Sackcloth and ashes

What were the people in charge of Oldham Athletic thinking when they thought to recruit the convicted rapist Ched Evans? Did they think that they could sneak this one under the radar? When someone at the club raised the idea of signing the disgraced footballer, surely it must have occurred to them that there might just be a bit of a backlash? They must have considered the probability of some awkward outcomes if they went through with this deal; the likelihood is that, at some point in the process, they probably believed that they could just tough it out.  

Evans is a convicted rapist and, we may assume, not a very nice man. On a personal level, we may be entitled to our misgivings about this deal, but the law has already exacted its penance and there is no compelling moral obligation for us to go above and beyond that; any judgement we make will be entirely subjective. If company A thinks it unacceptable to recruit a convicted rapist, it will act accordingly. But company B is entitled to come to a different conclusion and may believe it appropriate and fair to offer this offender a chance to earn a living and to rebuild his reputation. Accordingly, Oldham Athletic should sign Ched Evans, or decide against signing him, based on what they think is the right thing to do, not on how the notion goes down on twitter, which is what appears to be happening. After news of the deal was leaked, the club appeared to take cold feet. The official statement on their website states that: “Whilst acknowledging the considerable media attention, we continue to have conversations with representative bodies such as the PFA and will conduct due diligence with regard to any decision we make on this matter.”

If the Oldham officials arrived at their decision after some serious discussion, they might at least have tried to ensure that they had arguments robust enough to stand up to scrutiny. If you’re going to make a decision that some folk will regard as controversial, you should be prepared to take a little flak from social media. Some people might think it rather dismissive to describe an online petition signed (so far) by 45,000 people as ‘a little flak’, but I chose those words deliberately. There are many wonderful things about social media, but there are also some significant downsides. Twitter, in particular, provides perfect conditions for two of the most tiresome species known to humankind: those who seek to offend and those who seek to be offended. At times, it seems little more than an echo chamber wherein the like-minded can get their righteous kicks by acting like a 21^st century equivalent of the lynch mob. It is interesting to note that the anti-Evans petition was started by a blogger whose commitment to justice is so principled that he or she writes under the pseudonym ‘Jean Hatchet’.     

What are the special conditions about this case that make Mr. or Ms. Hatchet (and those who signed the petition) believe that the law is inadequate and that Ched Evans deserves additional punishment? Are there any other professions to which these special conditions should apply? Are there any other crimes to which these special conditions should apply?  

We either believe in the principle of the rehabilitation of offenders, or we don’t. If we wish to make exceptions, we should perhaps vote for people who will put these exceptions on the statute book. But if we’d rather let subjective morality usurp objective law, if we’d rather label for life those we would disdain, we might as well go the whole hog. 

We could make all convicted offenders wear sackcloth and ashes. Or better still, we could tattoo the word ‘criminal’ on their foreheads. 

Here’s another idea: why not chop off the hands of anyone who steals?

Making an album, part 5: In search of the perfect pop song

One fine morning a few weeks ago, I emerged from sleep with a tune in my head. The tune was ‘Late for the train’, the final track on ‘Love Bites’, the second album by the English post-punk band Buzzcocks. The imprint of that tune, deeply encoded on some neglected neural pathway, provoked an early-morning flashback so vivid and poignant that -for a brief instant- I was once again a spotty teenager in love with that band and their music. The tantalising, sleep-charged echo of ‘Late for the train’ fooled the adult me into believing that he was the teenaged me, a kid buffeted by the turbulence of hopes, fears and passions that he hoped would somehow propel him through an exciting world of possibilities. Alas, the tangibility of the moment was all-too-brief and I was soon back in the present, wide awake to the fact that I’m an adult comfortably tethered to my responsibilities. The flashback, however, had reminded me once more of how potent pop music can be. Like the powerful scent of cheap perfume, even the tawdriest manufactured pop ditty has the potential to evoke powerful memories. It can make you smile, laugh or cry; it can make you remember people, places and things. I like pop music more than I like any other art form. At its best, I believe the popular song to be one of humankind’s great achievements, because something wonderful and transcendent happens within certain intoxicating combinations of rhythm, melody, notes, voices and words. Pop music, in that sense, is capable of achieving artistic perfection, although it would be difficult for any two people to agree on a definition of perfect pop; some might even argue that there is no such thing.  

But let’s assume for the moment that perfection is possible; what would the ingredients of a perfect pop song be? At the risk of stating the obvious, it has to be popular; it can’t be too alternative, too under-the-radar. It shouldn’t overstay its welcome and should probably be able to accommodate mainstream tastes. It can be breezy (like 'I get around' by The Beach Boys) or menacing (like 'Every breath you take' by The Police), but definitely not dreary. It can be populist and perhaps even a bit lightweight; it should be catchy, but not annoyingly so. 'Itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini' is catchy, but it’s catchy in the same way that scabies is catchy.

A great pop song can be very much of its time, but should also have that elusive element of timelessness. You shouldn’t have to say: ‘you had to be there’ or ‘you had to be on such-and-such a drug’ to appreciate a truly perfect pop song. Some songs are so closely identified with the era from which they emerged that they are eulogised mainly by the folk who lived through their glorious flowering; others rise above their milieu to achieve greatness. 'Smoke gets in your eyes' by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach is a wonderful song that was written for a musical in the 1930s, but you don’t need to have seen the show or to have lived through that decade in order to appreciate it. 'Penny Lane' by the Beatles evokes a very particular time and place, but you don’t have to have lived in Liverpool in the 1960s to know that it is a great pop tune. In many cases, you don’t even need to understand the lyrics to appreciate a great song. 'Sir Duke' by Stevie Wonder waxes lyrical about the contribution that black artists have made to American popular culture, but you don’t need to ‘get’ the words to be moved by the joy and genius in the music. If pushed to come up with a definition, I’d suggest that perfect pop happens when there is a magical alchemy between words, rhythm, melody, voice and structure. A perfect pop song is probably something to which nothing could be added or taken away to improve it.

So what has any of this got to do with me?  

At this time last year, I wrote about my intention to record an album. Although I have not yet managed to complete this task, I’m probably about 60% of the way there. The project has taken some unexpected twists and turns and I’ve already changed my mind several times about songs, themes and the album title. I’ve narrowed the contenders down to around songs and each of these is partly recorded, with some of them just about finished and others requiring a bit more work. Once that work is done, I’ll pick the twelve songs that sound to me like they will make most sense as a collection. Within this body of work, it would be ridiculous for me to claim that I have the remotest chance of creating a perfect pop song. With respect to the criteria listed above, it’s clear that I can’t qualify in many of the categories. None of my songs are going to be popular, because very few people are going to get to hear them; none of my songs are going to remind anyone of an important time in their life; none of my songs will provide the soundtrack to anyone’s dream. There is not a single spotty teenager on the planet who will think that anything I write will encapsulate the equivalent feelings of lust, rebellion, restlessness, excitement and wonder that I felt when listening to that Buzzcocks tune.   

So why bother? I’ve asked myself this question many times and, if I had to boil the answer down to a single notion, it would be this: Let’s suppose I found a piece of driftwood on the beach and decided to take it home and sculpt something interesting out of it. Suppose I then decided to make an objet d’art for my garden. This artefact would be required to serve no other purpose than to sit somewhere and be pleasing on the eye. I might spend ages on this project – filing, carving, whittling, scraping, gouging and maybe some other associated words that you’ll find under ‘sculpt’ in a thesaurus. The process of creating that artefact would be rewarding in and of itself. The number of folk who’d get to see or appreciate my garden sculpture would be more or less irrelevant. If only a few friends and relatives ever got to see it, that would be fine with me.  

Accordingly, my satisfaction with making music resides in the peace that comes with the imagining act, the execution of creative impulses, the feeling of having brought a new thing into the world. It matters little if I am the only one who can hear beauty in any of these songs. When I listen, I can also hear the process and the goal; I hear echoes of everything else I have ever listened to; I hear inchoate ideas rescued from formlessness by the building blocks of melody and rhythm, random promiscuous scatterings of notes and chords arranged into order and harmony. From the chaos of noise and purposelessness, I hear the shaping of disparate elements into a brief illusion of meaning, into three and a half minutes in which the universe appears to make sense. There are a couple of songs I’m working on for my album which –in my head at least- have the makings of perfect pop songs, as long as we extend a generous definition of the word perfect to include ‘well-constructed songs that don’t actually make you feel physically sick’.   

I started work on the song I've linked to below (If she gets on my train) with the intention of writing something upbeat and life-affirming. It tried its best for a while, but has somehow ended up with a sting in the tail. The lyric tries to get inside the head of a guy who nurses a crush on a girl he sees every day when he commutes to work. At one point I imagined that there would be a happy ending, with him asking the girl out and them both living happily ever after, but I never got around to completing that draft; by the time I returned to the lyric, it seemed more appropriate to insert a twist. The protagonist is trying to imagine a situation in which he will have the courage to make an approach to the girl of his dreams, but with every situation he imagines (she gets on his train, she walks down his street) there is also the recognition that all he will ever do is continue to do what he has always done. He knows that he will never pluck up the courage to ask the girl out, so settles instead for running little fantasy scenarios in his head.

When I let a friend hear a version of this a few months ago, he suggested that I hadn’t quite nailed the ending. This led me to return to the recording with the idea of emphasizing the character’s haplessness in the fadeout. Rather than let him fantasize about the life he might lead with this mystery girl, the extent of his detachment from reality would be delineated by his repetition of the line ‘if she gets on my train, we could have a conversation’. By this point in the song, we know that he is not going to be having any conversation with that girl. In that sense, the fadeout is a little nod to the chilling climax of Terry Gilliam’s dystopian nightmare ‘Brazil’, in which the audience is led to believe that the hero (played by Jonathan Pryce) has escaped the rapacious clutches of the Big Brother state and is living in bliss with his sweetheart. The big reveal comes when we discover that he is, in fact, tied to a chair and under brutal interrogation; so complete is his abandonment of his awful reality that he has retreated to a safe place inside his head where he can run his fantasies even as the state thugs are pulling his nails out with pliers.          

As is often the case, the failure seemed more interesting than the success.

If she gets on my train

The wrong end of the telescope

There’s no accounting for taste. Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’ has had some mixed reviews, but I really liked it. A recurring theme among critics is that the film is over-sentimental, perhaps even ‘schmaltzy’. It certainly has a big focus on relationships, particularly on the one between Cooper (a star turn by Matthew McConaughey) and his daughter Murphy, played variously by Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain and Ellen Burstyn. But just because something connects on an emotional level doesn’t make it schmaltzy; I get the feeling that some reviewers are uncomfortable with the film’s emotional clout and they deal with that discomfort by pretending to look down their noses at it. Or perhaps they think that a film purporting to have grand ideas about the future of civilization shouldn’t be slumming it in soap opera territory, getting bogged down in all that silly emotional stuff.  

One of the best things about ‘Interstellar’ is that it beats a drum for the indomitability of the human spirit. The bedraggled earth of the near future appears to be stripped of hope, ambition, or any semblance of the pioneering spirit. Cooper rails against this malaise, believing that humankind is (or was) capable of greatness: “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars … now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

When he gets summoned to meet the teachers at Murphy’s school, we see the contrast between the world that he’s stuck in and the world he’d rather live in. The teachers point out the various ways in which his galactically bright daughter is ‘failing’ in her education; they are particularly concerned about her wasting time on ancient books that don’t adhere to the current intellectual orthodoxies. In this miserable, dust-covered future, where the earth has succumbed to blight and has turned its back on big ideas and big technology, school text books teach that the 1969 moon landings were faked for propaganda purposes. 

As a prissy young teacher, unencumbered by doubt, lectures Cooper about the ‘excess and wastefulness of the 20^th century’, the look on his face manages to convey all of the rage, the betrayal, the bewilderment and hurt of a man who still believes passionately in the infinite possibilities of humankind, who believes that “we’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible”.   

I detect echoes of that fictional schoolteacher in the row over Matt Taylor’s ‘sexist’ shirt. The Rosetta mission scientist Taylor is part of a team that managed to send a vehicle on a ten-year journey of four billion miles in order to land on a comet that is hurtling through space at 40,000 mph. You’d think that might have been enough to impress people, but not everyone was happy. Some people chose to focus on the hideous shirt that he wore to a news conference, deeming the bozo scientist to be guilty of sexism.  

The argument, as I understand it, is that girls might somehow be put off science by the shirt’s subliminal message (namely, girls are not welcome in the world of science). Really? Does anyone believe that a bright kid sitting in front of her television, curious and excited about all of this astonishing stuff going on in space, will see a guy in a dodgy shirt and think: “I’m going to sign up for a ‘hair, nails and beauty’ course, because that man’s horrible shirt is telling me that science isn't for females"?  The notion is not only patronising rubbish, it’s insulting to that intelligent and curious little girl (not to mention the women working on the Rosetta mission).  

The evidence indicates that Taylor must be a very clever scientist, but I have no idea what he’s like as a human being. Given the scale of his achievements, I’d prefer not to judge him on one unfortunate item of clothing, but our burgeoning offencerati seem to believe that every aspect of human endeavour, every person doing every activity in every possible location, regardless of context, should be subject to the standards by which we’d judge a junior social worker on a ‘diversity awareness’ training course. The hive mind, alas, is governed by illiberal impulses. Its puritan obsession with minutiae is often not just about a failure to see the bigger picture; it’s about a refusal to acknowledge that a bigger picture exists.

The teacher in ‘Interstellar’ is a fictional character, put in a story to illustrate the idea of a spirit-crushing poverty of aspiration. I don’t know what the excuse is for the folk who, instead of looking up to the stars, are worrying about Matt Taylor’s shirt.

Surfing against the zeitgeist

After their triumphant televised gig from Hyde Park, the critical re-appraisal of Jeff Lynne’s ELO continues apace, with articles appearing in various ‘proper’ newspapers testifying to the quality of their music. Although I’m glad to see them get what they deserve, this kind of thing just reminds me how silly it is to pay too much attention to music journalism, to "fashion-monging boys, that lie and cog and flout".
For those not old enough to remember, it was precisely the opposite of ‘cool’ to like ELO in the late 70s, when the rock cognoscenti would heap opprobrium on them at every opportunity. The fact that they were clearly a quality pop act counted against them. Certain bands (usually accomplished musicians who had paid their dues over many years on the club and university circuit) were seen as the ‘enemy’ by portions of the British music press, some of whom believed that punk had ‘happened’ in order to rid the world of light and shade. Surfing against the zeitgeist, ELO represented the epitome of naff. I remember one particularly silly example when the band was butchered on Radio One's Round Table because -in the opinion of some jerk on the panel- the French bit of the lyric on Hold on Tight sounded more French-Canadian than 'genuine' French (clearly a heinous crime). When I was young and impressionable, it was difficult to own up to liking stuff that had not been approved by the taste-makers in the music press, particularly the resident high priests at Sounds and NME. Nobody wants to betray their own generation and there was a time when admitting that you preferred ELO to the Sex Pistols would have been a hanging offence. 

By today’s standards, the band took the long road to stardom. Their early records showed promise, although some of the songs were overwrought and stodgy and the sound was often grittier than it had to be. After three albums in which they couldn’t make up their mind about whether they wanted to be heavy (always seen as a good thing) or light (almost never seen as a good thing), band leader Jeff Lynne finally hit his songwriting groove on ‘Eldorado’. For the first time, an orchestra and choir were hired to expand the musical palette (on previous albums, the cellists had been overdubbed). That fourth album marked the spot where the focus moved joyfully and unashamedly to the tunes.  

By the time they hit the high spots in their catalogue (‘A New World Record’ in 1976 and ‘Out of the Blue’ just a year later) ELO had graduated from the dingy hinterland of progressive rock to become a sophisticated pop act on the way to selling 50 million albums. The visual template for tribute acts was set at this point, with Jeff adopting that ‘shaggy perm, beard and shades' look. It’s clearly a disguise, because he is essentially a modest and unassuming bloke who chooses to put his art front and centre of our attention. It’s not about him, the image is suggesting; it’s about the tunes. It’s about the sound of the music. 

I can think of loads of acts that I listened to in the late 70s /early 80s that don't do anything for me now; by contrast, the albums from ELO's imperial phase still sound fantastic. There are many things to love about their music (personally, those ‘major to minor’ chord changes on songs like Livin' Thing and Turn to Stone get me every time), but there is no point in trying to analyse why it has taken some people so long to work that out. There was a time when nobody would have admitted to liking them and at least that seems to have changed. It could be that some folk have mellowed with age, or perhaps new listeners are just experiencing the music without having to put it through the 'cool /uncool' cultural filter that was compulsory in the fallout from the cultural revolution of the late 70s. Either way, I'm just happy to enjoy the moment and hope that it encourages Jeff Lynne to hit the road once more, hopefully with something resembling the spectacular combo that featured at Hyde Park.

In the meantime, here’s a link to one of my favourite internet musical discoveries. It’s the Sunflower Orchestra performing their version of one of ELO’s most beautiful songs. Other than the fact they are Polish, I know nothing about the Sunflower Orchestra. It looks like their gig took place in a community centre with maybe twenty folk in the audience, but the performance was measured, dignified and faithful to the melancholic beauty of the original. For someone not noted for being much of a lyricist, Jeff Lynne comes up with a lovely image on the chorus in which he expresses loss, regret, longing and the ebbing away of hope with this single evocative line: 
“My Shangri La has gone away, faded like the Beatles on Hey Jude.” 

Who needs to surf the zeitgeist when you can write like that? 

Sticks and stones

For all that it had its high points and low points, there are things about the referendum campaign that Scotland can be proud of, not the least of which is the fact that so many folk turned out to vote after a debate that was –for the most part- reasonably civilised, if often rather light on content. Those of us who voted No should be mindful of the disappointment that our friends and neighbours on the Yes side will be feeling. I honestly don’t know how I would have reacted had the vote gone the other way, but I do know that I felt just as strongly about my vote as my friends on the Yes side felt about theirs. I had to be prodded with a big stick before making my move and it was only in the last couple of weeks of the campaign that I realised just how strongly I felt about it. Had the Yes campaign prevailed, I would have been very disappointed indeed, but I’d like to think that I would have had the grace to accept the result. I’d like to think that I would not have disdained my fellow Scots for deciding to take that leap of faith. And, if there had been a ten-point margin in the polls and 28 out of 32 local authorities had voted Yes, I don’t think I’d have been asking for a recount.

Accordingly, it has been disappointing to hear and read some of the things that have been said in the aftermath of the vote. It’s as if some folk are unwilling, or unable, to appreciate that it is possible for people to look at exactly the same information but arrive at completely different conclusions.

One common observation is that No voters somehow forced Scotland to miss an opportunity. This overlooks the fact that something is only an opportunity if the person who is offered it perceives it to be one. I might, with the sincerest intentions, offer you an opportunity to invest in my new business. In such a case, you’d expect to consider the pros and cons before making a judgement about whether or not the likely outcomes of that opportunity outweighed the possible risks. Most people would apply this logic in their everyday lives, so why shouldn’t they have applied it in a decision about the fate of their country? It was incumbent upon the Yes campaign to persuade enough people to vote against the status quo; for a variety of reasons, most of the Scottish electorate was not convinced that the opportunities outweighed the risks.

Surely only the most deluded Yes supporter can believe that the way to rebuild an independence campaign (which is a perfectly legitimate aim) is to start by traducing 55% of the population? But voting No, according to some, was equivalent to expressing a desire to see more food banks, the dismantling of the NHS and the west coast of Scotland obliterated in a nuclear attack. Reading and hearing some of the more hysterical stuff, I’ve wondered if the folk who say these things are aware of the contradiction between, on the one hand, their claim that they want to create a newer, fairer, more compassionate Scotland and, on the other, the fact that they are willing to describe 55% of the electorate as fools, quislings, cowards or – my personal choice of nadir- victims of Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological condition in which hostages start to have positive feelings towards their captors. Presumably the folk who level that accusation are angry about all of those English tanks rolling down our streets and the occupying troops arresting anyone who has red hair or who is wearing a kilt. Pathologising the enemy within was an old Stalinist trick.  ‘If you don’t agree with us’, so it went, ‘there must be something wrong with how you think. Perhaps some time spent in a correction centre will help you to see things our way.’ This is, in essence, a totalitarian impulse and one which has no place in a civilised polity. 

It is clear that, for some folk, political discourse is underpinned by a received narrative which allows that the left somehow occupies the moral high ground. It’s a nonsensical idea, but at least one of the positive side effects of the referendum is that more people will now recognise it as such. Some of my No-voting Labour friends were stunned at the extent to which their intentions were impugned during the campaign, but I merely welcomed them to the club; for anyone who sits to right of, say, Andy Burnham, this is what it’s like all the time.   

This desire to dismiss opponents as stupid, selfish or uncaring has long been one of the great limiters to mature political debate and we’d all be much better off without it. Many people don’t seem to understand that to attribute negative emotional or intellectual characteristics to folk who don’t agree with you is not a political argument; it’s the absence of a political argument. I can understand why it might make people feel good (and by ‘good’, I mean ‘superior’) to dismiss their opponents as stupid, selfish, or –in the case of the independence referendum- ‘scared’, but all that does is absolve the accuser of the responsibility of actually winning an argument. When you use tactics like that, it doesn't say anything about the other side; it says something about you.

Politics isn’t a vanity contest about who purports to ‘care’ the most; it’s a marketplace of ideas, a push and pull of competing philosophies focused on how best to manage resources. And, however some folk might choose to deny it, the truth is that these conflicting philosophies generally want the same thing: the greatest outcomes for the greatest number of people. A political stance that, primarily, makes you feel good about yourself is hardly a political stance at all, because politics isn’t about you and it isn’t about me; it’s about us. It’s about how we come to an accommodation with each other, how we find ways to co-exist peacefully with people with whom we may have very little in common.

History tells us that there is no such thing as a perfect world and no possibility of perfecting humankind. In the imperfect world we inhabit, politics is -and always will be- a series of compromises between intention, imagination, utility and will. Sometimes it will be pretty and sometimes it will be ugly, sometimes poetry and sometimes prose. Grand ideas are all well and good, but the little details are usually what count the most. As PJ O’Rourke succinctly puts it: ‘Everyone wants to save the planet, but nobody wants to help mum do the dishes.’

All of the available evidence tells us that the left is correct about some things and that the right is correct about others. Anyone who thinks that politics really is as simple as ‘agree with me = good, disagree with me = bad’ simply hasn’t given it enough thought.

Think of a number you don't know

My youngest son, who is 16, was voting for the first time in this referendum. He was really interested in the issues and often asked me what I thought about this or that. As a parent you have to walk a fine line between, on the one hand, passing on some of the stuff you have learned and believe to be true and, on the other, avoiding dumping your prejudices on an impressionable young person. Just because I’m a jaded old fart doesn’t mean that I want my son to believe everything that I do. I earned my degree in scepticism through age and experience, but I certainly wouldn’t wish to deny my boy his right to youthful idealism. Whenever we talk about stuff, I do my best to point out both sides in an argument and encourage him to make up his own mind, rather than take his old man’s word for it.      

In the last few days of the campaign, with the country seemingly at fever pitch, some of his friends posted pictures and videos from a ‘Yes’ rally in the centre of Glasgow. He was obviously excited by these events, intoxicated by the overwhelming positivity and sheer sense of occasion. Scotland, it seemed, was on the verge of something momentous. “Wow” he said, “look at the number of people who are in George Square.” There were a few things I thought of saying at that point, but I settled for posing him what seemed like a slightly abstract question. “That’s impressive” I said, “but how many folk aren’t there?” I wanted him to understand that impressions, opinions and moods are formed through how we respond to the information we choose to absorb. If that information comes from only one or two sources, our view of the big picture is likely to be incomplete. Without wishing to come over all Donald Rumsfeld, I wanted my son to be aware that, in every situation, there are things you think you know, things you know you don’t know and, sometimes, things you don’t know that you don’t know. There were lots of excited and committed folk in the square, celebrating their common cause, but elections are not necessarily won by the people who take to the streets. The numbers registered for this referendum were well in advance of anything witnessed at recent elections, but what did we know about all of these ‘new’ people who had never voted before? And, more to the point, what did we not know about them? 

It seemed to me that the people who favoured Yes were generally quite happy to let you know about it; they certainly outnumbered the people who were willing to state a preference for No. But lots of folk were keeping conspicuously quiet about the referendum. It was clear that not everyone was being swept up in that seemingly unstoppable tide of momentum. As the campaign built to a climax, I concluded that many of the folk who were playing their cards close to their chest were likely to be No voters. I pointed out some time ago that the Yes campaign had gambled with their ‘No Tories in Scotland’ policy. It seemed to give out a clear signal that a certain section of the electorate (i.e. disaffected Labour) was being targeted and that another section was being told that their votes would not be required. I understand why the Yes team felt that they had to take that gamble; they simply could not have captured that disaffected Labour vote by also attempting to woo big and small ‘c’ conservatives. But the picture they based this calculation on was only focused on the things that they knew. 

The Yes team knew that 16.7% of the Scottish electorate was willing to vote Conservative at the last General Election. What they perhaps hadn’t considered was the fact that these people consistently voted Conservative in the full knowledge that, in a 'first-past-the-post' system, they had absolutely no chance of winning. That’s quite a significant statement to make, one that should perhaps have made the Yes team consider the possibility that even more people might have voted Conservative if they felt they had a chance of getting representation. And what the Yes team didn’t know they didn’t know was just how many of those newly-registered referendum voters might naturally be inclined to take a conservative (small c) option on such a contentious issue as the break-up of the United Kingdom.

The fall-out from the Thatcher years has encouraged some people to take it as an article of faith that Scotland has an inbuilt left-leaning majority. Many seem to have forgotten that the Conservatives are the only party ever to have won a majority vote in Scotland in a general election. The country may have changed a lot since 1955, but not to the degree that the Conservatives have been wiped from the political map. Admitting to being a Conservative in Scotland is viewed by some as akin to admitting to being a child molester, but some traditional ‘conservative’ values (hard work, self-reliance, financial prudence) are actually held by many Scottish people. The perception that conservatism is a toxic brand may be true when it comes to public declarations of political allegiance, but it can hardly be described as electorally toxic when the Tories -in spite of everything- consistently poll similar numbers to the LibDems. In private, many folk hold ‘small c’ conservative views, so the Yes team was not only writing off the votes of that committed 16.7% of the electorate (412,855 people); it was writing off the votes of an unspecifiable number of people who: 

a) may have been inclined to espouse conservative values 

and b) may have been incentivised by the prospect that their vote, for once, might actually make a difference in Scotland.   

The Yes team couldn’t possibly have known what that number was, but they appear to have overlooked the possibility that it might have been quite big. As it turns out, the number was big enough for Yes to lose in 28 out of 32 Scottish local authorities. The more voters that turned out, the more likely they were to vote No; of the 24 regions with the biggest turnouts, 23 of them voted against independence. The two regions with the lowest turnouts –Glasgow and Dundee- both went to Yes.     

The referendum process excited my son and made him think about lots of things. He’s a wiser and more politically engaged person now than he was a month or two ago. He understood what I meant by that question about how many folk weren’t at the demonstration. He understands that forming a political view isn’t about re-tweeting one-liners from acerbic comedians or posting links to propaganda sites. He understands that the world is more complicated than some folk would have us believe. He understands that it’s not only worth giving a bit of thought to things that he hadn’t previously considered, it’s also worth considering the possibility that there are things he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know.

Scotland is going to be just fine if his generation grow up understanding that when people say something is a ‘no brainer’, it usually means the exact opposite.

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?