'Progressive' is the new 'authoritarian'

Watching this election has convinced me of one thing above all else: I need to buy a new dictionary. The one that generally sits next to my computer is The Chambers Dictionary (1994) edition. It has served me well, but I have come to realise that twenty years is a long time in the evolution of words. At some point, I must have missed the memo about the redefinition of quite an important word. That word is ‘progressive’. According to Chambers, in 1994 it meant: ‘moving forward, modern, esp. displaying or applying liberal or enlightened views or practices’.

I’m not exactly sure what the new definition is yet, but the word has certainly been bandied about quite a bit, particularly by three of the parties hoping to form a progressive alliance against ‘austerity’. I don’t know much about Plaid Cymru, although I have noticed that whenever their leader -Leanne Wood- is on TV, she likes to point out, at least once or twice, that she is Welsh and represents the people of Wales. It’s good to know that she’s mindful of the needs of the information-poor.  

I do know a bit about the SNP though, enough to be surprised that their progressive brand of identity politics (ingredients: a sense of grievance, a bit of paranoia, a large dollop of self-righteousness with a wee side-helping of cultist absolutism) appears to be paying off. But even if you put the nationalism to one side, the word ‘progressive’, as defined in that 1994 Chambers Dictionary, doesn’t really fit with their modus operandi. The word I would choose is ‘authoritarian’, defined by Chambers as ‘setting authority above freedom; stressing the importance and power of authority; domineering; disciplinarian.’   

That isn’t an assessment based on tribal prejudice; it is based on paying attention to the things they have said and done while in office.   

Since taking power, the SNP has made it clear through the laws it has introduced that it sees the state as the embodiment of The Nation. Many of their supporters take that idea even further: they see the party as the embodiment of The Nation. If you considered yourself to be liberal (again, Chambers Dictionary 1994: ‘generous; broad-minded; not bound by authority or traditional orthodoxy’) you’d surely be troubled by the way that some nationalists are unable, or unwilling, to differentiate between the interests of their political party and the interests of their country. In everyday discourse, criticism of the SNP (and sometimes even criticism of their leader) is now routinely conflated with criticism of Scotland as a whole.

If you know your history, you’ll appreciate that we’ve already seen several examples of this kind of thing in other countries. When people start using words like ‘quisling’ or ‘traitor’ to describe their fellow citizens, we’re witnessing the ugly phenomenon of ideological certainty unmediated by knowledge, perspective, humility or, indeed, just a little bit of healthy scepticism. And if you don’t know your history, here’s a spoiler alert: this sort of thing usually doesn’t end well.

The SNP’s commitment to progressive politics (new definition) is writ large in the form of two illiberal (old definition) pieces of legislation.
This country already had more than enough laws to deal with anti-social or violent behaviour, but they introduced the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, giving police officers the power to decide the context in which blessing oneself or singing the national anthem might be considered 'offensive'. Even East Germany's Stasi didn't have the nerve to pull an oppressive stunt like that. Some of us, at least, are alarmed that we now live in a country where someone can be arrested for singing the national anthem or for blessing himself.

As if that isn’t bad enough, the ‘named person’ legislation (which requires everyone under 18 in the country to have an individual state guardian) is a pretty clear statement that the SNP view the family unit as undermining the authority of the state. It’s a grotesquely Orwellian piece of legislation, dressed up in the usual verbiage about it all being for the good of vulnerable kids. I’ve no doubt that there are folk in Scotland who believe that, since devolution, the country has adopted some progressive (new definition) legislation, but I can’t think of a single thing that the SNP has done to transfer power from the state to the citizen; it all goes the other way with them. That’s the thing about paternalistic, authoritarian statist parties; at their core, they want everyone to be a ward of the state, which is pretty much the opposite of progressive (old definition).

The other party working to the new definition of progressive is the Greens. I once voted for them because I thought I was making a protest. They wanted to save the planet, reduce pollution, preserve endangered species etc. Who could object to all that? 

But the devil, as ever, is in the detail. 

According to political shorthand, some parties don’t like particular groups of people. UKIP don’t like immigrants; Labour don’t like the rich; the Tories don’t like the poor and the needy; the SNP don’t like the English. But the Greens trump all of that, because they don’t even like human beings. They started life in the 1970s as pressure group with the principle aim of reducing the UK population to 20 million. They’ve got a much better image these days, but they still cling to their miserable neo-Malthusian prejudices.

They would like there to be fewer human beings on the planet, consuming stuff and generally messing the place up. This in spite of the fact that, for the last century, the annual number of deaths due to starvation have been dropping and lifespans in some countries have doubled. And all of this has taken place alongside a huge rise in the global population. The Greens don’t get the fact that the more people there are, the more we rise to the challenge of improving the lot of humankind. As PJ O'Rourke observed, the truth is that those 'progressive' concerns about population control can be distilled down to one grubby little nugget of prejudice: There's just enough of me, but way too much of you.  

They want to end all animal experimentation. This, in effect, means that they believe that a rat or a guinea pig in a laboratory is as important as a child with cystic fibrosis, diabetes or sickle cell anaemia. For that reason alone, they don’t deserve your vote. I’m not even sure that I’d trust anyone with those views to go and collect my laundry.

But if you think that communism was a good idea that only got a bad name because it was ineptly managed by the wrong people, you’ll find plenty to love in the Green manifesto.   

Among other things, they’d like to control and reduce the volume of advertising on TV and in newspapers, because it promotes the “materialist and consumption-driven culture”. They’d like to introduce measures designed to encourage a “transition from diets dominated by meat” to vegetarianism. I’m wondering what that ‘encouragement’ would look like. I’m a non-smoker, but have noted with interest the way that smokers have been encouraged not to smoke in public places and will shortly be encouraged not to smoke in their cars. Maybe 'encourage' is another of those words that was redefined when I wasn’t paying attention. 

One thing you can say in their favour is that they have got lots of ideas; in fact, they’ve got a whole steaming pile of them. Their manifesto is a gift that keeps on giving: They’ll reduce the numbers of people in prison by introducing ‘mediation centres’ where the principles of ‘restorative justice’ will ensure that, if any nasty crime is committed, we’ll all be able to sit down and have a right good chat about it. They have a position on which countries the national football team should be allowed to play against and also a position on the ownership of football clubs. They say that, "where appropriate" they would put members –and not shareholders- in charge. It must really have irked them when Manchester City's owners recently used £200 million of dirty oil money to build a football academy in order to develop young talent.  

The so-called ‘Beyonce tax’ (wherein a penalty on “superstar performances” will be levied in order to support “local cultural enterprises”) is more than just a proposal for a stupendously wrong-headed bit of meddling. The idea of imposing a tax on one art form specifically to support another art form is such a brutally naked example of top-down cultural elitism that it almost takes the breath away.

Think what it would take to do all of these things. Think of the powers that a government would have to have in order to carry out such a programme. No wonder they are also agitating for state funding of political parties.  

Oh, and everyone is going to get free condoms to prevent … can you guess what? Yes, it’s overpopulation. That’s the Greens in a nutshell. They view every new human being as a problem to be dealt with, not as a potentially wonderful person, a wealth creator, a brilliant entertainer or architect or sports person or nurse or brother or daughter or inventor. They talk about helping the poor, but they despise the one thing –economic growth- that actually lifts people out of poverty. They believe that "the pursuit of economic growth… must cease to be an automatic aim of human societies.” Right. Let’s all get back to working the land, making our own candles and shitting in ditches.   

If, however, you like this kind of stuff, I’d recommend that you do some reading on the history of 20^th century politics. You’ll quickly get an idea of how well the imposition of that amount of state control worked out for some of our Eastern European neighbours.

The people who had to live through it didn’t like it very much, but hey, that’s just a detail when you’re on the side of progress (new definition).

The monster is about to tear down Frankenstein Castle

One of the more surreal episodes in Scottish political life occurred seven or eight years ago when Motherwell was nominated for the annual ‘Carbuncle’ prize. The architecture magazine Urban Realm (formerly known as Prospect) gives out this award with a view to encouraging discussion and debate about the quality of development in Scotland's towns and cities. Their editorial line is that "the truly depressing places are the ones which could be great, but are stifled by a lack of imagination, creativity and passion. The towns shortlisted … must have real potential, which local leaders for one reason or another are failing to exploit."

The leader of the Scottish Labour party at the time, Jack McConnell, thought that it was a disgrace that Motherwell town centre had been allowed to get into such a state. He described it as ‘dirty’ and ‘untidy’ and criticised other towns for failing to show enough civic pride. He said that Scotland had a problem with “small provincial towns like Motherwell, Wishaw, Paisley, Alloa, Cumbernauld and Dunfermline” and argued that the neglect of these town centres symbolised “something in the public realm that has a lack of commitment to quality of life.”

It was hard to disagree with such noble sentiments. 

But this was Jack McConnell speaking, the Labour leader and a North Lanarkshire MSP. That's North Lanarkshire, the region that had been run by Labour since dinosaurs roamed the earth, the place where a blow-up doll in a red rosette would command a good majority in any of the constituencies. You couldn’t help but feel that perhaps Jack was suffering from a touch of the old cognitive dissonance. He thought that our town centres (generally run by Labour) were disgraceful, but went on to cite the “Tory economic decline of the 1980s” as a major factor. Of course … it was all Thatcher’s fault.

It was no real surprise that he could so nonchalantly absent his cronies from anything approaching ‘blame’. For more than half a century, the Labour Party in Scotland operated like the Cosa Nostra, but without the glamour, the violence or the intellectual depth. Mired in class-warrior dogma that was at least a generation past its sell-by date, the ‘natural’ party of government in Scotland could coast along in what was, effectively, a one-party state. When bad stuff happened it was never their fault, because those perfidious Tories in Westminster were always to blame and -as long as enough of the electorate fell for that line- everything was more or less peachy for Labour; it could take a pliant electorate for granted, happy to peddle the myth of Scottish exceptionalism. Scots vote Labour, so the argument went, because we have a more developed sense of social responsibility. That may have made some folk feel good about themselves, but it was -and still is- utter tripe.

Voting habits are always influenced by a variety of factors. Under the last Labour administration, there were parts of Scotland where the public sector accounted for more than 70% of all economic activity. You don’t have to be a genius to work out that if a large chunk of the electorate is -either directly or indirectly- on the government payroll, then a greater proportion of that electorate will invariably vote for the party that advocates a bigger government payroll. Nor do you need a degree in economics to understand that the continuation of government largesse, on those non-wealth generating percentages, is not merely unsustainable; somewhere down the track and around the bend, it’s going to be a train wreck for which your kids and grandkids will be picking up the tab. 

To get an understanding of just how successful the long Gramscian march through the Scottish institutions was, all you have to do is watch a TV debate, listen to a radio phone-in or loiter for a while on the social networks. You’ll soon notice that our overwhelming political orthodoxy is both statist and leftist. For a large section of the public, anything that involves spending money on ‘public services’ is unequivocally good, while anything that involves spending rather less of that money is not just bad; it’s disgracefully immoral. 

A couple of years ago, the right to buy council houses, as introduced by the Conservative government in 1979, was described by The Herald columnist Ian Bell as an ‘atrocity’. Some of you may think that ‘atrocity’ is a word you’d use to describe fifty people being blown up in a Baghdad marketplace, or perhaps a group of fanatics indulging in a bit of ethnic cleansing, but no. According to this respected columnist, it was an ‘atrocity’ that working class people had been allowed to buy their own homes. Bell articulated the disdain of the patrician, authoritarian left: How dare these folk get so uppity as to want to buy their own home? Where was their sense of class solidarity?  

That default ‘blame it on Thatcher’ position also accounted for the collapse of the traditional heavy industries. There was little acknowledgement of the economic fact that if you can’t make stuff at a price that people are willing to pay for it, you’ve got problems. And as recently as 2012, I heard a radio interview in which a Labour councillor in Glasgow blamed ‘Thatcherism’ for vandalism and petty crime in his constituency. But Mr. Bell’s ‘atrocity’ remark unwittingly revealed the truth that, for many on the left, the real sin of Mrs Thatcher’s government -the one that will never be forgiven- was to persuade working class people, in big numbers, to vote for her version of popular capitalism. She ‘stole’ some of Labour’s people, voters they had taken for granted. Plus ca change.    
But if you say something often enough, some people will start believing you. In 2015, when someone talks about enterprise, self-reliance or public spending restraint in the land of Adam Smith’s birth, it sounds to great chunks of the electorate like white noise. It’s not that these arguments are being lost; rather, they hardly ever get made, because that language no longer makes sense to people who appear to believe that politicians have the option of ‘abolishing’ austerity, as if there was a secret switch in an oak-panelled room somewhere in Westminster or Holyrood:

Press button 1 to abolish austerity. 
Press button 2 to abolish the deficit. 
Press button 3 to abolish the national debt.    

Maybe there's a button for the weather, too. 

If the opinion polls are correct, Labour will get a thrashing in Scotland at this election. It’s hard to feel sympathy for a party that has been quite so complacent, quite so content to showboat its spurious sense of moral superiority, quite so unwilling to accept the fact that it is economic activity that lifts people out of poverty, not government programmes. Another party may be wearing their clothes now, but that unflagging commitment to the ‘tax and spend’ expansion of the state still makes perfect sense to those who would consider economic literacy to be an over-rated concept. 

Yet even as the SNP pull the collectivist rug from under their feet, those high priests of profligacy, Miliband and Balls, are hamstrung by the knowledge that, to have any hope of winning at Westminster, they must concede that our national debt and deficit have to be addressed at some point. But they are discovering that this won’t wash with an electorate weaned on five decades of an unending statist narrative. The people want an end to austerity, so someone must promise to push that magic button.  

And now the monster that Labour helped create is preparing to tear down a once-impregnable fortress. As they survey the auguries of electoral Armaggedon, I wonder if any of those Labour apparatchiks, purveyors of the old tribalist dogma, might have cause to recall the words of WB Yeats:
  
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

A 'Yes' vote isn't really about change

Ask yourself this question: If you are going to charge someone with the responsibility of making decisions which will impact on you and your family, who would you prefer to make those decisions? A stupid person who lives next door, or a smart person who lives 400 miles away? The answer to that should be obvious, but the Yes campaign asks us to believe that the person next door –by the very fact that he or she lives next door- will be better placed to make those decisions. The next-doorness of that person overrides any notions of ability, intelligence, vision, empathy or wisdom. In identity politics, it is an article of faith that next-doorness trumps everything. And make no mistake, the Yes campaign contains many of the key characteristics of identity politics: the paranoia, the sense of grievance, the absurd manipulation of ‘facts’ to suit an agenda, the demonising of opponents, the offence-taking, the scaremongering, the cultist absolutism. Some on the left may choose to believe that this is a rainbow coalition, a grass roots movement kicking against a corrupt and out-of-touch political establishment, a populist tide focused on optimism, hope and the invigorating possibilities of change. But to adopt that position requires you to put a blind eye to the telescope, because this is clearly a marriage of convenience between the disaffected left, a gaggle of disparate pressure groups and the Scottish National Party. And, as with all marriages, you don’t get to have much say about the in-laws you inherit. 

Imagine, if you will, that at some point in the last 50 years, Britain had elected a left-leaning government with an unshakeable commitment to political reform and social justice. What do you think the SNP would have been doing? The answer, of course, is that they would have been campaigning to break up the United Kingdom, because that commitment to separation is their raison d’etre. If you could provide empirical evidence that Scotland would be worse off as an independent country, they would still campaign for it, because that’s what nationalists do. The same is true of hard-core unionists, of course, but they are not trying to break a 300-year partnership that, according to every single post-war election, is supported by the majority of the Scottish population. Only a couple of decades ago, the SNP were pejoratively known as the ‘Tartan Tories’, yet they now present as a left-leaning party committed to social justice, greener policies, free everything for everyone, yada, yada, yada. But their radical conversion is little more than an opportunistic re-branding designed to exploit the frustration of disaffected Labour voters. Successive electoral beatings taught them that this was the only way they were ever going to have a chance of achieving their goal, so they changed tack. And it seems to have worked.  

It’s worth looking back to the period just before the devolution settlement to understand exactly how we got ourselves into this fine mess. By the beginning of the 1990s, devolution had come to be regarded by the powers-that-be as a bulwark against nationalism and, in a 1997 referendum, 74% of those who voted favoured the notion of devolved government for Scotland. Once we started down that road, we were assured by the great and the good that the Scottish Parliament would be a ‘parliament of all the talents’. We wouldn’t just have the usual party hacks; we’d have poets, artists, thinkers, business leaders, ordinary people. Believe me, some folk actually said stuff like that. Well, we certainly got 'ordinary', but not in the sense of representing the ordinary man or woman in the street. We got ordinary as in ‘largely devoid of any distinguishing characteristics’. We were also told by the architects of the new Scotland that devolution, with its cleverly-constructed voting system, would effectively neuter the separatist movement by giving Scots the representation they desired. 

Holyrood was set up with assurances that no party would ever have an overall majority, meaning that we’d always have consensus politics. At first, everything went pretty much as the smart politicos intended. We had Labour-LibDem coalitions between 1999 and 2007; so far, so cosy. The SNP upset the applecart by forming a minority administration in 2007 and, four years later, the thing that wasn't supposed to happen, happened: one party won an outright majority at Holyrood. Since that day, Alex Salmond and his team have played their hand brilliantly to the point where they have now pushed Scotland to the very edge of secession from the UK. This in spite of the fact that only around 12% of those eligible to vote in the 2010 General Election could be bothered to express a preference for independence.   

For proponents of next-doorness, who believe that ‘we’ know better than ‘them’, this point is worth emphasising: In attempting to come up with a blueprint to tame the separatist beast, Scotland’s smartest political brains produced the one mechanism that could give the nationalists a tilt at their holy grail. Some people did point this out at the time, but who wants to listen to a bunch of negative vibe merchants with their ‘what ifs’ and ‘have you really thought about thats’? (Does any of this sound familiar?)
So, barely 15 years into that ‘foolproof’ devolution settlement, we’ve got a nationalist government gearing up for its big shot. And, in case you hadn’t noticed, everything the SNP has ever said and done has been focused on this moment.

The Yes campaign argues that at least independence will give us the opportunity to build a ‘fairer’ society. Unless I’ve missed something, we’ve already got our own parliament with significant powers. What’s stopping us building a fairer society right now? What exactly is it that Westminster is stopping us from doing? It’s not as if we’re short of money. If our Parliament really believes that we have got disgraceful levels of poverty and ailing public services, why would they have spent £1 billion on a vanity project like the tram system that barely stretches across six miles of Edinburgh? 

Whatever else Westminster has done, it has certainly not stopped the SNP from exercising an authoritarian streak in attempting to micro-manage the lives of Scottish citizens. A couple of recent examples stand out. Scotland now has a law that criminalises people for singing songs at football matches and the context of whether or not the song you are singing is offensive is ‘at the discretion’ of the officer-in-charge. Which means, more or less: you are breaking the law if I don’t like the cut of your jib. Where does that one sit on the progressive /repressive continuum? Creepier still is their idea to appoint a 'state guardian' for every child born in our country. This state guardian will have the legal right to ensure that a child is raised in a government-approved manner and can report any issues about their upbringing to the authorities. I recall watching a TV discussion about this, during which Aileen Campbell -the Minister for Children- used this telling phrase: “Of course, parents also have a role in this” (my italics). Parents also have a role in bringing up children. Well gee, thanks, Aileen. I can only hope that me and the wife don’t let the government down by maybe giving our kids too many sweets, or by expressing opinions that don’t match the latest dogma. You’ll forgive me if I don’t feel like celebrating when people like this get what they want. 

The truth is that the drivers of this Yes campaign are offering a vision that has already been presented at general elections and been rejected by the electorate. But rather than fight for the 'change' they claim to believe in, they wish to set up a cosy northern enclave in which a built-in left-leaning majority obviates the need to win the battle of ideas across the whole country. It’s an extraordinarily defeatist attitude and an abject retreat from universalism.
And at the heart of this grubby accommodation is the biggest lie of all, the idea that Scotland is somehow more compassionate and progressive than anywhere else in the UK. To use that old phrase, it is ‘nonsense on stilts’ and is equivalent to saying that Irish people are stupid or that Germans don’t have a sense of humour. If it’s wrong to attribute negative characteristics on the basis of national identity, it’s also wrong to attribute positive characteristics on the basis of national identity. That many on the left have chosen to go along with the SNP's cynical propagation of the myth of Scottish exceptionalism represents a nadir for the movement which shaped the post-war settlement and which once stood for universalism and solidarity. 

I don’t believe that I’m any less Scottish or any less desirous of change for refusing to buy into the Panglossian cult of the Yes campaign. I happen to believe that the change we need in the United Kingdom is nothing less than a recalibration of the relationship between citizen and state, between the electorate and the political class. There are simple things that we could do now which would begin the process of handing power back to people: Granting power of recall to constituents would be a start; open primaries for prospective MPs would be another. The digital age offers limitless possibilities to enrich the concept of democracy, but we’re still practicing analogue politics. If our politicians really believed in people power -as opposed to just saying that they believe in it- they’d be doing this stuff already.

The disconnection between the electorate and the political class is so profound that it can’t be fixed by shifting a few powers from London to Edinburgh. We won’t be any more independent or better governed after a Yes vote and we won’t be any more independent or better governed after a No vote, because -until we fix that connection- we’ll be electing the same people in the same parties. 
Most folk will have already made up their minds how to vote, so I doubt that this polemic will change anyone’s mind. All I’m doing is pointing out the truth as I see it, using the evidence of my own eyes, my own experiences. I believe that on 18th September, we’re being asked to vote for Holyrood’s independence, not our own. So I’ll be saying: "No thanks".

I think that people can change politics, but it takes more than a leap of faith to believe that, after this referendum, Labour, Conservative, LibDem and the SNP will suddenly start recruiting from a different gene pool and begin to produce visionary political ideas in a new Scotland.

But if you believe that, I wish you luck.

And while you’re here, can I interest you in some magic beans?

The Referendum: Head, heart and gut.

I was on a training course the other day. At the end of the course, the participants had to fill in one of those monitoring forms where they ask about your age, gender, ethnicity and all the rest of it. Apart from noting that there seemed to be quite a few gender options available these days, the question that gave me most cause for concern was this one: 

Ethnicity: please indicate how you would describe yourself (please tick one box). 

Among the options were ‘Scottish’ and ‘British’. I wondered which one I should pick. I had to give it some thought; in fact, I’ve been thinking about little else recently as I’ve grappled with the issue of what to do with my vote on 18th September. I’ve been thinking about the country I grew up in, about how that country has changed and about how it’s likely to change even more. I’ve been thinking about the kind of place I’d like my kids and their kids to grow up in. I’m pretty clear that there are good (and bad) arguments on both sides of the referendum debate and also believe that -whatever happens- we’ll somehow manage to get along reasonably well once the dust has settled. In the process of reading, thinking, listening and arguing about this, I’ve been trying to find some kind of peaceful resting place for my referendum vote. I’ve been waiting for a moment when my head, my heart and my gut would be in alignment; only when that moment arrived, I thought, would I know what I was going to do.

Something from years ago has been playing on my mind recently. I recall watching, sometime in the early 90s, a news item on TV about a group of young musicians who had formed what seemed, at the time, to be an unusual band. They were called Bombay Talkie and the members were all of South Asian descent, but spoke with broad Glaswegian accents. They played Bhangra music and dressed in a bizarre mix of traditional Asian costume and tartan. Some of them wore kilts and turbans; I suspect that bagpipes were also somewhere in the mix. The young men in this band spoke with clarity and confidence about their identity as what they called ‘Scots Asians’. They were completely comfortable with the idea that they were Scottish, but had roots in Asian culture. They saw no contradiction in that and wanted their music to express the push and pull of the various cultural influences they had been exposed to.   

This may sound a bit soppy, but watching that news item made my heart soar. What a great place to live, I thought. And what a great time to be alive, in a country that could welcome folk from foreign lands, a country that could house them, employ them, give them opportunities and support them to the extent that -just a generation or two later- their kids could be so assimilated that they could nonchalantly mix and match their various influences to produce a vibrant musical expression of their cultural confidence. The lads from Bombay Talkie were fantastic ambassadors for their families and for these islands. I loved the fact that these young men saw no problem whatsoever in the idea that they could be both ‘Scottish’ and ‘Asian’. I felt proud to be, in some small way, part of that, part of a United Kingdom which was -in essence- a great, ongoing multi-cultural experiment, a land that had peaceably (but not without difficulty) transformed itself over the years.   

By way of contrast, I also recall that the Conservative government minister Norman Tebbit made some ill-judged remarks in the late 80s about English-born fans of West Indian descent who supported the West Indies cricket team over the English one. He was critical of their decision not to support the home nation and appeared to suggest that this was a test of ‘Britishness’ that those cricket fans had somehow failed. Mr Tebbit was vilified for what I’ll call his ‘insensitivity’ on this matter, but sadly, during this referendum debate, some folk seem willing to lapse into that same kind of thinking. I’ve been dismayed by some of the things that seemingly intelligent folk are willing to write and say. I resent, for instance, the notion that there is a ‘Team Scotland’, and that if you are not ‘with the programme’, if you are not swept away by the sheer momentum of it all, then you are somehow not part of that team. Your Scottishness is questioned, as if you somehow don’t care or haven’t thought about the issues involved in the referendum debate. I resent being told that the vote on 18^th September is a no-brainer, when it is clearly the exact opposite. I resent being told that, if I were to side with the No camp, I’d be a stooge of idiotic and venal Westminster politicians, as if a decision about a 300-year partnership should be made on the basis of despising a few clowns who will be forgotten before the decade is out. I resent being told that a Yes vote is the only progressive choice and that to contemplate saying No is to side with the forces of darkness. In fact, I’m more than resentful at all this febrile stupidity; I’m furious, because I just don’t recognise my country in some of the things that are going on just now.         

Anyway … back to the tick-box option on that monitoring form. 

Ethnicity: please indicate how you would describe yourself (please tick one box). 

I thought about those lads in Bombay Talkie. What would they have done, had someone asked them to pick between ‘Scottish’ and ‘Asian’? It’s obvious, isn’t it? They would have told them to get lost, although I suspect that they would have used much stronger words.  

So I ticked the two boxes: Scottish and British. 

And do you want to know something?  It felt good.

Referendum Dictionary

The Scottish independence debate is getting a bit heated and I have little doubt that the temperature will rise even further between now and September 18^th. It’s only natural that folk get worked up about such a big subject, but as both sides continue to make claims and counter-claims, promises and counter-promises, it can be difficult to drown out the background noise and focus on exactly what is being said. Sometimes people say one thing when they mean another. And sometimes people say one thing without realising that they are actually saying something else. 

With this in mind, I thought it might be useful to provide a brief ‘strip-away-the-bullshit’ guide to some of the assertions that are made regularly during discussions and debates, both in the digital domain and in that much more civilised neighbouring state, the real world.

Debates are more interesting when the participants speak with clarity and passion, maintaining a respect for (and understanding of) the arguments of their opponents. There will be plenty of passion, but I’m not confident that ‘respect’ is going to thrive over the next couple of weeks. As for clarity, I hope that this modest attempt to decode some of the referendum bunkum, baloney and balderdash makes a small contribution to the debate. I should point out here that the views expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of the author, unless they are. 

What they say	What it means
‘It’s a no-brainer’	I am not prepared to give this subject much thought.
‘We need to address the democratic deficit’	I want the party I support to win every election.
‘After a no vote, there will be more powers for the Scottish Parliament’	You can have just as many Gaelic signs as you like.
‘Here’s a link to an interesting article’	Here’s a link to an article that supports my opinion, because I only read stuff that backs up what I’m thinking anyway.
‘After independence, we’ll be able to vote for whichever government we want’	After independence, we’ll be able to pick from two slightly different brands of ‘tax and spend’ socialism.
‘A report by a leading think-tank says that the oil might run out by 2018’	I really don’t have a clue about any of this.
‘An independent Scotland will have better public services, free prescriptions, no tuition fees and better retirement conditions for everyone’	I’m not very good at sums.
‘Such-and-such an actor from such-and-such a TV show has come out in favour of Yes /No’	I think that people who dress up for a living and then say stuff that is written for them by other folk are best placed to advise us on how to vote.
‘There was no clear winner in the first televised debate’	I’m voting Yes, no matter what.
‘The second televised debate was a bit of a shambles’	I’m voting No, no matter what.
‘I’m voting for the future of our children’	Anyone who doesn’t agree with me is a selfish unthinking bastard and probably not much better than a child abuser.
‘Anyone who votes Yes/No is selfish, unthinking or stupid’	Trapped within the dreary architecture of a limited imagination, I am unable to grasp the simple concept that other people might hold legitimate opinions which don’t coincide with my own, so I just settle for calling them names.
‘I don’t know’	No.
‘After independence, we’ll be able to make our own decisions’	I want the party I support to win every election.
‘There are some interesting arguments on both sides’	One side is as bad as the other.
‘It’s our pound, so we can use it if we want’	What does ‘lender of last resort’ even mean?
‘I don’t think an independent Scotland could pay its way’	I hate Alex Salmond.
‘This is not about Alex Salmond’	This is about Alex Salmond.
‘The likes of David Bowie and Eddie Izzard have no understanding of what the Yes campaign means in Scotland and about how  it represents progressive values.  If they lived here, I’m sure they would be Yes voters’	Fuck off back to Englandshire and mind your own business.
‘The media bias in this campaign has been astonishing’	I don’t like it when folk present views that don’t entirely accord with mine.
‘What do a bunch of public school toffs know about the real world?’	I hate Boris Johnson.
‘I hate Boris Johnson’	I have a sneaking suspicion that this man somehow possesses a broad popular appeal and that he might actually end up as British prime-minister.
‘Neither side has made it clear exactly what a Yes or No vote actually means’	I’m still not sure which side is offering the electorate the biggest bag of sweeties.
‘The artistic community in Scotland is right behind the Yes campaign’	The artistic community in Scotland is right behind the Yes campaign, except for the ones who are afraid to speak up in case they get crucified on the various social networks.
‘After independence, we’ll be one of the most progressive, forward-thinking, greenest nations on the planet with a commitment to social justice and international peace’	Pass the bong … this is some really good shit.
‘This article, by Professor Whoever from the University of Hot Air, demonstrates that Scotland will be mega-rich /flat broke after independence’	40% of statistics are based on firm evidence, 25% are based on subjective interpretations of selected data, 25% are based on subjective readings of anecdotal evidence and the other 17% are just made up on the spot.
‘Scotland has been betrayed by the quislings in the Labour party’	Lacking any sense of perspective, I have no appreciation that a casual use of the word ‘quisling’ might just be insulting to the memory of the Norwegian Jews who were sent to concentration camps in 1942 by Vidkun Quisling, the puppet dictator supported by the invading National Socialists.
’We’ve got an ageing population and being part of the UK means that we’ll be able to share the pensions burden across a much bigger demographic’	Vote independence and, by the time you’re old, you’ll be burning your own furniture and hunting scabby pigeons for your dinner.
‘This isn’t about being anti-English, it’s about being anti-Westminster’	Such is my hatred for the Tories, I’m happy -for the moment, at least- to go along with the SNP’s subtle re-branding of its chip-on-the-shoulder petty nationalism as a ‘principled stand against Westminster politics’.
‘I just hope we can all get on after September 18th'	If my side loses by a narrow margin, the campaign for a re-run will start immediately.