Andrew Tickell: The Positive Case & The Empathy Gap

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THE DROUTH

SPRING 2014 ISSUE 48

THE POSITIVE CASE & THE EMPATHY GAP

SPRING 2014 ISSUE 48

THE DROUTH

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Andrew Tickell

“I don’t want some fucker from Inverness deciding about my life.

Don’t get me wrong.

I’m a wanker, but I’m a Glaswegian wanker.”

It wasn’t exactly the answer I anticipated when I asked the lushed-up Old Soldier why he was voting No in September’s independence referendum. Quite what black encounter with a domineering Highlander prompted this bleak assessment, I couldn’t say, but the sentiment isn’t an entirely unfamiliar one around the central belt. Another character intending to vote Yes chips in, “I see September as the first step in securing the Greater Glaswegian republic.”

Something in the autosyndicalistic commune line, no Edinburghers allowed, its Sudeten logic spiralling out from the dear green place to its spiritual satellites elsewhere in west-central Scotland.

In the last few months, I’ve acquired a distracting symptom: my ears are constantly burning, lugging in to conversations about September’s independence referendum. These overhearings are interesting in part because you can’t write them off as conversations prompted only by the committed constitutional bore or devoted partisan who can’t resist persecuting strangers with political questions.

They’re everywhere: in homes and schools and universities, churches and village halls, football grounds and cafes. Labour’s current line is that “Scotland is on pause”. I can’t agree. If the country isn’t quite in ferment, it’s in a fascinating, uncharacteristic fizz.

Conferences, marches, rallies, meetings, conspicuous Yes buttons at bus-stops, stalls, mass canvassing, hipster piss-ups: tracking the Yes campaign across Scotland isn’t difficult. Unless you fancy spanking your way through Glasgow to the sound of flutes and drums under an Orange banner, want to nip up to a Lanarkshire miners’ club to hear a Labour worthy denounce the perfidy of the Nationalist threat, or are significantly big in the wig to be invited to attend a London ministerial sally north, it’s far more difficult to find any organised life in the No campaign. The snooping social detective, trying to gain some sort of insight into the overlooked lived experiences of unionists in this campaign, would be well-advised to acquire a pith helmet, native guides, an indefatigable mount and weeks of supplies. Similes of seeking needles in haystacks won’t do. The No campaign is like a hay-bail which has been hit by a cyclone, every straw twisting, isolated, in the revolving breeze, disconnected, disorganised.

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“I’m a No voter, but I could be persuaded.

I’m not a nationalist. I don’t like nationalism, politically. It worries me. But I haven’t made up my mind.”

“The point is, we’re everywhere. We’re the majority,” an uninspired but confident No-voting Labour activist explains. Better Together’s troops may be thin on the ground, their campaign sprouting few vigorous offshoots or set-piece encounters, elite, lifeless, charmless and under-engaged, but the Plain People of Scotland have been and still remain unconvinced by minority demands for independence. The polls, though squirming closer, leave the No campaign comfortably in the lead.

Listen closely to the quotidian chatter all around you, and Project Fear’s key activists – Inertia, Caution, Anxiety, Fatalism – continue to work communities up and down the country, from coast to coast.

In the lurid witch-light of a Glasgow casino, disengaged young Fifers in their twenties, complexions a matt tangerine, quaffing potions in neon shades, squint sceptically at Alex Salmond’s “indylite” offering and ask – “what’s the point in that? Keeping the pound, the queen – why bother?”

In a flap, their more indy-sympathetic interlocutor protests, citing coalition tax policy, and social security cuts. They slurp, cynicism unabated, independence clearly one roulette wheel they won’t be taking a turn on.

In the south side of the city, hauf and a hauf laid in, a stringy middle aged character expounds to a Yes-inclined crony, “I’m a No voter, but I could be persuaded. I’m not a nationalist. I don’t like nationalism, politically. It worries me. But I haven’t made up my mind.” And another old boy in another corner, who shares the sentiment but draws a different conclusion entirely, explains to an inquisitive German couple that ‘I’m not naturally a nationalist, but it is purely a political thing now. We seem to think differently, and vote differently. Things have changed so much over the decades. The way that politics are going in England is very —“ A phantom whiff of Nigel Farage’s wax jacket; a wrinkled proboscis. The Germans nod knowingly, benignly curious in their host’s explanations for his unanticipated and recently acquired secessionist tendencies. In another pub in the West End, log crackling in the grate, another speaker explains with vehemence, “I’m from England but I’m not English. I’m British. If we vote Yes, what am I? What am I left with?”

Being a perfidious cybernat myself, professions of faith from new converts to the independence cause tend to strike the ear more pleasingly, but all of this quotidian but earnest chatter is uplifting. It’s the political noise of a country taking itself and its politics seriously. In a memorable turn of phrase which SNP politicians have hastily cannibalised, Jim Sillars has pointed out that between the hours of 7.00am and 10.00pm on the 18th of September 2014, the Scottish people will be absolutely sovereign. In an unremarkable, quiet way, my burning ears suggest that folk are taking that sovereign choice seriously.

For many commentators based outside of Scotland, the thoughtful consideration which people are giving to our political future is at once surprising and mildly disturbing. I spent most of the last four years living and working amid the blond sandstone Edwardiana of Oxford, which consistently threw up evidence of the disunited character of our kingdom, and the complacent and hackneyed misunderstandings of the Scottish political scene which prevail down south.

The characteristic response to revelations about my constitutional sympathies was a scrappy mix of neglect and condescension. I note this in no spirit

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“ARE YOU ENGLISH? ARE YOU ENGLISH?” of rancour or complaint: its social and political implications are far more interesting than that.

Disdainful, left-leaning dons explained that Scottish independence was laughably disreputable. Surely no right-thinking soul would even countenance the idea, and by consequence, the SNP referendum was self-evidently, inevitably doomed from the getgo? From the detached comfort of the Oxbridge college, possessed by its own backbiting and petty provincialisms, Scottish constitutional politics resemble the ridiculous sectarian divisions which gripped Dean Swift’s Lilliput concerning which end of your boiled eggs you ought to crack first at breakfast. Few of these armchair Gullivers have much truck with our Big-Endians. I even found myself wedged beside a royal functionary at dinner – a slight senior serviceman – who was, as one might expect, a pleasant, rather worldly reactionary, who plunked a full beaker of scorn over the idea of self-government. Courageously, I kept mum about where my own passions lay, and circulated the port.

It never seemed to cross his mind that anyone might think differently. Hostility, one can understand. Other responses to the prospect of the break-up of Britain are far weirder.

Another respected English academic appeared to give a lecture on the communist and socialist genealogy of ideals of self-determination in a international law. In the course of his talk, he canvassed a range of contemporary secessionist hot-spots – Quebec, Belgium, Kosovo, Catalonia, South Sudan – I waited in vain. No Scotland. It is difficult to think of any other country in which a smart, educated, engaged soul could give a lecture on movements for self-determination, and fail even to mention the campaign that was and remains posed to break off a full third of Britain’s landmass.

The professor shrugged it off as an incidental and untelling elision. I suspected a deeper and more significant complacency and detachment.

The historian Colin Kidd has written about the idea of “banal unionism”: a unionism that isn’t talked about, fought or argued for, but which prevails in the form of a largely unquestioned, common political sense. If in England, an unreflective and uncritical version of unionism arguably persists, in Scotland, the luxury of taking it for granted has been lost.

Whether or not Scotland votes to separate in the autumn, the commitment of its people to continuing union with the rest of the UK has been revealed as unnervingly provisional. A No vote may well be brought home yet, but it will be a victory won in a crabbit, fretful voice, not in a buoyant, lucid affirmation of a United Kingdom forged from an equal, respectful partnership of peoples. Shed of its onetime authority, the old common sense, it transpires, is not so readily stated.

Any spryness of youth has fallen away from the Old Soldier. Short, tending to stoutness, in his drunkenness he isn’t grandfatherly. An old coat in blotchy pastel blue, shirt and woollen tie, his rheumy eyes two trembling brown pools of heavy, his lined face, beetroot. A small town solicitor now, his NCO stripes have faded, but his experiences in the forces continue to command a profound and passionate allegiance to the British state. “You’re voting Yes?” he barks, incredulously. He squints at me, suddenly suspicious, pulpy aubergine nose inflating: “Are you English? Are you English?” From his tone, it is clear that any confession of Englishness would not be regarded as a virtue. I’m not, I protest. “And you?”

He fixes my comrade with a wet, unsteady eye.

“I’m from Liverpool-”, he begins to explain. The Old Soldier finds his fire: “I don’t want this man to be a foreigner!” he interrupts with feeling, digging a stubby digit into the chest of the visiting Liverpudlian, whose bemusement is mounting.

I explain that if we become independent, I doubt I’d think of my companion as a foreigner either. At least in as much as the term suggests something alien and apart, as opposed to a proximate people, with much in common, who happen to receive their passports from another state bureaucracy. He blinks, taking a good deep prevaricating swig, fuggy brain coming up blank. “But I don’t want this man to be a foreigner!” he repeats, before descending into a furious diatribe about Alex Salmond’s alleged “hatred” of our southern neighbours, peppered intermittently with the forgetful question: “Are you English? Are you English?”

It is an odd, frustrating, but memorable encounter.

We talk past one another, each occupying our respective positions, unmovably. We both lack empathy. The Britishness he professes, misses me.

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I get nothing from it, cannot find myself in it, and cannot feel that independence would deprive us of anything apart from the chains which manacle our choices on taxation, social security and defence to the increasingly narrow, right-wing Westminster consensus. The question on the ballot paper is “should Scotland be an independent country?”

But our respective glosses on that question couldn’t be more different. For the Old Soldier, the question turns on nationalistic passions, on loyalties, ties, identities, and the smuggled-in premise that such identities should be given expression in shared institutions of government. For me, the critical issues are not those of identity, but responsibility and ideology, power and governance. To echo the First Minister, himself lightly paraphrasing the Declaration of Arbroath, in the referendum campaign “it is not for flags and anthems that I fight, but for fairness and compassion.”

The Old Soldier’s logic also has a curious and troubling doubleness to it. The explicit content is a loving we, a fraternal arm slung about the Liverpudlian’s shoulder. The latent content is a bit more disturbing. “What’s wrong with being a ‘foreigner’ anyway?” Is your first reaction on encountering someone from the Irish Republic, or France or Canada, anxiety that they’ve been born under a foreign flag, and owe allegiance to an alien power? I’d love to go out for a pint and be pals, but regrettably, you appear not to be British, so let’s be uncongenial instead. One might try to rescue the better half of his argument while jettisoning its implicit xenophobia, by saying that one has nothing against foreigners: it is not a question of lapsing into something bad through independence, but forgoing something good, abandoning our political unity and at the very least imperilling the shared institutional basis undergirding a sense of Britishness, however ill-defined or thin. It is one of the underappreciated ironies of the referendum campaign thus far that it turns many traditional expectations on their heads. Inattentive and incurious voices in the London media want to paint the pro-independence campaign in woad:

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an atavistic ethnic project whose symbols are the cockade, the claymore and targe, trembling with barely concealed hatred of the English and rejoicing in blood-spattered medieval victories, won on the point of the pike and the prong of the caltrop.

Against the straw warrior of this “narrow nationalism”, the spokesmen of the ancien régime are meant to offer realism and hard-headed and unsentimental calculation. But increasingly, we see these polarities being reversed. While independence supporters strive to secure “powers for a purpose,” the No campaign wants to talk about sentiment, identities, flags and old battles. Over the past few months, coalition ministers have been putting a bit of stick about north of the border, their chorus cry uncertainty, doubt, and prophecies of grave perils for the nation if Scots vote Yes. But increasingly, there’s a waggle of carrot to go with the birch.

It seems that the positive case for the Union is to be British nationalism.

Ed Miliband maintains that the poll comes down to a choice between nationalities, with the none-toosubtle hint that if you feel any residual attachment to Britishness whatever, you should vote agin.

Evoking the “summer that patriotism came out of the shadows and into the sun” in the Olympic stadium in London, and appealing to the “quiet patriots people who love the UK, love our flag and our history,” the Prime Minister has argued that the “best thing about the Olympics wasn’t the winning.

It was the red, the white, the blue.” And that, David Cameron suggests, is a reason to vote No. “Team GB,” – you and I, I think he means – are “the winning team in world history.” This immodest claim, Cameron buttonholes with the ghastly invocation of “brand Britain”, and the mercantile demerits of its defacement. Stick together ‘cos we’ve got loads of Union Jack tat back in the warehouse to sell to credulous Americans. Vote No for the Great British Bake Off, for the retro-retro melted plastic of late-1990s Cool Britannia kitscherie. Jarvis Cocker expects every Scotchman to do his duty. Cameron’s “game-changing” speech also resounded with the rat-a-tat-tat of the infantry column on parade. “Together we’ve got the finest armed forces on the planet,” proclaimed the PM, explaining unselfconsciously that his “love of country” was “about Lord Lovat on the beach on D-Day, the bagpipes playing as his brigade landed ashore. It’s about HMS Sheffield, HMS Glasgow, HMS Antrim, HMS Glamorgan grey ships ploughing through grey seas for 8,000 miles to the Falkland Islands.”

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This is vintage high Tory stuff, old-time patriotism with a bit of Blairite new management bollocks thrown in for the sake of our beloved corporate sponsors. Queen, country, and waddling toy soldiers; grenadiers looking smashing in scarlet and the heavy cavalry in gilt cuirasses. Vote No for the “spirit of the south Atlantic”, super-duper ballistic missiles and the howl of the chanter as the ladies from hell plough into the gushing, encarmined swell, to screams and the staccato report of rifle and machine-gun fire.

Vote No for red post boxes, for rationing, and the elderly Wordsworth, Dad’s Army, Victoria sponges and the cheerful, fluttering bunting of a sun-swollen British summertime. Vote No for the British sausage.

Keep calm and carry on. For the cynical Scottish nationalist a draught of this – by turns mawkish and bellicose – vision of Britishness is likely to be felt an unwholesome, sugary emetic. But there’s no folly more readily committed in politics, or more perilous, than assuming that everybody shares your prejudices.

While just over a quarter of Scots don’t feel British at all, polling suggests that some 74% are prepared to avow some sense of Britishness, though for around 28% of folk, it is a secondary identity of uncertain intensity. For those like my Old Soldier, significant attachment to a British identity is a powerful predictor of a No vote. Opposition to independence amongst those who see themselves as British not Scottish, or more British than Scottish, stands at 91%.

More importantly, amongst the 33% of folk who identify as equally Scottish and British, a thumping great 81% oppose separation. Cameron’s jingoistic vision of jam, Britpop and rifle rounds may not appeal, the disputatious passion of cantankerous old corporals may alienate, but there are many ways to skin the independence cat.

The empathy gap separating me from the Old Soldier worries me. My impulse towards sarcasm worries me. From Better Together’s point of view, the big strategic question is: can British nationalism really bear the weight they hope to put on it?

It turned the Old Soldier’s phizog from scarlet to puce. But how many Old Soldiers are there out there? Can this sort of appeal really pluck on the Scottish heartstrings, tempting waverers away from independence? Ipsos-MORI polling suggests that the tactical thinking appears superficially sound, but the bottom line numbers don’t really come together.

The name may not be familiar, but you’re likely to have come across some permutation of the “Moreno scale” in your time. An attempt to measure national identities where dual loyalties may obtain, the Moreno measure sets the two potential identities against one another, obliging respondents to reject or give priority to one over the other, or in the alternative, hold the pair in perfect balance.

Scottish and British? Scottish more than British?

Or equally both?

A loving young couple, one from the north, another from the south, who met at university and made a life here. The comradely worker, whose business has taken him across the face of the nation, as happy in Newcastle as he is in Glasgow. A twinkle-eyed, no-nonsense Scottish granny with a spice of wit to her looks on as a chortling knot of her grandweans make mischief in a sunblushing spring garden. Their peals of laughter rise in a range of accents: just one of the many branching families which have grown, and unselfconsciously rooted themselves, across the UK.

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