The office is a large, open-plan room with plenty of work stations. Craig, effectively a one-woman band, clearly has ambitious expansion plans, but the chill is not wholly to do with the temperature. Since its inception a year ago, the Centre for Confidence has had enough of a drubbing in some parts of the press to knock the stuffing out of an elephant. Craig, who is by nature outgoing, is giving me the benefit of the doubt. It is clear, however, that she has been bruised by the criticism.
Earlier, I listened to her address a group from the Institute of Directors. Overwhelmingly white, male and middle-aged, they might have been expected to be especially sceptical of Craig’s brand of positive psychology. Instead, they enthusiastically endorse her thesis. Craig, a former BBC education officer who retrained 15 years ago as an assertiveness trainer, believes the Scots lack confidence. They do so, she argues, for some specifically Scottish reasons, and things have become worse in the last 20 years.
Her book The Scots’ Crisis of Confidence grew from her sense of alarm about the negative analysis of Scotland that had been promulgated over the years by countless, mainly male, commentators. Part of her thesis is that self-confidence is kept in check by the way Scots view the world. Being Scottish, she believes, comes with a fairly narrow set of attitudes about how a “true Scot” should behave and think. This stunts individuality, creativity and enterprise.
Craig is a modern-day missionary. She gave more than 50 talks last year and remains in high demand. The purpose of the centre is “to make a difference” by promoting a brand of positive psychology that is palatable to the Scots. A great deal of what she says is refreshingly counter-intuitive and is more sophisticated and subtle than the happy-clappy, motivational mulch of the self-help gurus.
The most surprising thing about Craig, who is the daughter of an engine driver and was brought up in a council house in Milngavie, is that so many of her ideas chime with those of right-wing thinkers. “I do think we have created a poverty industry. I do think policy makers often make things worse,” she says.
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“I’m not saying this is unique to Scotland. I’ve always felt we have a lot of parallels with Russia. If you have big utopian ideals, you have to control the behaviour of individuals. Part of the problem is political. There is no doubt about that.”
She has a surprisingly un-Scottish analysis of the impact of Thatcherism on the nation. “There was much more of a sense of individuality in Scotland prior to the 1960s and one of the things that has made it worse for Scotland is how Scotland responded to Thatcherism,” she says. “If Thatcher represented the individual, success and money, we as Scots — to mark ourselves out as different — placed ourselves to the other end of the spectrum. We recreated Scotland in the process.
“Thatcher was individualistic, so we were collectivist. If she was for money, we weren’t. It reinforced this idea that we’re all the same and that there is something bad about aspiration. Of course, there were aspects of Thatcherism which were anathema to Scots. But around that a mythology about Scotland was created.”
While Craig’s work is endorsed by many in the private sector, including BT, Clydesdale Bank, the Hunter Foundation and Standard Life, it is her relationship with the Scottish executive that has caused most controversy and with which she seems most uneasy. She has been portrayed as a crony of Jack McConnell’s, bankrolled by taxpayer’s money.
The implication is that she has bagged a first-class cabin on the gravy train. It is, she says, an upsetting allegation, made more so because she bankrolled much of the start-up costs for the centre herself. The centre, run on a not-for-profit basis, has just received charitable status and Craig has only recently started drawing a salary.
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The centre receives £150,000 a year of public money from three government departments: social work, education and mental health. In addition, Scottish Enterprise has seconded a member of staff to work with the centre.
“Scotland is a village and of course I know Jack McConnell,” says Craig. “I’ve met him on a few occasions and it sounds odd if I say he is not a friend, but he is not a friend in that sense.
“I’ve sat beside him at dinner. I’ve also been to Bute House, but it was my husband who was invited.” (Her husband, Alf Young, is a policy editor on The Herald).
There is, however, no getting away from the fact that the Centre for Confidence and Wellbeing is a one-woman show that lacks academic credentials, and is receiving £450,000 of taxpayers’ money over three years.
Craig points out that the empirical evidence for much of what she is advancing simply does not exist. Part of her job is to build up that body of evidence. “If you are the type of person that will only be convinced by numbers and hard facts, I suggest you take the book back and get a refund,” she writes in The Scots’ Crisis of Confidence.
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I like Craig’s assertion that we are not suffering from a lack of Scottish identity, but a surfeit. Her observation that American egalitarianism leads to a belief that “everyone is special” but Scottish egalitarianism leads to a belief that “nobody is special” also seems astute, but I can’t help wondering if her thesis is not out of date. Do young people in Scotland really lack confidence and is it a specifically Scottish problem? “Young people in Scotland are more confident than previous generations, but if you compare them with their peer group in other countries, they are still less confident,” she says. “There are a lot of parents in Scotland who define the success of their children in very narrow terms.”
The centre has come a long way in the past year, but to justify the funding she has to come up with some quantifiable results and differentiate herself from the plethora of czars and quangos littering the public arena. Her big idea is that to change attitudes you have to introduce small not sweeping change.
“People who are interested in change are often eager for it to happen quickly,” she says. “That approach is inevitably scary and it doesn’t work. We want to develop a strategy that involves lots of people with a sense of common purpose united by making small change.”
The Small Change project is in the planning stage and should be up and running by the end of the year. “We don’t want to be proscriptive,” she says. “But just understanding that people see the world in a different way can make a huge difference. That can usher in quite a big change in how you relate to other people. I would certainly be disappointed if this couldn’t make a difference to people who are poor, disadvantaged and leading difficult lives.”
What she is talking about is inventing a kind of Scots optimism. It’s such a bold ambition that, while admiring her drive and vision, it’s hard to suppress a natural scepticism. Craig can understand this. It is, after all, in the genes.