The Scottish independence campaign needs the Orange gatecrashers
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Version 0 of 1. I go back along way with the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland. All the way back, indeed, to childhood summers in Girvan and the middle Sunday of our holiday when Orangemen from Glasgow would disembark at the nearby station and parade all the way into town right past our window. And we would get to gawp at the colour and the noise and, in particular, that wee twisting, turning marionette at the front tossing his stick high into the air before pirouetting and catching it behind his back. And behind him the lines of drummers and fife players belted out The Sash My Father Wore and Derry's Walls with a gallus swagger that said this was their day and they had been living towards it all year. Not long afterwards, innocence was replaced by knowledge and so I, an Irish Catholic and they, striving to uphold a rapidly disappearing Protestant hegemony, have since eyed each other with suspicion and mistrust and perhaps a little fear. We have been through a lot over the years, but does there not come a time when we all have to let go of the old enmities and the ancient hurts and regard instead the common enemy? The Orangemen's time is passing and fear and suspicion have been replaced by something almost approaching compassion. Now, as they all gather once more for the 12th, I can see only poverty and despair in their eyes and something that speaks of being aliens in their own land. To the liberal, godless political classes who run Holyrood, this is most definitely a good thing. At this time of the year, they write to newspapers and take to Twitter and Facebook to denounce the Orange parades. In the new model of Scotland they have constructed and which, in this referendum year, they are busy taking to every town hall in Scotland, there is no room for the Orangemen with their crimplene, electric blue trousers and their bowler hats and their Bibles and their… ahem, quixotic attitude to popery ("popery" is one of those words best imagined in a thick Northern Irish accent, don't you think?). There is a delightful irony in all this, of course. For those who now want to ban the Orangemen from the Queen's highway always affect a hand-wringing concern for us poor Catholics having to endure these vile and intrusive parades. This makes me laugh. The rest of the year this unlovely atheist high council is busy telling the world how rotten and corrupt is the Catholic church. Some of these chocolate intellectuals are currently engaged in a nationwide mutual masturbation exercise as they tour Scotland trying to chivvy the rest of us into voting yes on 18 September. Hell, I've even been persuaded to sit on the odd panel myself to throw in my tuppence worth (well, every other numpty with half a brain seems to be). Last week, the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland decided to gatecrash the philosophers' party by enlisting as an officially recognised participant in the referendum campaign on the no side. You could almost reach out and touch the horror and disdain of the red corduroy and ponytail brigade at this announcement. How dare these uncouth neanderthals try to crash our party? My favourite moment was watching a poor director of the Better Together campaign squirming in his seat on the BBC's Scotland 2014 programme as Sarah Smith asked him why he wasn't delighted at this news. And beside him there was a bushy-tailed yes-looking type desperately wrestling with the appropriate response from her side. This is not to decry the remarkable national debate we are all having about the future of our nation and how it ought to be governed. No matter what the outcome is after 18 September, I suspect things will never be the same again in Scotland because something has been awoken. But you do get the impression that some of us have got far too much time on our hands. I've attended a few referendum gatherings and while they have been entertaining, and occasionally inspiring, what they have not been is representative of all parts of Scottish society. In the main, the audiences were affluent, professional and university-educated. There were political activists there, too, and trade union officials. I acknowledge that there are many who had previously been politically disengaged who are attending these meetings but, with some exceptions, this has been a campaign conducted by white, middle-class liberals. Each night in Scotland, there are utopian visions being shared of a land flowing with milk and honey and where the people will be the most tolerant and educated on the planet. Lions will be lying down with lambs all over the shop. But while we are all going to sleep with pictures of tartan unicorns dancing in sun-dappled glens, we shouldn't be disdaining the Orangemen and what they are representing in this campaign, which is a dose of scrofulous reality. These people may be grimly clinging to an old and outdated model of Scotland, but that's only because modern Scotland has impoverished them, dismantled their neighbourhoods and their industrial hinterlands and shut down their schools. And then we mock them for their adherence to God, Queen and country. In the same way that we deride any among us who persist in going to church in smart, enlightened, modern Scotland. In the meantime, we empower our increasingly antagonistic and out-of-control police force to stop, search and detain young, working-class men in the west of Scotland for singing songs about Irish history. The people who will decide the referendum will not be those in the chattering, political classes but the tens of thousands in the housing schemes across the country whose children are underfed and who are exploited by employers paying very low wages. Their voting records are not high and so we tend to ignore them at a Westminster or Holyrood election. Well, they're voting in this contest – and so both sides had better start properly to understand their language and their curious ways. |