19th September, 2014

On the 19th of September 2014, I wrote a piece entitled “under the low sky.” It is an evocative line – stolen – from a book I read years ago about the experience of living in the Netherlands, where the horizon presses down on you, without the thrown elbows of mountains to keep it at bay. But the phrase seemed apt to the slate-grey Glasgow afternoon which the indyref left in its wake, and the half-throttled sense of sadness I felt, as the long day wore on, accumulating sorrows. 

Unlike many folk, I felt no real hope or anticipation that the Yes campaign would carry the day two years ago.  Defeat, even a narrow defeat, seemed almost inevitable. When Clackmannanshire declared, the night was already dead for me. I know some folk waited and waited up, in hope and expectation, but Don Quixote’s horse had already been shot out from under him. Sancho Panza was floating, face down, in the Clyde. Being right wasn’t much of an emotional salve, it transpired. 

As the Orcadians said No, I escaped from Pacific Quay into the cold but fresher night air, as the wind chased down the currents of the river and the BBC building behind me fizzed and sweltered and thronged. Big Kevin McKenna, built like a Renaissance cardinal, was sucking a sanguine cigarette outside. We talked, briefly, only to be interrupted by the jubilant figure of Margaret Curran. I remember the Labour MP did a kind of jinking danse macabre as the majority No vote accumulated, a sort of hirpling Scottische. You shouldn’t begrudge your opponents their successes, I suppose. But that little jig. I’ll never, ever – quite – be able to forgive Margaret Curran for her little jig. 

(Though I suppose, as the saying goes, she’s not jigging noo. “Even victors are by victories undone.” In the aftermath of the 2015 general election, I happened to bump into the former Scottish Labour MP in a pub in Oxford during a flying visit. Sauntering past her as she walked in to the Lamb and Flag, I was stunned to hear myself say “You’re Margaret Curran. Tell me. How are you bearing up?” As luck would have it, Curran clearly had no idea who I was, or any clue about my separatist politics. I left her with a kind word, undisabused, as an apparently sympathetic Scotsman, safely south of the wall.)

But back in Pacific Quay, in the early hours of the 19th of September 2014, Margaret was still jigging. I decided to leave before the emotion of the moment overtook me, and I said something I might come to regret. Abandoning all hope of securing a friendly cab out of there, I made my escape on foot, marching out along the banks of the river, an unsteady, half-gralloched figure, lurching between sorrow, rage and resignation. 

My company for the first part of this journey – perhaps curiously – was Adam Tomkins. The Glasgow law professor was cutting his way along from the BBC towards Better Together’s victory party in the Hilton, where the corks were already popping.  Adam behaved with all the kindliness and consideration you could expect from a political opponent at their moment of victory – much more, really. The balance of the way home I spent alone, eyes stinging, bitter, sad. I turned in, and slept a dull sleep without dreams. It is only election night I’ve been unable to see through. 

I’ve never known at atmosphere like the one I woke up to in Glasgow the next day. The result hung over everything. It leached all the social colour from the day. The weather provided an obligingly grim backdrop. The gloom was general. I live in the south side of the city, Nicola Sturgeon’s constituency. The Yes vote prevailed here - one of the few reassuring things about the immediate aftermath of the poll. The national picture may have been disappointing, but amid everything else, at least you read your own community correctly. 

I sat in a pub. I watched Alex Salmond resign before a dumb room, eyes all fixed on the telly. A man ordered another double shot of strong liquor. A fourth pint suddenly seemed wise.  And for those drinkers who quietly concluded that independence wasn’t a sure bet, who voted no? It was a scene of victory without jubilation. It must have been an odd experience. An unseen hand kept squeezing away at my throat. I made rash promises to myself that I’d never write about Scottish politics again. That I was done with it all. I might take up something wholesome like gardening instead, or skydiving. Half an hour later, I’d written this blog. It is often a painful – even embarrassing – thing to rake back over your old prose. This, at least, evoked the experience I remember. 

I am not one of life's joiners, despite my partisan inclinations. I'm not a marcher.  I didn't find myself, politically, during the indyref. I am a crappy and a complacent activist. An inactivist, essentially. The experience didn't transform my ideas of politics. But like many folk of my generation, it was, and remains a profoundly important - even seminal - moment from which it will be difficult to escape for some time to come. Whether or not we revisit the national question later rather than sooner, the autumn of 2014 will cast a long shadow for decades. But where are we now, two years on? Whither now, for the calculating Scottish nationalist with the long view? It has all become tremendously complicated. I wish I could see my way through it all more clearly.

Do we really understand English politics?

One of my favourite, counterintuitive political facts is that Oxford has fewer Tory councillors than Glasgow.  The Edwardian stone, the tweedy dons, the unselfconscious wearing of straw boaters - in the Scottish public imagination, you might expect the educational centre of the British establishment to be true blue, all the way. Not so. Oxford wards return precisely no Conservative representatives, while Pollokshields yields up Glasgow's solitary Tory. 

In fairness, the city is a speck of red in the surrounding blue: Banbury, Henley, Witney. Labour are entrenched in east Oxford. The Tories snatched Oxford North and Abingdon in 2010 and held it comfortably after the Liberal Democratic collapse of 2015. But when I first learned this small statistic, it made me wonder: did I really understand English politics as well as I thought? Was I projecting onto, rather than really appreciating, the complexity and ambivalence of the political ideas and identities of the folk who lived around me? 

There is a tendency among Scottish political obsessives - and I count myself among them - to imagine that we understand English politics because we keep abreast of what happens at Westminster. But just as what goes on on the green benches is a poor guide to the constituencies we live in, so too, the Commons feels a million miles away from the sleepy back streets of Oxfordshire, or the noisy conurbations of the midlands and the north. Logical consequences follow. You'll have heard the old gag about the United States and Great Britain being "two countries separated by a common language." The shared language in which American politics is transacted creates an illusion of accessibility. But as we listen to Clinton drone on, or try to follow Trump's latest quackery, you gradually realise that we really miss and misunderstand as much as we appreciate. 

When I moved to the south of England, I also came to realise - a bit guiltily - that was I interpreting the politics of my English colleagues and neighbours using a series of very crude, roughcast ideas. And often as not, my stock characters proved dead wrong. They were false friends. There was the medieval historian - a picture of crusty reaction - who radiated social snobbery but who was a Labour man to his fingertips. His politics recalled the establishment of the old Labour Right: Healy, Wilson, Smith.  A conservative figure - make no mistake - but with only scorn for David Cameron's Conservative government. 

Then there was the bluff College porter who was a dyed in the wool Tory. Not a Scullion, but a tough-minded and conclusive kind of character, satisfied with his lot. Even stranger was the delightful, kind-hearted and subversive old dame who seemed to support little in the party manifesto but who had also voted Tory all her days. Still more perplexing were the floating voters who had ping-ponged unselfconsciously between Labour and the Tories for decades.

It seemed to me like Beowulf voting for Grendel's mother, and vice versa. I struggled even to begin to compute the idea of politics which made these choices seem reasonable and understandable. James Meek did a power of work for UKIP in the same vein in the London Review of Books -- but somehow the idea of a Labour-Tory voter remains elusive. The only two I can think of are Alex Massie and Chris Deerin -- hardly a representative sample of what is a commonplace character in English constituencies. We struggle to take off our Scottish political goggles, and too often, they distort our vision and our understanding.

The political passions of others you met were more obvious. The bumptious former city trader with army affectations might have come from central casting or Tory central office. The young, highly-educated precariat, preoccupied by questions of social liberalism, who once voted Liberal Democrat, but now cast ballots for Labour without much enthusiasm, or tacked Green. The North Oxford Liberal Democrats - wealthy, worthy, perjink - who couldn't vote Labour out of social snobbery, and declined to support what they saw as the vulgar, worldly Conservatives for much the same reason. This mortgaged, property-owning tribe were entirely unmoved by the 2010 coalition and continued to return local Liberal representatatives with thumping votes. Theirs was a liberalism of the polite centre.  

But having spent a number of years living south of the border in growing suspicion -- more and more, I find my own prejudices a poor guide to English politics. Perhaps they always were. But the political conversation north of the border has now diverged so significantly from the experience south of it, I now acutely mistrust my own impressions. In Labour politics, the importance of these issues and judgements are now acute.

If Jeremy Corbyn wins the UK Labour leadership, can he carry the country in 2020? Will England warm to him, disappointing his many detractors who cry him "unelectable"? Or is Liz Kendall right - that only tough medicine will do and that Labour must make further concessions to Osborne's vision of Britain to win again? Judging this correctly is critical for Labour's future. A couple of weeks back, SNP spinner Erik Geddes posted this fascinating table on Twitter. Based on research by YouGov, it asked what folk thought were the most important reasons for Labour's defeat in 2015.

The divergence between the explanations giving in Scottish and English samples are revealing.  The preoccupations which drove Labour's disastrous showing in May north and south of the border are fundamentally different. They are seen differently. Andy Burham is, I think, dead wrong to argue that Labour's route back to power runs through Glasgow. 2015 did not represent a temporary blip, but a generational shift in political allegiances north of the border. It wasn't a sudden change, but the logical consequence of decades of Labour decline. It only completed the process which has been chipping away at the party's electoral performance for years.

To put it at its harshest, if UK Labour's route to victory runs through Glasgow, then Labour is going to continue to lose to their Conservative opponents for the foreseeable future. Finding a winning strategy for England is essential. I have no idea which of the four candidates - if any - is best placed to do so. However, in striving to identify that winning strategy, they'd be well-advised to ignore the advice of their Scottish comrades, critics and fellow-travellers. We just don't get it.

On Gl★sgow...

One of the great pleasures about being back in Glasgow is how much stuff is on the go. Oxford can be a curious town. So much of the population pass through in transit, tarrying at most for a year or two, the place itself sometimes feels ... hollow, almost.  Not a place in which folk really live, day to day.

This is an exaggeration, of course, and I have friends who still stay there quite contentedly, but I'd struggle ever to envision returning myself on any more permanent basis.  

One frustrating aspect of my time there was the thinness of the local theatre scene. True, Oxford boasts a pretty, expansive Playhouse, but its repertory company long withered away, and it is only now starting to produce its own drama, instead playing host to touring shows from across the country. The National Theatre of Scotland are taking their revival of David Greig's Dunsinane (2010) down there later this month.

This is all well and good, but the lack of localness, and the absence of an abiding relationship between the theatre company and the wider the community, only underlines Oxford's nagging civic gap. 

In fairness, Oxford students are a rapacious dramatic lot. One of the most (unintentionally) funny things I saw was a gaggle of English public schoolboys, trying their gangled pins and reedy voices on West Side Story. The idea of shimmying knife-gangs, and crooning hard-nuts, was already troubling.  Needless to say, for all of their enthusiasm, the stilted, callow academic types didn't quite realise the Sharks or the Jets.

What's more, a few committed independent companies (including my friends and comrades, Troika) bring some splendid productions to life, including the summer staple of open-air Shakespeare, requiring only brass lungs, a voice that carries, and the good luck to situate your run during a blue-skied week.

Now that I'm back in Glasgow, I'll be doing the odd theatre view for the good folk of Exeunt magazine. Last week, I hied me down to the Citizens Theatre to see their new production of Crime and Punishment, on in Glasgow until the 28th, before transferring to Liverpool, and back up to Edinburgh at the end of October. It is a really interesting, theatrical, thought-provoking production, which I'd commend to you all.

If you need further enticing, you can read my whole review here.

Sandstone, blonde and red, for brick

Glasgow and Oxford contrasted: fewer straw boaters, fewer crushed-strawberry trews, sweat-stained linen suits, and old owlish characters, scudding by at speed on their bicycles, in spectacles seemingly borrowed from a Labour cabinet minister of the 1960s. In Glasgow, more toddling, twinkly old dears, who call you "son" and religiously wear their quilted winter coats in summer, hipsterism rampant - and amateur Pillsbury doughboys, wan and suety, only sine chef's hat. Sandstone, blonde and red, for brick, the atmosphere less sleepily Edwardian, more mischievous, thronging, alive.

In short: I'm back in Glasgow after my four-year sojourn south of the Wall.  

Before I left, however, there was just enough time to record a final edition of the For A' That podcast from leafy north Oxford.  We're up to episode number 31, and joining us this week, was freelance journalist Peter Geogeghan, who writes for various folk, including intermittently in the Scotsman, and blogs over at the London Review of Books.

On this week's show, we discuss the state of the constitutional debate over the green salad days of the Summer. Peter has his worries about how the discussion over independence is developing. I wonder why you find marvellously few proper unionists these days. We also discussed some of the findings from the recent Panelbase poll (full tables here), commissioned by Wings Over Scotland and his readers, on the canny basis of crowdfunding.

Michael and I also revealed a couple of incriminating juvenile deliquencies. Mine involves a copy of the Bible, and I may never live it down. 

To hear the show and ensure you never miss an episode, acquire our RSS feed, lend your lugs via iTunes, or download the file, or listen here.

On the Regal Sprog

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Scots man in the sunshine of south east England must be broiled a healthy puce. 

Halcyon days here in Oxford, the smouldering sun drying up the Isis, and nights full of fever dreams, most recently of being pursued through an Escher landscape by a brass minotaur.  

Otherwise, I creak on, with joyfully few thoughts on any political topic to speak of.  Most of my emotional energy is going into avoiding swampy jugs of Pimms, enthusiasm for which is the English's most inexplicable, and most revolting summer passion.  Substitute a beaker of gin any day.

After these languorous few weeks, Michael and I thought we'd ease ourself gently back onto the podcasty scene with this special edition, focussing on the Impending Windsor, the Regal Sprog, the Sovereign Wean.  We discuss the historical background of the birth, the long and rich monarchical traditions we enjoy in these islands, and the full implications of this anointed little life for the ever-thorny independence debate.  You can listen to our extended disquisition here, visit via iTunes, or download it for later delectation.

Equal marriage & the passionate mode of politics...

Regular readers may not readily associate my prose with the passionate mode of politics.  Law school is where warm hearts go to be extinguished.  There's a certain truth to that. If you've a mind and disposition kiltered towards abstractions, chances are, it'll tell in your political writing. 

On the equal marriage debate thus far, I've been a more or less cool partisan for the equal marriage side of the spectrum. I've tried to bracket my own sentiments, and take an interest in the reasoning of the other side. As wise women have reminded us, the personal is political too, and the past couple of weeks, I've encountered a couple of things which have gone a long way to hardening my attitude. 

The first was an otherwise inconspicuous conversation with a friend and colleague in an Oxford pub. But for the smoking ban, beards would be brooding over pipes, and fragrant gusts of tobacco smoke.  Wood panelling, ale, a chestnut-eyed black Labrador, his friendliness injudiciously distributed to all and sundry. The usual odorous knot of greying wankers perched at the bar, stooled, guffawing at thin jokes, creasing yellowing tabloids under their armpits, bickering over crossword clues. An abacus line of rheumy eyes for the lassies, taking deep pulls from electronic cigarettes, their only nicotine-fingered gesture to modernity.  Bitterness and honesty dictates the admission: the Men at the Bar usually defeat us in the pub quiz. And great was the rhubarbing, and gnashing of teeth.

In anticipation of the quiz, the usual team (which I habitually christen "Ann Widdecombe's Steel-Reinforced Colostomy Bag", when permitted) nattered away about this and that, supping cheerily. The usual local colour and gossip, of friends, gags, tales, nonsense, flashes of earnestness. We're a motley band. Graduate students, university staff, freelance cooks, theatricals. English and Irish, Dutch and Norwegian, Australian and Canadian. 

The designated political bore, at my instigation the conversation in one corner happened to turn to the second reading of the same-sex marriage legislation in the House of Lords.  Rather to my surprise, an ordinarily almost entirely non-political comrade piped up that he had been following their Lordships' deliberations earlier that day.  He was lightly smarting from the experience, from the words and sentiments he'd heard. In a long-term, happy and committed relationship with another fellow at the table, he'd fired up Democracy Live, and subjected himself to the judgement of faded Barons and dust-lunged Baronesses about his ordinarily thoughtless, joyful, careless sense of himself, his sexuality, his relationship.  

As is perhaps inevitably the case, the contrary statements proved more memorable than the speeches which endorsed the idea of equal marriage. My own impulse is towards intellectual imperviousness, a shrug.  You may very well think that, but regrettably, you're a chronic wanker, and your sentiments are of signal indifference to me. In a small, gentle way, with the diffusing good humour and irreverence which characterises him, it was clear that these shoogly old villains had wounded my friend.  It is extraordinary the thought never struck me before that the debate might. Perhaps I lack imagination. But seeing the small but perceptible injury these doddering old coots had done dug a thumb right into my chest, sounding the heart strings.  A muted, but perceptible note. Whose side are you on? We passed on to other chatter. The old gits won the quiz. We rhubarbed, ordered another round, cursed our losses, and blethered cheerfully on.

The second incident was grander, a marriage. The first of my contemporaries were wed in full fig this last weekend. A curious experience. Before Saturday, I'd been a nipper at my aunt's wedding, and an even smaller nipper in a clip-on tie at some other, forgotten relative's union. Otherwise, I had little to go on. I'm not married. No marriage is in the offing. My parents are happily knotted together, but bred up neither my sister nor I particularly to reverence the wedded state, even on a secular basis. More important than the formalities, than the witnessed names in the book, the rings and ceremonies, was the abiding sense of affection.

As a consequence, I wasn't sure how I would respond to my friends' getting hitched. It was bound to be a lovely day, full of conviviality, generosity, and happiness for the pair. The officiating cleric may have been a republican socialist who favours disestablishment of the Church of England. Despite this beguilingly contrary ideology from a man in a brocade frock, nevertheless, I anticipated the religious bells and whistles to jar somewhat with my godless cynicism. As usual. What I did not expect, however, was how moving the ceremony would be. An absolutely sincere, soft-voiced, avowal of devotion and love. Not for me, and I suppose for many there, in the eyes of some all-seeing, all-judging creator deity, but before the eyes of friends and family, of folk who meant something to each other.

It was lovely to see, truly, and reminded me of a perceptive observation Nicola Sturgeon made about her evolving attitudes towards marriage. I paraphrase, as I cannot find the link to the original article, but from memory, Nicola remarked that her own, recent wedding to Peter Murrell surprised her, and was charged with more emotional power and significance than she had conceived of when they were just bidie ins, mooting the idea.  I do enjoy being emotionally surprised, and Saturday certainly sprung one on me. I think I might, might understand what Nicola means now.  A gentle revision of my notions may be in order.

I'm not suggesting that marriage is for everyone. I've no idea whether it is even for me.  What I do feel, however, more keenly than ever, is that arresting thumb again at my chest, sounding a demanding note. The idea that only some of my friends, only those with the fortune to find themselves emotionally entangled with someone of the opposite gender, should be able to stand in that convocation of their friends, together, in that transporting moment, that day, pleasure etched on faces, unbidden tears gladly stinging the eye.  That thought's now an outrage, even a cruelty.

As today's delightfully serendipitous, lovely wee video from the Scottish Equality Network makes plain, it's time.  Oftentimes, doing the just thing is difficult and costly.  This isn't one of those times.

Let's get this done.

"What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch?"

It is not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that I blog, but for cheerful diversion alone, for that alone, which no honest man gives up but for having other stuff to do. A sober year, the coming one for me. A doctorate to finish, and then adrift on the choppy waters of the economy, hoping to alight on an outcrop with sufficient supply of fodder and water to keep me going.

Although much knuckling down will be called for, I'm hoping to keep the blog going over the next twelve months in reasonably vital form. I'm also mooting another project while I'm still down south, shifting from the visual range of blog text, to the aural.  Recording the recent episode of the Scottish independence podcast with Michael Greenwell was a genuinely entertaining process, which I'm toying with extending.  

More concretely, I have it in mind to put together a series of England on Scotland podcasts, buttonholing interesting folk around Oxford, and exploring independence, devolution, and the reverberations which can be felt (however faintly), across the United Kingdom. Living in England, one of the more interesting features of day to day political conversation is how regularly you talk to folk, entertaining a whole gamut of perspectives - sympathetic and unsympathetic, more and less well-informed - towards Scottish independence and nationalism. 

I've previously documented, with anonymity preserved, some of the analysis I've been treated to at College dinner tables.  Although whether or not Scotland elects to become a sovereign state is a matter for those living in Scotland, it matters how people elsewhere in these islands see the process the country is going through, and which we are, to great extent, subjecting the often bewildered population elsewhere in the United Kingdom to. These thoughts and feelings matter if the referendum is carried, or defeated. They obtain if we're negotiating the end of our political union, or if we remain within the UK after a potentially bruising and divisive defeat for YesScotland. British identity, English identity, the people and places governing England, the promise and challenge which the jolt of an independent Scotland might have for the political unit which remains. These seem themes worth exploring.

It's a commonplace to suggest that the UK press has, to great extent, drifted away from an increasingly distinct, albeit still crude and sketchy Scottish public sphere. The ties are fraying, the concepts used to describe Scottish politics - and Scottish nationalism - are hackneyed, crude, romantic, and often basically misinformed.  Faced with such misinderstandings, a measure of Scottish nationalist snarkiness is understandable, but it isn't terrifically productive. I don't envisage the podcasts as a vast endeavour of documentation, but it could, I think, provide an interesting alternative voice to the debate, adhering to Michael Greenwell's worthy dictum of attempting "to discuss some of the real choices coming up for Scotland without the jingoism and, frankly, the silliness that surrounds much of the debate at the moment." I may not agree with many of the folk I hope to speak to, but the aspiration will always be towards the civilised, reflective, and hopefully informative. That's my idea anyway. Comments, observations, or wry notes of discouragement concerning the whole endeavour, gratefully received.  

In other news, as regular visitors will know, I don't host advertising or suchlike, but a couple of folk have recently asked me about making modest financial contributions to support the blog, having enjoyed my scribbling. Although initially a little leery about the idea, I've succumbed. If you'd like to buy me a glass of wine, and inch me closer to finishing my doctorate, beaker by industrious beaker, all contributions will be very gratefully received.

Podcasting Scottish independence ...

Back in the middle of August, Michael Greenwell popped over to Oxford to record the second in his itinerant series of Scottish Independence podcasts, which...

"... attempt to discuss some of the real choices coming up for Scotland without the jingoism and, frankly, the silliness, that surrounds much of the debate at the moment."

Michael's first episode was a conversation with Donald Adamson of the University of Cambridge.  His second was with me: a wide-ranging discussion on the contemporary ums and ahs around the independence referendum, a little on the polling and the legalities, we also attempted a few coarse prophecies about the political future after 2014, whether Scotland steps back onto the world stage as a sovereign state, or continues, a stateless nation, within the circumference of a disjointed, but still more or less United Kingdom.

You can listen or download to our full conversation here.

If you prefer, you can also download our discussion via iTunes.

Labour for Independence?

Beyond the pale, disreputable, thoroughly discreditable, incredible, unthinkable. At some point in our lives, most of us should have encountered a moment when we were surrounded by people for whom some cherished conviction of our own was absolutely anathema. Whether representative of the wider population or not, this "common sense in the room" can be intoxicating. For an extreme instance, watch Scottish Questions at Westminster, which is now devoted to pouring vial after vial of scorn over SNP heads. In the great baying mob of MPs, the isolated Nationalist delegation's voices are thin, reedy and invariably drowned out in a haughty chorus of gleeful insolence.

I blogged a wee while back about my experiences at the high table of an Oxford college (which will remain nameless), at which Scottish nationalism wasn’t exactly held in high regard. Indeed, it was dismissed summarily, out of hand, as if the proposition was a transparent absurdity, and any soul who conceived otherwise was surely a silly sausage, and certainly not to be taken seriously. It matters who and what we feel able to write off out of hand, in a casual, argument-slaying shrug. In that piece, I suggested that Scottish Tories are likely to find themselves victim to this sort of chortling scorn, scorned to be taken seriously, the possibilities for reasoned argument foreclosed by your interlocutor's contempt.

Few Holyrood watchers could have failed to notice that hitherto a similar spirit has ruled much of the independence referendum debate. At First Minster’s questions, Ruth Davidson and Johann Lamont habitually inveigh against nationalism, full of fulmination, damning Salmond’s eyes for a daffy, Quixotic fellow on a fool’s errand. Despite occasions in the past where both women have explicitly recognised that Scotland is fit for self-government, rhetorically at least, both have done their weather best to characterise nationalism as outlandish, pathological, and unthinkable. The other day, it struck me that this discourse is dependent on the logic of partisanship, assuming that all of the SNP align behind YesScotland, and all of Labour and the Tories form up with BetterTogether. As the name implies, it may be surprising for your average supporter of the Conservative and Unionist party to support independence – but what about Labour? 

As some of the party’s supporters never tire of telling us, they are not nationalists, nor unionists, but understand their politics to be animated by rather different gods. Some, undoubtedly, still identify as democratic socialists, or at the very least as social democrats, and see their primary purpose – their project – in those terms, whatever intersecting national borders their political struggles may cross. All well and good, and for the moment, let’s take them at their word and accept their political self-diagnosis. If their attitude to the referendum is essentially about means rather than ends – and their question, what means best secure our ends, Union or Scottish independence? – wouldn’t it be a little strange if there was no disagreement whatsoever about which constitutional strategy the party ought to pursue? 

Which got me wondering, where's "Labour for independence?", and is such a movement even thinkable in the contemporary Scottish Labour party? You have Dennis Canavan, of course, but he's been out of Labour politics for yonks now.  I don’t know enough about the ins and the outs of the outfit to tell. One thing is obvious: Johann obviously feels no need to be circumspect about the views of the membership of her party, or for that matter, her fellow parliamentarians in Westminster or in Holyrood.  All are assumed to share her sovereign contempt for the motives and missions of Scottish nationalists.

It may well be that, in the atmosphere which has governed Scottish politics these last years, premised on daggers-drawn between Labour and the SNP, you couldn’t get elected an MSP or MP without being committed to an uncharacteristic, reflexive Unionism of the sort espoused – albeit rather limply these days – by the Tories. I doubt very much, however, that this unwavering phalanx of pro-Union opinion can be representative of the whole Labour movement.  After all, in their own terms, they are neither unionists nor nationalists, and there is at least an argument that realising democratic socialist goals in an independent Scotland would be more straightforwardly accomplished than in Westminster. 

Many folk have been protesting that they're keen for a civilised, intelligent, substantive debate on independence.  It may well be that the first step to doing so is the emergence of a Labour pro-independence group of any significance - or at the very least, a shift in unionist discourse from the idea that nationalism is discreditable, unserious folly, but is instead a viable perspective on politics and the constitution with which they respectfully disagree.  We all know that the atmosphere around the SNP has changed in a number of respects these last years.  In 2006, Mike Russell published a co-authored tract, calling for a "new Union" in these islands.  Various other figures in the party have been taking another look at Britishness, and instead of casually rejecting it, are finding interesting new articulations of the idea. For myself, I tried to contribute in a small way towards obliterating the gridiron binaries and recrimination which has characterised the debate by outlining my own ambivalences about the nationalist project.

These aren't concessions to a opposed worldview, nor I think signs of Nationalist weakness.  Quite the opposite.  Occam's razor a clumsy instrument. Things are complicated, and compromised, and owning up to that's no vice.  We may despatch such ambivalences to a gloomy gulag in the back of our minds, but the niggling little thoughts cannot so easily be exorcised. Folk like Gerry Hassan have been arguing for a long while that the crude Manichean spirit which dominates Scottish politics is pernicious. These past months, we've arguably seen movement on the nationalist side of the argument, but little or no evidence of  Unionist attempts to understand the compelling dimensions of the nationalist case, not as a declaratory ethnic project, but one based on ideas of responsibility, self-government, of a better politics afloat on something other than endlessly repatched, creaky, leaky British ship of state.

I enjoy a good flyting. I'm no wilting bloom, opposed to a dry line, the cruel laugh, the mirthful, malicious put down neatly deployed to disarm an opponent.  Don't let's be prissy. But a precondition of meaningful debate is understanding your opponents ideas, their language and ambitions. We'll never achieve that, without nationalists occasionally borrowing unionist wellies, taking them out for a traipse, and vice versa.  As Johann Lamont's recent performances at FMQs has shown, imperious scorn can be the stuff of effective stand-up comedy but not, I fancy, of illuminating dialectic. 

A nationalist liferaft, but who is it for?

By nature, I'm something of a switherer.  I could try to paint this as a virtue, suspicious of the verities of one side and open to alternative arguments, but it makes for a damn predicament when critical moments of choice come along.  And for a nationalist, the question whether or not we should incorporate a second, devo-something question into the independence referendum is one of those moments of choice.  A few months back, I felt flatly in favour of a yeah or nay vote, independence or not, and then I wobbled. 

I’ve been trying to discern why.  Not, of course, that my say so or nay so matters a jot, but it’d be nice to see clearly through the constitutional fog, for my own sake.  The polls are obviously part of the calculation.  On the best evidence we have before us, most Scots do not currently favour independence, being partial instead to a reformed Union which nobody is offering, and a Scottish Parliament with extensive new powers over taxation and welfare which hitherto, all of the UK parties have stridently resisted devolving. As someone with democratic sensibilities, it would be churlish to ignore those demands, whatever your political persuasion. As Duncan Hamilton recently wrote in the Scotland on Sunday, in a significant piece from the former MSP and Salmond aide:

“The campaign is clearly for independence but, as gradualists, most independence supporters (like me) also see the merit in working with the majority opinion, which is currently overwhelmingly in favour of a second question on the maximum devolution short of independence.  We want Scotland to move forward united, and if that means accepting a slower pace towards independence, so be it.”

On the other hand, the polls show that we’ll be accepting “a slower pace towards independence” by significantly diminishing support for independence in the process.  Of course, the polls may yet change before 2014 – upward or downward for either side – but we’re in the process of framing this referendum now.  Its legal basis will have to be in place at the very latest in the first quarter of 2013.  While it is a fond thought that come 2014, Cameron may find himself pitched into panic as YesScotland succeed in aligning mistrust of Westminster and political suspicion of Tories into support for independence, no late changes to the number of questions posed in the referendum will follow.  This just wouldn’t be practicable. No, we’ve got to decide on the final formal shape of the poll over the next few months, on the current best evidence about the state of public opinion.  So what’s to do and why to do it?

The calculating nationalist might consider recent political parallels. Take the abortive reform of the electoral system.  In 2011, the Alternative Vote referendum was defeated by a margin of 32.1% to 67.9%.  While we may debate whether the whole process represented a set-back or a knee-up for the causes of electoral reform in the longer run, in the short and the medium, it has largely been construed as a triumphant reaffirmation of the first past the post system, a fillip for comforting Britannic narratives of parliamentary sovereignty, “strong” government, and the solidity of Westminster’s creaking edifice.  The idea that the referendum presages a shift towards a more proportional electoral system deserves a black laugh.

Now consider the national question.  Imagine you are a nationalist who is pessimistic about the likelihood that Scots will embrace independence by 2014.  You are understandably keen to secure the best outcome possible in terms of Scottish self government, and the greatest reign of power for Scots institutions.  What do you do? A hefty “yes” vote in the referendum might do the trick, but if the dominant story is “independence defeated”, with no alternative tale to tell about Scots’ dissatisfaction with the status quo, why should one expect that the Unionist parties will be minded to make concessions to a defeated Scottish Nationalist party?

For those who favour a single question, and who are pessimistic about the consequences of a “no” vote, the vista is simply bleak.  No obvious route to more devolution. No independence.  Nowt.  For folk like Gerry Hassan, we’re putting it all to the touch, to win or lose it all.  He’s written supportively of a single, crisp referendum question.  In a recent discussion on twitter, Gerry was also critical about unilateral federation in these islands. Can it be legitimate for Scotland to try to use concepts of national self-determination to enforce a more federal structure on the rest of the United Kingdom? Surely you cannot unilaterally seize federation, but have to come together, all of your constituent parts, properly to constitute one? Constitutional buccaneers are likely to be impatient with this, and to dismiss it as an unnecessarily abstract council of woe or an excess of political scrupulousness, whose upshot is nothing less than self-denying political paralysis. 

If unilateral Scottish action – through a devo-something question in a referendum, for example – seems the only way to secure what the majority of Scots seem to want, and a powerful pan-UK campaign for federalism cannot be expected and will not materialise, then damn the niceties and confound the cavils! Press on with a campaign to secure devolution by employing nationalist language and arguments.  The outcome will crown the work, and if some folk find that conceptually messy, I’m sure they’ll get over it come the day Holyrood takes over its taxing and welfare powers.  That’s the argument, anyway.

For the Devo-Buccaneer, a second question is absolutely necessary.  For him, it won’t answer that Holyrood hasn’t the power unilaterally to deliver a much-enhanced devolutionary package of powers: this is politics, the stuff of persuasion – and putting the fear of God into your enemies.  If this is the only conceivable way to make the slack British political establishment snap to, and deliver further, substantive powers – so be it.  Critically, these picaresque devolutionary adventurers are likely to be sceptical about Westminster’s reaction to a “no” vote in Holyrood, absent a strongly-endorsed alternative answer to the question of Scotland’s powers.  If independence is posed alone, loses, and loses big – say the order of defeat the AV vote went down under – the political impetus will be away from more devolution, not towards it without another question.  It is not in Britain’s nature to reform its centre.  In the absence of a clear, noisy, democratic endorsement of change, its servants and politicians may be expected to kick against the pricks, advance at best at a brisk Calman dawdle, and do everything in its power to compromise and equivocate, to avoid change.

For my part, I suspect my ambivalence and equivocation on the second question is partly due to my ‘federal nationalist’ inclinations.  Biographically, there are plenty of reasons why the concept of sovereignty and even independence isn’t one which particularly fires my imagination. I am a Scottish nationalist, currently live and work in England, and study the greater Europe encompassed by the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.  For nationalists, it seems to me essential that the independence debate focuses not on question of national identities, Scottish-and-or-equally-British, but instead on political powers. Who do you wish to make decisions affecting your lives, on taxation, on welfare, on war?  By including a devo-something option on the ballot, we tilt the debate more in that direction.  Against this, folk tend to argue that devolution and independence are fundamentally different, and to suggest that the two are on some sort of spectrum of Scottish self-government is bunkum, a category error.  As the polls show, that is simply not how most Scots currently see the constitutional debate. As a nationalist who will on some level regret Britain’s failure to save itself come independence, I sympathise. 

Most of my friends are flown here from every corner of the earth, but many are locals. I do not see myself as a “narrow nationalist” of any persuasion.  As someone with a background in critical sociology, I cannot but approach ideas of ethnicity, of nation and nationality gingerly, with a hefty dose of suspicion.  Even hailing from what has been a nationalist-leaning family for some generations now, and not identifying as British at all, I’m not immune to the sort of feelings of cross-border connection and solidarity which I’d hazard many of those opposed to independence feel, albeit unburdened with the idea that these are “British” connections, and imply views on Westminster’s jurisdiction to make political decisions effecting Scotland.

I’ve recently completed a long-term theatre project with a brilliant, cheerful, personable group of folk, most of them Oxford natives: decidedly town not gown.  It was a marvellous experience for a range of reasons which I needn’t go into here – but as we all sat down together after much work and laughter shared, with food, drink and convivial chatter – a familiar question formed, though not one which regularly suggests itself to me.  Wouldn’t we lose something between us if we split, an ineffable tie, difficult to articulate, but indubitably there? The thought hastily qualified itself: we counted an Australian chap and an Irishman amongst the glad company, and the separate statehood of the lands from which they hailed interceded not a jot, to exclude them from the rest of the troupe.  Interesting, though, how such thoughts can steal up on you, even when your position on the constitutional question is clear and decisive.  A timely reminder – and we often need reminding – that the hard binaries of Unionist and nationalist fail to capture the much more nuanced and compromised spectrum of feelings this debate stirs. 

If the UK adopted a radical scheme to de-centre the British state, re-coining a vision of a stable, federal United Kingdom, empowering Scottish institutions, excising its worm-eaten political core, and exorcised the bloody imperial ghosts which haunt its imagination, I can easily envision myself abandoning the independence project altogether.  Yet survey Westminster.  Note its dominant spirits, their political preoccupations and their rhetoric.  Only a fantasist could inspect those green and scarlet benches and see the germinal seeds of an imminent revolution in the way UK politics is imagined and conducted. 

Mine is a nationalism more in sorrow than in anger.  If I thought it practicable to reform the British constitution better to accommodate Scottish demands for self-government, I’d cheerful adopt it.  Hence, I think, Scottish Labour’s rhetoric is essentially “form up for another forlorn hope”. I say it sympathetically, but how many more of the glorious dead must choke the ditches of the Union before we recognise that this is a failed political strategy? I’d rather be cracking on with creating a more just republic for our people, than singing constant requiems for departed hopes, distracting us from the hopelessness of our situation. There is nothing inevitable about independence, but if it transpires, I firmly believe it will be attributable in large part to the unbending sclerosis which paralyses the British political imagination.  My feeling is that independence shouldn’t be necessary, but has become so.  In some sense, ironic though it is, devolution-max isn’t just a lifebelt cannily packed by the vanquished nationalist to keep them afloat during the coming squall, but can be seen too as raft flung to a floundering, waterlogged Britannia.  It appeals to the undecided, and to nationalist folk like me, who cannot but seriously entertain the idea of independence with a pang of regret.  Not for the end of Westminster rule, mind you, or abandoning the dismal British political consensus, but for the alternative, unrealised possibility of a better British polity that never materialised, and brought us to this pass.

I began swithering.  I hoped by scribbling this up, I’d have hacked my way through this intertwining thicket of sensibilities – and cleared some space in my head – but I swither still.  Does it come to this, that in some corner of my mind, I’ve not entirely given up on finding a way out of our predicament without resorting to the radical measure of independence? For a nationalist, this is an uncomfortable, niggling thought.  And yet, you don’t throw a life-belt to a drowned man, do you?    

Is the SNP's Britishness forlorn?

Over the weekend, I was scooting across Oxford in a taxi, when up piped the driver, "So, what do you make of this Scottish National Party then?" The fellow hailed from somewhere in the Middle East - difficult to place where precisely - but he was firmly of the view that Scottish secession would be a mistake.  Clenching his fist by way of illustration, he argued that while thin, extended fingers are liable to snap if buffeted, when our digits are all drawn together into a first, their combined solidity rebuffs all threats. The constitutional analogy drawn speaks for itself.  It was a pithy restatement of the No campaign's "stronger together" motto, quite unsolicited by me, offered up almost immediately when the chap ascertained I was Scottish.

Although the content and pitch of these conversations vary significantly, this encounter was just one of many recent instances.  Whether they be taxi drivers, or an academic stranger plonked next to you at dinner, it's now quite common for folk to ask about my attitude towards the national question in particular, and about the SNP in general. This isn't just me being a tedious obsessive, endlessly shoe-horning independence into every conversation - well, mostly not.  A number of folk down south seem honestly curious about it all, about the character and nature of Scottish nationalism. Are its primary drivers romantic nationalism or pragmatic calculation? Its prime spurs political disagreement with the prevailing UK political scene, or the stuff of atavistic ethnic animus?  

For me, however, the most interesting perspectives on the whole conundrum have come not from folk from south of the Tweed, but hailing from the other side of the Atlantic.  In Oxford, I have the advantage of several (primarily Anglophone) Canadian friends, and their perspectives on the referendum - informed by the legacies of Québécois nationalism and the 1995 referendum in their own lives - has been a source of significant interest to me.  One friend, keen on French and the beneficiary of a francophone Canadian education, speaks of how, as a child, she went to bed on the eve of the poll, anxious that she might wake up to find that her country was no more, if Quebec peeled off from the country's provinces and territories.  Even as a wean, she understood Canada in terms of its dual founding, and the prospect of losing that identity was an unwelcome and discombobulating prospect. She greeted the close failure of the Québécois referendum with an undisguised sense of relief.  

Following on from Ed Miliband's speech on Britishness, another Canadian crony put an interesting - and tricky - question to me. The SNP and others are strongly promoting what we might think of as an instrumental rather than a romantic or ethnic account of their nationalism. As Salmond once put it, "It is not for flags and anthems that I fight, but for fairness and compassion".  Mere bloviation, the skeptical amongst you will surely cry, bloviation and humbug.  Now, one may be somewhat cynical about how programmatic Salmond's idea of fairness and compassion really are, or how thoroughgoing and thought through his ideological commitments might be.  But on the core principle that independence should be envisaged as a means to greater political ends rather than an end in itself , the First Minister's position is absolutely solid.  

As Iain MacWhirter put it recently, contra Miliband's characterisation of the referendum - “To stay in the United Kingdom or to leave? To be Scottish or British or both?” - "this debate isn't about flags and national identity ... it's about power." Who do you want to decide your rates of taxation? The character of welfare provision? To decide whether or not Scottish soldiers are deployed in battle on some foreign field? George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith? William Hague and David Cameron? While the current political situation personalises the rhetoric and gives it a contemporary spice, the point can be framed more generally.  What sort of folk do you want taking decisions about your life? What kind of politics would you like to see for your country? Do you imagine that sort of politics is remotely attainable through Westminster?

The question my Canadian pal put to me was this.  Just how effective will this nationalist framing of the referendum really prove? Will a practical, political nationalist case focussing on who makes decisions impacting on people's lives really be able to displace those questions of identity, as the pencils of the undecided middle hover over their ballot papers? In the end, despite all the practical issues to and fro, might a sizeable percentage of the population not put a rather more simple question to themselves: who am I? how do I feel? And if an idea of Britishness-entangled-with-UK-institutions enjoys any purchase, and excites any fondness or sense of connection, won't they just vote "no"?

A politically-driven, instrumental nationalist approach to the referendum is one which I'd enthusiastically endorse, but if yesterday's Ipsos-MORI poll on independence is anything to go by, nationalists still have some way to go to break the link in many people's minds between (a) feeling British and (b) support for the United Kingdom.  Most folk lingered over the 35% to 55% topline polling against independence, but in the light of last week's blog, I was particularly interested in the table which correlated "Moreno" identities with support or opposition to independence.  The survey asked, "Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?" Taking the responses of all those absolutely certain to vote in the referendum, Ipsos-MORI found the following spread:

 

A few initial caveats.  Firstly, this data doesn't capture the number of Scottish voters who self-identify with each of the options given, and in particular, in the population at large, there are a far greater number of folk who identify as Scottish more than British than more British or just British.  For example, while 91% of respondents identifying as British not Scottish were opposed to independence, they made up just 7% of the whole number of respondents polled by Ipsos-MORI.  The whole number of respondents to this part of the poll broke down as follows:

 

We may have a lively disagreement about whether these percentages really reflect the underlying Moreno identities of the Scottish population - but it doesn't matter terrifically for our rough and ready purposes. It is clear, and clearly reflected in this poll, that Scottish identities are clustered around the left-hand side of the Moreno scale, prioritising Scottishness, but often identifying to some extent with Britishness too.  Whether or not 33% of Scots think of themselves as equally British and Scottish, nevertheless, a significant segment of the population certainly feels that way, and they are, for the moment, strongly opposed to independence. Just 10% of respondents who felt equally Scottish and British would vote "yes", compared to 41% of those who give priority to Scottish but feel some British sensibility who would do so. 

While caution about conflating correlation and causation is sensible, this data seems to suggest that Miliband's British nationalist proposition - if you feel British, keep the UK - still enjoys a very strong purchase in the minds of many Scots, especially those who comfortably and concurrently avow both identities. As I noted in a recent essay, various SNP politicians have recently been promoting the idea that British identities can be comfortably decoupled from ongoing political union.  They argue that we can be British by dint of our geography, or enjoy solidarity shy of shared participation in a more-or-less integrated state.  Advocates of this position strongly contend that Britishness need not be relinquished on independence, and vitally, should be imagined distinctly from the United Kingdom.  To feel British is no impediment, on this theory, to support for Scottish independence.  This sort of rhetoric has penetrated pretty deeply into SNP discourse. While we've heard a good deal on these themes from Pete Wishart, Salmond and Angus Robertson, on a recent BBC Question Time from Inverness, even Alex Neil dutifully suggested that he thinks of himself as an "Ayrshire man", and British to boot (colour me skeptical about that one).  

This is a understandable strategy for nationalists to adopt.  If independence is framed as a referendum on the extent to which Scots feel British - and we fail to dismantle the connection between British identities and the UK state in voters' minds - we'll get handily drubbed.  Ed's head doesn't button up the back. Neither do the noggins of Salmond, Wishart and Robertson - and this new-found articulation of a Britishness distinct from the UK is clearly an attempt to neutralise the threat of a British nationalist framing of the referendum along Miliband's lines. 

While drawing parallels with Scandinavian solidarity between Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Swedish peoples seems a nimble rhetorical move, on the evidence of this MORI poll, that argument hasn't remotely begun to displace the sort of British nationalism which Ed was promoting last week. It may well be that a sort of "geographical Britishness" decoupled from UK state structures is simply too esoteric a proposition to ever do so.  In particular, how much do Scots really know about the extent to which Scandinavians feel a common, cross-cutting sense of identity, despite their formal borders and distinct states? To your average punter, I'd guess that the Nordic Council sounds like just another abstract European bureaucracy, rather than a crucible of comity between independent states, to be imitated in these islands after independence.  For all of its virtues, and the importance of imagining future affinities between states after independence, I'm exceedingly skeptical that the Nordic parallel really resonates.

The lesson of all of this? For all of the cunning, I'm profoundly skeptical that re-accommodating themselves to Britishness will seriously dent the anti-independence logic which the Ipsos-MORI captures amongst people who feel equally Scottish and British.  The rhetoric may serve other purposes, of course, couching the nationalist project in positive, temperate terms, rather than alienating those sections of the Scottish population - the majority - who think of themselves as British, however slight or thin that affiliation might be.  It is early days, of course, but the ineffectiveness of nationalist rhetoric on Britishness thus far makes it all the more important for nationalists that the referendum not become Miliband's question of identities - Scottish or British, and so independent or in the UK? - but focusses instead on questions of power, and who the people really want to be making political decisions which affect them.