In 10 years, Scottish independence has achieved precisely nothing. Today marks a decade since the referendum. In that time we’ve seen anger, vitriol, hope, despair and various degrees of resignation. What was it all for? Nothing. What did it accomplish? Nothing. It’s all been a total waste of time.
We didn’t realise it at the time, but the 2014 referendum was the opening act in what would become a decade of freewheeling identity politics in Britain. What was immediately noticeable was the degree of vitriol and bitterness which met any contribution which did not agree with the nationalists.
In the years to come, we would come to accept this as the default tone for any number of issues – Brexit, the trans debate, even Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. But this was the first moment many of us had encountered it. The degree of abuse as extraordinary. There wasn’t even a glimmer of people trying to have a conversation: just hatred, venom, partisanship.
Something specific happened in that campaign. We introduced a binary opposition to what until then been the usual multifaceted political debate: a wedge that cleaved society in two and then demanded they vote on one side or other.
You see this throughout history – key moments when everything is reduced to black and white, us and them, loyalist or traitor, yes or no. It happened in France during the clerical oath during the revolution and then again during the Dreyfus Affair. It happened in Germany under Bismarck during Kulturkampf – the first culture war. Now it was happening here.
On 14 September, 2014, a few days before the vote, independence campaigners gathered to protest outside the BBC. It was one of the first times we’d seen anger targeted at journalists. And it was, in its way, perfectly predictable. In binary politics your side is entirely good and the other side is entirely bad, so scrutiny is merely evidence of bias.
The National Union of Journalists warned that journalists were being purposefully intimidated and demanded security be ramped up ahead of the vote. One BBC journalist had to delete 400 abusive tweets from his feed. Again, little did we know, but this would soon become routine. The politics of identity were upon us.
Any sensible, perceptive human being would have looked at that referendum and thought: let’s not do that again. But David Cameron was not a sensible man, nor a perceptive one. So instead, we had Brexit two years later, and had to watch the same events play out once more, this time at a UK-wide level.
Again the whole of the political world, with all its shades of grey, froze into crude categories. You were pro-Europe or anti-Europe, pro-Britain or anti-Britain, a “somewhere” or an “anywhere”, a member of the liberal metropolitan elite or an advocate for the will of the people.
The SNP opposed Brexit. Its campaigners were some of the most passionate, articulate and effective opponents of the project. But there was a disturbing truth lurking underneath that dynamic. Brexit replicated every aspect of the Scottish independence issue, from the referendum itself to the consequences of it succeeding. If Scotland ever voted for independence, the agonising debate we had in the aftermath of the EU vote would necessarily have to be litigated all over again on a British level.
What would Scotland’s regulatory regime be? If it left the UK’s orbit, it would need to accept painful obstacles to trade in Britain. But if it stayed, what was the point of the vote? What would its customs arrangements be? If it left the British customs system, there’d have to be checks on goods going North and South. But if it stayed, why be independent at all?
Once again, these heartfelt issues of nationhood would mutate into painstaking legal technicalities. Once again, people would be driven to despise one another across a tribal divide, fighting a proxy war for identity in the land of trade bureaucracy.
These referendums don’t even resolve the questions they’re ostensibly meant to address. After the 2014 vote Cameron said the question of Scottish independence had been settled “for a generation”. In fact, it metastasised into a beast that would dominate Scottish politics, blotting out all the humdrum issues that actually make people’s lives better: health, transport, education, housing.
Announcing the Brexit vote, Cameron said it was “time to settle this European question in British politics”. The same thing happened. These types of votes do not heal wounds. They deepen them.
There was, in the end, only one real accomplishment of the referendum: it served to divide and thereby neutralise progressive forces in Britain.
Labour lost one third of its supporters to the SNP between the vote and the general election the following year, the vast majority of them independence supporters who consolidated around the SNP. In the UK, Brexit unmoored cultural debates from economic ones, tearing Labour’s electoral coalition in two.
Both these processes were deadly. It’s only now that progressive forces have finally acted with newfound unity and coordination to get the Conservatives out of office. Introducing these binary questions of identity to political life merely serves to divide the left and allow the right a monopoly.
So where are we now? The latest YouGov poll puts support for the Union at 56 per cent and support for independence at 44 per cent, barely moved since the 55 per cent to 45 per cent vote 10 years ago. All that sound and fury, signifying nothing. What a terrible, tragic, pointless waste of time.
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