Politics & Power Quote by Irvine Welsh

Welsh’s refusal to “make any kind of political statement” is itself a sly statement about how politics gets smuggled into art: through voice. In talking about Trainspotting as something that arrived in his ear first, he frames the novel’s profanity, Scots dialect, and scalding humor not as a posture but as fidelity. The key word is “pretentious.” For Welsh, the truly affected move would have been translating working-class Edinburgh into the approved diction of British literary respectability. He’s not apologizing for the register; he’s indicting the cultural machinery that labels authenticity as “too much” and middle-class neutrality as “just writing.”

That claim also works as a preemptive defense against two predictable readings of Trainspotting in the early 1990s: moral panic (it “glorifies” heroin) and sociological tourism (it’s “about” Thatcherite Britain). Welsh insists he’s not staging a thesis; he’s building a world. Yet the subtext is that narrative realism is never politically innocent. To render these characters in their own rhythms is to assert they’re worth listening to without translation, pity, or institutional framing.

His stance hints at a broader tension in British culture: accent as class marker, language as gatekeeping, “literary” as a passport control. Welsh positions himself against the idea that marginalized lives need polishing to be legible. He’s saying the politics weren’t added on; they were already embedded in the sound of the room.