo-busting – indeed, an explicit alternative to the specious health-and-global-harmony claims from Coke and Pepsi. Is it authentic, in a very modern way, to know you’re drinking something that’s destroying your innards, and merely speeding you from one exhausting task of modern life to the next? It’s not a particularly healthy kind, I must admit.

Maybe all this will arrive in a dossier for AOC (I wonder who might send it?). It would point out such matters as the contradiction between Bru-enthusiasm and the need to address public health, working-class obesity, and the addictive tendencies these drinks exploit.

Maybe it would also contain news of how the Scottish public petitioned – successfully – to restore levels of sugar in the drink, previously taxed by government legislation. Phenomenal!

But before it does arrive … What fascinates me about AOC’s guileless celebration of the Bru is the way she didn’t join the dots, given her stature as a paragon of progressive thinking.

Of course, that could be explained by the sub-state triviality of Scotland, in these circumstances. Irn Bru becomes just one of the quaint conditions of the locale, like tartan trimming or monsters in the loch. (Though on social media, AOC did delight that a “head of state” – Sturgeon – had procured her drink preference. So the FM’s schmoozing seems to have been effective and indy-evocative).

So yes, we wouldn’t be as reduceable to our cultural markers, if we were a participating nation-state. But I have to admire the Scottish Government’s pragmatic doggedness about making the most of COP26, even with the geopolitical agency they have. Why not ally with mayors and the cities they run, with federal and devolved regions within other states, with networks of feminists and indigenous activists?

YOU could argue this extends the “gradualist” approach to domestic indy to the international realm. It generates an experience and narrative of both competence, and principled action, for an international audience. One that, when presented with Scottish independence, will regard it as a natural next-step for such an already active entity.

It’s the left’s job in Scotland to make sure that the gap between Scottish Government’s aspirational rhetoric, and actual practice, doesn’t become ridiculously wide. I have been happy that struggles to improve low pay in public services have run alongside the COP event.

We admire the restive tendencies of French society, where the citoyens and ouvrières feel that ownership of the streets is their historical right. Why wouldn’t we also regard Scottish militancy as a sign of civic vitality, amidst a climate crisis that is also about excessive returns to capital over labour?

The other trigger of tut-tuttery in the last week has been the latest in the series of Scotland Is Now videos, featuring a young female poet rhyming (and hymning) the nature and values of this country.

It is of course correct to point out that declaring “this is a place of equals” doesn’t sit with a rise in child poverty levels, over the existence of Holyrood. Or that every penny the Scottish Government spends supporting fossil-fuel industry is a direct threat to all those “mountains and flowers…worth more than money”, invoked at the beginning of the clip.

But I guess it makes me a Scottish nationalist to confess that the vision of the country laid out in the video – that this is a place “where good things live” – is what has motivated me to support this cause from the very beginning.

The truth that most experts know about soft power, as a way to make your polity attractive to the world, is that it evaporates as soon as the global audience realises you can’t back up your claims. So I don’t mind such envisionings, if the risk of a bullshit-call means they are a spur to action.

Irn-Bru: whatever. Resting a new nation-state on a reputation and record for societal invention, one that brings its citizenry along with the zero-carbon changes required: devoutly to be desired. And AOC: your invite to Independence Day is already in the envelope.