A FRIEND on Facebook said: “Every day I get more pro Scottish independence, which is saying something given how passionately pro-Union I was in 2014!” A friend of his, a very reasonable person, replied that Scotland becoming independent would – in the current climate – be too much of a gamble.
So this is my response to a friend of a friend.
Yes, any political decision is a gamble, and staying in the UK with its direction of travel is very much a gamble I don’t want to take.
There is little difference in policy choices between people in England and Scotland. Both are left-leaning social democrats in terms of social and economic policy. The difference is over the EU. But that is code for a far bigger difference, evident in the dramatic (up by 14%) rise in hate crime in England immediately after Brexit, and now normalised, and the equivalent drop in Scotland immediately after the 62% Remain vote here.
Again, that is nothing to do with people being fundamentally different in England and Scotland. It is to do with two things:
1) The differing Brexit votes were taken as telling a story about society, about who we are and who we are not, and that story is now very different north and south of the Border.
2) The fact that England is moving so rapidly away from the social-democratic, inclusive Britain we knew (and so far from the actual policy choices people in England would make, except on immigration/EU etc) is because there is a corporate capture of politics and the media there that is so profound and parallels what has happened in the USA.
There is the same corporate capture of the media in Scotland, but in 2014 there was a huge wake-up call for a lot more than half the population, and events since then have meant we have not gone back to sleep. Far from it.
The different directions of travel were apparent well before 2014, but it has only recently become glaringly obvious.
I am not in the SNP, and independence is not about that party but about people here being able to choose governments that reflect what we want our society to be. However, it happens that by definition the SNP has to be “populist” (it wants to win a referendum after all, and the huge influx of social-democratic membership post-2014 referendum by those who joined it because they want a better democracy means it is very hard for it to be captured by corporate interests).
Being “populist” in a country where the population is self-awarely social-democratic leads to an entirely different government to the populism elsewhere, just as being “nationalist’”carries the opposite meaning to the xenophobia it means in so many other places.
The pressure is on though. Those who control the UK national narrative are now doing to the UK as a whole what they were doing to Scotland in 2014. Pushing fear and asserting arrogance.
I wouldn’t trust those running the UK to care for the poor. So even though there will be huge challenges with independence, they are the challenges you face when escaping from an abusive relationship. Staying in one is infinitely worse.
But for me the key issue is simply that democracy as currently constructed requires national borders. So it is simply a question of where best to draw those borders.
I think Scotland has a voting and parliamentary system that is much more democratic than that of the UK, and it was created by almost all the political parties in Scotland. I also think that surviving the challenges and caring for each other will demonstrate to those in the UK outwith Scotland that there is an alternative. It is the best thing we can do for them: an act of solidarity.
Justin Kenrick
Edinburgh
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