The last few days have produced a distillation of what is wrong with each of the campaigns contesting the future of Scotland.
The pro-indy Achilles-heel
The First Minister’s address to the party faithful at the SNP conference in Aberdeen made Conservatives the easy totemic scapegoat for all that separatists Scots hate about – to be direct about it – England.
Despite the fact that there is a substantial percentage of the SNP membership which is of a conservative persuasion, the First Minister pressed on with demonising Conservatives in the way that class bullies pick a victim, target and terrorise them.
Speaking of the sort of government that might be in an independent Scotland, Mr Salmond said – and this is the textual presentation of his speech:
‘I tell you what it won’t be.
‘It won’t be a government led by a party with just a single MP in Scotland.
‘A government dismantling our welfare state.
‘Privatising public services.
‘In an independent Scotland we can give this guarantee:
‘THE ERA OF TORY GOVERNMENTS UNELECTED BY THE PEOPLE OF SCOTLAND HANDING OUT PUNISHMENT TO THE POOR AND THE DISABLED WILL BE GONE AND GONE FOR GOOD.’
RaRaRa assured.
The trouble with this sort of stunt is that, in pushing what he is saying to its indefensible extremity – as in ‘…the era of …handing out punishment to the poor and the disabled will be gone for good’ – Mr Salmond isolates and vilifies beyond reason an entire section of our society, as entitled to its views as is anyone else.
For Argyll is no apologist for the wholesale policies of any party, finding them all self-interested, inward looking and damage-dealing. We argue repeatedly for the abandonment of party politics because this outdated system leaves us incapable of establishing any consistent strategic development in any field.
But it is unbalanced and juvenile to vilify Conservatives and Conservative governments per se. Nothing is all bad. Grown up politics discriminates between what is good, what is acceptable and what is intolerable in anything.
We have to remember and acknowledge that on two major occasions in living memory, it has been a Conservative administration that has pulled this country off the floor after catastrophic financial and budgetary management by a Labour administration.
The first was in 1976, when the Labour party under James Callaghan, with Denis Healey as Chancellor of the Exchequer, brought Britain to an equivalent position to the recent one of Greece within the eurozone. The IMF was all over us, demanding swingeing austerity measures in exchange for bailouts. Like her or detest her, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative administration recovered Britain from that very real potential disaster.
Then in 2008, as a consequence of Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s unhinged irresponsibility in ‘regulation with a light touch’, our free-swimming banks made Britain a major player in a worldwide financial collapse, which brought us to our knees in the biggest national crisis of our lifetimes.
The current Conservative-led administration, with George Osborne as Chancellor, has pulled Britain back from that potential collapse.
Whatever else conservative administrations may be and have been, this country unquestionably owes them for these specific salvage operations. Labour could not and would not have been able to do it.
A country with a bankrupt economy has no means of delivering social justice.
It is spiritually ungenerous not to recognise signal positive contributions, whatever their source; and it is dangerously divisive to isolate and demonise without discrimination.
The pro-union blindness
Does anyone in the never-worse-named bunch of ferrets in the sack of Better Together ever actually look at the galoots they send out to argue for the union – and worse, send up here to do it?
Yesterday there was Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond – an effete, bloodless, cold eyed, disengaged apparatchik.
What’s that ever going to achieve? What’s to like? And what does he like? There’s no sense that many of the messengers sent out to warn actually like the Scots. And that doesn’t mean we need to be told – which is patronising and juvenilising.
Scotland will only listen to real people. Can’t Westminster tell the real from the machine made?
It’s not enough for the union to be a safe bet, the shelter belt. Everyone knows that it is. That status will, not unreasonably, be the major reason for whatever the pro-union vote turns out to be.
To be the transformative agent it ought to want to be, the pro-union cause needs to let the United Kingdom be seen to be attractive, exhilarating, adventurous, challenging, irresistible – something valuable to us, something we’ve made, something we want, not something we owe or something we medicinally accept.
The niceties of rank and political balance in the pro-union campaign hierarchy and its essential leaderlessness need to be binned in short order, if the driver of the game is actually to win.
Make it Boris Johnson’s job to save the union and let him loose, let him choose who’s on his team, from whatever unionist party. What’s to lose? At least this would be fun instead of the relentless grinding misery of the iron-fisted emissaries. BoJo’s unsinkable and we need some buoyancy in the leavening of the campaigns. A debate between Alex Salmond and Boris Johnson would be left field and really worth watching.
The predictable antagonistic tedium of the entire contest is sucking the life out of us. Let’s shake it up.
Johnson is also the Mayor of the UK’s biggest USP – the majestic London.
Most of us wouldn’t want to live there but who doesn’t want it as ‘ours’ – the international envy of its huge economic engine and social buzz, the opportunities, the multicultural appropriateness of the metropolis, the architectural legacy, the energy of the modern buildings, the green parks, the river, the fulcrum and repository of so much of all our histories, the magnificent ritual spectacle of the set piece public occasions? Why would we want to make these foreign and not ‘ours’?
And so…
The pro-indy campaign needs to grow up, tell the truth, stop the victimisation and leave its own campaign of terror well behind. Silencing people will not make them vote ‘Yes’ once they get in that booth.
The pro-union campaign needs to get real. It isn’t.