Ten years on, a look back to when Scots went to the polls to vote on independence
I remember it all as if it was yesterday — the fierce debates, packed meetings, vibrant street rallies, and the sense that the world was close to being turned upside down.
The cause of Scottish independence ten years ago, looking back now, was to large extent the very epitome of an idea whose time had come. The deindustrialization of Britain in the name of free market capitalism, authored by Reagan and Thatcher, had sown dragon’s teeth.
Prior to that, Scotland had been an industrial powerhouse. Shipbuilding, steelworks, coal mining, oil, car manufacturing — heavy industry in general was the engine of the country’s economy and its working class life and culture.
When Margaret Thatcher took a knife to all of that in the 1980s she, unwittingly, took a knife to the the very foundations of a United Kingdom that had been forged and formed in the name of empire centuries prior in 1707.
The result is that ten years ago, this week, the people of Scotland found themselves living through one of those rare moments in a nation’s history when politics doesn’t merely assume an importance it normally never has in the lives of the majority of its citizens, it is becomes the only thing that matters.
Though back then I believed that independence would be a step back rather than forward for the majority of people affected by it — specifically working people throughout the British Isles due to the realities of neoliberalism and the race to the bottom that would have likely been the result — the Yes campaign was mightily impressive.
It brought tens of thousands of people into politics and political engagement for the first time, particularly those who hitherto had felt disenfranchised, left out and left behind. It was a campaign that took on the character of a democratic insurgency from below in the process.
The Yes campaign for Scottish independence mobilized the young, the old, disabled, poor, and idealistic alike.
Drive or walk through most working-class communities in Scotland ten years ago and the proliferation of Yes posters in windows, Yes stickers on cars etc, was evidence of a growing association between independence and the need for change — real change, too, not just the tinkering round the edges of a system which rests on foundations of poverty, alienation and despair.
I campaigned against Scottish independence in the company of the redoubtable George Galloway. We did so on the basis of class reality being far more of an essential factor within a capitalist society than national identity. Again and again, George during his Just Say Naw (Just Say No) tour of Scotland, made the inarguable point that a Scottish factory worker in Edinburgh has far more in common with an English factory worker in Manchester or Liverpool than he does with the Scottish businessman who owns his factory.
But then, looking back on it now, the sage words of the legendary Scottish trade union (labor) leader and socialist, Jimmy Reid, proved key in understanding the brand of Scottish nationalism embraced by the then Alex Salmond led Scottish National Party (SNP) and that of the English nationalism exemplified by Nigel Farage, who was key in the Brexit campaign two years later in 2016.
Jimmy Reid: “Nationalism is like electricity. It can kill a man in the electric chair or keep a baby alive in an incubator.”
To give Salmond, the SNP and the broader Yes campaign for Scottish independence their due, the brand of nationalism they espoused was of the decidedly latter variety in Jimmy Reid’s aforementioned formulation. It was both inclusive and expansive on the basis of the old Scottish mantra that “We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns” (We are all Jock Tamson’s children). EU nationals living, working, and loving in Scotland were given a vote. EU nationals were not afforded the same privilege in the Brexit referendum — a referendum largely about their very fate — in 2016.
George Galloway was never better than he was in the run-up to the referendum on Scottish independence back in 2014. On full display was the passion, eloquence and courage for which he is known. He refused to take a backwards step as he literally hurled himself into the fray. This was an old Labour Party man doing battle in the cause of class unity over national particularism. It was really something to see.
This being said, ten years on and I now consider myself to have been on the wrong side of this constitutional question. Yes, Salmond’s prospectus for independence, laid out in his ‘white paper’, was as tepid as tepid could be. Enshrined within it was the retention of UK sterling as an ‘independent Scotland’s’ currency; the retenion of the monarchy as an independent Scotland’s head of state; and perhaps the most regressive of all, NATO membership. It was, in sum, a manifesto for capitalism and imperialism with a Scottish face.
It will never happen again — at least not electorally. When then UK prime minister, David Cameron, agreed to a referendum on this question way back in 2013, he did so with the hubris of a scion of English privately-schooled exceptionalism. He believed there was no chance of people in Scotland voting to separate from the UK.
The actual truth is that the UK had separated from the people of Scotland decades before. We in Scotland despise the Tories (Conservative Party) and all that they and it represents. We, by inclination, are of a collectvist not indvidualist persuasion.
George Galloway, to my mind, deserves huge credit for his role in making the case against Scottish independence on the basis of class throughout this tumultuous period. He traveled the length and breadth in the doing and saying. What a time it was to be alive.
End.
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