PK in The National: The indy cause is not lost – we just have to take power into our own hands
PK in The National: The indy cause is not lost – we just have to take power into our own hands
Scots need to recover an appetite for building the good society.
This is a fully-research-linked, mildly updated version of my paywalled column for The National, published Saturday, 14th September, 2024
DWELLING on 10 years since the indyref has driven me back 50 years – to the first time the idea of Scotland ever really made an imprint on a certain 10-year-old boy.
And it was utopian. Through some mash-up of my reading of Isaac Asimov, and my absorbing of the SNP’s campaigns on “It’s Scotland’s Oil”, I would regularly revel in night-time dreams of a futuristic Scotland.
Gleaming ziggurats, families in angular clothes with rosy cheeks, maybe a domestic robot or two whizzing around on casters. But an ideal country, for sure – with all the power (and powers) it needed, for a general feeling of peace and happiness to pertain.
It would be true to say that something of those dreams has always animated my fitful wrestling with the politics of Scottish independence – all the way up to the apex of my involvement, as a member of the Yes Scotland advisory board.
The energy bounty I dreamt of as a wee yin was still there in 2014, but redoubled with the prospects of renewable energy from wind and wave. (Many posters and imagery from Yessers, memorably those of the Radical Independence Campaign, featured wind turbines marching confidently across landscapes and waters).
The peace, at least, would be increased by the clear commitment to use Scottish sovereignty to remove Trident – still the electrified “third rail” of Scots indy politics.
And as for happiness … well, that wasn’t guaranteed. In the interim decades – fuelled by magazines like Radical Scotland and the Edinburgh Review, or great minds like Tom Nairn, Andre Gorz and Neal Ascherson – I had bolted together a prospectus for a progressive future Scotland.
Universal basic income, shorter working weeks, green industrial prowess, constructive peace-making across the planet, culture at the centre of our lives… You may know the drill. But in the meantime, there were some awkward compromises to be accepted, if we were to get to the launchpad for all that. As recent polling by Stewart Kirkpatrick has shown, the question of currency bedevilled Yessers.
I remembered watching Salmond breezily assume the creation of a “Sterling Zone” across the UK, and wondered myself: will the Treasury go along with that?
And really, were we being asked to accept that we were still part of five unions – EU, Nato, the monarchy, the social union, as well as currency – and only snipping off the fiscal and the political?
We left-greens on the YesScotland board, and in the wider movement, had to swallow down much of this stuff – which would have (to varying degrees) constrained Scottish independence from the get-go. But a thunderclap of national sovereignty and self-determination was the result that all the indy elements, from radicals to conservatives, wanted to get to. From that event, ultimately shaped and developed by democratic and civic process, various Scottish futures would be possible.
The profundity of saying “No” to that – holding your country in your hands for a day, as Jim Sillars phrased it, then deciding to put it back down again – I still don’t think has been properly reckoned with.
It’s hard not to see the ruinous, self-defeating nature of party politics as a major factor in the aftermath of the indyref. It’s understandable that the creative and social energies of the Yes movement had to go somewhere, in its moment of collective trauma – which was largely into the membership ranks of the SNP (and to a lesser extent, the Scottish Greens).
It's perhaps also understandable that, going by the logic of political parties, the SNP would regard this influx as meaning an increase in their campaigning footsoldiery, rather than anything deeper and wider.
Nevertheless, the chance to systemically build on the Yes movement – as an inclusive voice for energy and optimism, maintaining the spirit of small-i independence and initiative at an everyday level in Scotland – was largely lost. (Though entities like Common Weal, this newspaper, the AUOB marches and Believe In Scotland are signs that it wasn’t entirely).
Watching the Salmond-Sturgeon BBC documentaries over the last few days, I’d partly accept Salmond’s complaint that so many figures elemental to the SNP’s advance were left out, as the broadcaster constructed the psychodrama.
But the programmes are also, undeniably, a spectacle of party politics at its most dispiriting. The sheer grind of campaigning; the endless simulation of authority and mastery; the excusing of pathological or damaging personal behaviour, in service of the main objective.
At one point in the documentary, Salmond restates the classic claim of the golden thread of competence. If the politicians showed the Scottish people we could manage devolution well, this would give voters confidence that we could manage independence well.
Not only has that run up against the structural limitations of devolution – there’s only so much you can do in Holyrood to mitigate Westminster’s wrong directions. It’s also hit the disrepair of representative politics itself, and the elite bad behaviour it allows.
There’s much to regret here. This was a constitutional movement which promised (as Stephen Noon is currently reminding us) a “new kind of politics” in the 90s. But here we are with the same old politics: besuited figures operating under a cloud of criminal investigations, conducting public feuds, with swirling factionalism rife.
There’s a huge irony here, of course, which utopian indy-types like myself can’t fail to notice. Which is that the purpose of an independent Scottish nation-state – so besmirched by the broken and petty performances of a predictable political class – has never been clearer.
The constitutional pointy-heids always had it right. Nationalism helps populations cope with the tumult of future developments, by drawing on those resources of the past – traditions, culture, language, styles of governance – that help societies cohere in the present.
The big joke, from my perspective, is that the idea of Scots indy has never faced a more science-fictional future. Though, unfortunately, it’s not gleaming ziggurats anymore.
HOW is any polity supposed to handle well the inevitable economic and social shocks that will come from climate worsening? Or the automation of most occupations – not just services, but also industrial and creative – as the exponential curves of AI, and then robotics, rise to the heavens?
Or the arrival of planetary nomads to our land, burned out of theirs as a consequence of our industrial and consumer modernity, looking for safe harbour (if reparations aren’t available)?
But we must try to handle it well. And where I’ve shifted from 10 years ago is that I don’t think independence will be brought about as a consequence of great narratives, or great narrators. Especially not as those characters stride around the studios and press ops of the media-political complex, cosplaying their grip over an increasingly demanding reality.
However, indy may come from a “radical democracy” (as Stephen Maxwell once put it). One that pushes power out from the centre – where regulations and structures meet the place-based passions of rich, complex communities.
People want to feel agency in a demanding world. But it’s not “Team Scotland” they need to join, but “Teem, Scotland” – a land where diverse social and institutional experiment is welcomed and invited.
If we are not to be driven grimly defensive by the ever-crazier weather, the ubiquitous bots, the new nomadic souls in our midst, then Scots need to recover an appetite for building the good society.
I’d expect the macro-level powers we need to make that place will amount to independence. But it’s a citizenry actively confident in its own powers, not just passively gawping at the dramatic spectacles of representatives, who will more robustly demand it.
I don’t wish for the return of my childhood utopian dreams of a future Scotland. I believe we can still be ambitious enough in our waking hours. It’s still a Yes from me.
Subscribe to The National here.