23:59

That Scottish Labour slogan in short: "Vote for us to avoid an illegal referendum which nobody is proposing which we would shoot down immediately." #WinningHere.

Work for you?

On Andrew Neil's Sunday Politics sofa, senior Labour MP and shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Chris Leslie, just told the BBC that his party would block any further independence referendum in the next parliament. Neil suggested to him that #indyrefs remain "reserved matters" under the Scotland Act. "Absolutely," Leslie responded, "there is not a way that we would want to see a repetitious repeating of something that has been decided for a generation." 

A couple of days ago, I asked Scottish Labour leader a fairly simple question: does he or does he not believe that Holyrood has the legal authority to hold another independence referendum? Answer came there none. But Leslie's comments this morning confirm what Mr Murphy would not: the UK Labour Party clearly still believe and maintain that the Scottish Parliament currently does not have the power to hold a second referendum, that Westminster consent is necessary, and that Westminster consent would not be forthcoming in the next five years. No minority Labour government, no majority Labour government, no Tory and no coalition government would currently be prepared to put its name to another section 30 order, along the lines of the text adopted after the Edinburgh Agreement, paving the way for a second poll.

But here's big Jim, still galloping around the country, giving it his "24 hours to save the Union" routine.  “You only have 24 hours to stop a second referendum. The clock is ticking,” a leaked leaflet yelped. "Only Labour can STOP ANOTHER REFERENDUM." Caps lock is,  clearly, cruise control for TERROR.

As his helpful colleague just made clear to Andrew Neil, however, Murphy's threats are all empty. And he knows they are empty. His colleagues south of the border know they are empty. The wisp, the spectre, he hopes to frighten the electorate with has no substance. None of this ought to be news. It echoes Miliband's earlier statements that he would not accept another referendum any time soon.  But if there is zero prospect of a second referendum in this Westminster parliament, how the devil can you make that the central plank of your campaign against the SNP in the last two weeks of the campaign? If you maintain that the Scotland Act - here since 1998 - blocks an independence poll, why on earth do we need Scottish Labour MPs to "stop" it?

Several consequences logically flow from Leslie's comments, none of which seem particularly helpful for the Labour Party.  If you dp want a second referendum at some point in the future, I doubt you'll much appreciate this high-handed talk of "blocking" and permission refused. But then again, January's big plan to "reach out to" those who disagreed with the Labour leadership on the referendum seems to have gone the way of all things already. Instead, democratic socialists are despatching epistles to Tories in their constituencies, while Jim "I have never been a unionist" Murphy hopes to survive in East Renfrewhshire by attracting unionist votes. 

Alternatively, if you are swithering about voting for the Nats because of concerns that a second referendum might result - despite Nicola's repeated denials - you can heed these comments and rest easy. Whether or not you vote for the Labour Party, the Tories, the Liberals or for the SNP, no second referendum will result in this parliament. An SNP vote is risk-free on that score. Even if you disbelieve the First Minister, and sense that plots for a second plebiscite are brewing - Leslie reassures you - the unionist majority in Westminster can and doubtless will ensure that the question cannot be put.  The Union doesn't need the People's Party to save it once again. Constitutional law as already done the trick. Spectre, exorcised. 

If you didn't know better, you'd think that the left hand of the Labour party doesn't know what the right hand us up to. (Or, as one reader just suggested, that left and right hands are busy, fighting each other...)

Yes Vulnerabilities

When I was a teenager, I went through a phase of being much-taken with Stoic philosophy. We'd been exposed to Plato's Republic in school, and largely overlooked Aristotle. The Stoics I chanced across by myself: aphorisms of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. 

One aspect of Stoic thought which particularly appealed to me was its emphasis on the power of ideas to shape our responses to life's inevitable troubles, travails and setbacks. It has become a mantra of contemporary cognitive behavioural therapy, but if you can change how you think about a problem, you are half way to enduring it well. 

I also found adolescent lessons there about being yourself. About the importance of not "staking your happiness on the souls of other men." That isn't to say that goodness, kindliness or the assessment of others are inevitably unimportant - but you shouldn't outsource your self-esteem to other people, making your happiness and equanimity contingent on their good or bad conceits of you. As a nation, the Scots could do with a good deal more of this sort of confidence, which finds its expression not in chippiness, but in generosity, empathy and open-mindedness born of a basic existential security.

I was reminded of this over the weekend, as the Sunday Herald splashed with its decision explicitly to back independence for Scotland. The editorial explaining this decision is an impeccable statement of the now-mainstream case for a Yes vote: self-government, responsibility, democracy, justice. The response from Yes bods was remarkable too. The news stands were stripped. Copies tucked away for posterity. Twitter was ababble with excitable, breathless (even, dare I say, pathetically grateful) responses to the Sunday newspaper's endorsement of independence. 

I don't mean that disrespectfully, but I do think that the enthusiasm of the response cannot be explained in terms of the likely impact of the paper's decision. A more familiar phenomenon in the public debate is independence supporters crowing about the melancholy death of the mainstream media.  How can we explain the sudden overflowing gratitude when a mainstream publishing outfit of the "dead tree press" gives independence-supporters the nod?  

"At last, we see our voices reflected in the mainstream press," a number of folk cheered. But hold up a wee moment. Why should this reflection matter? The obvious answer here is an instrumental one. The media helps set the political agenda. It is a key source of information for voters going into this poll. Sympathetic (or much more numerous unsympathetic) voices matter and have the potential to affect the result. Absolutely.  But only up to a point Lord Copper. And not, to my mind, sufficiently significantly to explain the intensity of the enthusiasm with met Alastair Gray's front page. 

As others have pointed out, the Sunday Herald has a relatively limited circulation in the country (around 24,000 copies), and has been perceived as more than characteristically Yes sympathetic for a while. That said, the paper clearly pitches for a liberal, bourgeois audience. We're talking more about the gender gap these days, but we know from recent polling that the Yes campaign also continues to struggle to make inroads and persuade middle class Scots of the virtues of independence. 

At the very least, the Sunday Herald splash may persuade persuadables who read it to give independence serious consideration.  In a campaign which may be decided on the narrowest of bases, the endorsement of a once crackpot constitutional scheme by an impeccably respectable organ of Scottish opinion is not to be sniffed at. Like the sturdy, sensible SNP government, it helps answer the once-dominant, now embattled, idea that independence is unthinkable, lending the campaign a sort of reputability.  But in terms of the overall result, which side the Sunday Herald supports is really of marginal significance. Instrumental arguments can't explain the glee.

It is tempting to look to broader psychological explanations. Glasgow SNP councillor Mhairi Hunter asked a perceptive question recently. Better Together supporters are acquiring the tendency of getting touchy if challenged, hurt if mocked, and anxious if their views are dismissed without being given earnest consideration. For most Scottish nationalists, this is a familiar phenomenon. Mhairi wondered if familiarity bred contempt.  I wonder too. Their own hides toughened by years (and for some, by decades) of less than convivial or constructive responses to their constitutional ambitions, Scottish Nationalists haven't exactly been primed to respond sympathetically to the sudden sensitivity of their opponents. I've blogged before about my own encounters of this kind, where sympathy for Scottish self-government is written-off as a self-evident absurdity. It puts your back up.

You can respond to these testing experiences in different ways. The first simply repudiates any concern for those judging you critically. You may not take me seriously, but I don't care. I take myself seriously enough for the pair of us, as I'm going to win. I don't give a fig what you will or nil. But that sort of emancipation from concerns about how others see you isn't so easily achieved.  There's a quotation which I think is sometimes attributed to Voltaire, that to be free, all we need do is to wish to be so. There's a bit of truth to that, but liberty can be elusive. And we can grow perversely attached, even to our chains. 

You feel a similar glow when Salmond or Sturgeon does particularly well on the UK stage. A winning interview, an ace appearance on BBC Question Time, a flattering write-up. When the First Minister leathers a UK political worthy, trounces Neil or Paxman, or treads the world stage without looking like an inarticulate, over-promoted city councillor, you feel a sort of glad twinge. Biff. That's one in the eye for you, London establishment. Our man (or woman) can hold her own amongst the best you've got to offer, no bother. It's often struck me that there is a certain dubious logic beneath this wriggle of pleasure. A lack of self-respect which feels, however residually, that you've not really made it till you've made it in London and that our own judgement about whether Salmond or Sturgeon are talented or smart isn't sufficient - they've got to impress the very folk we don't care for and express indifference about for us to feel properly proud. 

It is an odd, ambivalent phenomenon, but not perhaps a unique one. History has known many edgy, lifetime outsiders, who secretly long to don the ribban or the ermine, to be recognised as respectable by the very establishments which they rejected and railed against (and vice versa).  Intuitively, the impulse is to some extent understandable, but it remains somewhat strange. I'm not criticising anyone for it, but the psychology of the Scottish nationalist movement is much more ambivalent and vulnerable than the orthodox Yes story of  confidence, hope and optimism sometimes allows.  Perhaps it speaks to the relative immaturity of our political culture, and the fact that many of our ghosts still walk amongst us, unexorcised. 

Blinded by the Westminster prism...

On the theme of significant political images, yesterday afforded another telling little scene, courtesy of the BBC's midday Daily Politics.  Jo Coburn was sitting in for Andrew Neil and the discussion, understandably, turned to the issue of Scottish independence, and Cameron's jaunt up to Edinburgh to subscribe to the deal.  In an earlier segment of the programme (starting about 7:00 minutes in), Coburn interrogated SNP local government minister, Derek Mackay, about the Nationalist position on a range of topics, opening with the gambit that "the terms of trade have been agreed, but we don't yet have a question.  What would you like the question to be?"

Now, I don't object to this style of interviewing, which poses, as if from a position of ignorance, critical questions, permitting politicians to make their views plain. But I wonder if there might be more to it than this. Coburn then proceeded to put several needling propositions about independence to Mackay, as is her right and indeed, journalistic duty. James Caan shared his unrecognisable, tin-eared interpretation from a position of palpable cluelessness.  Somewhat later in the programme, after a few shots of Cameron bounding up the steps of St Andrew's House, Coburn introduced her panel to "discuss this historic moment".  

A balanced bench of judges, this, consisting of Deputy Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, the Liberal Democrat MP for Solihill, Lorley Burt, and for the Tories, Steve Brine, MP for Winchester.  None of which were, as you can imagine, particularly complimentary about Scottish independence, as is their prerogative.  During this section, she announced, as if it was news to anyone, that the SNP does indeed have a preferred referendum question, squinting down to consult a note, as if she'd only just discovered this from the lips of Derek Mackay. Seasoned Scots political watchers no doubt fell out of their armchairs in shock at this startling revelation.

For the nationalist, the gripe about the political balance of the piece composes itself.  This was like an edition of Scottish Questions in the House of Commons, where the vast majority of participants agree that nationalists are a bemusing cadre, to be reported as the somewhat eccentric, Other, marginalised in the conversation and certainly not to be taken too seriously.  As a representative balance of political opinion on the topic, it was a signal failure.

But bracket the issue about the representativeness of the conversation broadcast. On this critical day in the referendum's progress, it's more than accidental, but significant and telling, that the BBC should cobble together a debate, reflecting not the realities of contemporary Scottish politics, but the old Westminster spectrum of opinion, in which a complete spread of views need only include beams of red, blue and canary yellow.

As someone living down south at the moment, I'm interested in what folk in England make of the process, and what significance, if any, they can see in the referendum for their own vision of politics and of the United Kingdom. I'm keen to hear, from time to time, how pro-federal English Liberals talk about Scottish independence, or listless half-unionists from the Tory benches defend their, often modest, enthusiasm for "keeping Britain together", or the extent to which apparently non-nationalist democratic socialists from the Labour benches account for their universal adherence to the United Kingdom.

I've written before about devolution, and the accelerating social disunion we can already detect, as the political spaces of Westminster and Holyrood - and their attendant reading and broadcasting publics - pull apart. Despite the proliferation of potential sources for the journalist or reader based furth of Scotland, despite the relative ease with which folk can find out more about the emerging sense of a distinct Scottish political space, we don't see a London media showing greater savvy about issues at the core of the referendum debate. Instead, hackneyed imagery of nationalism are endlessly repeated, reportage is dominated by the implications of distinctly Scottish politics on Westminster - isn't it unfair that you charge the English for tuition fees? Why should Scots get free prescriptions, and the English pay?

The binary language of "them" and "us" is often employed, oblivious to the significance of such pronouns, and the presumed audiences they purport to distinguish and address. One doesn't have to be a devotee of Scottish nationalism to recognise this ongoing trend, and the social and political drift which underwrites it. The Spectator's Fraser Nelson, no friend to the SNP, has repeatedly identified the phenomenon of a drift apart in UK public affairs,  Even under devolution, the social union is breaking down, precisely because a shared politics is part of constituting a shared social and public life.

For all of their hostility towards Scottish nationalism, it is ironic that through the exclusions of their reporting, and the projection of Scottish politics as a foreign vale, populated by curious natives whose political convictions refuse neatly to fit into the categories of Westminster-centric political analysis, these self-same London-based media outfits foster a critical sense of difference, and reinforce the boundaries between UK and Scottish constitutional and political space, by increasingly seeing and writing and talking about Scotland as if it were a foreign country, covering Scottish stories as they might developments in France, or German politics. To put it another way, albeit unwittingly, the unionist UK media are helping to create the conditions which Salmond was able to exploit yesterday, making Cameron look like a foreign dignitary, rather than a Prime Minister on his own turf. I'm reminded again of Michael Ignatieff's description of political life in Canada, and the effect of the divergent political conversations happening in Quebec, and the rest of the country:

“The problem here is that we don’t have anything to say to each other any more. There’s a contract of mutual indifference which is very striking for someone of my generation ... Now effectively – effectively – we’re almost two separate countries."

This already looks like a recognisable and escalating feature of the relationships between the "London centre" and the "devolved periphery" to me.  What is interesting, too, is that you find curious and telling manifestations of this sort of feeling everywhere, beyond the papers, the news bulletins and discussion programmes. I recently attended an otherwise engaging lecture in Oxford.  The (English) academic in question was keen to subvert the (pervasive) idea that the international recognition of a right of peoples to self-determination was rooted in Wilsonian idealism in the wake of World War II.  The speaker was keen, instead, to promote an alternative genealogy of self-determination, rooted not in American liberalism, but instead in communist and socialist political history. 

To underline the significance of his study, he listed several "independence struggles" for self-determination from across the world.  Quebec warranted a mention, as did the Catalans and the Basques., along with Palestine and the Chechens. I waited for the S-word.  His longish list ended, and he moved on, having identified, as he saw it, all the important examples of self-determination which his audience might be interested to consider. I sat, at once astonished, and on another level, hardly surprised, that the independence movement on his own doorstep, imminently imperilling the integrity of his own state, didn't seem to warrant inclusion.

Looked at abstractly, this is profoundly strange omission, and reflects remarkable complacency on his part. When I challenged him about the domestic gap in his account, he shrugged it off as an accidental exclusion, a meaningless oversight, and not to be read too much into.  I was unconvinced. The absence of Scotland from this English lawyer's imagination was not incidental, but tells us a good deal about how a sense of understanding about Scotland is circulating (or not) within the UK, despite his considerable resistance to seeing it that way.

In what other state but the United Kingdom is it even conceivable for smart, highly-educated scholar of self-determination, listing significant instances of his topic, not to think of secessionary movements within his own borders immediately, not first, not second - but not at all?