Scottish independence: why I have finally decided to vote a proud yes
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Version 0 of 1. My two-year journey to a new kind of political and cultural understanding during the referendum campaign on Scottish independence has been far from straightforward. I had expected the last few steps to be the most arduous and emotionally fraught of the entire process, but they have not. Thanks to BP, Standard Life, Royal Bank of Scotland, TSB, John Lewis and the mad Gadarene dash to Scotland of the Westminster elite, the final few days of the journey which had once promised to be rocky have been a breeze. I am grateful to all of them. Together they are a microcosm of what the entire no campaign has been all about: money; raw corporate power and a naked sense of absolute entitlement. So I will be voting yes for an independent Scotland on Thursday, with a confidence and certainty that, until last week, I would never have thought possible. For what I have witnessed are the massed ranks of the British and Westminster establishment roused in fury to stop the first-ever proper challenge to their power base. And their weapons of choice have been intimidation, fear and thinly veiled and sinister threats of reprisal. Mortgages will become unaffordable; prices will rise, deep recession will follow; jobs in the financial sector will disappear along with the flitting of the banks' headquarters. An economic whirlwind of biblical proportions will engulf the newly independent state. Wretchedly and unforgivably, right at the centre of this campaign of psychological terror is the British Labour party, whose conduct during this referendum campaign has been nothing other than a disgrace and a betrayal of all of its founding principles. Like many other children whose fathers are no longer with them, I like to speculate on how mine would have reacted at important events. My dad, a lifelong Labour man and trade unionist, would have been appalled at the recent conduct of the party he taught us all to love. Like many Scottish Labour types, he was uneasy about the ditching of Clause 4 ("Why is that so unpalatable to them?" he once asked) and was unhappy that Gordon Brown chose to spend much of his time in office involved in a self-serving and obsessive turf war with Tony Blair over the leadership. And don't even mention the access all areas passes he issued to the entire financial sector. It was about power and money. Labour's failure of imagination and spirit to oppose the punish-the-vulnerable austerity strategy of the Tory-led coalition was bad enough. But the acquiescence of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls in George Osborne's bribing of the entire Scottish nation with currency threats would finally have pushed him, sorrowfully, into the yes camp. Let's be frank here: there are not enough Scottish nationalists to deliver independence. If it's to be yes on the 18th it will have been achieved by the crucial intervention of tens of thousands of Labour voters. The failure of Labour has been its inability to understand why so many of them have felt alienated by the party. They have become disillusioned that Labour has failed to heed their dawning realisation that Westminster politics, right and left, is arranged by a tiny and anointed elite mainly for the benefit of themselves and their chums. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, with their unprecedented three-term majority, had a mandate to perform radical surgery on this outdated, self-serving and unrepresentative institution. But they squandered it by pandering to banks and corporate interests. Within their political generation the House of Lords became even more swollen, the statute book grew heavy, expenses corruption became the norm and corporate interests knew they could undermine parliamentary democracy by bribing MPs to represent them in the House. They've had enough time now to do it and been found wanting. So it is time to start again and build something better and cleaner in a separate kingdom. They are not easily cowed by the threats of economic catastrophe to a country with the natural resources, technological expertise and educational prowess this one possesses. During my own journey too I have also been forced to confront my own sense of Scottishness. For the first time ever, I am at peace with this sclerotic and hard little country of mine which opted to give my ancestors a sort of rough and resentful succour for a few generations. In the last two years this newspaper has sent me on assignments around parts of Scotland only previously glimpsed with drink at midnight on the telly with Weir's Way. And on my way around my blurred vision has been corrected. We all share similarities with our UK neighbours, but it is a falsehood to say that we are all the same underneath. Somehow the climate, the topography and the soil with which God has chosen to garland a country must seep into the soul of its people, become a part of them and make them something other than the rest; not better or more favoured; just different. I have never been more comfortable in the skin of this country and never been more at ease in defining myself as Scottish first and forsaking all the others who have made a claim on me: Ireland and England. Each of those two great nations though, will always be a part of me. Neither do I apologise for clothing some of this in the language of faith, because for me matters of nationhood and identity are sacred ones and not merely all about that which you can touch and see and hear. Sometimes I've felt like a stranger in my own country, though much of this alienation was of my own doing, like an adolescent in a wee house, but now it has never felt more like home. If it is the will of the people that Scotland becomes independent, I am not expecting any guarantees that we will become the most rock'n'roll, socially just state on the planet, a successful Cuba. But there are already visible signs of Scotland's social conscience in free care for the elderly, free tuition and free childcare. Independence, with all its risks and uncertainties, may give us the chance to extend that and to reach those among us who die early in unimaginable poverty and deprivation. Even the mere opportunity to do so must justify the economic risks. |