The People's Referendum: Why Scotland Will Never be the Same Again

161 Pages·2015·5.56 MB·English

by  Peter Geoghegan

PETER GEOGHEGAN is an Irish writer, journalist and broadcaster based in
Glasgow. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The London
Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Christian Science
Monitor, The Irish Times, Foreign Policy and numerous other publications. He
has reported for Al Jazeera, made documentaries on Mongolian wrestling for
BBC Radio 4, spent time reporting from the Balkans and wrote from Egypt
during the Arab Spring. He has never been a member of a political party.
From Glasgow’s George Square to High Street Stornoway, Peter
Geoghegan is an acute, insightful and empathic observer of the
referendum campaign and the characters who shaped it. Always
questioning, but refreshingly uncynical, his travels through Catalonia,
Bosnia and Northern Ireland have given him a unique and challenging
perspective on the year that changed Scotland. LIBBY BROOKS, The
Guardian This book offers a uniquely discursive take on Scotland’s
referendum experience. While most journalists were tapping official
sources, Peter was taking the pulse of ordinary – and not so ordinary –
Scots as 18 September approached. The result is a generous, original and
distinctive take on Scottish national life. JAMIE MAXWELL, journalist
and commentator Peter Geoghegan has succinctly and astutely identified
the heart of the matter and raised the fundamental question of this
campaign, all but missed by the old media: whether or not the momentum
in participative democracy will continue after 19 September. WILL
STORRAR, organiser, Bus Party 2013
The
People’s Referendum
Why Scotland Will Never Be the Same Again
PETER GEOGHEGAN
Luath Press Limited
EDINBURGH
www.luath.co.uk
For Ealasaid
First published 2015
ISBN: 978-1-910021-52-1
ISBN (EBK): 978-1-910324-47-9
The writer acknowledges the support of Creative Scotland towards the writing of
this volume.
The author’s right to be identified as author of this work under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.
© Peter Geoghegan
Contents
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION Scotland on The Edge
CHAPTER ONE Big Debate in Little Ireland
A dreich night in Coatbridge – the Irish Debate – Ireland and Scotland (A
Short History) – A Visit to the Orange Hall – An Afternoon with the Irish
Republicans – Coatbridge says ‘Yes’
CHAPTER TWO From Rosyth with Love
By-election in Cowdenbeath – The Last Communist – A Tour of the Coal
Mines – The Gothenburg Connection – The Berlin Wall Falls – Fife Votes
CHAPTER THREE The Debatable Lands
Holidays in Dumfries – A Reiver’s Tale – Rory Stewart’s Cairn – A Visit
to Langholm with Hugh MacDiarmid – William Wallace at Dryburgh –
Flodden Fields – Coldstream Says ‘No Thanks’
CHAPTER FOUR Catalonia Dreaming
The Siege of Barcelona – Performing Identity at La Sagrada Familia –
Catalan Demands – An Illegal Referendum – La Diada 2013 – The
Scottish Connection CHAPTER FIVE Fear and Loathing in Republika Srpska
In a Belgrade Bar – Searching for Milorad Dodik – Meeting the Bosniak
Returnees – A Visit to the Republika Srpska Museum – The Mosques of
Banja Luka – Bosnia Floods – Bosnia Votes CHAPTER SIX I Crossed the Minch
In Louis MacNeice’s Footsteps – Arriving in Stornoway – A Visit to the
Minister – A Harris Tweed Trip – Island Economy – Singing Gaelic
Psalms – The Stornoway Way – Crossing the Minch (again) CHAPTER
SEVEN Scotland Decides
An August morning on Sauchiehall Street – Jim Murphy Comes to
Coatbridge – Better Together vs Yes Scotland – On the Media – Another
Easterhouse is Possible – The Quiet No’s – The Final Week EPILOGUE Can
the Centre Hold?
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
This book could not have happened without the help of countless people, many
of them complete strangers that I met in villages, towns and cities across
Scotland during and after the independence referendum campaign. Some voted
Yes, others No, a few were undecided, but they all gave their time freely and
generously. They asked for nothing in return, save a fair hearing. I sincerely
hope that I have given them that.
I am also indebted to numerous friends and colleagues who offered advice
and guidance throughout the writing of this book. I would like in no particular
order to record my thanks to Nick Holdstock, Fraser MacDonald, Andrew
Tickell, Johnny Rodger, Mitch Miller, David Torrance, Daniel Gray, Dave Scott,
Harry Pearson, Aidan Kerr, Evan Beswick, Libby Brooks, Brendan Barrington,
Dominic Hinde, Mark Hennessy, Gerry Braiden, David Leask, Feargal Dalton,
Jamie Maxwell, Peter Mackay, Liz Castro, William Storrar, Eamonn O’Neill,
Iain Macwhirter, Ian Wilson, Ian S. Wood, Iain Pope, Dina Vosanovic, Mary
Melvin Geoghegan, Fionnula Mulcahy and Andrew McFadyen. The errors,
solecisms and misjudgements within these pages are my entirely my own.
Thanks also to Gavin MacDougall and everyone at Luath Press, and to Creative
Scotland, who supported this project. Sections of this book are based on writings
that previously appeared in The London Review of Books, The Drouth and The
Dublin Review.
A special word of thanks to my family in Ireland, and to Ealasaid, without
whose love, support and peerless proofreading skills this book would have
remained just another idea in my cluttered filing cabinet.
Finally a note on direct speech quoted in the book. Many of my interviewees
spoke in distinctive variations of Scots but due to my own linguistic failings I
had to reproduce their words in standard English. My apologies.
INTRODUCTION
Scotland on The Edge
THERE WAS A carnival atmosphere in Glasgow’s George Square on
Wednesday 17 September 2014. Thousands of Scottish independence supporters
filled the square, effectively reclaiming the normally staid collection of worthy
statues and grey asphalt as a genuine public space.
A crowd across from the City Chambers chanted ‘Scotland’ to an off-key
tune of ‘Hey Jude’. A middle-aged woman meandered slowly through the bodies
waving a sign that said ‘Scotland don’t be scared’. Hipsters with ripped jeans
and tattoos walked across the square with Yes stickers in their beards. The
unseasonably warm evening leant the whole scene a Mediterranean air. In the
gloaming the public address system stopped broadcasting political speeches and
began blaring out rave music.
This was Scotland as I had never seen it before. The boisterous rally,
organised largely on social media, reminded me of places I had reported from –
Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Occupy London, restive nights in the Balkans – not the
country I had lived in for the best part of a decade. Like the ‘occupied’ public
squares across Europe, the atmosphere was febrile, driven by smart phones and
nervous energy. There were similar anxieties, too, about what the following day
might bring. Across Scotland, less than 12 hours later, polls would open in the
most heavily trailed vote in Scottish history. ‘Should Scotland Be An
Independent Country?’ A Manichean choice. Yes or No.
This book is about how the independence referendum changed not just
Scottish politics but the nation’s people, its sense of itself and its future. This is
the story of the campaign and its aftermath, not as recorded by pollsters and
politicians or by the official Yes and No campaigns, Yes Scotland and Better
Together, but as it was experienced by some of the five million ordinary – and
extraordinary – people involved on both sides of the debate. Their stories also
speak to what comes next for Scotland.
Scots said No to independence but a return to the status quo hardly seems
possible. Immediately after the referendum, more than 70,000 people joined pro-
independence political parties. At the time of writing, in late 2014, the Scottish
National Party are riding high in opinion polls both for Holyrood and
Westminster. Labour, meanwhile, is trying to re-engage with its core voters,
many of whom ignored the party line and said Yes to independence. Among the
politicians, the battle for more powers for the devolved parliament at Holyrood
was being fought with pens and paper at the cross-party Smith Commission.
Most No voters are tired of the constitutional tumult, but for many Yes activists,
innervated by the referendum campaign, only full independence will suffice. The
future, for Scotland and the UK, has seldom looked more uncertain.
Many commentators outside Scotland struggled to understand why there was a
referendum on independence in the first place. Certainly leaving the UK was
hardly a burning issue of public concern. Poll after poll put Scottish support for
separation at around a third. But, on 5 May 2011, this cosy consensus was
broken when the Scottish National Party achieved the seemingly impossible: a
majority of seats in the devolved parliament in Edinburgh. A plebiscite on
independence was a longstanding manifesto pledge (and for many supporters the
party’s raison d’être). In Westminster, Conservative Prime Minister David
Cameron acquiesced to Holyrood’s demands. The so-called Edinburgh
Agreement was signed the following October. Scotland would have a chance to
vote on ending the 1707 Union with England. The eventual result – 55.3 per cent
for No; 44.7 for Yes – reaffirmed that Scots favoured the United Kingdom over
the establishment of a new state of their own.
But that narrative is too simplistic. The referendum was as much a product of
the 2008 financial crash, MPs’ expenses, falling real wages and
deindustrialisation as it was about commitments laid out in the White Paper, the
SNP’s prospectus for independence. The gradual erosion of faith in the idea of
Great Britain, and Scotland’s place in it, began after the Second World War and
accelerated in the lugubrious half-light of the 1970s. By the start of the second
decade of the new millennium once seemingly immutable Scottish institutions
were in chaos, too: the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Catholic Church, Rangers
Football Club. The flag waving masses in George Square were a symptom of a
wider (partly globalised) malaise, not its root cause. But they were a raucous,
often angry indicator all the same. The Glasgow ‘occupiers’ wanted change –
and they saw independence as the best way of getting it.
In George Square on 17 September, as I stood scribbling on the edge of the
crowd, a middle-aged woman sidled up to me and asked: ‘Are you a journalist?’
I nodded, slightly sheepishly. She smiled. ‘I just want to talk’. And talk we did.
She told me how ‘absolutely disgusted’ she was by the British political system.
‘Not by the UK, not by England, I’m disgusted by Westminster.’ She
clutched a Saltire by her side. She talked, too, about her brother, who had been
killed by an Irish Republican Army sniper in South Armagh during the Troubles.
‘He fought and died to protect his people, the people of the UK, a UK he