Irvine ‘Trainspotting’ Welsh offers a shrewd analysis in the Grauniad today:
“There was much talk of how ineffective the no campaign was. In some ways this is unfair: you can only go with what you’ve got and they simply weren’t packing much heat. The union they strove to protect was based on industry and empire and the esprit de corps from both world wars, and you can’t maintain a political relationship on declining historical sentiment alone. With the big, inclusive postwar building blocks of the welfare state and the NHS being ripped apart by both major parties there’s zero currency in campaigning on that, especially as they’re only being preserved in Scotland by the devolved parliament. The boast of using oil revenues to fund privatisation projects and bail out bankers for their avarice and incompetence is never going to be a vote winner. Going negative was the only option.”
What struck me on two visits this year to Scotland is the relative strength of municipalism there. It showed in small but telling ways; like spotless public loos on Shetland, with real live attendants and hot water, open till midnight or later.
Forty years of public service cuts, attacks on the many in the interests of the few, under Tories and Labour, have progressively desensitised us. Many of us, especially in the home counties, never noticed how much of the post 1945 state has been rolled back, far less how wealthy a few became as a result and how closely they rub shoulders with the political establishment. Scotland is no collectivist paradise but far enough ahead of England, in clinging to standards of care that in no small part define a civilised society, to prove the old adage that you have to see how good things can be to know how bad they ar“.
As Owen Jones argued a couple of weeks back, also in the Grauniad, Celtic romanticism was never the key to the Yes vote. Yes to an Independent Scotland was a no to neoliberalism.
Welsh’s piece in full here.
Follow up, September 21. Several have replied to yesterday’s email in ways that assume I supported the ‘Yes’ campaign. Actually I haven’t done nearly enough homework to take a definite stand there. If I must define myself then I’m more socialist than nationalist.
Those interested in the relationship between the two can do worse than revisit a debate within the Third International a century ago, when empires that had for centuries ruled Europe and beyond were disintegrating. Lenin wrote a polemic, The Right of Nations to Self Determination. Rosa Luxemburg accused him of opportunism, of pandering to ‘bourgois nationalism’ in ways that would come back to haunt socialism. History, I’d say, vindicates Luxemburg.
And now? As the political establishment, already repenting its panic, scrambles to reposition itself, we can expect reinterpretations of the narrative: the one common thread being a desire to frame that incredible Yes momentum in ways least damaging to the status quo.
That is why I wrote yesterday. It’s important we understand why so many Scots want self determination?
PS I’m grateful to a friend for pointing out that loos on Shetland are a poor example of Scottish municipal tradition. Shetlanders barely consider themselves Scottish (though unlike with Scotland, no one in their right mind would consider the islands a viable nation state). But loos are a distraction. Let’s take university fees instead. Too few people realise that higher education is costing the tax payer, south of the border, just as much as it did in the days of free delivery. In the most recent (and easiest) sell off of student loans, we got less than seventeen pence in the pound. Go figure where the eighty-three pence went.