I’M just back from a trip to the US to visit with my fiancée and to make plans for our wedding. We visited New York for a long weekend and coincidentally it was Tartan Week, where there was a parade of pipe bands, people in kilts, and a couple dressed up as the Loch Ness Monster, all the way along 6th Avenue. It was a bit like the more famous St Patrick’s Day Parade, only with morose drunk people instead. Because we’re Scottish.
For the first time ever the parade marshall was a woman, the singer KT Tunstall. Or as a wee guy standing beside me kept calling her, Katie Turnstyle. It was a strange experience to stand in the biggest city in the US amidst a sea of Scottish flags.
I was standing in the crowd watching the parade go by, and was the only person in earshot with a Scottish accent. It meant that lots of people wanted to talk to me, and invariably they wanted to know if Scotland was going to become independent. Many of the Americans in the crowd either claimed Scottish ancestry, or had visited Scotland. There was one woman, a native New Yorker, who told me that she’d stuck a pin in a map at random in order to decide where to go on holiday, and she ended up going to Kirkcaldy. She’s loved Scotland ever since. Another woman told me that her grandparents had emigrated to the US from Shettleston and she was thrilled when I told her that I come from the East End of Glasgow myself. All of them were urging Scotland on to go for independence. “Getting independence from the English worked for us,” said one American man to me.
To celebrate the event, the Empire State Building was lit up in the colours of the Saltire, and there were as many Saltires on display along 6th Avenue as you’ll see at an independence march. What you wouldn’t see at an independence march however was the guy at the front of the parade. It was a certain Ken Wossisname, the eminently forgettable Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament all dressed up in a kilt because he’s a Proud-Scot-But – but not so proud that he doesn’t put his British nationalism before the right of Holyrood to protect its powers from Theresa May’s power grab. There were two Union Flegs in evidence too, one at the front of the parade, presumably to make Ken feel at home, and another carried by some organisation describing itself as a British heritage group. I took plenty of photies, although not of the Union Flegs. I was going to take a pic of Ken too. But I forgot.
The trip to the US meant that I was able to miss out on the latest arguments to have broken out on Scottish social media. Apparently in my absence, the independence movement has been torn in two. Again. Or possibly it’s been torn in three, or maybe four. Or one of the pieces into which it was previously torn has torn itself into two. Or perhaps it’s Jim Sillars, who is a piece all by himself. It’s hard to tell really, but that’s what comes from reading the British nationalist media in Scotland. Anyway, it seems we’ve all been falling out about the timing of another independence referendum.
This comes as news to me. I’ve only been visiting independence groups and organisations the length and breadth of Scotland for months and have dismally failed to find the evidence of the fall outs that so occupy the British nationalist press. The grass-roots movement is pretty determined that there needs to be a referendum within the term of this Scottish Parliament. But what would I know? I don’t do Twitter any more, just real life, but Twitter is far more important than real life for Scottish political reportage.
Mostly, what counts as reporting on the independence movement in the British nationalist press comes from journalists trolling Twitter in the search of people falling out about stuff. Now admittedly it’s true that when you put two Scottish people in a room you immediately have three arguments. Taking the humph is a vital part of our cultural heritage. However it has to be said that looking on Twitter for arguments is a bit like looking for cow pats in a field full of cattle and then getting all outraged because you keep standing in it.
To be frank, Twitter is really just a way for people who are too afraid to experiment with powerful, illegal drugs to experience the brain damage, paranoia, and addictive behaviours that drugs produce, but without the high or the temporary sense of well-being and being at one with the universe. The best you can hope for is being at one with a mildly amusing photo of a cat. But the biggest problem with Twitter is that however obvious it is that something someone tweeted is a stupid joke, someone else will have taken it seriously, and then at least three dozen other people will take it upon themselves to get outraged on their behalf.
Then in turn this will be followed by the entire thing getting plastered all over the front page of a newspaper where a journalist will stoke up even more harrumphage because Nicola Sturgeon hasn’t condemned it. This is what passes for the news cycle in the early 21st century.
Back in the real world, in the streets and in Scottish communities, away from the journalistic bubble of Twitter, the pride in Scotland and the confidence in this country’s potential that was on display in New York is increasingly being felt in Scotland too. The topic of independence has been normalised.
The question facing Scotland now is no longer “Should Scotland become an independent country?” The question is “When should Scotland become an independent country?”
That is going to be answered a lot sooner than Ken Wossisname might like, and within a few short years the Tartan Day Parade in New York will be celebrating an independent Scotland that has retaken its rightful place amongst the sovereign states of the world.
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