Of Oxford, Edinburgh and Glasgow
Sep 16th 2014
By J.C. | EDINBURGH
A FEW years back, your correspondent was in a pub in Oxford with two other students. One, a Scot active on the political left at the university (and a member of its doughtiest left-leaning college, Balliol), was bemoaning the lack of political choice back home in Glasgow. The Labour Party there was insipid, he complained. The Scottish Socialist Party was mired in scandal. What was the alternative? “The nats?” the other asked, raising an eyebrow. The three of us looked at each other, then burst into laughter.
Half a decade later, my old Balliol friend is now a leading light in Yes Scotland, the campaign for Scottish independence, in Glasgow. What happened to Scottish politics in those five years to change his outlook? What was the grand strategy, and who hatched it?
Little though we knew it back in 2009—in the dog days of Gordon Brown’s spell in Downing Street—the seeds of the separatist surge now bearing fruit had been sown long before our conversation.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when Scottish National Party (SNP) types were known as the “tartan Tories” for their middle-class backgrounds and pro-business outlook, a gang of young turks begged to differ. Gathered around Alex Salmond, a left-wing economist known to display a bust of Lenin in his office, they envisaged an unremittingly anti-bourgeois nationalism. Scottish independence, they reckoned, could be a means to social change, not an end in itself. Others in this circle included Stephen Maxwell (later a Cambridge academic), Owen Dudley Edwards (who went on to lecture at Edinburgh University) and Margo McDonald (the landlady of the Hootlet’s Nest, a pub outside Glasgow). Wherever they lived, they were “Glasgow” in spirit—tough, communitarian and mostly blue-collar in background.
Other young leftists on the Scottish political scene saw these sorts as turncoats. In 1975 the precocious rector of Edinburgh University brushed nationalism aside as: “less an assertion of Scotland’s permanence as a nation than a response to Scotland’s uneven development”. His name? Gordon Brown. He turned out to be “Edinburgh” to the core—moderate, pragmatic and middle-class in background.
Over the following years, however, Mr Salmond became more “Edinburgh”, too. He was elected MP for Banff and Buchan, on the north Aberdeenshire coast, in 1987. In the early 1990s he split from his old radical comrades in the nationalist movement, including Jim Sillars, Ms McDonald’s left-wing husband. As the Labour Party came round to and then championed devolution—under Tony Blair and Mr Brown, as the shadow-chancellor and then chancellor—Mr Salmond reconciled his party to gradualism. Devolution was a stepping-stone to independence, he argued (not entirely incredibly, given intervening developments). In 2000 he stepped down after a decade at the helm of the SNP and after much ugly in-fighting. But in 2004, having ruled out running for the leadership, he returned (in his own words) “with a degree of surprise and humility, but with a renewed determination.” He went on to become first minister of a minority SNP government of Scotland in 2007.
In 2011 Mr Salmond led the SNP to a shock majority in the Scottish Parliament. This was his chance to call a referendum endorsing the independence that his younger, more radical self had craved (though whether he still felt the same way is debated to this day). In 2012 he signed the Edinburgh Agreement with David Cameron. While Mr Salmond had been hatching grand plans to rid Scotland of the capitalist (read: English) yoke, Mr Cameron had been carousing in Brasenose College, Oxford, as a member of the Bullingdon Club, a private drinking society known for smashing up the venues at which it drank. The referendum, the two agreed, should take place on September 18th 2014.
What has happened since that day nearly two years ago can be seen as a grand competition on two axes. The horizontal one is simple: Balliol versus Brasenose, or in other words left versus right. The vertical one is more complicated: Edinburgh versus Glasgow, or establishment versus insurgency (readers from both cities will hopefully forgive the generalisation).
Initially the Yes to independence campaign was what one might call “Balliol-Edinburgh”. That is: the old middle-class instincts of the SNP prevailed. Yes Scotland, when it was established in 2012, was a predominantly SNP outfit. For the first months of the campaign, it stalled. Angus Robertson, the party’s leader in Westminster, dithered over big questions like which currency a sovereign Scotland would use, and by which legal channel it could stay in the European Union. When the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament came out for secession, it did so on the initiative of its Labour members, not its SNP ones—the nationalists were initially overwhelmed by the power now in their hands.
By early 2013 things had not got much better. The Yes campaign had a shiny office in Glasgow (on Hope Street, employees proudly trilled). It had branded mouse mats. It had branded coffee mugs. But if it had a strategy, it was vague at best. At a planning meeting participants argued that the campaign needed to appeal to aspirational, middle-class voters. Scots would choose independence if they thought they would make them a tad richer, it was argued. Beyond this, the Yes pitch remained Delphic. With just over a year to go until the referendum one leading nationalist admitted to having barely thought about which currency an independent Scotland would use.
This disorganisation was evident on the ground, too. In Lanarkshire a campaign manager from headquarters addressed a meeting of the nascent Yes campaign. Questions abounded. Had the campaign a single canvassing system? He was not sure. What should we say about the currency? He prevaricated. Should we set up bank accounts for campaign funds? No idea. The best the Yes campaign could do was to urge people to press on with local campaigns as they saw fit.
By the spring of last year meetings at Hope Street, combined with reports from local groups, were driving those on the left of the nationalist movement—the “Balliol-Glasgow” types—to despair. An SNP-dominated campaign, they concluded, would remain insufficiently focused on the blue-collar, public-sector and female voters who would decide the referendum's result. The radicals, they concluded, would have to take things into their own hands. So they did. The result was a cross-party coalition of left-wingers committed to independence and gathered around the Radical Independence Campaign (RIC). Along with Common Weal, a related body drawing on working-class and artistic groups, RIC began to campaign on wages, jobs and the future of the state-funded National Health Service.
Others followed suit. Soon there were myriad sub-groups within the Yes campaign. Teachers for Yes, Lawyers for Yes, even Davids for Indepedence made their voices heard. This unplanned, decentralised structure brought advantages, particularly as it enabled local groups to segment their messages. Not bound by the discipline of the Better Together campaign, Yes campaigners could craft their pitches according to their target voters. Students queuing for the cinema were given leaflets explaining “how to disarm a nuke” (the answer: vote Yes to force Britain’s deterrent from Scottish waters). Parents waiting at school gates got literature on childcare. Flats in blue-collar areas received fliers outlining the many ways in which the union had failed them, entitled: “Britain is for the rich. Scotland can be ours.”
Yet the official Yes campaign had little purchase on these foot soldiers. At a pro-independence away day at Murrayfield, a rugby stadium in Edinburgh, last July delegates listened engrossed as two campaigners lectured on how to craft clear, punchy, lefty messages. The session was already over-running when the fire alarm was triggered. Those present trooped into the car park outside. All gossiped together, leaving Blair Jenkins, the director of Yes Scotland, to stand on his own—evidence, if it were needed, of the independent-mindedness of the independence movement.
In some areas, like Inverness, the SNP kept control of the campaign. In such places its strategy was “could, should, must” (explain why independence is possible, why it is desirable and why the alternative is undesirable). But across most of Scotland the party’s local presence dissolved into the wider Yes movement. By the final stages of the campaign, Balliol-Edinburgh types like Mr Salmond were taking lines from Balliol-Glasgow types. The first minister’s decision to concentrate on healthcare in his televised debates with Alistair Darling, the leader of the No campaign, drew directly on slogans pioneered and popularised by the pro-independence left.
When, a couple of weeks ago, the countdown to the deadline for voter registrations reached its final, evening hour, residents of Glasgow council estates were hurtling through the twilight streets in their pajamas to sign up, and urging their neighbours to do the same. So when the campaign pulled ahead of No in polls a few days later grassroots Yes types were not the slightest bit surprised. The absence of a single, clear strategy had enabled local groups to say and do what they needed to win over voters—indeed, even Mr Jenkins accepts that this was his side’s strength. Through lack of a deliberate strategy, the pro-independence campaign stumbled across a formula that suited it perfectly: pluralism.
Your correspondent finds himself walking the hilly, neo-Gothic alleys of Edinburgh wondering how this nation will vote in a little over 24 hours’ time. In this city folk will probably lean towards No. But a mere 40-minute train-ride to the west, on the coldly rational, neo-Classical and Modernist terraces of Glasgow, it is more likely that they will vote Yes. Looking at the polls, it is quite conceivable that this latter camp will prevail, probably ending the career of Mr Cameron (Brasenose-Edinburgh) and thrusting Mr Salmond (Balliol-Glasgow, then Balliol-Edinburgh) onto the pages of history books thanks to the efforts of my old Oxford friend (Balliol-Glasgow) and others like him. Those five years separating Scotland tonight from that carefree evening in an Oxford pub seem like an age.
