This may seem to some like an odd subject for me to address, so allow me to explain. Ever since I have been involved in the Scottish independence debate I have been seeing assertions, from ‘No’ supporters, about what the debate is ‘all about.’ Of course I’ve also seen a multitude of statements from ‘Yes’ supporters with regard to what it is about. What’s remarkable about this is how little overlap there is between the two. Now this must be very difficult for those who are undecided to understand. It might almost seem as if there are two completely separate debates taking place. Neither side, it would seem, is listening to the other and consequently they are talking at cross purposes. Neither side appears to recognise their opponents’ characterisation of the debate. It is to those of you who are undecided that I wish to address my observations, and I thought perhaps to do so it might be worthwhile to try coming at the subject from a different angle – what it’s not about. I’ve identified, after many, many months of observation, a number of things that, although we hear about them a lot, it’s not actually about. So, in alphabetical order:

Alex Salmond

It’s not all about Alex Salmond. Or any other politician for that matter. The ‘No’ side talk an awful lot about Alex Salmond, but on the ‘Yes’ side you hardly hear him mentioned at all. The ‘No’ side say independence is Salmond’s ‘vanity project,’ they call him the ‘Dear Leader’ (North Korean reference), paint him as a Machiavellian manipulator, an egomaniac, a megalomaniac, a would-be dictator, and from the crudest elements we hear a torrent of personal abuse. I won’t disturb you with the details because they would, well, disturb you.

Now I don’t know Alex Salmond. I’ve never met him. I cannot, therefore, say anything very definitive about his personal qualities, psychological make-up or deep-seated motivations. I strongly suspect many of the people passing judgement on him have never met him either, although that doesn’t seem to deter them one bit, but I prefer to deal in the concrete, with what I know. So what I can tell you about is exactly how Alex Salmond has influenced my thinking and my opinions.

He hasn’t. Not at all. Not even a little bit. I arrived at the conclusion that independence was the only way forward for Scotland long before I’d even heard of Alex Salmond. I arrived at that conclusion entirely by myself, pretty much in isolation, because I arrived at it after I left Scotland. I have written about the circumstances of my leaving in The Moment When You Know so I won’t go into it further here, but the perspective of living elsewhere was very much a part my thinking process.

Now it is undeniable that he played an important part in bringing about the forthcoming referendum, but since I started participating in the online debate I have met a great many supporters of independence, not one of whom has cited him as a reason for their support. They all have their reasons, and the reasons are many and varied, but Salmond is never one of them.

Anti-English Sentiment

It’s not about anti-English sentiment. It’s not because we ‘hate the English.’ You hear this one a lot too, all the time in fact. But I see very little evidence of it. I suppose there must be a few people who do. Show me a country entirely devoid of racism and I’ll show you, well, nothing, because no such country exists. You just don’t hear that much of it. The message to our English friends seems to be, “It’s not you, it’s us.” Because one thing David Cameron was right about is the fact that the ties of friendship and family between our peoples are many. I myself have family throughout the British Isles. I’ve lived in North Wales and in London in my time, and made good friends there. I’m a great admirer of English culture. The very name of this blog pays tribute to one of my favourite writers, and a very English writer he was.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding here, and it’s this: you don’t have to hate someone, or even mildly dislike them, in order to recognise that you’re not the same as them, that your interests are not necessarily identical. On an individual level this happens when you are very young. It’s called ‘theory of mind.’ It’s when infants realise that other people are other people, independent entities like themselves. At a collective level it happens more gradually. For Scotland it happened somewhere between 700 and 1200 years ago. We recognised that we were one people, part of something bigger than ourselves, our families or our clans. A single nation within, more or less, our current borders. A nation amongst other nations, and not just England, which was going through the same process at about the same time, but we were also in regular touch with the Welsh, the Irish, and most of Western Europe from the Baltic to the Mediterranean.

Now you might think that sense of national identity would have been subsumed, after 307 years, into a British identity, but that has not happened. You can look at polls, you can look at the census, the vast majority of people in Scotland still give ‘Scottish’ as their principal nationality. It’s important that I say principal, because interestingly even relatively recent migrants and children of migrants who still identify with another nationality also identify as Scottish rather than British. Again, this does not mean they hate anyone. It’s just who they think they are.

This is only half of the story however. Despite the best efforts of the media at ‘dumbing down’ (not just in the UK but all over the western world) the Scots still seem to be able to distinguish between individuals and their governments. Which is why, when you listen to the ‘Yes’ supporters, you don’t really hear people talking about ‘the English,’ but you do hear them talking about Westminster. The name Westminster embodies all that is wrong with UK politics, and hey, it’s not only the Scots who feel that way. We understand this. There are many English people, particularly in the regions, who would dearly love to have the opportunity we have to distance themselves from Westminster. We sympathise. There’s not a great deal we can do though. Scots are waking up to the fact that we don’t have to be a part of it any more, but we can hardly start making territorial claims over bits of England. Many of us have reached the conclusion that the best thing we can do is to lead by example. Strike out and find another, better way. Our own way.

Brigadoon and Braveheart

It’s not about Brigadoon and/or Braveheart. This should go without saying, it’s such a silly notion, but it’s an accusation which is still thrown around with monotonous regularity. We are all, we’re told, hopeless romantics, gullible enough to allow Hollywood to determine our political views, and define our sense of ourselves. I have never been able to sit through Brigadoon, crude parody of Scottishness that it is. And Braveheart, though obviously a very successful piece of entertainment, certainly isn’t history, and I don’t know anyone who thinks it is. Nor do they see it as any kind of inspiration for independence today. We do not discount our history, it is part of who we are, but the reasons we seek independence, and our visions of the Scotland we wish to create are ‘all about’ the present and the future, not the past. Of course there are things in our past of which we are rightly and justly proud, ideas that are every bit as relevant and laudable today as they were when they were new:

Nationalism

It’s not about nationalism. At least not as most people understand that concept. I have never considered myself a nationalist. I have, and still do, consider myself an internationalist. But like many ‘Yes’ supporters it is my view that I can be a more effective internationalist in an independent Scotland than I ever could in the UK. This is because the Scottish people are more internationalist in their outlook then our southern cousins. You’ll find far more nationalism, in the traditional sense of the term, in England than in Scotland. I suspect the confusion arises from a popular fallacy, which is that SNP stands for ‘Scottish Nationalist Party.’ It doesn’t. It stands for ‘Scottish National Party.’ I can’t help but think though that Alex Salmond has muddied the waters somewhat with his talk of ‘civic nationalism.’ I understand what he’s getting at, but many of us feel a more accurate description would be ‘normalist.’ Because it is entirely normal, is it not, for nations to govern their own affairs? We simply seek democracy. Real, vibrant, inclusive democracy.

Oil

It’s not about oil. It’s nice for any country to have natural resources, but for Scotland it’s a bonus. We would not in any sense be dependent on oil (although we have not failed to notice that Scotland is the only country in history to strike oil and get poorer). The figures say we would be just as healthy economically as the UK even if the oil didn’t exist. And yet we constantly hear that we will be hostage to fluctuations in the price of oil, not just from individuals but from the official ‘No’ campaign and from the UK government. Not only that, but we are expected to believe that independence will create so much ‘uncertainty’ that oil companies will abandon North Sea oilfields. But ask yourself this – have you ever heard of an oil company walking away from an oilfield? Anywhere? In any circumstances? Of course not! They hung on for grim death to their leases in Iraq, despite a full scale war followed by a long-running insurgency. They hang onto them in Nigeria despite all the conflict and the human rights abuses there. But an independent Scotland, we’re told, would be too much for them to handle.

Secession

It’s not about secession, for one very simple reason – that is the term for when a region, or part of a country, seeks to leave that country. We are an ancient nation, seeking not to leave the union, but to end the union. The UK is a voluntary union, of two equal nations, the Kingdom of Scotland and the Kingdom of England (incorporating Wales and Ireland, both of which England had conquered and annexed centuries earlier). If one of these two nations resolves to leave the union therefore it ceases to exist. There is no such thing, after all, as a union of one.

Separatism

It’s not about separatism, though it is one of the favourite terms of the ‘No’ side. Have you noticed that they never utter the word ‘independence?’ It’s always ‘separation,’ as if in event of a ‘Yes’ vote we will all turn up at the border on the 19th with pneumatic drills, ready to set about detaching ourselves from the rest of the island. In point of fact many Scots are increasingly worried that the English electorate, given their promised referendum in 2017, will opt to separate us from the EU, whether we like it or not. Perhaps the unionists are afraid that it will end like this:

😉

The SNP

It’s not about the SNP. Of course the SNP support independence, it is their raison d’être. But now that independence is a real possibility the vast majority can see that this decision is far bigger than any party or any politician. Here’s what I think happened. Thirty or forty years ago the SNP could have been described as a centrist party, perhaps even centre right. Since then however it has evolved into a social democratic party. It won the Scottish election of 2007 on a social democratic platform, and it retained government and increased its representation (to an outright majority, despite the fact that the system of proportional representation by which the Holyrood parliament is elected is widely thought to have been designed to ensure nobody would ever achieve such a majority) in 2011 because they were perceived by the electorate as being a better social democratic party than Labour. They were re-elected on their record, but also on a platform of holding a referendum on the subject of independence. This does not mean that all those who voted SNP in 2011 had made up their minds to vote for independence. But there was an implied bargain, in that they were perceived to have done a good enough job of governing to be given the opportunity of making their case.

Having reached that point though, numerous others who were not members of the SNP, or even supporters in many cases, became involved in the debate on the pro-independence side. This is because many on the left in Scotland had by then reached the same conclusion that I had in my isolation – that Westminster had become so dysfunctional that it was in all probability beyond saving, and that an independent Scotland therefore represented the only realistic possibility of generating any positive change in the foreseeable future. As the debate has continued more and more people seem to have been persuaded of this. This is why the attempts by the ‘No’ campaign to equate a ‘Yes’ vote with a vote for the SNP have backfired – ‘Yes’ voters who are SNP supporters don’t care, and those who are not find these assertions ill-informed, condescending and just plain annoying.

So what is it about?

It’s really very simple.

We seek to regain by democratic means that which was once won in battle, and lost to treachery and deceit, namely our ancient freedoms and liberties, and the sovereignty of our people. We have that right, and we will exercise it on the 18th of September.*

*Obviously there’s a bit more to it than that. For a full exploration of what it’s really all about, please see The Hitchhikers’ Guide To Scottish Independence series (that link will take you to part one). 🙂