19th September, 2014

On the 19th of September 2014, I wrote a piece entitled “under the low sky.” It is an evocative line – stolen – from a book I read years ago about the experience of living in the Netherlands, where the horizon presses down on you, without the thrown elbows of mountains to keep it at bay. But the phrase seemed apt to the slate-grey Glasgow afternoon which the indyref left in its wake, and the half-throttled sense of sadness I felt, as the long day wore on, accumulating sorrows. 

Unlike many folk, I felt no real hope or anticipation that the Yes campaign would carry the day two years ago.  Defeat, even a narrow defeat, seemed almost inevitable. When Clackmannanshire declared, the night was already dead for me. I know some folk waited and waited up, in hope and expectation, but Don Quixote’s horse had already been shot out from under him. Sancho Panza was floating, face down, in the Clyde. Being right wasn’t much of an emotional salve, it transpired. 

As the Orcadians said No, I escaped from Pacific Quay into the cold but fresher night air, as the wind chased down the currents of the river and the BBC building behind me fizzed and sweltered and thronged. Big Kevin McKenna, built like a Renaissance cardinal, was sucking a sanguine cigarette outside. We talked, briefly, only to be interrupted by the jubilant figure of Margaret Curran. I remember the Labour MP did a kind of jinking danse macabre as the majority No vote accumulated, a sort of hirpling Scottische. You shouldn’t begrudge your opponents their successes, I suppose. But that little jig. I’ll never, ever – quite – be able to forgive Margaret Curran for her little jig. 

(Though I suppose, as the saying goes, she’s not jigging noo. “Even victors are by victories undone.” In the aftermath of the 2015 general election, I happened to bump into the former Scottish Labour MP in a pub in Oxford during a flying visit. Sauntering past her as she walked in to the Lamb and Flag, I was stunned to hear myself say “You’re Margaret Curran. Tell me. How are you bearing up?” As luck would have it, Curran clearly had no idea who I was, or any clue about my separatist politics. I left her with a kind word, undisabused, as an apparently sympathetic Scotsman, safely south of the wall.)

But back in Pacific Quay, in the early hours of the 19th of September 2014, Margaret was still jigging. I decided to leave before the emotion of the moment overtook me, and I said something I might come to regret. Abandoning all hope of securing a friendly cab out of there, I made my escape on foot, marching out along the banks of the river, an unsteady, half-gralloched figure, lurching between sorrow, rage and resignation. 

My company for the first part of this journey – perhaps curiously – was Adam Tomkins. The Glasgow law professor was cutting his way along from the BBC towards Better Together’s victory party in the Hilton, where the corks were already popping.  Adam behaved with all the kindliness and consideration you could expect from a political opponent at their moment of victory – much more, really. The balance of the way home I spent alone, eyes stinging, bitter, sad. I turned in, and slept a dull sleep without dreams. It is only election night I’ve been unable to see through. 

I’ve never known at atmosphere like the one I woke up to in Glasgow the next day. The result hung over everything. It leached all the social colour from the day. The weather provided an obligingly grim backdrop. The gloom was general. I live in the south side of the city, Nicola Sturgeon’s constituency. The Yes vote prevailed here - one of the few reassuring things about the immediate aftermath of the poll. The national picture may have been disappointing, but amid everything else, at least you read your own community correctly. 

I sat in a pub. I watched Alex Salmond resign before a dumb room, eyes all fixed on the telly. A man ordered another double shot of strong liquor. A fourth pint suddenly seemed wise.  And for those drinkers who quietly concluded that independence wasn’t a sure bet, who voted no? It was a scene of victory without jubilation. It must have been an odd experience. An unseen hand kept squeezing away at my throat. I made rash promises to myself that I’d never write about Scottish politics again. That I was done with it all. I might take up something wholesome like gardening instead, or skydiving. Half an hour later, I’d written this blog. It is often a painful – even embarrassing – thing to rake back over your old prose. This, at least, evoked the experience I remember. 

I am not one of life's joiners, despite my partisan inclinations. I'm not a marcher.  I didn't find myself, politically, during the indyref. I am a crappy and a complacent activist. An inactivist, essentially. The experience didn't transform my ideas of politics. But like many folk of my generation, it was, and remains a profoundly important - even seminal - moment from which it will be difficult to escape for some time to come. Whether or not we revisit the national question later rather than sooner, the autumn of 2014 will cast a long shadow for decades. But where are we now, two years on? Whither now, for the calculating Scottish nationalist with the long view? It has all become tremendously complicated. I wish I could see my way through it all more clearly.

The Little Engine That Couldn't

Choo, choo. At the risk of repeating myself, we really have to nail this one down: the Scottish Government does not have the legal power to take railways into any kind of public ownership. There aren't shades of grey here. There aren't knotty legal complexities. It is clear as day. Clear, apparently, to everybody except the new leader of the Labour Party. 

Interviewed by Gary Robertson on BBC Good Morning Scotland this morning, Jeremy Corbyn decided not to retreat from the inaccurate charges he laid at the door of the Scottish Government last Sunday. Instead, he chose to reiterate and elaborate on his allegations (from 02:40:00 in). And it is sorry, sorry stuff.

Robertson: "You also said on Sunday that they [the SNP] were behind the privatisation of ScotRail. Do you accept that that was wrong?" 

Corbyn: "No I don't think it was wrong at all, because I think - again - they could have taken a different option and could have pushed for public ownership rather than handing it over to the Dutch public." 

Robertson: "But that was about - again - that was about the franchise, wasn't it? Their argument is that in 1993, that was when ScotRail was privatised." 

Corbyn: "The franchise, yes. But I do think they had a choice, and they could have exercised it to ensure that ScotRail remained - or, er turned, rather - into full public ownership. Surely that would be a much better way of doing things. And indeed the Labour policy, overall, is to return the franchises and the rail operating companies into public ownership, so that we all get the benefits of the rail service and the profits that go with it."

This is a mess. Actually, it is worse than a mess: it is a sleekit politician's answer. And worse, I'm afraid, it is a lie. So let's strip it all back to basics. If Holyrood passes legislation which "relates to reserved matters", the law is void. If Scottish ministers act beyond their powers, they behave unlawfully and a costly and damaging trip to the Court of Session beckons. If we rummage through Schedule 5 of the Scotland Act 1998, which sets out these reserved matters, we find the "provision and regulation of railway services". Holyrood can't change the Railways Act of 1993. 

And it is the 1993 Railways Act which sets out the legal process for tendering rail passenger services. This was the instrument of rail privatisation - not the Scottish Government's October 2014 decision to award the new tender to the Dutch company, Abellio. Only Westminster can change the rules. And what do we find in section 25 of the 1993 Act? Oh look. A provision which says - clear as day, black and white - that "public sector operators" can't be rail franchisees. And how are we defining public sector operators? That is any company or subsidiary which is majority owned by ministers, or civic government. That test binds the Scottish Government. That seems to catch the kind of operation Mr Corbyn has in mind. 

The new Scotland Bill finally proposes to tweak the Railways Act to make it clear that, in future, section 25 will not "prevent a public sector operator from being a franchisee in relation to a Scottish franchise agreement." In future, a "people's Scotrail" will be possible, in Scottish Labour's campaigning phrase. This is well and good: a positive development which will allow the merits and demerits of a public sector bid to be explored during the next round of tenders. But on the 8th of October 2014, the Scotland Bill was a dim speck of light on the horizon. 

On the 8th of October 2014, Lord Smith of Kelvin hadn't even held his first meeting with party representatives to negotiate the next stage of devolution. There was no timetable to change the tendering rules, no legislative proposal being scrutinised. Just wooly aspirations, a Tory government and a Labour party dragging its feet on the future powers of the Scottish Parliament. Until the ink was dry on Smith, and the Bill had been introduced, it was anything but clear whether Holyrood would be empowered to consider the kind of public sector bid the new Labour leader understandably favours.

But don't believe me. I refer you to the analysis of Kezia Dugdale's predecessor as Scottish Labour leader, Jim Murphy, who blogged that he wanted to:

“... see better, cheaper public transport. The Smith Agreement means we can have a ScotRail that is serving commuters, not shareholders. The current ScotRail franchise sees money going straight from the public purse to shareholders pockets. The incoming one will see Scottish public money support transport infrastructure in Holland. Neither deal is the best deal for Scotland when commuters are waiting on late running services, paying over inflated fares whilst being squeezed against train doors on overcrowded journeys. The best deal for Scotland is a People’s ScotRail, a railway company whose commitment is not to a group of shareholders or a foreign Government, but to the people of Scotland.”

The merits of a public sector bid are one thing. But even the People's Scottish Jim for Scotland - not averse to throwing any old brickbat at the SNP - recognised that what he wanted to do with the railways wasn't yet legal. Even Mr Murphy declined to slag off the Scottish government for failing to do something which the law prevents them from doing. And yet, given a golden opportunity to clarify his remarks - in the interests of straight talking and honest politics - Mr Corbyn doubles down on his wrong-headed claims. 

So taking all of that into account, a few questions. In what sense, Mr Corbyn, could the Scottish Government "have taken a different option" on rail franchising? What "choice" of "full public ownership" did the law give them? Are you seriously suggesting that failing to convince the UK parliament to change the law amounts to an SNP privatisation agenda in all but name? Does that seem fair to you? Do you think most people, listening to your interview, would have understood this was really what you meant? Or do you think the half-attending average punter would be left confused and deceived by your remarks?

You began by suggesting the SNP privatised the railways. Now that has morphed into a claim that they could have considered a public sector bid, but failed to do so, which was bad. But a thorough examination of the law shows us that the parliament in which you sit made it legally impossible for Scottish ministers to entertain the public sector bid you desire. The Scotland Bill, currently going through the parliament in which you sit, underscores the point and fatally undermines your argument. So in what sense did the SNP privatise the railways? Oh dear Jeremy. Straight talking, honest politics my foot. 

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can, said the Little Engine That Could. But thinking doesn't make it so. 

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...)

Notes on "Defcon F*****d"

Believe it or not, in Inverness Nairn Badenoch and Strathspey in the general election of 2010, Danny Alexander's primary challenger was the Labour Party. The Liberal Democrat secured just shy of 41% of the vote in the Highland seat (19,172) while his Labour challenger Mike Robb took 10,407 to John Finnie's (SNP) 8,803. This time out, Alexander faces Drew Hendry for the Nats, while Labour have given Mike Robb a second crack at the seat.  

But given the history of the constituency, its Holyrood voting behaviour, and the failure of the Scottish Labour Party to pitch beyond urban (and increasingly west-central) Scotland, few folk will be expecting Danny Alexander to be unseated by the representative of the People's Party. Robb will hope to run his opponents close, and to build on his solid 2010 performance to make it a three-way race, but Ashcroft's February poll suggests that he has already been pushed into a distant third.

Those of you watching even snippets of the STV and BBC Scotland debates these past two evenings will have been struck by the vehemence with which the old Better Together coalition representatives went hunting for Nicola. And no surprise. The SNP is the only political party which can really be said to be in contention in every single seat in Scotland. Aberdeenshire to the Borders, Dundee to west central Scotland, everyone up there with Sturgeon has something to lose. Everyone, everywhere, has colleagues and comrades, with a Nat potentially nipping at their heels. The same cannot really be said of Labour, defending their redoubts, or the Tories, trying to shore up Mundell and hoping to give the ailing Liberal Democrats a kicking in Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk. 

Whatever your view of the national question, Nicola was always going to have a big, beaming target on her back. And despite the rough handling and the multiple angles of fire, she held up well.

Deprived of the relative security of a proportional electoral system, first past the post ratchets up the stakes. It forces the candidates - as if they needed any encouragement - to fight like rats in a sack. The risks and rewards of failure are far greater. Think of it this way. If Holyrood had been elected in 2011 solely on the basis of who won in the Holyrood constituencies, the SNP would have won 53 of 73 seats (73%) on the basis of 45% of the votes. Labour would have been reduced to just 15 seats in the chamber (21%), despite attracting 32% of constituency votes. The Blair years tell a similar story. 

Other first past the post systems throw up parallel calamities and triumphs, as marginal winners win big, and marginal losers get decimated. The mild folk of Canada have been particularly ferocious in this respect. In the federal election of 2011, the Liberal Party under Michael Ignatieff went into the poll with 77 MPs in the Canadian House of Commons, crashing to just 34. That was as nothing compared to the party's fate in 1984, when the Liberals lost 73% of their parliamentary delegation, falling from 147 to just 40 MPs. The Liberals paid their opponents back in kind in 1993, however, when the Progressive Conservatives conspired to lose 99% of their ridings, belly-flopping from the heights of 169 seats to just two. 

Even the disheartened Scottish Labour MP, complaining of "being set to Defcon f****d", must concede that their own predicament isn't quite so dire -- yet.  But first past the post can be like like Saturn: it devours its own children.    

Conflict aversion

"Do you think it's really wise, putting your head above the parapet like this? I just don't understand why you do it." It is the opening gambit in a curious, but now familiar, conversation which I've had a couple of times with folk over the course of the referendum campaign. Both were confident, articulate, committed Yes voters, working in the public sector. Both had internalised, if not outright aversion to expressing their political preferences in public, then a distinct anxiety about finding themselves embroiled in any sort of overt, public disagreement. 

For them, politics was a matter for convivial rage down the pub, amongst friends, or outraged but private newspaper consumption. Their politics only really activated in the secret, individual communion with the ballot box. For them, to nail your colours visibly and unrepentantly to the mast is also to lob a torch carelessly into the powder magazine: you burn your boats. After all, Scotland is a small country. You never know what's coming down the line, and what powerful figure might in future put a black spot against your name for your mutinies against their constitutional preferences. Far better, far more circumspect, to keep your burning passions for the dining table and the snug, and to vote Yes discreetly on the 18th of September. Nothing ventured: something potentially gained.  Belt and braces.

Some of this can be explained by a safety-first interpretation of rational self-interest. But I wonder if there isn't a wider cultural point about a Scottish discomfort with public political disagreement which the referendum process has revealed. One hackneyed account of Scotland sees us as a belligerent, in-your-face nation, at home in a habitat of conflict. A flyting tribe of impatient Groundskeeper Willies, bubbling over with antipathies, irreverent, thrawn and not feart to fall into controversy.  Given the trembling unease which has characterised the referendum campaign, and real discomfort about the idea of ordinary folk becoming engaged in politics, you've got to wonder how much truth there really is in the Cowardly Lion's play of dauntless courage.

Many folk don't like conflict, even, or perhaps especially, a conflict of ideas. Having loitered around in academic circles for some time, you internalise a sort of ease with conceptual disputes. You know that if a colleague or a friend vigorously dissents from some argument or idea that you've advanced: it's probably nothing personal. And if you are a switherer like me, some of these exchanges will undoubtedly have prompted you to revise your thinking, nudging you into looking at the universe at a slightly different angle. Other points, nothing will move you from. But the process can knock the rough edges from off your arguments, sharpening them up, pairing back your impassioned exaggerations and opening a window into other perspectives. Being open to this kind of critical process is something I try hard to kindle in my students.

But outside of these kinds of environments, I've often found that folk get tremendously invested in their ideas. They stitch them through themselves. To disagree with someone can feel like a sort of personal attack, met not with open-minded confidence, but with defensive measures. The tone can easily turn got-at and snarky. In the campaign, we've seen a fair bit of this kind of anxiety. The No campaign has been haunted by imaginary oppressors, and in the absence of any credible bully-boy tactics, has expended a remarkable amount of emotional energy into the verruca gnome that is the "cybernat". 

Last night, to end an admirably steered, engaged, informed and thoughtful BBC Scotland referendum debate in Inverness, a member of the audience reprised the divided Scotland meme. Won't the referendum leave families torn apart by conflict, divisions and discord? Won't we need some wet-eyed member of the clergy to tour the country, laying on hands, comforting the ailing and the distressed? Some elements of the No campaign favour a similar argument, implying that to have the referendum at all represents an ugly and indefensible act of strife to inflict on the nation. Things can only get bitter, they lament, regretfully. Over at the Scottish Review today, that corner of the interweb where Scotsmen of a certain antiquity repair to bemoan the fate of the nation, Kenneth Roy takes up the theme, concluding:

... I have begun to feel like an alien myself. There are days when Scotland – a country in which I have spent all of my life without a thought of ever leaving it – is barely recognisable from the Scotland of my memory and affections.

We have a tradition of the stairheid rammy. I have always liked the idea of the stairheid rammy. In actuality or merely in print, it is a way of letting off steam, is soon over, does not involve a long journey home, and seldom brings with it damaging long-term consequences. 

The new Scotland is different. It is increasingly difficult to care which side – Yes or No – is more responsible for the ugliness of the present mood. What matters is how it is tearing us apart. The debate, if one must dignify it with that lofty description, has gone beyond 'robust', the word of choice of those who excuse it. It's simply vicious. The men of God are right. The scars will not be easily healed.

But fear not. The new aliens in our midst, people like me, will not be attacking Scotland. We are too repelled and ashamed to do anything very much. Like the fairies at the foot of the garden and the UFOs outside the big house, we are essentially harmless.

Jeezo. Given the civility and respectfulness of almost all of the debate about our constitutional future, given the high passions and the strong views which rightly characterise it, there's something pitifully spineless about this aversion to active citizenship and - let's face it, fairly mild - political conflict. You wonder what folk like Roy would do in a situation of more profound factionalism and animosity, if they are reduced to trembling aspic by this exemplary political process. 

Weren't things much less ugly, more dignified, more consensual, when we suffered quietly, kept our politics between ourselves and the ballot box, and the people stoutly upheld the dignity of the stoic and took their radishing with good grace and their mouths shut? Whichever way you intend to vote in the referendum, there's something down-heartening about the uptight longing for the days, when we railed pointlessly about politics in private, and took no action to transform it in public. I've written before about the perils and challenges of talking past one another. There's doubtless an empathy gap in this referendum, and a tendency on both sides to overlook the ambivalences which characterise many people's feelings on the constitutional question.

But the old republican villain, Niccolo Machiavelli, had good things to say about the utility of conflict in political systems. He pointed to ancient Rome, for example, contending that the episodes of strife between the people and the senate helped to keep both honest, and ensured that the liberty of the people was better upheld. Conflict can be uncomfortable and yes, potentially divisive. But we disagree, and if we keep our gobs shut, we're only disavowing the importance of our political beliefs, and awarding victory to the party who is better at smuggling their political ideas in quietly, as inevitability or common sense. That's making a desert and calling it peace.

 

The utter chicken-heartedness of the idea that you get a better kind of democracy by just keeping your head down disgusts me.

If this kind of politics troubles you, grow a spine.

Nigel's Big Day Out

Nigel is a passionate Highlander. He likes current affairs. He follows politics. He cares deeply about the outcome of the referendum. As good luck would have it, he discovers that Britain's flagship current affairs show is coming to his home town.  Now's the moment, he thinks, to take my case for independence to the British people. Here's the ideal stage, to make my heartfelt case for the United Kingdom to change utterly.

Sitting quietly in the draughty hall as the first few questions are asked and answered, he waggles his hand with increasing urgency, bursting to speak, desperate to catch Dimblebumble's wandering gaze. At last, the ancient compère's eye alights upon him. "You sir," he says. Nigel's gorge rises. His heart pumps, eyes dazzle. At last, he finds his voice, uncertain at first, but then growing in vigour and conviction. He speaks:

"I am born in Inverness. I am a passionate Highlander. And I love Scotland. And I will take a stand to break up this United Kingdom. I will give my life for my country as my grandfather did in the First World War, and his brother Charlie. Highland Regiment! Scottish Army! I am Scottish forever. We will never, never change. We will end this Union, in the name of Jesus. I will break - if it's my own life - I will break up this country with my blood."

Afterwards, he feels cleansed, like he's got something off his chest. The volcanic energies which had been building up in him - temporarily released. Resolving to carry on with his struggle for independence tomorrow, he says a prayer for the departed souls of his grandfather and his brother. That night, he sleeps soundly. "The sleep of the just," he thinks to himself, as he stirs, cheerful and refreshed the next day. A wan sun shines early that morning. A sign that the man upstairs is not displeased, he thinks fondly, as he deposits the kettle on the aga and waits for it to bubble with a welcome peal.

The first sign that all was not well was the incessant ringing of the land line. It starts after breakfast. Usually, the phone's grating trill only disturbed the peace one or twice a week. Now that terrible grating sound bounced endlessly through his cottage. When he gingerly plucked up the receiver, it was little better. Hectoring voices - journalists' voices - at the end of the line. "Are you prepared to answer some questions, Nigel?" "Would you care to comment on your hateful outburst, Nigel?" "Nigel, would you say you are a blood and soil nationalist?" "Where do you hope to be martyred for Scotland, Nigel?" "Does Jesus tell you to do anything else, Nigel?" "Do you use twitter or facebook, Nigel?"

He never lets them beyond the first or second question, planting the receiver down firmly, double-pressing the button at the back to make sure he'd cut off the call. But he couldn't disconnect the line entirely, or just let the phone ring out. His sister might call, or a neighbour, needing something urgently. So he sits, answering each time, each time reluctantly cutting short the ringing. It was around this time that the men arrive outside of his cottage. They seem to be carrying some sort of camera equipment. They skirt the house. He ignores them. Tourists probably, he thinks, on a walking holiday. Nervous he sits in his kitchen, answering the phone, bemusement mounting, drinking cup and after cup of tea. The milk runs out. He can't take tea without milk. He's been taking milk in his tea since his schooldays down in the big city.

A run to the shop, he thinks. Just what I need to clear my head and get me away from this confounded phone. A paper too, perhaps. Yes, definitely a paper. To keep abreast of the affairs of the day, he thinks, as his old father used to say when cracking his morning eggs and reading the financial section of the Times with a judicious merchant's eye. Donning gilet and tie, spruce, he steps out into the sunshine. A burst of photography. Flash, flash, flash. Brighter than the sun.

The tourists, he thinks, shielding his eyes, hurrying into his clapped out old landrover. Just an eagle. Or a deer. The keys won't fit in the ignition - just too much tea, the trembling hands, he thinks - more milk, more milk. With a scoosh of relief, the key sinks home and turns. The engine coughs into life. He pulls out of the driveway and scuds down the single-track road, the gravel thrumming of the ancient engine somehow reassuring.

He didn't expect to see his own face - his image - burning out of the front pages. "NATIONALIST ACTIVIST IN BLOOD AND SOIL ROW" "HATEFUL CYBERNAT INVADES BELOVED BRITISH TV INSTITUTION WITH SEPARATIST THREATS" "I'LL DIE FOR SCOTLAND, SNP LUNATIC WARNS" "JESUS: HE'S NOT THE MESSIAH, HE'S A VERY BLOODY SEPARATIST."

The keys fell with a dull clatter from his numb, trembling hands. His temples throb. Back in Nigel's cottage, the phone rings incessantly. Another dazing burst of photography erupts from nowhere. Nigel shields his rheumy eyes, barely able to focus. Milk, he thinks, milk, trying to keep hold of something tangible - to keep the thread - as he lollops into the local shop, pulling his wax hat down low over his brow.

Miles south, in Glasgow, Rob Shorthouse puts the finishing touches to his press release in the Better Together HQ, crackling with unveiled glee."The Yes campaign has hit a new low. This kind of language is completely unacceptable but all too common from those trying to break up Britain. The mask has slipped. The true face of the separatist movement is revealed. Salmond must act. We will consider referring these hateful and sinister comments to the proper authorities." In Hope Street, a nervous Yes Scotland official reassures the skeptical reporter on the other end of the line that Nigel is a lone eccentric and not really part of the campaign at all.

In newspaper offices across the land, in a fug of instant coffee and perspiration, time-taxed hacks squabble over whether "Cybernat" should be capitalised and put in inverted commas in their copy. Bored journalists phone around old work colleagues and neighbours for choice anecdotes about how Nigel always seemed like a nutter liable to leak his bodily fluids in pursuit of independence.

Peals of laughter rise from Scottish political staff in the Telegraph, Daily Mail and the Express as they gleefully put the boot in with thundering editorials about the evil spirits unleashed by this referendum and the "dark heart" of the case for separation. Labour press officers ponder creative ways to link a lone Highland weirdo to the First Minister's office. "Have they ever met? Can we find out?" Paul Sinclair rubs his hand, as he sits down to write Johann Lamont's script for FMQs. "This'll be an easy week," he thinks, gratefully.

And Nigel sits in his cottage, with the lights off, curtains pulled, phone tolling a constant judgment. He never did buy a paper that morning. Or the next.

Feart

Back in 2011, the Flying Rodent composed this majestic diatribe, detailing a doer's guide to Concern Trolling. The target of the Rodent's ire was a rash of reports and articles in the UK media, which represented its authors as embattled truth-tellers, "shouted down" by the PC mob and silenced by illiberal liberal elites, inimically hostile to the unsayable, plain, old-fashioned common sense which the hacks and politicians imagine they espouse. 

Nigel Farage has become a past-master of this dual strategy, assuming the mantle of both the Plain Fellow and the Victim. I marvel every time I hear an earnest right-wing gob-jobber on Question Time insisting that "we can't talk about immigration in this country," having spent half of the BBC's flagship politics show, speculating on the extent to which Romanians are lifting the colostomy bags of British grannies, or offering up distorting and racist accounts of crime statistics. 

Whatever pinko censor is responsible for keeping this stuff off the British airwaves is either grossly incompetent, or the forces of reaction's most effective third columnist. As suppression-tactics go, the liberal tyranny which rules us needs sent to Pyongyang for retraining. We seem to hear and see a remarkable quantity of the "unsayable" in the popular media, yet its free availability does nothing to diminish its proponents' sense of themselves as gallant counter-cultural warriors, embattled but determined to make the truth heard, as they see it.  

The lesson? Bullshit fantasies of victimisation have their compensations and pleasures. And the frisson of ressentiment is all the more enjoyable, if you don't actually have to suffer or forgo anything to enjoy your sense of being hard done by. Being "shouted down" is far more satisfactory, it seems, while having your views projected, unchallenged, on the front pages of the national press. Surveying a range of articles cast in these terms, the Rodent concluded:

"I notice the single common factor to each piece (I'll paraphrase, since the Times is paywalled) in that almost every one - report, leader, opinion piece - starts with the premise that the topic is taboo; that discussing it in racial/religious terms opens the speaker up to malicious attacks from the Politically Correct mob; that, in short, the Times isn't allowed to discuss this stuff in these terms. Wait a minute, I think.  You're the nation's paper of record, and you're telling your readership that you're not allowed to report on the things which you are in fact reporting on, in the specific terms in which you're reporting upon them? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense."

Roused from my slumber at dawn on Friday, I agreed to go on Kaye Adams' Morning Call programme on BBC Radio Scotland, to discuss President Obama's faltering endorsement of a "united" Britain. As it transpired, I spent much of my speaking time, responding to a couple of callers claiming that the Yes side of the argument was "shouting down" those committed to continuing Union. 

Earlier in the show, I'd suggested that Obama had lost the redemptive veneer of his first election. No JFK (and the ghastly JFK was no JFK either), the President is now a figure tarnished by the challenges and compromises of office. Not all of this is the President's fault. But whatever his views on Scottish independence, and whatever his assessment of the best outcome from the perspective of American security interests, Obama now cuts a diminished figure. I doubt very much whether his remarks will weigh with many of us on the 18th of September, as we puzzle over which way to cast our ballots, one way or the other. 

Despite the First Minister's pitch-perfect response to Obama's comments, (and my own concerted attempt to be reasonable), Kaye's No callers proved conspicuously attached to the idea that folk of my constitutional persuasion were somehow bullying or unjustly muting dissenters. Despite. You know. Their own opportunity to express their sentiments on national radio. And. Um. The fact that the President of the United States' comments appeared on just about every front page in the country. And. Er. The daily grind of independence-hostile front-pages, news content, reportage and opinion columns. Clearly, opposition to independence is the one political cause in this country which dare not speak its name for fear and trembling. We can only conclude that the pinko censor, charged with keeping immigration off-topic in the UK press, has been transferred to the Yes Scotland office.

Just this weekend, a series of articles in the press harp on the same string. The Times has a piece on unionist artists being bullied mute by thuggee nationalist sculptors and the unevidenced threats and menaces from secessionist choreographers. That notoriously thin-skinned band, stand-up comics, are apparently feart of broaching referendum controversy at this year's festival in Edinburgh.  My heart bleeds.  I suppose they'll be forced into retelling their "edgy" rape jokes instead.  You know: something less controversial. Just the latest, tragic victims of our bilious and bile-spattered referendum campaign.

Hardly a week goes by, without some new tale of a No voter having their misplaced anxieties - and I'm afraid, their cowardice - indulged by sympathetic media outfits, doing their darnedest to convince us that this poll - this model of participative democracy, this civil, invigorating campaign - is something dark and terrible, rending the country apart. In its worst excesses, this construction of the referendum betrays an unseemly relish for the wildly remote prospect of blood on the tiles. 

The underlying message of this commentary is hardly subtle: to hold a referendum represents an irresponsible, civility-curdling outrage: no reasonable soul could honourably agitate for separation. This control-freakery is fundamentally hostile to the democratic spirit in which this referendum is being conducted, sprouting from the bottom up, drafting a new generation of active citizens to crack open and blow a gust of fresh air through the dusty, reverent halls of politics as usual. 

Participative democracy is scrappy, untidy, and frequently impolite. Social media transforms anyone with a keyboard and an opinion into a publisher and commentator. You can, if the mood takes you, fire up Twitter and pour a vial of wrath over leading politicians you disagree with. It won't always be edifying or even instructive, but the opportunity to do so challenges the old stultifying deferences, separating the communicators and those communicated to, and the division of power and roles which this implies. 

Too often, we lack empathy with our opponents. It would be a better country, if more folk could see and understand where those who take a different tack on the constitution are coming from, not least because empathy is the best weapon. But let's keep a sense of proportion, and remember the value of an open society. Uncritically reporting baseless fears is innuendo, plain and simple, even if the anxieties are sincerely felt.

I know a number of folk on both sides, who have been reluctant to participate publicly in the constitutional debate for a range of reasons. Some are protecting their public standing and reputation. Others are trying to ride the two horses at once, anxious not to find themselves getting too publicly embroiled with the loser. Still more are determined in their constitutional views, but pretty lukewarm in them, and reluctant to become the face of one campaign, or the other. We each of us must make our own judgements on this score. But how we understand and construct that reticence is critically important.

"Shouting down" is becoming one of the referendum campaign's irregular verbs: I disagree with you. You shout me down. Alex Salmond behaves like Kim Jong-il. To explain to someone that you regard their case as unconvincing or wrong-headed is not shouting them down. To reject somebody's argument is not to "silence" them. Delusions of victimisation have their emotional compensations, but they disfigure our politics. To repackage disagreement as oppression is to do a fundamental disservice to the democratic process. People who disagree can be disagreeable. Argument can be uncomfortable. But if you feel tempted to regard that as the end of civilisation and the death of democracy, your democratic muscle needs serious toughening. 

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. 

Fiat Justicia, Pereat Some Badly-Written-Wummin

A: "I'm a lawyer."
B: "Oh? What sort of thing?"

A: "Mostly criminal defence work. These days."

B: "I don't know how you do it."

A: "Do what?"

B: "Defend people like that. Criminals. People who do awful things. Aren't you worried, if you get them off, that they'll be free to do something terrible to yet another innocent person? Representing them, even if you believe - even if you know - they're guilty? I couldn't do it..."

This is a grim party staple. The sort of thing you resort to, when the flint of conviviality isn't striking, and there's no light or heat in the conversation. It also tends, in my experience, to solicit boring but worthy answers from the glazed lawyer, who listens to the questions with a mounting attitude of resignation, grasping stoutly for the claret glass to get them through it. Everyone is entitled to a defence. Fair trials, terrifically important. Not for me to judge. Rhubarb, rhubarb.

This predictable question is at the heart of the BBC's predictable new legal drama, The Escape Artist.  And like the droopy party chat which it takes as its inspiration, The Escape Artist is numbingly dreary.  The Artist in question is Will Burton, played by David Tennant.  Burton is a thriving junior barrister, renowned for his surprising defences in hopeless cases: a trimmer, less charming Rumpole figure, without the Wordsworth and the termagant spouse in She-Who-Must-be-Obeyed.  

Yes, Burton may be guilty of working too hard at his legal practice, and neglecting his wife and wean a bit, but he is surrounded by a cardboard cut-out Happy Family. They might as well come with a dotted line in red across their throats with the instruction "cut here".  Burton's saccharine and colourless domestic bliss is upended when he takes on the case of a sub-Lecter, facing charges on overwhelming evidence that he brutally murdered, mutilated and sexually assaulted a young woman.  

This menacing character maintains an aviary in his living room. Flat-cap-and-Yorkshire tea this is not. He ought to have "I dunnit" rent into his forehead, or a colourful range of shirts run up, bearing the legend "homicide's my hobby: do not approach or you'll be next". As you'd expect, the Escape Artist produces the anticipated jurisprudential trick - but manages to slight this guilty murderous goon, resulting in ... well, just what you'd expect really. You can imagine the transactions at the script meeting: "wouldn't it be wizard, if we visited a defence lawyer with the bloody consequences of his profession?"

Napoleon once quipped, having ditched the infertile Josephine in hopes of a younger wife who could produce an heir, that "what we need is a walking womb." Although Ashley Jensen does her best to give her cardboard character some idiosyncratic life, her purpose in the drama is primarily (a) to have baths (b) to hover supportively around Tennant's character, cooing to ratchet up sympathy for this dramatically bland clan and (c) to get brutally hacked to death (it is the predictably which makes it harrowing) by Toby Kebbell's none-too-subtle bird-fancying sociopath. 

Sorry to ruin the end of the first episode for you, but if you didn't expect to see Jensen lying face-down in a pool of gore fifteen minutes into this thing, after Tennant had secured the inevitable acquittal on a technicality, your sensitivity settings need recalibrating. Character Arc: Death is not an unfamiliar fate for chronically underwritten, often female, characters of this sort, but The Escape Artist reduces Jensen's character to a ridiculous cypher, a supporting actress in Burton's tragedy with little personal interest, texture or spirit beyond what the spirited and appealing Jensen brings with her.

That's just hackneyed plotting, crass characterisation and bad writing. That'd be enough to hull this programme beneath the waterline. What sinks this piece altogether is the banal, unoriginal way the writer - David Wolstencroft of Spooks fame - addresses his central theme. The work of a defence advocate does pose interesting ethical questions. Wolstencroft's toom tabard plotwork means that The Escape Artist poses almost none of them.  He gives us a totally unsympathetic criminal. A criminal we all know to be guilty. The interesting contingencies and uncertainties of real life are all entirely eliminated.

If you are sitting, talking to a client who insists, plausibly, that he is innocent of the crimes imputed to him by the prosecution, I dare say his protestations and denials might seem convincing. At least in the moment. David Tennant, and the audience, face none of those conundrums here.  Because, as everybody knows, all complex issues are best examined in drama, by knocking off all their grey edges and ambivalences. As engagements with the theme go, The Escape Artist is turgid.

Paired back, Wolstencroft seems to be asking us, should folk who keep owls caged in their living rooms all be summarily shot without trial - just to be on the safe side? After all, Fiat Justicia, Pereat Some Badly-Written-Wummin...

The shamrock and the thistle?

Why is Ireland missing from the current independence debate? Can the concept of Britishness be effectively co-opted by independence supporters? How can the Scottish Greens contribute to the referendum campaign, and more widely, how can the party pull itself out of its political rut in Scotland?

Just a couple of the issues which came up on this week's edition of the For A' That podcast.  This week we were joined by Peter McColl.  Peter is a Green Party supporter and Rector of the University of Edinburgh.  We also discussed the news that the BBC will be ploughing £5,000,000 into their coverage of the independence debate. Good news, and a way of restoring the flagging fortunes of BBC political programming, or a tricky maneuver for the public broadcasting corporation, committed to promoting the idea of the unity of the British people? We also took a brief look at the outcome of the recent General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and its recognition of gay clergy.

You can listen to the show right here, snap up our RSS feed, via iTunes or download the show for future consumption.

Not Scandinavia, but Ireland...

In a column in last weekend's Scotland on Sunday, former SNP MSP Andrew Wilson returned to a familiar theme, arguing that "British identity is key to debate on independence."   

Andrew worries that "fewer than one in ten Scots with a “strong sense of British identity” back independence".  What is to be done? Andrew's answer is that the Nationalists should cunningly hijack British identity, and rearticulate it in a form more amenable to our constitutional ambitions.

"... the SNP and the Yes Campaign have just over a year to communicate cleverly that Britishness is about much, much more than the functions of state government. Indeed, who the government is and what it does is the least important aspect of Britishness and most urgent to reform. The familial, cultural, social and economic ties that bind will endure and strengthen when the politics is taken out of the equation."

But is it really a question of "cleverly" articulating a new, non-state account of British identity, as Wilson contends? I'm not so sure. As I tracked in a post here some time ago, nationalist politicians have been using the language of a "social union" after independence for a good while now. The idea that Britishness and this "social union" can and should be used interchangeably, seems a more recent development in pro-independence rhetoric. And for me, one of the least convincing.  

On BBC Question Time a while back, the SNP MSP Alex Neil told the audience that "I am an Ayrshireman, I am a Scot and I feel British and European as well." Now, I've no window into the Health Secretary's heart. A cherished sense of Britishness may warm his cockles.  If so, little of that heat communicated itself in his answer. His Britannic protestations looked strained, and hollow, altogether too pleased with themselves. Some independence supporters may feel profoundly British, but I doubt most prominent Nationalists do, and for them to pretend to do so looks decidedly shifty, and decidedly not convincing.

SNP MP Pete Wishart has been at the forefront of the argument that we should think about Britishness in geographical, super-state terms, detachable from national governments, and independent from the question of whether Scotland sends parliamentarians to Westminster.  As is so often the case at the moment, Pete offers us Nordic models in justification.   

"Britishness is as much about geography as it is about identity and history. Coming from Perth in the northern part of the island of Greater Britain I am as much British as someone from Stockholm is Scandinavian."

This argument has a superficial allure to it. Scots won't lose Britishness if we vote yes. Fear not fellow citizens! We'd be just like those friendly folks lining the fjords of Sweden, and of Norway and Denmark. But what do most folk know about shared Scandinavian solidarity and identity? Bugger all. How does the reference connect up to Scots' lived experiences? Not to any significant extent. So why the devil should we think that recasting Britishness in terms of an alien concept of regional identity of which most folk know nothing is going to do the trick? 

Wilson's choice of words is significant. Such a strategy is "clever", but I think, too clever by half, and unlikely to make much sense to your average Scot, with hazy British sympathies, and at most a couple of days in Stockholm, or a couple of episodes of the Killing under their belts. 

By making Britishness the answer to Yes Scotland's campaigning problems, Wilson's argument conflates two points. As he diagnoses, rightly, if the referendum resolves itself into a question of "do you feel British?", the SNP are stuffed. On the Better Together side, we've heard Ed Miliband's identity-driven British nationalist case for the Union.  According to the Labour leader, the referendum turns on the question of identity, his message to Scottish voters: Feel British? Vote No.  Independence supporters must resist this framing of the question.  Hitherto, they have done so by focussing on independence as a constitutional, civic and political issue, about powers, not identities.  The question before voters is not whether they feel British, but whether they want Scotland's democratic institutions to make key political decisions about their public services, their wars, their social security and taxation. 

One of the surprises of the Better Together campaign hitherto has been the absence of the full-scale sentimental British nationalist campaign promised by Miliband's intervention. You could do it marvellously. Twinkle-eyed Corby grannies, born in Dumbarton but long in the south, surrounded by a giggling knot of grandchildren, and ideally, with a son and daughter living on both sides of the Tweed, whose laughing children sound an untroubled mixter-maxter of accents. The young couple, one Fifer, one Londoner, who met at university in Edinburgh, and settled down, all invested in the idea that the noble goal of a multi-national state is worth preserving, all arguing we're "better together", as the saying has it. And so on, and so on.  

It might be an idea for Yes Scotland to get their retaliation in first, and to shoot a counter-intuitive ad with similar characters on both sides of the border endorsing independence, relaxed about the implications for their families and relationships. For Yes campaign to make the case for companionable Britishness, however, would be madness, and do Better Together's identity politics for them.

As many of you will know, since 2009, I have lived in the south east of England. I don't feel British to any significant extent. I enjoy warm and convivial relationships with my friends, neighbours and colleagues in Oxfordshire, unencumbered by any requirement that we share some defined regional supra-identity. I get along without Britishness quite happily. More and more, I've been wondering if independence supporters, tickled by the novelty of Scandinavian parallels, and the cul de sac of reclaiming Britishness from the British state, are neglecting the more obvious, more helpful contemporary example of the Republic of Ireland in talking about social, family and commercial bonds, after independence.

English-speaking, sharing a land-border and abiding historical ties, you'll find few people who seriously think, in Johann Lamont's ugly phrase, of the denizens of Tipperary or Cork as "foreigners" in the United Kingdom today. As is well known, Irish nationals enjoy a number of rights under UK law, including the ability to vote in our elections, free movement and immigration rights (above and beyond the rights of EU nationals in this respect).  For most folk in Great Britain, the Irish are betwixt and between, resisting the straightforward binary of the Self and the Other.  From my experiences in England, they are not significantly different from Scots in this respect, despite my Irish friends' "separate" government in Dublin, and "our" shared parliament in Westminster.

Identities don't belong to states. The Irish lesson shows us, in concrete terms most people in our country will understand, that our shared bonds in these islands won't break up if Britain breaks up.  We don't need any mediating concept of Britishness to make this happen, to maintain the to-and-fro of immigration and emigration, wandering carelessly over lightly-drawn borders, comfortably befriending, loving, working and belonging.  I don't need any pseudo Britto-Nordic construct to feel that my Irish friends here in England aren't the "foreigners" Johann Lamont would have them be. 

"I'm issuing an injunction!"

I'm always interested in the representations of law you find in popular culture. That needn't just mean fictional portrayals of courts and lawyers.  Like folk in the real world, characters in drama bandy about legal concepts more and less accurately much more often than one might think.  While it's common to envisage the law as something external and official, situated in courts, and above and apart from most people's everyday lives, the reality is rather different.  Law saturates our day to day interactions. Quietly, mutely, perhaps, but it is practically impossible to get through a day without engaging with some legally significant concept, whether it is property ownership, leases, sales of goods, contracts, remedies for debt, divorces - and so on. 

I don't regularly watch BBC Scotland's River City, it must be said, but last week's episode caught my eye.  It includes an range of scenes from the sheriff court, in an increasingly acrimonious case about child residency. Many hoary old clichés were dusted off. Juliet Cadzow, the dragonish sheriff: pert, judgemental, Anglicised and bourgeois. In deference to the formality of the occasion, the other characters wore suits, appeared nervous. Legal perceptions of the relevant issues, and those entertained by the two characters most invested in the dispute, were substantially mismatched. This mismatch caused frustration, precipitating interruptions, and increasingly heated transgressions against the stiff, formal atmosphere of the courtroom.

The legal characters, the solicitors and presiding judge, repeatedly emphasised that cool decorum was expected. Allegations and awkward questions were to be met with equanimity.  The moral? Displaying emotion in courts gets your card marked as an intemperate villain, you lose, and your life is ruined. Law courts aren't terrifically interested in your private sense of grief or injustice.

I'm sure any Scots lawyers watching it would have squirmed when Cadzow's sheriff cried "I'm issuing an injunction!" - an English concept not known to the law of Scotland, which uses interdicts - but such inaccurate marginalia are hardly unknown in Scottish drama.  As I argued back in October 2010, in Scotland we almost never see the inside of our courts fictionally depicted, and where such representations do occur, they invariably incorporate at least some alien American or English legal concepts.

What struck me as interesting, however, was how far the rest of the episode, outwith the majestic confines of the fictional Clydeinch Sheriff Cour, and out from under Cadzow's gorgonesque gaze, also turned on legal ideas of property, debt, security - and even licensing laws, egad.  Canny but unscrupulous characters take advantage of legal information asymmetries, and of wealth and access to professional counsel, to screw over others without these advantages.

You can make the case, I think compellingly, that it is actually soap operas, and not our Kavanagh QCs and Rumpoles of the Bailey, which represent our pre-eminent legal dramas, depicting the overwhelming presence of law in society, with only very occasional, uncomfortable and generally unsatisfactory forays into courts when one character is prosecuted for clobbering another, or pursues a dramatically arresting piece of civil litigation. Soaps' storytelling is rooted in communities, with large casts, and their plots revolve around their businesses and their interactions (and the ubiquitous centrality of the local boozer). Legal ideas and interactions are pervasive. 

It is a commonplace among curmudgeonly lawyers that court dramas tend to distort the reality of legal processes, generalising from the exceptional or eccentric litigant, and accordingly, cultivate a misleading impression of how civil and crime justice functions.  You can make a parallel argument about the idea that legal dramas must include gowns, wigs, a mute jury and officious ushers. Most legal disputes in our society are resolved without anyone donning a horsehair peruke. Most legal thinking in the broad sense occurs outside the courtroom.  

"Our job is to link the individual issues to the concept of independence..."

Imagine an election hustings, held somewhere in Scotland in early 2011. As you would expect, the political panel was filled out primarily by representatives of all of the main Scottish political parties, both unionist and nationalist, scrounging for votes. Gathered up before the assembled speakers, a modal sort of Scottish crowd, if perhaps, by dint of their attendance at the meeting, more interested in politics than many of their fellow citizens. 

The issue of independence was raised, sceptically, by a voice from the floor. Hostile rhubarbs from the Labour and Conservative representatives, albeit of varying degrees of intensity. Then, up pipes a pro-independence speaker. She asks the panel and the crowd something like the following series of questions.

"Would you rather commit our welfare system into Iain Duncan Smith's hands, or to elect someone - to elect any of us, all of us - sitting here, to ensure we can secure a decent standard of living to the poor, the unemployed, the disabled? Would you rather David Cameron decided if and where the Royal Regiment of Scotland was deployed to fight and die in the field, or anyone on this panel? Are you comfortable with George Osborne's ideas of what a fair taxation system looks like, comfortable with George's ideas of equality, or might you have a more faith in a John Swinney - or for that matter, any of us sitting here to share your values and reflect your priorities on taxation, if we only had the powers to decide?"

It should not, perhaps, surprise us that this form of pro-independence rhetoric was put to me by a Green Party member, who doesn't conceive of himself and his politics as being driven primarily by national sentiment. I've tried permutations of it out a few times with socially liberal, economically centre-left, highly-educated, well-off or soon-to-be relatively well-off Scottish friends.  If we've had our noses in the polls, it shouldn't surprise us that the vast majority of these AB voters - or offspring of AB voters - remain sceptical, and most are minded to give you a negative answer if you ask them pat, "do you support independence for Scotland?"

I've found that if you reorientate your question, however, that robust, reflexive rejection of independence starts to look decidedly shooglier.  Many of these folk share an essentially fatalistic assessment of the possibilities afforded by Westminster politics, and are not optimistic about the prospects of the UK Labour Party, whether in office, or in opposition. Most would, given their first preference, choose some sort of devo-something settlement for Scotland.  Unless they have a taste for tomorrow's condiments, ingredients not yet disclosed, they're deprived of that option. One of the critical benefits of the whole devo-something discussion, kite-flying though much of it has been, is that it has focussed minds and the recent debate - at least in Scotland - on powers not on identities, and it is powers which are of the essence in the intervention which I sketched above.

Who should make decisions impacting on your life? Which institutions and which politicians do you most trust to make decisions which come closest to your core convictions about the role of the state in society, or the scope of its ethical vocation to its citizens? This case for independence emphasises responsibility and faith in Scotland's hidden powers, the potential of its people to make decisions for ourselves, hoisting the burden of political choices - seasoned, admittedly, with just a little old time anti-Toryism. It couldn't be further away from the images which still heftily predominate in the London-based media, envisaging a Scottish nationalism driven primarily by Romanticism, the political expression of which being an atavistic - and essentially suspect - ethnic project. 

Instead of asking your dubious pal about independence, file instead through the catalogue of things which the state does or could do, and canvass who they trust more (or less) on the issues and where they'd prefer to see powers exerted and decisions made, if they were cloud-compellers and could work their constitutional will without restraint. I'd wager that you'll find that many of your friends, though reflexively anti-independence, will begin to squirm uncomfortably in their chairs, realising the extent to which the gap which separates independence from the distribution of powers they'd prefer to see is rather smaller than the gap separating their constitutional ideal from the constitutional status quo.  The SNP have been promoting the idea of a "spectrum of self-government" for some time now, most recently in Salmond's speech to conference in October.  Lest we missed it, the First Minister courteously kept it back until the last lines of his address:

"Our home rule journey, begun by so few so many years past, is coming to its conclusion. Together, we say Yes. To Scotland and to Independence."

For obvious reasons, unionists have been making strenuous efforts to denounce this sort of rhetoric in at least two ways. First, simply as an inadmissible category mistake, which conflates constitutional solutions (Scottish independence) to contingent political problems (Tory government).  Secondly, we see pro-Unionists striving simultaneously to dismantle the metaphor of a spectrum of self government, from status quo ante, to devolution, to independence, to European and international bonds - positing the middle two as categorically opposed choices, all or nothing.  It's this sort of childish logic which lies behind the eminently tiresome but regularly regurgitated proposition that the SNP or "Alex Salmond doesn't believe in devolution", feeding quietly on an abiding (but fundamentally disingenuous) Labour myth, that only "we are the true party of devolution", and accordingly, that any credit for establishing Holyrood ought to accrue exclusively to those in red jaikets. 

With this in mind, I was interested to watch Alex Salmond, interviewed by Raymond Buchanan on the BBC this morning. Inevitably, the referendum came up in their discussion.  What was interesting was Salmond's response: for my money, the clearest statement yet from the First Minister about how he strategically envisions the upcoming argument for Scottish independence. Interestingly, it is remarkably similar to the argument advanced above.  It's an important answer too, so I've transcribed it in full below. Emphases mine.

Buchanan: You have, though, an issue if you talk to pollsters, which is: you're very popular, the SNP are popular, but your principal aim of independence still only commands around a third of Scots in most polls. And, in fact, that seems to be going down in recent polls. How are you going to convince people that they can back independence.

Salmond: Well, there is another paradox in the polls. And that is, if you ask people the individual questions like, "should Scotland control its own economy?", the answer's yes.  "Should Scotland have the power to abolish nuclear weapons from our country?" The answer's yes.  So when you ask people about specific policies about independence, then they give an argument in favour. And therefore that gives me great hope that we can combine the specific beliefs that people have and say, well, what that is, is Scottish independence. There's a great yearning wish to have power in Scotland. I think generally, actually, there's a great wish for people in these difficult economic times to have more control over their circumstances, more control over what's happening to them and their communities and families.  And independence, I believe, is part of that process.  It's part of a process of empowerment. 

So our job is to link the individual issues to the concept of independence, and to paint a picture of the future, of what Scotland could achieve, because the other thing that is important in difficult times is hope for the future.  Some people say optimism in politics is something for when times are easy - when the money's flowing - when the economy's going great. I just think optimism and hope and belief in the future is even more at a premium when times are tough. So if we can pitch our campaign to say these individual projects amount to Scottish independence, if you want to have control over these things - like the economy - then independence will give us that, and to show that independence is a proper, optimistic way forward for this country.

When Shakespeare wanted to emphasise something, he included it twice in his scripts. Salmond makes the point three times here, and for me, his analysis is absolutely spot on.  For nationalists, the referendum cannot - will not - be about British or Scottish identities, Braveheart imagery or plucked heartstrings, but must focus instead, foremost and forefront on the question of who exercises political power and to what purpose, and the opportunities represented by independent statehood for Scotland.

This is already shaping up to be one of the great ironies of this campaign: supposedly Romantic nationalists only want to talk about democratic governance structures and political choice, while it is the pro-Union side of the debate who are currently discoursing most and more vehemently on identities and sentiment.  One day, the UK press might notice this queer discrepancy.  Until then, though, it's Scotland through the looking glass...