A Lost Decade

Alistair Carmichael, the Pinocchio MP for Orkney and Shetland explains it all. He writes: “Ten years on from the independence reference, the new divide in Scottish politics is between those who have moved on – and those who cannot.”

Carmichael, famous for being ‘economic with the truth’ thunders: “For years, the SNP and the wider nationalist movement had political success in framing the break-up of the UK as a progressive proposition. The “Union” was the past; independence was the future. How times change.”

Carmichael does little to lay out what this bright new Unionist future actually is, how could he? Britain is a country cut-off from Europe, which has suffered a summer of spasms of fascist violence across England, and a place committed to such a narrow bandwidth of political outlook that austerity economics seems like a permanent fixture of our social landscape. The political message is the same since Thatcher’s time: TINA (there is no alternative). So, the consensus is the same wherever you look. It’s all over.

This is the overwhelming narrative of your influencers and columnists, your editors and gatekeepers. The tone is triumphalist: Independence is dead.

Go home.

A decade after the independence referendum a host of writers this week struggled to make sense of it all with the distance of time. The difficulty was that although that time of immense hope and insurgency now seems a distant land, we are still tangled in and surrounded by the question we were asked back then: Should Scotland be an independent country?

We are stuck in a place that looks and feels utterly different from 2014, yet is still mired in the same issues and questions. While the Unionist camp is in gleeful mode after the last general election, you are also struck by the extent to which little has changed. Writing in The Scotsman Joyce McMillan notes (‘Why cock-a-hoop Scottish unionists are actually LOSING the argument‘) : “…what is striking about the Scottish unionist cause, as it marks the tenth anniversary of its victory, is how little it has moved on, in these ten years, from the wholly negative “project fear” approach that delivered that result, but also drove much larger numbers than ever before into the independence camp. There is, after all, something profoundly wrong and reactionary about a Union which can only survive by constantly telling the people of Scotland how broken and dependent on handouts the place is, how useless they and their elected government are, and what fools they were ever to vote for it.”

Even that question, ‘who won’? is difficult to disentangle. Of course Better Together won, but the result precipitated an SNP electoral tsunami and a surge in membership of the pro-independence parties. Arguably the closeness of the result led to a massive backlash, a rise in English nationalism and ultimately, Brexit. Even Paul Sinclair wrote this week: “We won the vote, but as a senior member of the Better Together team, I still doubt we won the campaign.”

Nothing is really resolved. There is no settled will.

This sense of confusion and ambiguity was continued by Rory Scothorne, usually an insightful commentator, who evoked the old canard of the ‘split Scotland’, writing: “…voters declared a sort of spectral independence – a fantasy-system of our own, clinging to the ghost of our last attempt at something more real. Perhaps that was preferable to the more difficult task of bringing Scotland’s split consciousness together – ambition and reality, optimism and pessimism, hope and fear.”

This notion of a Divided Scotland – split irrevocably between Catholic and Protestant, Highland and Lowland, a sort of Jekyll and Hyde/Deacon Brodie nation is an old one, usually utilised to make out that Scotland isn’t really a nation at all.

But Scothorne is right at least in that the Yes / No campaigns were sharply divided by tone. Yes had all the poets and hope, No had all the fear and (self) loathing. Not much has changed. Blair MacDougall and Alistair Darling’s relentless negativity has been replaced since with Muscular Unionism, direct threats to devolution and Keir Starmer’s miserabilist message that “things are going to get worse” and the ominous intonation of “tough choices ahead”. The feeling of being strapped to a political entity in permanent decline is amplified when you realise that in ‘defeating the Tories’ you have replaced Rishi Sunak’s economics with George Osborne’s. Labour is a replicant of the Conservative Party circa 2010. This is ‘change’ apparently.

There are signs that people are realising this isn’t so great, and despite the great efforts to write-off the entire independence movement, it, we, haven’t gone anywhere. As Nicola McEwen director of the Centre for Public Policy has noted: “Ten years ago, Scots rejected independence by 55% to 45%. A clear enough victory for the no side, but close enough to leave the issue unresolved.”

“Today, 45% appears to be a floor rather than a ceiling on independence support. Asked how they would vote if there were a referendum tomorrow, most opinion polls suggest somewhere between 45% and 52% of voters in Scotland would choose independence. For an eight-month period during the first year of Covid, there were sustained Yes majorities, and again in the month after the Liz Truss administration. Mismanagement of the UK government boosts independence.”

This last point is worth noting as Keir Starmer meets the Italian fascist leader Giorgia Meloni and praises her plans to deport refugees to camps in Albania. Every day it dawns on the voter who was so keen to ‘get rid of the Tories’ that in their haste they were electing a party which is Tory-lite. And the fact that it is a Labour government enacting Tory economics is only providing a sort of existential crisis for liberal and centrist Scotland who hoped for so much better. As a journalist asked Starmer earlier this week: “⁦Prime Minister…you earn £167,000 a year. If you need help buying your wardrobe then why shouldn’t pensioners on £13,000 a year get help with their heating?”

The disenchantment with Labour is already taking hold. As Marina Hyde writes: “According to Ipsos polling in the FT today, half of British voters say they are disappointed in how Labour has governed so far, with Starmer’s approval ratings worse than those of any of his predecessors except Liz Truss.” And this just a month before the foreshadowed ‘doom-budget’.

The shambles of being tied to Britain, being constantly derided, told you don’t really exist, that you are – uniquely in the world – incapable of governing yourselves – and as the Labour leader said himself this week, there are no circumstances in which Scotland would be ‘granted’ a referendum by him while he was in office. None.

If this is a Union with no exit it is no Union at all.

Ten years on the voices and forces of Unionism may feel emboldened and victorious, but what sort of victory relies on suppressing the wishes of half of the country and treating an entire nation as a peripheral non-entity? That is the only conclusion you can draw from the decision to close Grangemouth. We are irrelevant.

Not forever. The current nadir of the Yes movement, the collapse of credibility of the SNP, the impasse of strategy will shift. This is an interregnum. In the space where things have gone badly, you have experienced failure, rejection, hurt or injury, you repair, you reflect, you heal. That is what the independence movement has to do now.

I doubt that the SNP will survive as an entity that made claim to be the vehicle for constitutional change unless it undergoes a deep and radical re-think about what it is and how it operates, This would involve – I believe – a complete restructuring, re-naming and re-alignment from ground-up. This is unlikely given the conservatism and cautiousness that seems hard-wired into the party leadership. Exactly the same can be said of large parts of the wider movement. I have long said that we need new voices, fresh thinking and ideas, younger people, and a more diverse leadership.

Bourgeoise Unionism

Alistair Carmichael talks about a ‘lost decade’ – bemoaning the time the SNP has spent in office, and hinting obliquely at better things to come. It is quite right that you can take apart the SNP’s time in office and critique a litany of policy failures. But for me the real lost decade is the counterfactual history in which we voted Yes in 2014 and escaped the madness of Brexit, and a further ten years of chaotic Tory rule under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss (briefly) and Rishi Sunak.

The future that Carmichael (or any of his colleagues) can’t articulate is absent for good reason. They have swallowed wholesale the economic orthodoxy of neoliberalism, they have abandoned their own (partial and inadequate) constitutional reforms, their social agenda has reduced in scope and ambition to wanting better Food Banks, and their relentless negativity about their own country is still palpable in the continuity of Project Fear. The future we are told is Douglas Alexander.

I think we can use the derided and precise phrase that has been used to repress the independence movement and turn it on its head. The idea that the matter was settled ‘for a generation’ was an invention, but lets got with it, because a lot of these challenges and crisis feel inter-generational. Younger Scots have been pulled out of Europe against their wishes, seen their -and our – climate futures dashed on the rocks of intransigency and collusion – and seen employment and education opportunities reduced and reduced to the point of the precariat.

I watched Bernard Ponsonby and Alex Massie’s podcast on the subject of the tenth anniversary. It was full of the usual self-satisfaction and incoherent right-wing politics. But a stand-out was the idea that the huge figures for young people supporting independence would collapse as people grew older. Young people’s support for independence has increased since 2014. Opinium polling published this weekend in the Sunday Times found that almost two-thirds of 16- to 34-year-olds want to leave the UK

Bernard Ponsonby argued that this huge support for independence among younger Scots is null and void because “when people are in their mid thirties and own their own property might take a different view”. It was a great snapshot of inter-generational incomprehension. One of the greatest differences between these generations is the lack of opportunity for affordable housing, never mind the idea that everyone’s getting a mortgage and with it collapsing into Bourgeoise Unionism.

This idea of releasing the energy of a new generation was palpable in 2014 and remains so today. It was articulated by Irvine Welsh on the pages of Bella in September 2014 (Labour Pains , Labour of Love) when he wrote:

“So perhaps the unionist apologists from my generation should consider that it isn’t just about them any more. A march towards democracy is a process, not a destination; it’s not solely about a ‘vote’ on September 18^th, or any other vote.”

“What I think it is about, is this generation having something of their own, a project that inspires them. The rest of us should be cheering them on, not sneering, grumbling, or ‘standing alongside’ establishment reactionaries against them, fuelled by a petty strop because we so manifestly failed to deliver on our own dreams. For the new generation, social progress is about more than trying to vote in a right-wing Labour Party every five years.”

“So maybe its time to let those smart young Scots take the lead in building something different and inspirational, free from the whines of the browbeaten, gloomy naysayers and vested interests of the elitist no-can-dooers. And, while we’re at it, support the bright young people of England in getting on with creating a truly post-imperial, multi-ethnic civic identity and democratic society, based on ability, rather than cemented rank and privilege.”

This remains true today. But it casts a new light on Alistair Carmichael’s idea to ‘move on’ from the 2014 referendum. We really should move on but not in the way he thinks. Give the utter paucity of the politics being put forward by Carmichael & Co, given the total absence of a positive case for the Union, and given the experience of what ‘change’ actually means at Westminster the motivation to build a new Scotland and avoid another ‘lost decade’ is overwhelming.