Early Days, Still

Written looking back at the tenth anniversary of the Scottish independence referendum, November 2024.

The last few months have simplified and revealed some of the deeper questions at play ten years ago, when we had the chance to break-up the British state and declare independence.

The Labour party has ascended to government on a landslide derived from a small percentage of the vote. Having campaigned on a message of ‘Change’ they have immediately announced sweeping cuts and a programme of austerity mirroring precisely George Osborne’s fiscal plans. In the UK we effectively live under one totalising economic system delivered by a variant of parties with different characters and slogans who take turns in office but are unified around most of the diagnosis of the problems we face – and the solutions on offer.

At the time of 2014 we were (or some of us were) aspiring to create the conditions for real change. ‘Britain is for the rich, Scotland can be ours’ was the slogan, and the packed live public meetings, protests, and cultural outpouring felt to be part of an insurgency at times. This energy was infectious and you could see it gathering momentum. There were multiple points of leadership, the map of Yes campaign groups and projects across the country flourished and the issue of self-determination was being used as a lens to look at power, feminism, peace and disarmament, land reform, the monarchy in an endlessly iterative process. People were awakened politically in a way I’ve never seen. But there was something more going on here because people were giving their whole selves to the cause in an outpouring of enthusiasm. People were beginning to dream of a better future and to believe they could have a real-world impact.

That might not have been your experience of 2014. Maybe you were a No voter who just found the whole thing difficult and uncomfortable. But this was my experience and hundreds of thousands of others. But before we get too nostalgic it’s worth noting that there were real problems, problems that we can see much more clearly now in the rearview mirror of history.

The first problem is foundational. In order to achieve a moment of real change, a rupture, a break with the past and with the British state itself, massive structural forces would need to be in play. We had very few of these. We didn’t own the media, we didn’t have proper roots in the trade unions, and we had all of the most powerful interests ranged against us, including the British state (in all its forms).

The second problem was, and is, connected. The movement was unclear about its aims and values. Some of us viewed the task, the actual reason for the whole process to be ‘real change, a rupture, a break with the past and with the British state itself’, others didn’t. Some of the professional political class wanted to offset the real challenge of this and opted for a ‘don’t startle the horses’ approach. For some this was a tactical move that they believed was the right thing to do to win. Others opted for this tactic because they really didn’t want any kind of rupture. They wanted it to be like devolution, smooth, stately, safe and controlled and run by the establishment. The new Scotland they were imagining was pretty much the same as the Scotland we currently live in – but with them in charge. The flag would change above Edinburgh Castle but little else would really change. There would be no struggle with power, no shift in ownership or structural change.

Beneath this was a large section of the Yes movement that embraced this cautionary approach, not out of strategic awareness or cold calculation but because they were cowed, not very confident and had endured decades, or even centuries of being told ‘you don’t really exist’ and living in a culture that wasn’t recognised, valued or championed beyond tea towels celebrating tar macadam, Alexander Graham Bell or Rabbie Burns.

The don’t startle the horses faction won (and lost). But these factions – or currents – fought side by side unconscious of the disabling differences until it was too late. The stultifying cry of ‘unity’ was used to suppress debate and understanding and to enforce the top-down managerial approach to movement building. Unity in diversity can indeed be a useful tool in political movements but not if it is used to champion a single lens or confuse genuine political differences. Arguably the Yes movement was best when it was anarchic and insurgent, paradoxically when it was completely ‘out of control’. This gave the movement a feeling of energy, authenticity and complete difference to anything that people had experienced before.

The third problem was one experienced by the whole of society, but it proved a particular issue for the Yes movement. We live in digital silos, slave to the (algorithm) that keeps us often in bounded groups, literally talking to ourselves. At times valiant efforts were made to change this dynamic and reach out and beyond, but this was hard, and made harder by the Unionist tendency to not engage, to cancel or not turn up for meetings. At times it was like speaking into a void.

This was for good reasons. For some on the opposite side had literally nothing to say. Such was (and is) the low level of aspiration or critical thinking that the entire campaign was accurately reduced to UK:OK. This was the shortest slogan in the world and amounted to a disinterested shrug of the shoulders. It was the ‘Everything’s Fine’ when your house is on fire meme writ large. For anyone to look at the state of our world, our society, our country or our communities – either then or now – and conclude that nothing really needs to change – is pretty grotesque. So it wasn’t just the algorithms that kept us apart, it was also genuine complete (and mutual) incomprehension.

Silos can be hypnotic. I well remember a live Yes concert at the Usher Hall a few weeks before the referendum. It was exhilarating to be among ‘your own people’ and the energy in the hall was amazing. The NO campaign had no such energy and no such events. They didn’t need to. Every blank window was a No voter. Every quiet and uncomfortable person was a No voter steadfastly refusing to participate.

These questions: how do you create meaningful conversation across divides in our society? How do you make the media more democratic? What do you do about complete apathy and complicity in the face of huge social problems? How do you create better systems of democracy from within Britain’s creaking archaic systems? All of these questions remain.

Looking backwards you can now see these fundamental problems with the independence movement that still remain with us today. But why is there still room for hope? Why would you still believe that the best outcome would be an independent Scotland?

2014 – 2024

The brutal reality is that the landscape has changed so dramatically between 2014 and 2024 as to be barely recognisable as the same country. In 2014 genuine hope of change existed, political ideas were being tested and explored, new sections of society were engaged and animated and sections of the British establishment were sufficiently startled to come out with some ridiculous arguments to remain part of the Union.

The No sides Project Fear was ultimately successful but it was also pitiful. The search for the ‘positive case for the Union’ was an unending one, and the arguments that Britain was either a) a progressive multicultural polity or b) a source of benevolent financial security now look wildly ridiculous as the far-right riots across England and the cost of living crisis push people into destitution.

But even though the case for the Union was never made, and what arguments were made have been proven to be hollow or broken or lies, we remain in deadlock. The Yes movement is tired, burnt out and devoid of strategy. The SNP as the main vehicle for delivery is discredited and has shown little credible leadership. It’s much vaunted – and incredible – success as an electoral force seems to have run its course, and even if it was to somehow regain that success it remains to be seen what good that would do. What would be the point of (re) electing the SNP if they have neither a good track record in office nor a credible strategy for independence? But alongside this is the problem that none of the alternative pro-indy parties have attracted any significant support, nor do they have credible alternative strategies or inspiring individuals.

It became a truism to say that ‘Scotland has changed forever’ after 2014, but that’s not true. In reality Scotland changed very little. We elected consecutive SNP governments, held a pro-independence majority at Holyrood, sent squad loads of MPs to Westminster, all to little effect. Scotland remains a country governed in social democratic centrist consensus, riddled with social conservatism, owned by landlords and landed power and now presided over by a tight network of lobbyists and a media-political class united in managerialism.

But if Scotland hasn’t ‘changed forever’, Britain has. The Brexit debacle unleashed the demons of English nationalism and emboldened the forces of pure racism. Since 2014 and since David Cameron stood down, humming away in gilded insouciance – have been some of the most radical far-right regimes we have ever seen. In terms of the promise of the No campaign – that we would be allied to one of the most stable and prosperous economies in Europe – we have instead been subject to wildly unstable law-breaking governments, punitive austerity and a series of disastrous Conservative Prime Ministers who made the UK an international laughing stock.

This year we saw the BBC describe fascists hunting down immigrants and people of colour on the streets of England as ‘pro British’ demonstrations. That’s a long way from 2014 when people arguing for self-determination were derided as ‘narrow nationalists’.

Part of the way that Britain has changed in this period – and the reason why it is untenable and irredeemable – is the way in which British identity has been weaponised and altered. In 2014 there was much talk of a ‘Union of Equals’, a ‘partnership of nations’. The invitation (sometimes with implied threat, sometimes with love bombing) was always as a participant: “lead don’t leave” we were told. However the interim has showed quite a different offering.

What we call ‘Muscular Unionism’ has replaced the very idea of a union and Scotland has been subsumed within a greater Britain. The aftershock of the independence referendum did not result in concessions or understanding to Scotland’s aspirations, it resulted in the opposite. It resulted in a massive backlash against Scotland and the Brexit debacle.

As Anthony Barnett has written (New Statesman, August 2024):

“When David Cameron called for a referendum in the hope of skewering Ukip, he calculated that Farage’s obvious bigotry would have ensured a reluctant majority for staying in the EU. But many other figures shared a belief that, once “freed” from the EU, Britain could find its way back to the greatness of Thatcher. Among the most significant of these was Paul Dacre, then editor of the Daily Mail. Fearing the loss of his last, best opportunity, in February 2016 he plastered this huge headline across his paper’s front page: “Who will speak for England?” His furious editorial demanded that acceptable politicians capable of winning (such as Michael Gove and Boris Johnson) step forward to take the lead in the referendum from the likes of Farage. Buried within the editorial was a telling aside: “Of course, by England… we mean the whole of the United Kingdom.”

“If you are English, you need to read this sentence out loud while imagining what it must be like to be Scottish, Irish or Welsh. Dacre was not calling on leaders to speak for England. He is calling for the opposite, leaders who will make a claim on all the nations of the archipelago that make up Britain. This is the “narrative” – an English insistence that our role in the world is to be “Great Britain” – that won the 2016 referendum.!”

This is a true account. All four nations are subsumed into a fragile concept – a fantasy of a nation called ‘Britain’. It requires the constant fabrication of history and the constant creation of national moments – the Mother of all Parliaments, jubilees, funerals, weddings, state opening of parliament, Black Rod, the Speaker of the House, the Changing of the Guard, and a manufactured culture. This is Parody Britain. If bunting and confetti were important to Declining Britain they are essential to Parody Britain.

Parody Britain also requires that we ignore the fact that one of the four nations is different from the others, hosts the ‘national’ parliament’, the vast bulk of the wealth, the vast majority of the population, all the agencies of state power and the broadcast and print media. One of the four nations has an enormous amount of transport and building infrastructure invested in it.

For decades this was all thought to be ‘just fine’ for all parties. Northern Ireland had an assembly at Stormont run by Unionist politicians, Welsh drive for self-determination was largely subsumed within issues of culture and language, Scotland had been successfully fobbed-off with a devolved assembly, and few in England had ever thought about issues of governance, why should they?

One solution to this would have been some fairly hefty constitutional reform, the revolution that never was. Gordon Brown’ s grandly titled: ‘A New Britain: Renewing our Democracy and Rebuilding our Economy, Report of the Commission on the UK’s Future’ landed with a big clunky-fisted thump in 2022 and has been ignored ever since.

It was a strange document.

While the report scatters scraps of odd powers to the ‘nations and regions’ it has a strange absence at its very heart. The nation for which this document has really been prepared doesn’t appear in its pages. As Kirsty Hughes writes: “Somewhere missing in this is England as a whole. Brown’s report talks of a ‘Union of Nations’ but the strangely absent England remains the heart of power & dominance where Westminster still effectively acts as the UK and England’s government. It’s the shadowy elephant in the room…”

And yet, much of the report is aimed at English voters and based on English political innovations. In this respect it pretends that devolution hasn’t really happened, and certainly that the Better Together campaign never did.

As Kirsty Hughes writes: “Somewhere missing in this is England as a whole. Brown’s report talks of a ‘Union of Nations’ but the strangely absent England remains the heart of power & dominance where Westminster still effectively acts as the UK and England’s government. It’s the shadowy elephant in the room…”

Brown is now a marginal figure, lauded in Scotland and marked as ‘elder statesman’ but really concentrating mostly on the marginal chore of improving the state of Britain’s burgeoning food banks, as grotesque inequality blooms.

But this fantasy of the British nation, which has replaced the concept of the Union, is difficult to sustain. Post-indy Britain and post-Brexit England are difficult to imagine as coherent entities. There are very good reasons for this. The rise of an explicit English nationalism surges against this notion of Britain and Britishness. UKIP, Reform, Britain First, and the (now defunct) English Defence League all play with tropes of Englishness, Spitfire Nationalism, and a recurrent theme of repelling foreigners. Not all forms of English nationalism are as rebarbative, but the dominant forces have been expressions of the far-right. Added to this the changing nature of Irish politics makes this notion of a united British nation impossible. The economist David McWilliams wrote back in 2017: “If Britain leaves the EU, it could start a domino effect – at the end of which is a united Ireland” adding, “Relative to the South, the Northern economy has fallen backwards since the guns were silenced. If there was an economic peace dividend, it went South.”

In a considered piece analysing shifting allegiances, birth rates and demographics McWilliams added:

“A cursory glance at the performance of the Northern Irish economy since 1922 would suggest that the Union has been an economic disaster for the people of Northern Ireland. They have been impoverished by the Union and this shows no sign of letting up. The only solace the Northerners might hold onto is the fact that all British regions have lost out income-wise to Southern England; however, “we’re all getting poor together” is hardly a persuasive chorus for an ode to the Union.”

Though Irish unity or even a border poll is by no means certain, Northern Ireland and Ireland have baked into the Good Friday Agreement an ‘opt out clause’, setting out explicitly the terms for which a poll on reunification would be granted. Scotland has no such option.

All of this, nevermind the situation in Wales makes the notion of ‘Britain’ as a unifying, coherent or credible concept unlikely.

This is now an economic basket case sustained on pure ego, unprotected by constitution, and consumed by political opportunism. The delusion is fading. We are now in a moment where constitutional crisis is colliding with, not economic uncertainty but dire economic certainty

As Tom Nairn wrote in After Britain in 2000:

“The Constitution of old England-Britain once stood like a mighty dam, preserving its subjects from such a fate; nowadays, leaking on all sides, it merely guides them to the appropriate slope or exit. Blairism has reformed just enough to destabilise everything, and to make a reconsolidation of the once-sacred earth of British Sovereignty impossible. As if panicked by this realisation, his government has then begun to run around in circles groaning that enough is enough, and that everything must be left well alone. The trouble is that everything is now broken – at least in the sense of being questioned , uncertain, a bit ridiculous, lacking in conviction, up for grabs, floundering, demoralised, and worried about the future.”

This is where we are ten years on from 2014.

Yes the independence movement was deeply flawed and problematic and (probably) doomed; yes the SNP’s force and momentum lies in tatters; yes the independence has lost much of its hope, energy and drive. But for those indulging in triumphalism in these state of affairs, the wider picture is worth noting. The idea that Starmer’s Labour government is a unifying force, the idea that ‘Britain’ as a nation is a concept that can withstand the various forces allied against it: Welsh autonomy, Irish unification, Scottish independence, and most importantly English nationalism, seems outlandish. For those that repeat with some glee that the Labour government will never concede to a second independence referendum, it may be worth reflecting that simply holding 50% of a people in a state they have rejected isn’t a long-term solution.

The independence movement needs a profound re-think, a re-build from the ground up. Continuity won’t cut it.

We need to do two things at the same time. We need to be far more vociferous in actively rejecting the British state, and this means widespread NVDA. We need to become ungovernable. Second, and just as important, we need to be actively building counter-institutions, alternative systems, an imaginative alter-Scotland. These could be anything from alternative democratic systems such as assemblies, networks of banking and savings collectives, economic models that retain resources within communities, and local food systems that create resilient and sustainable regional produce. These projects should be oriented around being future-focused and in line with the threats we face of climate breakdown and the challenge of creating survivable communities. That widest community should be ‘Scotland’ still makes the most sense to me ten years on as I survey the landscape of Broken Britain, but as Alasdair Gray suggested, there is work to be done.