Now be a nation again
What Scotland won and lost in the indyref campaign— and the scars it leaves behind.
When the history of the Scottish independence referendum is written, it will — like the punditry in the op-ed pages and on Twitter this morning — hail it as a great national debate, and a phenomenal feat of political engagement. And they will be right: never in living memory has Britain seen anything remotely comparable to this raucous fistfight for the future of Scotland.
But those historians will also elide less glorious truths, because while the victors don’t always write history, they invariably set the context for it. They will gloss over how vicious and divisive this discourse became, or the sad fact that while we engaged millions of previously disenfranchised, disaffected and marginalised voters, the political culture with which we engaged them is broken and toxic. We got 85% of the electorate to the ballot box — but we lured many of them there by force of fear and falsehood.
These unworthy campaigns
I have seen much gnashing of teeth this morning about Scots voting against their own interests; I have seen unforgivable things being said among friends and neighbours. I have seen unbearable smugness, and mean-spirited gloating. I have seen dire predictions of dystopian futures and imminent ‘punishment’ by the Westminster elites, and self-satisfied declarations that Scottish nationalism has — again — been ‘killed for a generation’. But in all that chatter, I have also seen too little awareness of the deep faultlines this campaign has scored in Scottish society.
We were duped and misled by both sides. There was so much that was positive about this process—in the local campaigns, fought hard in village halls, local pubs and city streets around the country. The campaign that was waged at the grassroots was for the most part a remarkable spectacle of high-functioning democracy. There was hope, and optimism, and a desire — on both sides — to change our society for the better.
But in the national political arena, in the media and online — in all the places where the agenda is actually set, and from where talking points trickle down to the grassroots — we weren’t watching a grand conversation about our national future. We were building echo chambers and indulging the worst kinds of confirmation bias, and we were cruelly mocking as unpatriotic or uninformed those who disagreed with us. We—politicians, journalists, armchair pundits, kremlinologists of Westminster and Holyrood — were playing politics, and we were playing dirty.
Better Together deserve nothing but contempt for how they fought this campaign — from the cowardly, cringing centre. Perhaps it was politically necessary, for an uneasy alliance of sworn ideological enemies, but their chosen path blended intellectual mediocrity with tactical incompetence — and if they had lost the argument it would have been richly deserved.
Yes Scotland’s ground game was masterful, and it’s easy to understate the scale of what they achieved: for the first time in history, they dragged Scottish independence from the lunatic fringe to the political mainstream — and they came damn close to making it a new orthodoxy.
But it was left to fringe groups in the Yes alliance — the remarkable Radical Independence campaign, cultural groups like the National Collective and intellectual forces like the Common Weal movement to make the really bold, progressive cases for independence. Those groups should have been at the forefront of this conversation — and at times, they were. But too often, they were drowned out by the likes of Wings Over Scotland and by party-political spin.
But both sides lied, and glossed, and frequently allowed their worst angels to take the wheel. Early pledges to run constructive campaigns and to put forward positive visions for Scotland’s future quickly gave way to cynical populism — Better Together patronised us and played on our fears without shame, and the SNP successfully concealed their calculating neoliberalism behind a disingenuous facade. Both sides mendaciously preyed on social rifts, and made the most vulnerable in our society into political footballs. They built their own nationalist visions, each as invidious as the other.
A carnival of glibness
All this brutal politicking only made the ‘positive visions’ seem insincere, and at times it poisoned the entire discourse. We talked about the issues, but more often that not we were glib: we argued over who ‘owned’ the pound and whether it was an ‘asset’ that could be ‘shared’, but ignored the real question of where control of an independent Scotland’s monetary policy should lie. We bickered over oil — how much of it was left and who should own it — rather than debating whether that was the most stable bedrock on which to build our nations’ future economies. We all became macroeconomists and constitutional lawyers, but we’re intellectually none the richer for it.
This was in large part a campaign of talking points, image politics and partisan street-fighting. The crude populist strand in both campaigns’ DNA frequently reduced this debate to class warfare, with an ugly anti-intellectual streak. No campaigners dismissed the nationalists as naïve pawns of the neo-Machiavellian SNP, and Yes supporters caricatured every No voter as masochistic, crypto-Tory fearties; turkeys voting for Christmas.
Every academic who ventured to make an observation was smeared as a stooge of whichever side they appeared to favour. Every eminence of business or public policy who offered an opinion was lampooned as a hack and a puppet of Alex Salmond or David Cameron.
A narrative emerged in certain corners of the Yes camp which argued that the elites in our society were attempting to squash Scotland’s drive for self-determination; it argued, therefore, that any No voter was either part of those elites, or at least complicit in those power structures. At its most insidious, it made the explicit charge that No voters were not true Scots; that they were unpatriotic, self-loathing creatures without pride or self-belief. I never again want to hear the pejorative ‘Uncle Tam’, freighted as it is with racist implications, bandied around as though it were wit.
Meanwhile, the unionists’ crank contingent — those fellow travellers from the restive backbenches of the Conservative party, UKIP and further out to the right — tried to paint all nationalists as xenophobes and anti-English bigots; as “rebellious Scots” to be crushed and as traitors to crown and country. They responded to the energetic nationalism of Yes Scotland with their own, crude creed of British-ness.
And all of it left a bad taste in my mouth.
Heart and heid
This complex political-ideological stramash was to be expected: nationalism and self-determination movements generally come with a certain revolutionary character. They offer the promise of dramatic social change, and a challenge to existing power structures. A No vote was a vote for the status quo; in that sense, it was an inherently conservative act, and it’s hard to construct a radical case against independence.
But to pigeonhole No voters as right-wingers, and assign the Yes campaign a monopoly on progressivism; to assume that it is only those political binaries and individual socio-economic status which govern how you voted yesterday, is a nonsense. I wrestled with my vote yesterday, and it struck me that the reason this was so hard — the reason I was momentarily paralysed in the voting booth, staring blankly at my ballot and doubting my decision— was that this was not a choice informed only by ‘the issues’. This was as much an emotional choice, in which your views are forged by your story, your family, your life to date and your aspirations to come.
That is — at least in part — why the meta-conversation around independence became so savage, and why I believe that savagery was so wrong-headed. You don’t know why 55% of Scotland voted no, any more than you can create a unified theory of what the 45% who voted Yes want. The SNP has always been a broad church, bound together by one totemic idea: Scottish nationalism. The Yes campaign was no different; neither was Better Together, in its own way.
A couple of weeks ago my grandfather, the journalist and broadcaster R. D. Kernohan, wrote an essay in the Scottish Review, staking out his position against independence under the headline ‘No! I am voting to save my countries.’ His politics—he is an elder of the Church of Scotland; a past Conservative PPC, and a former director of Conservative Central Office in Scotland — are not mine, but we certainly agree on the tortured question of national identity in these isles: it’s complicated. He’d give short shrift to anyone who tried to tell him he wasn’t a proud Scot, or implied that he wanted anything less than a prosperous, happy Scotland:
Salmond is all for ‘social union’, by which he surely means, even if he does not admit it, the network of personal and cultural as well as historical links which make Britain much more than a geographical expression. (Some of us call it nationality and tremble when UKIP try to distort it into a cruder populist nationalism.)
But now the recriminations have to end. It’s over — at least for now— and we’re going to have plenty of scar tissue to tend, and new challenges to face. First and foremost among those is to make the next debate better — because I don’t want us to go through another fight like this one.
We didn’t build a new consensus here, and we didn’t build a new politics. We allowed this campaign to be dominated by forces that were mean and mistrustful; petty internet ideologues battling over ‘gotcha!’ moments and minutiae, and obsessing over polling data and psephological guesswork.
Now we risk going back to business as usual. We risk allowing this new popular engagement with the political process to wither even before the next Scottish Parliament election rolls around. We risk allowing disappointment or triumphalism to blind us to the next set of big questions: what does this referendum mean for Scotland and the UK? What does a new constitutional settlement look like? How can we reach a more comfortable condominium for these four nations? This campaign — as bitter and as divisive as it was — also produced great ideas and remarkable visions for the future. To allow them to become mere historical footnotes would be a crying shame.
Postscript
This morning, on Facebook, a close friend — who, while politically engaged, campaigned for neither side and is no kind of activist — posted the following:
If the result today makes you want to withdraw from politics, or makes you think your work is somehow over, then you, not people on the other side, are what’s wrong with politics.
The work doesn’t stop with one vote, no matter how it goes. Had Scotland woken today to discover it was a new country, there would still have been hungry children, still food banks, still people struggling on benefits, and I’d still be on my soapbox writing this status. This is not the end, nor is it the beginning; the world today is the same as it was yesterday, and no different than it would have been under a Yes vote. In fact, the only difference is that now we have a much larger country to try and change.
So where do we start?
I think that’s a brilliant articulation of one possible answer to the question: “What do we do now?” It’s also interesting because for the life of me I couldn’t tell you how he voted.
