The portrayal of Scots as abolitionists and liberal champions has hidden a long history of profiting from slavery in the Caribbean writes Yvonne Singh in The Guardian
The mangrove-fringed coast of Guyana, at the north-eastern tip of South America, does not immediately bring to mind the Highlands of Scotland, in the northernmost part of Great Britain. Guyana’s mudflats and silty brown coastal water have little in common with the lush green mountains and glens of the Highlands. If these landscapes share anything, it is their remoteness – one on the edge of a former empire burnished by the relentless equatorial sun and one on the edge of Europe whipped mercilessly by the Atlantic winds. But look closer and the links are there: Alness, Ankerville, Belladrum, Borlum, Cromarty, Culcairn, Dingwall, Dunrobin, Fyrish, Glastullich, Inverness, Kintail, Kintyre, Rosehall, Tain, Tarlogie, a join-the-dots list of placenames (30 in all) south of Guyana’s capital Georgetown that hint of a hidden association with the Scottish Highlands some 5,000 miles away.
As a child, I knew little of my parents’ country Guyana. I knew that it was part of the British West Indies and the only English-speaking country in South America. I knew that my parents, as part of the Windrush generation, had answered the call for labour in postwar Britain. My father, aged 19, travelled by ship from Trinidad in 1960 and enjoyed a long career with the Royal Mail; my mother arrived by plane a couple of years later, to work as a nurse at Rushgreen hospital in Essex.
I had visited Guyana just once at nine years old (our only plane holiday as children) when my mother’s youngest sister was getting married. My memories of that time are fragmented and rather strange: the scorching heat; the propensity of people to douse themselves with Limacol (“breeze in a bottle”); the glossy rubber leaves the size of dinner plates that were used to serve sticky balls of rice at the wedding dinner; the constant nag of insects – mosquitoes, cockroaches, spiders, flies – magnified in size and more vicious than any I’d seen in the UK; the pain and humiliation of getting sunburnt for the first time (“wha’ happ’n wid de gal face”); and finally my aunt looking demure in a white lace wedding dress for the Christian wedding ceremony, then transforming into a Lakshmi-like vision in a red-and-gold sari for the Hindu nuptials.
For this was and is a country that celebrated all religions – Christian, Hindu, Muslim – all features of a colonial past that involved the forced movement of people across continents to a life of bondage and indenture. Those people later settled and made Guyana their home, so it is known as the land of six peoples, with people of African, Indian, Chinese and European descent, as well as native Amerindians and a sizeable mixed-race group, making up its population.
The story of why my own family came to be in the Caribbean had been blurred over time: it was something to do with the British, something to do with slavery, but that was all that was shared. Decades later the Guyanese-American journalist Gaiutra Bahadur published the seminal book Coolie Woman, which brought much insight, but there have been few other notable works. Guyana doesn’t feature in the history books or the school curriculum in Britain.
This is astonishing when you think that the British had such a role to play in that nation’s birth and how central that colony was to the United Kingdom’s industrial wealth and growth in the 19th century. Unlike the Caribbean islands of Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad, it is possible that Guyana’s unique geography (being attached to the South American mainland) has rendered it and its history all but invisible from the collective British consciousness. Perhaps fittingly, it was the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.
I am standing on a ridge cluttered with dried grass and leaves on the eastern bank of Loch Ness. Below me, shimmering like a sheet of burnished steel, is the fabled water. I watch as puffy clouds tow shadows across its surface. North of where I stand is Dochfour House and Gardens, a sprawling, sandy-coloured, Italianate mansion, the ancestral home of the Baillie family, now owned by Alexander Baillie, after the death of his father – the eccentric Lord Burton – in 2013. The late lord was a hands-on estate owner and guarded his lands fiercely up until his death – one story has him forcing a car bonnet down on the hand of a passing motorist who had the temerity to examine his car engine near the entrance of the property.
Today the 11,000-acre estate can be hired for “exclusive house parties” and corporate events. Guests can spend time in the grand mansion, or enjoy shooting, fishing and sailing in the extensive grounds.
It’s an impressive legacy, even more so when you realise that the Baillies of Dochfour were leading “West Indian merchants” in the 1700s and early 1800s, active in the slave trade and the ownership of plantations in the Caribbean. Brothers Alexander and James, along with their cousin George, started trading in St Kitts and Grenada as Smith & Baillies in the 1760s. Their substantial interests spread to include plantations in Jamaica, Nevis, St Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago.
When the soils of the neighbouring islands had been exploited, excursions into Guyana presented more fertile territory. Consequently, the Baillies established a number of plantations there, with this colony yielding substantial profits even after the abolition of slavery.
Stabroek market in Georgetown, Guyana. Photograph: benedek/Getty Images
The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 didn’t just bring an end to chattel slavery, it also compensated Britain’s 46,000 slave owners for the loss of their “property”. As Guyana’s plantations were mostly involved in sugar-making, and sugar boilers commanded a compensation figure of £100 compared with that of £18 for an unskilled field worker, the Baillies and other plantation owners were heavily compensated for their estates in Guyana.
Consequently, the Baillies received a total of £110,000 (equivalent to around £9.2m today) compensation for the 3,100 slaves they lost, which they invested in a Monopoly board of estates across the Highlands, ensuring that they and their descendants would become one of the largest landed proprietors in the north of Scotland, largely thanks to the profits of slavery.
Imeet with historian David Alston in Cromarty, a small town in the Highlands that sits at the mouth of Cromarty Firth. Comprised of just a few streets, the town boasts a wealth of Georgian and Victorian architecture and its fair share of chi-chi boutiques, catering to the American and Canadian tourists who visit the area eager to seek a piece of Highland ancestry.
Alston explains that there are 13 different sites in this tiny place that have connections to slave plantations – mostly in Guyana. He says: “If you lived in the Highlands in the 1800s, you would know about Demerara and Berbice [in Guyana]; people would talk about coming back ‘as rich as a Demerary man’.”
It’s hard to process that a network of Scotsmen from here and the surrounding area used Guyana as a “get-rich-quick scheme”, exploiting for profit the trafficked humans (both slaves and indentured labourers) who were my ancestors. A “gold rush” with no thought of the tragic human consequence.
As I wade through research and testimonials of the fate of slaves in Guyana, it’s difficult to suppress the anger I feel: up until 1826 (nearly two decades after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807), “the 11 o’clock flog” was administered in Berbice’s searing heat to men and women who flagged in their tasks; sexual abuse was so endemic in the same district that, in 1819, one in 50 of the enslaved population was the child or grandchild of a white European.
What is also astonishing is that the people I speak to in Guyana don’t seem aware of this link with the Highlands. I speak to an older cousin who grew up in Guyana but now lives in the US. “We were taught about Cuffy [a rebel slave leader] and the slave rebellion of 1763,” she recounts. “But the slave trade wasn’t discussed.”
A statue of Cuffy, the slave rebellion leader, in Georgetown, Guyana. Photograph: Krystyna Szulecka/Alamy
I tell her about Cromarty and she laughs at the pronunciation of a well-known place from her childhood, near Cotton Tree in Berbice. “You know Aunty Florence’s mother, Big Mama, was half-Scottish,” she says. “We all used to wonder why she was so white and so much bigger than us, but then one day Granny told us that her father was a Scotsman.”
She then recalls a troubling story. “Granny said that the Indian women would be working out in the rice fields and it was then that most of the rapes would take place. No one would hear them scream … it was only nine months later that they had to deal with the consequences.”
The Baillies were part of an Inverness network of Scots, including the Frasers, the Inglis family and the Chisholms, who had substantial plantation interests in Guyana. However, slave ownership wasn’t confined to the wealthy: ordinary working people had a chance to buy slaves too. Alston has compiled a comprehensive index of more than 600 people from the Highlands with connections to Guyana before emancipation.
He says: “Guyana offered some the prospect of making a fortune, even for those of limited means, if they were prepared to start work as clerks, overseers and tradesmen. The key to success was to own slaves.”
Alston explains: “It was a weird accident that so many people from the Highlands went over. Plantations employed all sorts of people: carpenters, gardeners, bookkeepers and doctors were needed. Scotland had a good education system and the population was mobile. Tacksman [prinicipal tenants in Highlands after landowners] led immigrations and looked for opportunities.”
Despite Guyana’s distance and dangers (many Scots succumbed to yellow fever), the reward was seen as worth the risk. The benefits were many, there were people returning from Guyana buying land and estates and improving farms in Scotland, and the plantation economy also fired industrial wealth.
Alston states: “The livelihoods of some of the poorest people in Cromarty depended on what was going on in the Caribbean. There is a red sandstone building near the harbour which was established in the 1770s as a proto-factory: it imported hemp from St Petersburg and employed 250 people and 600 out-workers – more than the population of Cromarty now – to produce cloth to make bags and sacks for West Indian goods.”
The economic benefits of slavery had a trickle-down effect on every part of the Scottish economy: there was a boom in herring fishing in the Highland lochs, as this salted-down fish was a major export to the Caribbean as a protein-rich source of slave nutrition. Similarly, in the Outer Hebrides, many workers were employed in the manufacture of rough linen, known as slave cloth, for export to the colonies. In fact, Cromarty profited so much from the slave trade, it was one of the towns that petitioned against its abolition.
Highlanders also have the dubious accolade of pioneering the first shiploads of Indian indentured labourers to Guyana shortly after the abolition of slavery. John Gladstone (a Guyanese planter and father of the future British prime minister, who received £106,769 in compensation, the equivalent of about £9m today) wrote to Francis Mackenzie Gillanders of Gillanders, Arbuthnot & Co in Calcutta, requesting a new source of cheap and easily controlled labour.
Gillanders had already sent Indians to Mauritius under five-year contracts and was keen to fulfil Gladstone’s request. He perceived no difficulty with the new recruits, declaring they have “few wants beyond eating, sleeping and drinking”, referring to the “hill coolies of India” as “more akin to the monkey than the man”, unaware of “the place they agree to go to or the voyage they are undertaking”.
The arrival of the ships Whitby and Hesperus in Guyana in 1838 would herald the movement of more than half a million Indians to the Caribbean to work under overseers in the sweltering plantations, until the end of the practice in 1917.
What is shocking, given the extent of the involvement of Highland Scots in the history of Guyana, is the way their role has been airbrushed from history. Not many Scottish people would have a clue where Guyana is or of its importance to their own nation’s industrial growth.
Scots have been portrayed as abolitionists, reformers and liberal champions, so David Livingstone is remembered fondly, as is Scotland’s role in abolition, while the slave-owning firms of Sandbach Tinne, John Gladstone, HD and JE Baillie, CW&F Shand, Reid Irving and others are referred to euphemistically as “West Indian merchants”.
Unlike in Liverpool, Bristol or London, there is little acknowledgment in Glasgow of public buildings funded by the slave trade. Buchanan Street, Glassford Street and Ingram Street are named after notorious slavers, but there is no mention of this in the city’s history.
“The research I was doing in the 1990s felt very lonely,” says Alston. He recalls the opening of the National Museum of Scotland in 1998. “Despite huge sections devoted to Scotland and the world, there was not a mention of the slave trade or the slave-based plantation economies, which supported the rise of Scotland’s industrialisation. The story sits very uncomfortably with the narrative that people want to tell about Scotland and Highlanders.”
Alston explains that Scotland’s own historical grievances, specifically the Highland clearances (when tens of thousands of Highlanders were forcibly evicted from their homes to make way for large-scale sheep farming), make it unable to confront the past. He says: “If you want to portray yourself as a victim, the last thing you want to do is be the victimiser, and it is difficult for that to change because it is so embedded in the Scottish view of itself and the Highlands view of itself.
Cromarty graveyard in the Highlands, where some Scottish slave owners are buried. Photograph: Calum Davidson/Alamy
“In Sutherland county there is a memorial to the clearances funded by a Canadian whose ancestors were cleared [the Emigrants Statue]. The tone on the inscription is very much that the Scots enlightened the world. There was talk of putting replica statues up in all the places that Scots went to … I wonder if they will put one up in Georgetown, Guyana.”
Helen Cameron, who now lives in Australia, visited both Cromarty and Guyana in an attempt to trace her roots. Helen is related to the Camerons of Glen Nevis: John Cameron, her great, great, great-grandfather, came to Berbice in the early 1800s and set up a plantation with his kinsman Donald Charles Cameron. Accounts of their time there include shipments of coffee, cotton, rum and sugar, and the sale and hire of slaves. John Cameron had a relationship with Elizabeth Sharpe, “a free coloured woman” (a descendant of slaves) and they had seven children. The couple’s five sons all emigrated to Australia, while the daughters remained unmarried.
Helen writes by email: “It will seem strange that I did not make the intellectual connection of being a descendant of a plantation owner as also being a descendant of a slave owner. I was slightly taken aback when the manager of the hotel where we stayed in Guyana said, ‘This is the first time I have met the descendant of a slave owner.’”
She continues: “I had known that the family had plantations, but I do confess that until this research I had not considered who actually worked these plantations. I was also ignorant of Britain’s dependence on slavery.
“I hope my ancestors were benevolent slave owners,” she writes. “I do not like to think they were inhumane, even though, as one person in Guyana said, ‘Why would you think otherwise?’”
Scotland’s role in empire does not belong in the margins or footnotes: Highland Scots had a huge role to play in the large-scale trafficking of human beings for profit. I believe that however unpalatable this history is, it is a shared one, and contributes to our understanding of race and how the movements of people from long ago fits with our story now. To obscure these facts is to rob individuals of their stories all over again, and to deny them any sense of belonging or place in the world.
Today, steps are being made to acknowledge Scotland’s slaving past: there is a campaign to establish a museum of slavery, and for memorials and plaques to go up across the country on statues, streets and homes linked to the slave trade. In September 2018, Glasgow University published a report revealing that the institution benefited directly from the slave trade, despite its leading role in the abolitionist movement – receiving bequests of almost £200m in today’s money. The university has now launched a “reparative justice programme” that will involve the creation of a centre for the study of slavery as well as a collaboration with the University of the West Indies.
In Cromarty’s graveyard, the mid-morning sun slants across the gravestones pockmarked with moss and lichen, illuminating the faint inscriptions. The statue of Hugh Miller, the town’s famed geologist and writer, perched Nelson-like on a high column, overlooks the scene. I read the carved words on one crumbling grey stone that has sat in this cemetery for more than 150 years. It says: “John Munro late of Demerara.” Less clear is “Berbice” on another stone. A mere 20 miles south-west of this cemetery, at Gilchrist near Muir of Ord, is an ornate mausoleum containing the well-preserved tomb of Gillanders – he of the famous monkey quote. One truth remains: however hard we try to cover over our past, it rarely stays buried.
I had never heard of the game called “welly wanging”, but there it was on the News at Ten this week – in a report by the BBC’s home editor, Mark Easton, on the traditions that give the English regions their splendid variety. The report showed some people, probably children, throwing gumboots in a field – the competitor who threw a boot furthest was the winner. It was things like this, Easton said, that made Yorkshire different from other places, which had their own traditions that were just as special to them. Some morris dancers appeared, and a man in a Tyneside pub talked about how collective hardship had forged the Geordie identity, these days manifested in a love of Newcastle United Football Club and an equal hatred of its rival in Sunderland. It all felt flimsy and sad – that “regional identity” should amount to this rickle of bones.
FacebookTwitterPinterest A welly-wanging contest in an English village. ‘So far as I can tell it dates all the way back to AD2010.’ Photograph: Alamy.
The last colliery in the north-east closed in 2005, while the last shipyard on the Tyne launched its last ship in 2006, though those masculine industries had ceased to employ significant numbers long before. The north-east is poor, but then so are many other de-industrialised parts of the United Kingdom; hardship and heavy industry alone can’t explain its particular difference. As for “welly wanging”, so far as I can tell it dates all the way back to AD2010.
Thinking of Newcastle, I thought of my late mother-in-law, who lived and died there: a sweet and clever woman blessed with good humour (“This is my last territorial demand in Europe,” she might say, requesting a cup of tea at bedtime), who in her forgetful days asked me the same set of questions more than once. “What’s your tartan? Isn’t there a Jack tartan? Have you never worn a kilt?”
My answers puzzled her – “I don’t know”, “I hope not”, “Not ever” – more by their brevity than anything else. I feel sorry for my irritation now. My explanation, that I came from a Lowland family, and had no entitlement to tartans, clearly didn’t wash. Having glanced through the window of more than one kilt emporium, she knew that the enterprise of the Scottish tourist industry had allotted a tartan to almost every surname in an old British telephone directory, often by deciding that a common Lowland name such as Taylor was really a “sept”, or subdivision, of a Highland clan such as Cameron. The clans ruled the roost.
Oddly, given that Jacks lie thick in the graveyards of the Black Isle, my surname didn’t then feature on these lists. (It does now; the Clan Jack Society registered a new design with the Scottish Register of Tartans in 2012.) But I didn’t at all regret the omission. What I found impossible to tell my mother-in-law, without making a priggish meal of it, was that the whole rigmarole of clans and tartans, sometimes known as Highlandism, was largely confected in the 18th and 19th centuries, and that any reality it might be connected to was far removed from the one most Scottish people knew; and also that this feudal, claymore-wielding “identity” obscured a true history of achievement that had once made a trousered Scotland important to the world: Adam Smith, James Watt, Keir Hardie, the Forth Bridge and so on.
It could have been a long speech, and tedious to the listener. I grew up hearing versions of it. Tartanry had many enemies in Scotland, particularly inside a socialist movement that was keen to establish a more class-based and less fanciful view of history. It fought what amounted to an underground campaign against figures such as Bonnie Prince Charlie and the music hall singer and comic Harry Lauder, who with his kilt and curly stick presented a caricature of Scotland at home and abroad.
Kilts in the 1950s were still worn mainly by Scottish regiments and public schoolboys, and often regarded by the rest of us as a middle-class affectation. Mocking evidence came from new scholarship that the kilt’s modern form – the “small kilt” – had been invented in the 1720s by a Lancashire Quaker and ironmaster, Thomas Rawlinson, to dress the workers at his Highland smelter. In the first half of the next century, the Anglo-Welsh Allen brothers printed the first colour illustrations of tartans – inspired, they said, by an ancient but never produced manuscript – that showed how different clans and families had adopted their distinctive patterns at least as early as the 16th century.
Hugh Trevor-Roper gave an entertaining account of these developments in his contribution to The Invention of Tradition, a collection of essays edited by his fellow historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger and published in 1983. “The creation of an independent Highland tradition, and the imposition of that new tradition, with its outward badges, on the whole Scottish nation, was the work of the later 18th and early 19th centuries,” he wrote combatively and, as it turned out, to no sartorial consequence. (Thirty-odd years later, nine out of 10 Scottish bridegrooms get married in the dress devised by the ironmaster Rawlinson.)
But his words were part of a general revaluation of Scottish history that did have a political effect. Scottish nationalism became less backward-looking, less romantic, less in thrall to fancy dress and myth. What too few people recognised – I include myself – was that no similar process was happening south of the border. England clings to history. Its view of its glorious past – as, for example, the begetter of parliamentary democracy and the lonely bulwark against Hitler – remains unmodified and may even have recently intensified. No myths have been shed.
The results are apparent in opinion polls about national identitycommissioned by the BBC, which led this week to Easton’s nightly appearance on the evening news. Welly wanging turned out to be a catchpenny sideshow, a misleading overture to more serious surveys of the states of mind of England, Scotland and Wales. All kinds of differences showed up, some unsurprising: fewer people in Scotland said that they felt “strongly British” than in England or Wales; the percentage of people in Scotland who strongly identified as Scottish was larger than the percentage in England who strongly identified as English, or as Welsh in Wales.
But the most marked contrast between England and Scotland was optimism. In England many more in the 20,081 sample said the country was better in the past (49%) than it would be in the future (17%). In Scotland, more people believed it would be better in the future (36%) than it was in the past (29%). The pollster John Curtice attributed this difference to two kinds of nationalism – defining English nationalists as those who said they were English and not British (one sixth of the sample in England), and Scottish nationalists as people who supported the SNP. More than two-thirds (70%) of English nationalists said the past was better; only 16% of Scottish nationalists felt the same. Only 8% of English nationalists felt “strongly European”; among Scottish nationalists the figure was 44%.
And so the quickening current sweeps our raft towards the waterfall, and the bones of Sir Francis Drake at its bottom.
A wave of new publicly owned companies is taking on the big six energy suppliers, as local authorities search out new revenue and seek to restore faith in public services and tackle fuel poverty. Islington council last week launched a not-for-profit energy firm, London’s first municipal operator in more than a century, while Doncaster’s energy company will start early next month.
Portsmouth is also on the verge of becoming the first Conservative-controlled council to launch one, to bring down residents’ bills as well as bringing investment to the city.
The first and best-known publicly owned energy companies, Robin Hood Energy in Nottingham and Bristol Energy, started two years ago. But the growing trend came to the fore this month when Nicola Sturgeon promised to create a Scottish public energy company by 2021.
“No shareholders to worry about. No corporate bonuses to consider. It would give people – particularly those on low incomes – more choice and the option of a supplier whose only job is to secure the lowest price for consumers,” Scotland’s first minister said, in an echo of the marketing used by the councils who have already started their own energy companies.
Sturgeon’s firm will be entering an increasingly crowded space: publicly owned firms include Liverpool’s Leccy, Derby’s Ram, and Leeds’ White Rose. Councils in Sussex are clubbing together to launch Your Energy Sussex latter this year.
The driving forces for these councils stepping into the complex, heavily regulated energy space are largely twofold. One is the need to create a new revenue stream in a time of austerity, as well as rebuilding the public sphere – councils are perhaps most visible to residents when they close libraries and cut other services.
But there is also a political project afoot as well, as Labour-controlled councils such as Nottingham push an agenda that has since been picked up by Jeremy Corbyn during the last election.
There is also genuine concern over fuel poverty, and a hope that local authorities will be more trusted than the usual energy suppliers, that even Theresa May says have ripped customers off.
“It’s about councils trying to provide a trusted and better service for people to switch. We want a challenger model to the big six,” said Labour MP Caroline Flint, whose Doncaster constituency will see the launch of publicly owned Great Northern Energy on 7 November.
The flurry of such firms showed Labour’s manifesto pledge of a publicly owned energy supplier in each region was happening regardless of the party’s failure to win power in June’s snap general election, Flint said.
Steve Battlemuch, chair of the board of Robin Hood Energy and a Labour councillor, said: “Nottingham has a lot of fuel poverty, lot of people on prepayment meters [which people in energy debt are often moved on to]. That was what drove us: coming into the market and driving down prices for the customer.”
Like other public firms, part of his sales pitch is that there are no corporate masters to pay.
“There’s no shareholder bonuses, because there’s no shareholder apart from Nottingham city council. There’s no director bonuses. I had a cupcake on our first anniversary,” he said.
Peter Haigh, managing director of Bristol Energy, said his organisation was more inclusive than private companies, and its physical presence in the city was a big attraction.
“Customers can and do walk in, sign up and pay a bill. That often attracts customers who have never switched, people who can pop in face to face,” he said.
Part of the reason councils are getting into energy is the barriers to market are not as great as they once were.
Mark Coyle, strategy director of Utiligroup, which has provided services to most of the publicly owned energy companies, said: “We’ve been able to lower the barriers for them, without lowering compliance.”
But while the sector appears to be burgeoning, combined these companies are a minnow compared with the blue whales that are the big six firms, which between them account for 80% share of the market.
Bristol Energy is biggest publicly owned energy supplier, with about 110,000 customers; Robin Hood has just over 100,000. Both have created more than 100 jobs locally, but neither has yet recovered their start-up costs.
Moreover, while such firms appear to be proliferating, most are simply rebranding off Robin Hood rather than setting up as fully licensed suppliers which can buy energy on the wholesale market. The approach has its critics.
“Islington are doing a good thing but it’s a shame that they’ve had to go to Nottingham to buy the energy,” said Caroline Russell, a Green party London assembly member.
Last month he was advised by experts to piggyback off an existing supplier, rather than create his own licensed company. While cheaper and quicker to do, it would also mean he had less power and flexibility to offer something genuinely new and different compared with the 50-plus private firms already in the market.
Nigel Cornwall, founder of energy analysts Cornwall Insight, said that while he was supportive of publicly owned energy companies, it was revealing that many councils were opting to ride on Robin Hood’s coat-tails rather than set up their own licensed firm.
“This is high-risk stuff. The sector is complicated. You [the council] probably don’t have the resources. You’ve probably underestimated the costs. And that’s with costs of entry falling dramatically,” he said.
Cornwall said he was also sceptical as to whether the companies would be sustainable and would become a permanent fixture in the market – but that would not stop them trying.
Battlemuch said: “What we need to do is break through into the mass market. That’s what we’re trying to do.”
Here is the question the people of Scotland will face in the next independence referendum: when England falls out of the boat like a block of concrete, do you want your foot tied to it?
It would be foolish to deny that there are risks in leaving the United Kingdom. Scotland’s economy is weak, not least because it has failed to wean itself off North Sea oil. There are major questions, not yet resolved, about the currency it would use; its trading relationship with the rump of the UK; and its association with the European Union, which it’s likely to try to rejoin.
But the risks of staying are as great or greater. Ministers are already trying to reconcile us to the possibility of falling out of the EU without a deal. If this happens, Britain would be the only one of the G20 nations without special access to EU trade – “a very destructive outcome leading to mutually assured damage for the EU and the UK”, according to the Commons foreign affairs committee. As the government has a weak hand, an obsession with past glories and an apparent yearning for a heroic gesture of self-destruction, this is not an unlikely result.
On the eve of the first independence referendum, in September 2014, David Cameron exhorted the people of Scotland to ask themselves: “Will my family and I truly be better off by going it alone? Will we really be more safe and secure?” Thanks to his machinations, the probable answer is now: yes.
In admonishing Scotland for seeking to protect itself from this chaos, the government applies a simple rule: whatever you say about Britain’s relationship with Europe, say the opposite about Scotland’s relationship with Britain.
In her speech to the Scottish Conservatives’ spring conference, Theresa May observed that “one of the driving forces behind the union’s creation was the remorseless logic that greater economic strength and security come from being united”. She was talking about the UK, but the same remorseless logic applies to the EU. In this case, however, she believes that our strength and security will be enhanced by leaving. “Politics is not a game, and government is not a platform from which to pursue constitutional obsessions,” she stormed – to which you can only assent.
A Conservative member of the Scottish parliament, Jamie Greene, complains thata new referendum “would force people to vote blind on the biggest political decision a country could face. That is utterly irresponsible.” This reminds me of something, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Before the last Scottish referendum, when the polls suggested that Scotland might choose independence, Boris Johnson, then London mayor, warned that “we are on the verge of an utter catastrophe for this country … No one has thought any of this through.” Now, as foreign secretary, he assures us that “we would be perfectly OK” if Britain leaves the EU without a deal.
Independence supporters gather in Glasgow’s George Square after Nicola Sturgeon’s call for a second referendum.
The frantic attempts by government and press to delegitimise the decision by the Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, to call for a second independence vote fall flat. Her party’s manifesto for the last Scottish election gives her an evident mandate: it would hold another referendum “if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will”.
Contrast this with May’s position. She has no mandate, from either the general election or the referendum, for leaving the single market and the European customs union. Her intransigence over these issues bends the Conservative manifesto’s pledge to “strengthen and improve devolution for each part of our United Kingdom”.
Her failure to consult the governments of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland before unilaterally deciding that the UK would leave the single market, and her refusal to respond to the paper the Scottish government produced exploring possible options for a continued engagement with the EU after Brexit testify to a relationship characterised by paternalism and contempt.
You can see the same attitude in the London-based newspapers. As the last referendum approached, they treated Scotland like an ungrateful servant. “What spoilt, selfish, childlike fools those Scots are … They simply don’t have a clue how lucky they are,” Melanie Reid sniffed in the Times. Now the charge is scheming opportunism. “We hope the Scottish people call Sturgeon out for her cynical, self-interested game-playing,” rages the Sun’s English edition. If you want to know what cynical, self-interested game-playing looks like, read the Sun’s Scottish edition. It says the opposite, contrasting the risks of independence with “the stick-on certainty of decades of Tory rule with nothing to soften it”, if Scotland remains within the UK.
Whenever I visit Scotland, I’m reminded that Britain is politically dead from the neck down. South of the border, we tolerate repeated assaults on the commonweal. As the self-hating state destroys its own power to distribute wealth, support public services and protect the NHS from ruin; as it rips up the rules protecting workers, the living world, our food, water and the very air we breathe; as disabled people are pushed off a cliff and poor people are evicted from their homes, we stand and stare. As the trade minister colludes with the dark money network on both sides of the Atlantic, threatening much that remains, we shake our heads then turn away.
Sure, there are some protests. There is plenty of dissent on social media; but our response is pathetic in comparison with the scale of what we face. The Labour opposition is divided, directionless and currently completely useless. But north of the border politics is everywhere, charged with hope, anger and a fierce desire for change. Again and again, this change is thwarted by the dead weight of Westminster. Who would remain tethered to this block, especially as the boat begins to list?
Scotland could wait to find out what happens after Brexit, though it is hard to see any likely outcome other than more of this and worse. Or it could cut the rope, pull itself back into the boat, and sail towards a hopeful if uncertain future. I know which option I would take.
Who knew Peter Pan would become one of the key political texts of the twenty-first century?
Jonn Elledge in The New Statesman
The moment you doubt whether you can fly,” J M Barrie once wrote, "You cease for ever to be able to do it.” Elsewhere in the same book he was blunter, still: “Whenever a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies’, there’s a little fairy somewhere that falls right down dead.” I would never have expected that Peter Pan would become one of the key political texts of the twenty-first century, if I’m honest. But predictions are not my strongpoint, and over the last few years, what one might term the Tinkerbell Theory of Politics has played an increasingly prominent role in national debate. The doubters’ lack of faith, we are told, is one of the biggest barriers to flight for everything from Jeremy Corbyn’s poll ratings to Brexit. Because we don’t believe, they can’t achieve.
It was in run up to the Scottish referendum that I first spotted Tinkerbell in the wild. Reports suggesting that RBS would consider relocating from Edinburgh, should independence lead to a significant rise in business costs – a statement of the bloody obvious, I’d have thought – were dismissed by then-First Minister Alex Salmond as merely “talking down Scotland”. Over the next few months, the same phrase was deployed by the SNP and its outriders whenever anyone questioned the Yes campaign’s optimistic estimates of future North Sea oil revenues.
The implications of all this were pretty clear: any practical problems apparently arising from independence were mere phantasms. The real threat to Scotland was the erosion of animal spirits caused by the faithlessness of unpatriotic unionists, who’d happily slaughter every fairy in the land before they risked an independent Scotland.
All this seemed pretty obnoxious to me, but at the time of the referendum it also all seemed to be a reassuringly long way away. Little did I realise that Salmond and co were just ahead of their time, because today, Tinkerbell-ism is bloody inescapable.
On Monday, Sir John Major made a wonkish speech laying out his concerns about Brexit. He talked about the threat to the Northern Ireland peace process, the way it would isolate Britain diplomatically, the difficulty of negotiating highly complicated trade deals on the timetable imposed by Article 50. He wanted, he said, to “warn against an over-optimism that – if unachieved – will sow further distrust between politics and the public, at a time when trust needs to be re-built”.
And how did Britain’s foreign secretary respond? “I think it’s very important that as we set out in this journey we are positive about the outcome for the very good reason the outcome will be fantastic for this country,” Boris said, probably imagining himself to be a bit like Cicero.
The problem, in other words, is not the government’s lack of a plan; the problem is its critics’ lack of faith. In a familiar phrase, the Telegraph headlined its report: “Boris Johnson criticises John Major for talking down UK’s post-Brexit prospects”.
The left is no better. In any discussion of the failings of Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party, it won’t be long before someone blames the polls, or the by-election results, on either the lack of support from the parliamentary Labour party, or the hostility of a media that never liked him in the first place. “Of course he’s struggling,” the implication runs. “Your lack of belief is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Dead fairies, everywhere you turn.
It’s easy to see why the Tinkerbell strategy would be such an attractive line of argument for those who deploy it - one that places responsibility for their own f*ck-ups squarely on their critics, thus rendering them impervious to attack. Corbyn’s failure becomes the fault of the Blairites. A bad Brexit becomes the fault of Remoaners, and not those who were dim enough to believe it would easy to begin with. Best of all, the more right your critics turn out to be, the more you have to blame them for.
But being impervious to criticism is not the same as being right, and to think this strategy is a recipe for good government is to mistake a closed loop of true believers for objective reality. Jeremy Corbyn is unlikely to start winning elections, no matter how hard the faithful believe. However much you talk up Scotland, that oil is still going to run out
And whatever the right-wing press do to convince themselves that Boris Johnson is right, and John Major is wrong, it is unlikely to affect the negotiating position of the 27 other states in the slightest. At the end of the day, our faith matters a lot less than the facts on the ground. There is no such things as fairies.
Scotland looks set to be the first part of the UK to pilot a basic income for every citizen, as councils in Fife and Glasgow investigate trial schemes in 2017.
The councillor Matt Kerr has been championing the idea through the ornate halls of Glasgow City Chambers, and is frank about the challenges it poses.
“Like a lot of people, I was interested in the idea but never completely convinced,” he said. But working as Labour’s anti-poverty lead on the council, Kerr says that he “kept coming back to the basic income”.
Kerr sees the basic income as a way of simplifying the UK’s byzantine welfare system. “But it is also about solidarity: it says that everyone is valued and the government will support you. It changes the relationship between the individual and the state.”
The concept of a universal basic income revolves around the idea of offering every individual, regardless of existing welfare benefits or earned income, a non-conditional flat-rate payment, with any income earned above that taxed progressively. The intention is to provide a basic economic platform on which people can build their lives, whether they choose to earn, learn, care or set up a business. The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has suggested that it is likely to appear in his party’s next manifesto, while there has been a groundswell of interest among anti-poverty groups who see it as a means of changing not only the relationship between people and the state, but between workers and increasingly insecure employment in the gig economy.
Kerr accepts that, while he is hopeful of cross-party support in Glasgow, there are “months of work ahead”, including first arranging a feasibility study in order to present a strong enough evidence base for a pilot. “But if there is ever a case to be made then you need to test it in a place like Glasgow, with the sheer numbers and levels of health inequality. If you can make it work here then it can work anywhere.”
The idea has its roots in 16th-century humanist philosophy, when it was developed by the likes of Thomas More, but in its modern incarnation it has lately enjoyed successful pilots in India and Africa.
Despite its utopian roots, champions believe that this is an idea whose time has come, particularly in Scotland where the governing SNP voted in support of a basic income at their spring conference (although the proposal has yet to make it into their manifesto).
At the heart of any experiment with basic income is money: how much should people get and where will it come from? Kerr says his instinct is to base the amount on similar calculations to those made for the living wage.
“It’s about having more than just enough to pay the bills. But part of the idea of doing a pilot is to make mistakes and also find out what is acceptable to the public. There will be a lot of resistance to this. We shouldn’t kid ourselves. Part of the problem is we’re working against a whole discourse of deserving and undeserving poor.”
As for where the money comes from, “the funding question is always the big one, and really will depend upon the approach a pilot takes,” says Jamie Cooke, head of RSA Scotland, which has been spearheading research on the subject across the UK.
Drawing on the experience of similar projects ongoing in Finland, Utrecht in the Netherland and Ontario in Canada, Cooke suggests: “It could be funding from particular trusts, it could be individual philanthropic funding, as we have seen in the States, or it could be a redirection of the existing welfare spend.” Obviously the latter is much harder to do in a pilot, although that will be happening in Finland next year where the experiment is being taken forward by the national government.
As the Scottish government consults on what it has described as “the biggest transfer of powers since devolution began” – the devolution of around £2.7bn, or 15% of the total Scottish benefits bill, affecting 1.4 million people – both Kerr and Cooke believe that this is an ideal moment to consider the basic income seriously. “It’s a time to be testing out new – or rather old – ideas for a welfare system that genuinely supports independence,” says Kerr.
Cooke likewise believes that cross-party support is key, pointing to the fact that the leader of the Conservative group on Fife council has joined forces with the Fairer Fife Commission, the council’s independent poverty advisory group which initially recommended the trial, with the aim of designing a pilot within the next six months.
Scotland was recently added to the list of “places to watch” for basic income activity by the Basic Income Earth Network, founded by the radical economist Guy Standing, whose hugely influential book The Precariat identified an emerging social class suffering the worst of job insecurity and most likely to be attracted to rightwing populism.
“The thing about Scotland is that they really understand the precariat,” says Standing, who recently visited the country to meet civil servants, local authorities and campaigners to discuss a basic income. “The sense of insecurity, the stagnating living standards, all of those things are clear in Scotland and the fact that so many within the SNP are supportive means there’s a real opportunity to do a pilot in Scotland.”
The momentum is there, he says, and once it is framed around a desire for greater social justice “then you get away from the stale debate about whether if you give people the basic income then they will be lazy”.
“People relate to the idea that everyone should have a social dividend. Everywhere I go, it’s the communities that feel left behind by globalisation that are most interested [in the idea of a basic income]. We have seen a sea-change in attitudes.
“This sense of alarm about populist rightwing politics has brought more people to thinking we need to do something to provide better security for people. We are risking our economic and political stability if we don’t do something about it.”
BBC Trending This map, created in 2014, has been widely shared again
Thousands of people in the North of England have been using the hashtag "take us with you Scotland" to express their upset about the result of last week's general election, and the Scottish nationalists are welcoming this English minority with open arms.
Since last Thursday's general election in Britain the phrase "take us with you Scotland" has been used more than 24,000 times. Cities in the North of England have traditionally been a stronghold of the Labour party who retained many of them in the recent vote, but won 232 seats overall, 26 fewer seats than they won in 2010. Voters in the region also returned Conservative MPs - including Chancellor George Osborne who is today setting out a plan for greater devolution to northern cities. For obvious reasons, the left-leaning Scottish National Party didn't stand in the region - but won nearly all the seats in Scotland.
On Sunday afternoon left-leaning voters in Yorkshire and Lancashire started to use the hashtag to express their upset at this situation. "#TakeUsWithYouScotland genuinely beginning to wonder if the North of England becoming a part of Scotland would be better for us, I really am" tweeted Aaron Miller from Yorkshire. Some cracked more jokes under the tag after the North West Motorway Police account, which gives traffic updates, announced that they had "picked up a pedestrian on the M62 who was trying to walk to Scotland".
After the initial spike of jokes on Sunday evening, the hashtag really took off when users start to mobilise around a year old petition on change.org, which is titled "allow the north of England to secede from the UK & join Scotland". The petition's creator, a Sheffield resident who calls himself "Stu Dent", set it up to coincide with last year's Scottish independence referendum. A map created by Dent imagining the boundary of a "Scotland plus the north" was also widely shared.
Dent runs the Twitter account Hunters Bar, named after an area of southwest Sheffield which is very popular with students and which also happens to sit on the edge of the Sheffield Hallam constituency - represented by the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg. Despite having thousands of followers on Twitter, when Dent first posted his map last year, the image was shared less than 100 times - but in the past week it's been retweeted by thousands.
Dent told BBC Trending that he was surprised at how popular his petition had become. "In hindsight, perhaps I shouldn't have been," he said. "There is a huge frustration in parts of the UK about the things that have happened since 2010."
"I think people need a place to go where they can say 'not in my name! This is not the England I want'," he added.
Thousands of people in the North of England have been petitioning for the region to be allowed to join Scotland
So why has the trend grown so big now? The election results are clearly one factor, but there may be another: the power of the Scottish Nationalists on Twitter and their ability to influence the discussion on the platform. What started as a post-election joke in the North of England was quickly embraced by the so-called "Cyber Nats" and they were able to push the image and petition up the Twitter trending list.
This tweet was retweeted 450 times and favourited more than 400 times by both Scottish and English users
More than 12,000 people from Scotland and Northern England have signed the petition and the map has now been retweeted more than 3,000 times. The SNP's social media strategist Ross Colquhoun expressed the party's mood about the hashtag best, in a post which was shared more than 500 times. "2014: #LetsStayTogether 2015: #TakeUsWithYouScotland What a difference a year makes" he tweeted.
‘Like a Rorschach test, both right and left gaze upon the saltires and the protesting crowds outside BBC Scotland, and see exactly what they want to see.’ Illustration: Daniel Pudles
A friend mails from Edinburgh: “The referendum is all anybody talks about. My mate is getting married next week and says despite that, all his dreams are about independence.” An uncle born in Rangoon, but living in London for 50 years, comes to visit with one thing on his mind: “I can’t hear enough about what’s happening in Scotland.”
Britain is in the middle of something so epic that almost everyone feels compelled to have a view on it. And like a Rorschach test, both right and left gaze upon the saltires and the protesting crowds outside BBC Scotland – and see exactly what they want to see.
For the right, this is an insurgency of the subsidy junkies: a coalition of the ungrateful, the unaffordable and the utopian, hell-bent on disrupting an order that has provided three centuries of stability. Seen from the left, this is an uprising by capitalism’s oppressed, throwing off the shackles placed on them by Thatcher’s children and the Blairite zombies they are just a vote away from a socially just Xanadu. I exaggerate a little, but – after all the afternoon rallies and midnight blogs and front-page warnings from the Queen – I’m not alone.
The fundamental point, though, is this: neither picture captures the reality. Look at Scotland’s economic profile, and it’s clear that independence would be viable. But count up the building blocks that would form the basis of a new economy, and it looks sadly unlikely that an independent Scotland would be much of an alternative to the Old Corruption south of the border.
None of the above is going to stop the no campaign from keeping the union together at all costs. Which is why this weekend’s newspapers were bursting with dreadful warnings from Deutsche Bank about how a yes vote would be “a political and economic mistake as large as Winston Churchill’s decision in 1925 to return the pound to the gold standard” or the missteps in Washington that triggered the Great Depression.
That note of alarm came from the foreword to a two-page research note issued by Deutsche. Over the year, I have read thousands of such finance-house briefings – indeed, I have dim memories from very early in my career of having contributed to a few – and can say two things about them with confidence. First, for all the numbers and letterheads, they are not the word of God. They are a cross between a commentary and a forecast: think of a horse-racing tip without the colourful names, or Simon Heffer with more graphs. The Deutsche paper fits the form to a T: the bank’s group chief economist’s remarks are less economic than political in nature. “Why anyone would want to exit a successful economic and political union … to go it alone for the benefit of ... what exactly, is incomprehensible to this author.”
Fair enough: it’s one man’s view. But the other rule of research notes is that there’s bound to be another expressing a contrasting opinion. Such as the email I received from the head of the global strategy team at Société Générale. It argues that a yes vote would lay bare the fact that, without Scotland’s oil exports, the rest of the UK simply doesn’t pay its way in the world – and so independence would see “sterling quite rightly plunge into the abyss”.
Two well-known financial strategists, two divergent views – but only one gets amplified by the media. Funny that.
To make the sort of call issued by the Deutsche economists, you would need the kind of information about who would get what share of the oil and of the UK’s debts that we just don’t have yet – because those negotiations between Holyrood and Westminster haven’t even begun. Despite that, the no camp leaps on any passing argument to support its side. Even if they are pish. You can’t argue both that a go-alone Scotland would be as overbanked as Iceland, and that RBS and Lloyds leaving spells disaster: it’s one or the other.
That said, the technicalities mean the transition to independence would be turbulent. Forget about devo max; there would be austerity max, thanks to Scotland’s budget deficit. Worried over the value of their assets, savers and companies would try to shift their money south. Thousands of business contracts would need to be redrawn.
If the Scots go into currency union with the rest of the UK, their interest rates, financial regulation and probably their tax-and-spend policies will be dictated by the entity they have just opted out of. The plan B of merely adopting the pound would be even worse, and leave banks headquartered in Scotland in need of a new lender of last resort. As Dundee-born economist Mark Blyth points out, the most sensible option, of a Scottish currency, would take about five to seven years to set up a new central bank, a new bond shop and a new tax office.
These are just the technicalities – and they already spell a decade of pain. But provided the new country’s electorate was primed for such sacrifices, they could be got through. The big question for the left, both in Scotland and the rest of the UK, is what kind of alternative economy would be built. And I can’t see that it would be so different. Adopting the pound or the euro would bind the new country into the same old hated structures. Going by SNP policies, this new small state would follow the path trod by many of its predecessors over the past two decades: cut corporation tax, sell assets and try to draw in as much foreign capital as possible. The result wouldn’t be Sweden, but Ireland: a plaything for big multinationals.
It wouldn’t be impossible to craft an alternative economic policy: but there isn’t one in place yet. Ask for one and you are pointed to the Wee Blue Book or Adam Ramsay’s 42 Reasons: both are smart, generous-minded critiques of Britain’s political economy, but they are short of concrete alternatives. Ask for an alternative to Alex Salmond and you’re shown “good bloke” Patrick Harvie. But the Green party he heads polls about as well north of the border as Ukip.
In the old days of ethnic nationalism, having a vacuum in place of an alternative wouldn’t matter so much: separatism would be an end in itself. But the yes campaign that’s emerged over the past few years is built around a civic nationalism, in which the forming of a nation is only the means to an end of progressive values. Trouble is, around the central issue of economics, there is a blank ready to be filled by the old conservatism and lobbying.
Alex Salmond (R) first minister of Scotland and Alistair Darling chair of Better Together. 'To vote no is to choose to live under a political system that sustains one of the rich world’s highest levels of inequality and deprivation.' Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty
Imagine the question posed the other way round. An independent nation is asked to decide whether to surrender its sovereignty to a larger union. It would be allowed a measure of autonomy, but key aspects of its governance would be handed to another nation. It would be used as a military base by the dominant power and yoked to an economy over which it had no control.
It would have to be bloody desperate. Only a nation in which the institutions of governance had collapsed, which had been ruined economically, which was threatened by invasion or civil war or famine might contemplate this drastic step. Most nations faced even with such catastrophes choose to retain their independence – in fact, will fight to preserve it – rather than surrender to a dominant foreign power.
So what would you say about a country that sacrificed its sovereignty without collapse or compulsion; that had no obvious enemies, a basically sound economy and a broadly functional democracy, yet chose to swap it for remote governance by the hereditary elite of another nation, beholden to a corrupt financial centre?
What would you say about a country that exchanged an economy based on enterprise and distribution for one based on speculation and rent? That chose obeisance to a government that spies on its own citizens, uses the planet as its dustbin, governs on behalf of a transnational elite that owes loyalty to no nation, cedes public services to corporations, forces terminally ill people to work and can’t be trusted with a box of fireworks, let alone a fleet of nuclear submarines? You would conclude that it had lost its senses.
So what’s the difference? How is the argument altered by the fact that Scotland is considering whether to gain independence rather than whether to lose it? It’s not. Those who would vote no – now, a new poll suggests, a rapidly diminishing majority – could be suffering from system justification.
System justification is defined as the “process by which existing social arrangements are legitimised, even at the expense of personal and group interest”. It consists of a desire to defend the status quo, regardless of its impacts. It has been demonstrated in a large body of experimental work, which has produced the following surprising results.
System justification becomes stronger when social and economic inequality is more extreme. This is because people try to rationalise their disadvantage by seeking legitimate reasons for their position. In some cases disadvantaged people are more likely than the privileged to support the status quo. One study found that US citizens on low incomes were more likely than those on high incomes to believe that economic inequality is legitimate and necessary.
It explains why women in experimental studies pay themselves less than men, why people in low-status jobs believe their work is worth less than those in high-status jobs, even when they’re performing the same task, and why people accept domination by another group. It might help to explain why so many people in Scotland are inclined to vote no.
The fears the no campaigners have worked so hard to stoke are – by comparison with what the Scots are being asked to lose – mere shadows. As Adam Ramsay points out in his treatise Forty-Two Reasons to Support Scottish Independence, there are plenty of nations smaller than Scotland that possess their own currencies and thrive. Most of the world’s prosperous nations are small: there are no inherent disadvantages to downsizing.
Remaining in the UK carries as much risk and uncertainty as leaving. England’s housing bubble could blow at any time. We might leave the European Union. Some of the most determined no campaigners would take us out: witness Ukip’s intention to stage a “pro-union rally” in Glasgow on 12 September. The union in question, of course, is the UK, not Europe. This reminds us of a crashing contradiction in the politics of such groups: if our membership of the EU represents an appalling and intolerable loss of sovereignty, why is the far greater loss Scotland is being asked to accept deemed tolerable and necessary.
The Scots are told they will have no control over their own currency if they leave the UK. But they have none today. The monetary policy committee is based in London and bows to the banks. The pound’s strength, which damages the manufacturing Scotland seeks to promote, reflects the interests of the City.
To vote no is to choose to live under a political system that sustains one of the rich world’s highest levels of inequality and deprivation. This is a system in which all major parties are complicit, which offers no obvious exit from a model that privileges neoliberal economics over other aspirations. It treats the natural world, civic life, equality, public health and effective public services as dispensable luxuries, and the freedom of the rich to exploit the poor as non-negotiable.
Its lack of a codified constitution permits numberless abuses of power. It has failed to reform the House of Lords, royal prerogative, campaign financeand first-past-the-post voting (another triumph for the no brigade). It is dominated by media owned by tax exiles, who, instructing their editors from their distant chateaux, play the patriotism card at every opportunity. The concerns of swing voters in marginal constituencies outweigh those of the majority; the concerns of corporations with no lasting stake in the country outweigh everything. Broken, corrupt, dysfunctional, retentive: you want to be part of this?
Independence, as more Scots are beginning to see, offers people an opportunity to rewrite the political rules. To create a written constitution, the very process of which is engaging and transformative. To build an economy of benefit to everyone. To promote cohesion, social justice, the defence of the living planet and an end to wars of choice.
To deny this to yourself, to remain subject to the whims of a distant and uncaring elite, to succumb to the bleak, deferential negativity of the no campaign, to accept other people’s myths in place of your own story: that would be an astonishing act of self-repudiation and self-harm. Consider yourselves independent and work backwards from there; then ask why you would sacrifice that freedom.
