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.

Glasgow: Forgetting slavery?

"Don't keep your head down. Look up." Whether you're trudging through Glasgow in the summer sleet, or the winter snow, the local sometimes needs reminded to contemplate the grandeur of the place. Edinburgh's skyline sucks the air out of you, a jagged man-made silhouette of spikes and spires. Glasgow's mountainous legacy of wealth is more easily overlooked. 

Its richly appointed statues stand sentinel over the bustling streets, peering down from formidable stone piles and Corinthian columns. Folk only rarely seem to notice the bombast and effrontery of the city chambers. We're more taken with the Duke of Wellington's famous headgear than the tobacco lord's townhouse which now hosts the Gallery of Modern Art. Familiarity breeds - not quite contempt - but a curious kind of taken-for-grantedness. I've been a more attentive reader of the many towns I've visited as a tourist than the fabric of the city in which I now live. I suspect I'm not alone. 

Kevin McKenna has an interesting piece in the Observer this morning, arguing "we Scots must face up to our slave trading past." This passage particularly struck me:

Well, a lot more of us ought to know now and we ought also to be demanding that we quietly take down the grotesque Merchant City signage and simply desist from using the term. And while we’re at it, we can also start looking at more appropriate names for Jamaica Street, Tobago Street and the Kingston Bridge, as well as the other roads and avenues that bear the imprint of evil. After all, we rightly celebrated renaming St George’s Place as Nelson Mandela Place. Of course there is a body of resentment over “reopening old wounds” and “raking up the past”.

I squirmed with discomfort here. Wouldn't renaming these streets represent only another erasure? Don't these streets quietly avow the past? I have a good deal of sympathy with Kevin's basic thesis. Scotland's role in legally-sanctioned kidnap and forced labour still feels marginalised in the public memory, not least in Glasgow. This can amount to what Stephen Mullen has described as a "myth of detachment and non-involvement" in slavery: "it wisnae me."

My secondary education contained next to no Scottish history. Needless to say, slavery and colonialism also went almost entirely unmentioned. In law school, I went on to study how Roman law was used to devise the early-modern duties and responsibilities and master and slave. I read the famous (1788) case of Joseph Knight, in which the Court of Session declared that Scots law did not recognise the institution of slavery. But overall? My understanding of this city's and this country's involvement in the exploitation of slaves remains sketchy, impressionistic. Again, I suspect I'm not alone. 

All that rum and cotton, that blood and toil and tobacco and molasses, has settled mutely into opulent stone I toddle past, all too often, bovine and unthinking. Jamaica Street doesn't (only) bear the imprint of the evil of slavery, but the imprint of our history. That history may not be inscribed on our memories. But these echoes - these nudges - preside over our streets, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. They ensure, every day, that Glaswegians have no excuse for failing to "face up to our slave trading past." 

Virginia and Antigua, Buchanan and Ingram, these names are indicting, they're our history, and they should stay. 

Fulsome prison blues...

Is there any way for the SNP to backtrack on the issue of prisoner voting in the independence referendum, and save face? In this weekend's Observer, Kevin McKenna laid into the Scottish Government's proposals to disenfranchise those in jail, arguing that "if there's any justice, prisoners must get the vote" in the referendum. McKenna's interpretation is that Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP are just feart of the tabloid blowback. Left to their own devices, he suggests, they'd extend the franchise those convicted and behind bars.

"The nationalists want the rest of us to overcome our fear of the unknown and help them to create a better and more just society in an independent Scotland. Yet by denying this basic human right to Scotland's prisoners, they are petrified of backing their own instincts. That makes them both dishonest and craven.  Winston Churchill, as home secretary, said: "The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the unfailing tests of the civilisation of a country." One hundred and three years later, his words are convicting Nicola Sturgeon and her scared party."

But is this credible, that the party (or at least its leadership) isn't really agin the notion of incarcerated folk exercising the franchise? A trawl through the official record of parliament and the press indicates that Sturgeon has been circumspect about commenting on the issue, and ferreting around surfaces nothing from her past record.  In her contribution to the parliamentary debate earlier this month, however, Sturgeon staked out a categorical opposition to prisoner voting in all circumstances, saying "personally, I do not believe that prisoners should have the right to vote in elections". 

"On principle, I believe, as all members do, in active engagement and participation in democracy—that is why I want 16 and 17-year-olds to vote—but I also have a strong belief in the balance between rights and responsibilities. That is partly why I take the view that I do on prisoner voting. I believe that, when an individual commits a crime and is sentenced to a custodial sentence, because the judge considers that the severity of the crime or the circumstances of the case merit such a sentence, the individual loses several rights that the rest of us take for granted, including the right to vote for the period for which they are incarcerated."

This is not, I'd suggest, a position amenable to reverse-ferreting. By contrast with his Deputy, Alex Salmond's attitudes on the issue have been aired before.  He told Holyrood, back in 2010:

"I know that the Liberals are understandably keen on the European Court of Human Rights and the European convention on human rights. However, I cannot believe that, back in 1997 when there was blanket signing up to the ECHR, those of us who argued very strongly that human rights should be observed across the European continent thought that one of the key issues would be to give convicted prisoners the right to vote. For most people, that does not seem to be what we would consider to be an important human right."

In Holyrood this month, Labour MSPs Helen Eadie and former polisman, Graeme Pearson, indicated that they are sympathetic to the idea of giving at least some prisoners the vote. By contrast, not a single SNP MSP spoke up in favour of the idea. Linda Fabiani suggested that for the Liberal Democrats to put the Scottish "Government under pressure" on the issue was only illegitimate "flip-flopping", while SNP MSP Richard Lyle did a passable impression of a reactionary Tory backwoodsman, suggesting that to support enfranchising any prisoners was the equivalent of suggesting "that prisoners should decide their own sentences".  Other SNP MSPs expressed similar sentiments. Bruce Crawford said:

"The basic principle behind that is that someone forfeits the right to vote once they have been incarcerated in a penal institution as a result of committing a crime. That is a pretty simple principle to get hold of."

While George Adam parroted your basic social contract theory, contending that:

"... individuals who have committed a crime have broken their pact with society, so I do not agree that they should have the opportunity to vote in the referendum"

Contra McKenna, this cup hardly overfloweth with suppressed enthusiasm for enfranchising lags serving short or long spells in the clink. I dare say some of the mute SNP MSPs might be more sympathetic, but can be expected, as usual, to keep their party discipline, unwilling to embarrass the government in public, and unlikely to dissent in the final vote. Sturgeon surely knew what she was about, setting out the government's categorical opposition to the idea of the participation of incarcerated convicts in our democratic process. Patrick Harvie played it cannily, clearly pitching for a limited compromise, arguing that only prisoners serving less than six months should be entitled to vote.  Even so, even that modest advance stands a snowball's chance in hell of making it onto the statute.

Kevin McKenna suggests that this is "craven and dishonest" politics. If the evidence from SNP parliamentarians is anything to go by, it is neither, unfortunately.