Triggers

Inevitably, much of the political coverage this morning has descended into a game of personalities. Its detail undigested, interest in the achievements and failures of David Cameron's apparently hard-won European Union deal has already dissipated. The papers and politics shows are full of who is backing who, and the high ambitions and low animal cunning which might explain why.

For my own part, I'm contemplating the approaching referendum on Britain's EU membership with a mounting sense of dread.  More, perhaps, than I anticipated. The promised poll has been rumbling towards us like prostate cancer for months - years - now. But as the grisly encounter approaches, I find myself grow increasingly pessimistic.

The smart money says that the establishment choice carries the day. The smart money sees the country briskly carpet bombed by corporate fear and menacing metaphors - and the British people shrugging their way back into the European Union, lovelessly, but without much animating antipathy either. I'd find this more impressive - and more reassuring - if the self same savvy pundits hadn't been wrong about more or less every significant development in British politics in the last five years.

A Tory majority in 2015 was nigh unthinkable. It happened. Corbyn was an outside candidate, a chortle for which hard-pressed hacks were grateful. He won. Scots would never in a million years vote for independence. An intensely negative campaign squandered a massive lead and gave David Cameron's administration its first cardiovascular incident. In the wake of the independence referendum, the SNP would descend into bloody civil war. Instead, Scottish Labour experienced an almost entirely unanticipated collapse.

I realise nobody is a prophet in their own country, this isn't exactly a list of events to instil confidence in our powers of divination. This isn't a motes and beams thing. I'm no good at making predictions either. You can try to be self aware, but invisible prejudices and preoccupations always cloud your vision. You can't always discern what your blind spots are, and where they lie. But I can't be alone in finding bluff confidence that the "remain" vote will carry the day remarkably complacent.

The campaign to frame the EU -- and hold to it fairly and unfairly responsible for Britain's perceived ills -- did not begin yesterday, with the unleashing of Cameron's divided cabinet. It has been playing out for weeks and months and years, in the pages of the press, and amplified by the powers of the broadcast media.

And in trying to anatomise my anxiety, much of it comes, I'm afraid, from intense pessimism about the politics of England. This is probably characteristic of those with the liberal Scottish nationalist outlook, and doubtless represents a crude and unnuanced depiction of the dominant political attitudes of both England and Scotland. It is probably exaggerated. But it abides.

Always ready with a striking phrase, in the 2014 campaign, Jim Sillars memorably remarked that "the referendum is about power. On 18 September, 2014, between the hours of 7 am and 10 pm, absolute sovereign power will lie in the hands of the Scottish people." I suppose one can say the same thing of this summer's referendum, when Europe is put to the question. After a burst of sound and fury, the people of the United Kingdom shall decide.  

But in grisly contrast with Sillars' formulation, I'm currently troubled by an all too familiar, all too overwhelming feeling of powerlessness. England's gonna do what England's gonna do. Them's the rules. That's democracy. This is precisely what the majority of our fellow countrymen and women chose, in the exercise of that dawn till dusk sovereign will. Months have sped by, but all of this was perfectly foreseeable over a year and a half ago.

But now the idea of Brexit is a real, rather than a remote possibility? Now it is an imminent moment of choice, rather than a hypothetical question? I'm surprised by the intensity of my first emotional reaction.  I can understand the intellectual critiques of the European Union. I can see the case against it from a democratic point of view. I can see, from the perspectives of a left-wing politics, how a Europe of competition and corporations and property, represents a sometimes challenging atmosphere in which to thrive. I don't have an awful lot of time for Michael Gove's quixotic, romantic critique -- but I have a lingering soft spot for the earnestness of the Lord Chancellor, despite himself.

But although I am sure Britain can survive and thrive beyond the European Union, I find the idea of a Scotland and Britain outside of the EU intensely depressing. That Scotland remains in the Union is to me personally a matter of regret. This much, you knew. But to remain in a Union outside of Europe, for the reasons advanced by the odious Chris Grayling, and the gormless Priti Patel? To leave, rudderless for the golden island which float in Nigel Farage's imagination, or in George Galloway's? To leave because of victim fantasies, the modest and overwhelmingly constructive free movement of people across this continent? To leave because of this? 

It is all just too ghastly, too retrograde, too shabby.If this is what Great Britain is to become, if this is what the Great British public vote for, I want out. More than ever. With more passionate intensity than ever I felt in 2014. Without regrets.

But supporters of Scottish independence shouldn't kid themselves on, and chortle behind their hands at the prospect of a "trigger" being pulled on a second referendum. Let's be honest: the SNP's European policy during the 2014 campaign was an absolute boorach, a mess. We faced difficulties with some of the economic messaging, but in terms of badly researched positions badly presented, the European stuff was up there. Now, let's not be hypercritical. Mistakes are innocent made. Details are missed. In the heat of the moment, and under pressure, loose lips say silly things. But on Europe, we don't yet see much evidence of a maturing Scottish nationalist analysis.

It was with some anxiety that I watched the Commons debate after the Prime Minister's statement on the draft European deal a few weeks by -- and saw that the Nationalist delegation had nothing to say, nothing to say, about the substance of European policy. We heard bleating about the conjunction of the EU referendum and the Holyrood poll, but next to nothing about substantive questions of European policy. This isn't good enough.

If Britain does choose to depart from the European Union, the version of Scottish nationalism which has sustained the SNP these last decades takes a fundamental knock. Make no bones about it. It will necessarily prompt a reappraisal of a vision of Scotland in Europe which has been fundamental to the party's mature thinking. This vision represents a riposte to allegation that independence is about narrow nationalism, about separatism, and the reclamation of a fantasy-land 19th century political sovereignty.

Where does the social and economic interests of an independent Scotland lie, if its key trading partner sits outside the confines of the European Union? These questions are acute also for the Republic of Ireland, which must be contemplating our big democratic summer with increasing anxiety. Is EU membership a question of honour, of identity, for Scots -- or is it also just a heartless commercial calculation? And if economic interests and questions of identity and international solidarity pull in different directions -- which of these should the SNP privilege? Which is more important?

The result of this referendum won't just shake the Conservative Party: it has the real potential to sew disorder - and open up fundamental decisions - for the SNP and the wider independence movement. It may not come to that. But for the next few months, I suspect I shall be mumbling Yeats, in fear and trembling, in exaggerated pessimism, over and over.

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."