IN less than three weeks, the voters of Britain will make what our political masters keep telling us is the biggest decision for a generation, if you don’t count that wee votey thing we had in Scotland in 2014. Naturally, Westminster doesn’t count that as the biggest decision that voters have faced because it was just a parochial Scottish thing and so by definition couldn’t have been very important.
It’s a bit odd then that this supposedly most important vote in the history of voting has stirred up all the enthusiasm in Scotland that we more usually associate with indoor bowling competitions from Coatbridge. Every time you hear the announcer saying it’s about to come on the telly, a wee part of your soul shrivels up and dies while you frantically press the remote control in the hope that you can find something more interesting, like a documentary about traditional llama herders in Patagonia.
Actually that’s not true, the indoor bowling doesn’t come from Coatbridge any more, and there are even some people in existence who are really interested in it. Like people whose eyes light up when the presenter says the magic words that signal admittance to a mystical land of artificial lawns and where getting a jack off on the short mat isn’t something that happens in an seedy nightclub for people with specialised tastes. Like the people who correct you when you make jokes about indoor bowling from Coatbridge.
There’s not many of them, admittedly, but they do exist and there’s a whole lot more of them than there are people who are deeply engaged with the EU referendum. No-one can be bothered to correct you when you say something ridiculous about the EU referendum, which is one reason why politicians representing the Remain and the Leave campaigns are spouting such utter, utter guff.
The number of ordinary people who are passionate about the EU referendum is approximately the same as the number who think that Ruth Davidson is Scotland’s most effective and interesting politician. So that would be Ruth, a handful of right-wing journalists, and the guy who takes the photies for her press releases, although he’s only doing it because he gets paid.
The independence referendum saw mass participation, posters in windows, local groups, local debates. It was a topic that was never far from any conversation, and irrespective of the way they intended to vote, people were engaged, interested, and passionate. Compare that to the dull sterility of the EU referendum. The media are desperately in search of a modicum of public interest, but all they’re finding is an indoor bowler who’s in mourning because Dougie Donnelly only seems to cover the golf these days. The indyref had wish trees, the EU ref has us wishing that they’d all go away and shut up.
The EU referendum is in fact the Ruth Davidson of referendums. It’s all camera flash and no substance, all photo opportunity and no significance, all hype and no content. It’s shallow and bereft of depth and each side is only interested in shouting down the other, preferably from the top of a tank.
This, they claim, is holding the other side to account. As with Ms Davidson, there’s nothing meaningful or lasting and outside a tiny self-referential circle of mutual back-slappers no-one cares because all it’s going to decide is which careerist gets to lead the Tory Party.
In case you were wondering, the plural of referendum is referendums. Referendum is a gerund in Latin, an impersonal and abstract part of the verbal system and as such has no plural. Referendum only requires a plural because it was borrowed into English as a noun, and therefore only requires a plural due to the demands of English grammar, not Latin grammar. So the only appropriate plural is the English one, referendums, not the pseudo-Latin referenda.
Even Boris Johnson gets that wrong and he’s supposedly an expert in the Classics, so all I can say is Playing Fields of Eton Nil, Coatbridge Comprehensive 1. This wee detour into grammar is more interesting to most people than the EU referendum in Scotland, that’s how little engagement there is with the topic which is dominant in the minds of the big girls and boys of Westminster.
The failure of the EU referendum to engage and excite the public in Scotland is a sign of just how estranged most of the country has become from the politics of Westminster. Both sides compete to scare voters the most, resulting in a stalemate which isn’t matey but which is very stale indeed.
This isn’t our referendum, it’s a vote in which Scotland’s voice will be swamped by louder and more shouty voices from elsewhere, and where any decision we make will be unlikely to affect the final outcome. The only interest Scotland has is what will happen if the rest of the UK votes to Leave but Scotland votes to Remain. Then things could get very interesting indeed.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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