Ten years ago today, the people of Scotland had control of their destiny.
Just for the day, mind you.
They had the chance to decide whether or not they wanted to remain as part of the United Kingdom.
You know the rest…
For the preceding six weeks, I had been in Fair Caledonia, mainly in Glasgow, but I had also journeyed to Edinburgh several times.
My task was to look at the role new media was playing on the Yes side of the debate.
As polling day was approaching, I asked some of the leading figures on the pro-independence side of the Fifth Estate a simple enough question:
If you lose but get forty-five per cent of the vote, what’s your next move?
For the record, no one, either in pressers or personal conversations, accepted the premise of my question.
They were unequivocally confident that they were going to win.
Your humble correspondent, who had travelled from Ireland, respectfully demurred.
There was no doubt that the Yes side was winning the exuberance campaign.
However, I felt that for all their brilliant energy, they were providing street theatre for people who were already going to vote their way.
There was also international support, often from stateless nations in Europe, that saw a common cause with Scotland’s situation.
These firefighters from Catalunya attracted much friendship and admiration for making the trip.
Despite being there as a political journalist, the writer in me could see genuine drama unfolding.
I was told that the constitutional question had even split families.
That was the thought that birthed my stage play “Hame”.
It premiered in Glasgow the following March as part of the Saint Patrick’s festival.
When the theatre company asked me if I had a picture for the flier, the featured image seemed entirely appropriate.
The firefighters from Iberia made an offstage contribution to the play.
On the day itself, I stood for a while outside of the polling station in Baillieston.
It was the primary school I had attended in the 1960s, Saint Bridget’s.
Here was Better Together chap outside in his regulation red zipper jacket.
A very personable English person who lived on the other side of Glasgow.
It quickly became apparent that he had no idea of Baillieston’s history as a mining village or the influx of Irish labour there starting in the Victorian era.
My maternal grandmother’s family had arrived there as Gastarbeiters when Edwardian Britain ruled much of the planet.
The Better Together representative revealed an ignorance of the place and its people, which was too contrived for a novel.
As the polls were closing, I travelled to the national count centre in Ingliston with a colleague.
We established ourselves in Lowland Hall, where, I’m told, they regularly hold agricultural shows.
With the rest of the foreign media, we were herded in for a freezing night in the huge barn of a structure.
Then, the results started to come in.
When he stood to watch Prime Minister David Cameron announce the result from the Lectern in Downing Street, I knew that my faith in the polling results was justified.
Their collective prediction of a 55/45 split in favour of Scotland remaining in the United Kingdom was pretty much spot on.
Of course, no one could have foreseen that in less than two years, the same Prime Minister would be in the same spot announcing his resignation after losing another constitutional referendum.
In the Brexit vote, the polling companies got it badly wrong, and the clever data types on the leave EU side located several million people who, in a sense, had no political credit rating.
To an Irish Republican, what was on offer to the people of Scotland a decade ago seemed rather anaemic.
The Saxe-Coburg Gotha family would still provide their unelected head of state.
In that sense, only the 1707 rapprochement was to be unpicked.
That was a marriage between two states already in the imperialism business.
The new polity of Great Britain was created to plunder the planet.
It’s fair to say that the East India Company and the Company of Scotland had met with mixed success against their Dutch and Spanish rivals.
The English and Scots could be an all-conquering alliance by burying their ancient differences.
For the avoidance of doubt, that is THE story of Britain.
Consequently, the contemporary narrative from those favouring “Indy” that Scotland is a “colony” is historical illiteracy on a frankly offensive scale.
Colonies do not keep a separate legal system.
Ask the Welsh.
Where are the laws of Hywel Dda now?
Here on my island, the Brits ensured that our ancient and fully functioning Brehon Laws were, well, outlawed.
No such legal privations for the Jocks.
Prime Minister Cameron later, not realising he was being recorded at a UN General Assembly meeting, spoke of calling the British Monarch and telling her the result of the Scottish Independence Referendum.
He said that Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg Gotha “purred” on learning that the Scots, to deploy the Caledonian vernacular, had shat it.
A legal system retained, but now overruled by a UK ‘Supreme Court’, a subordinated legal system that has never been allowed to threaten the unity of the new state. A fig leaf to keep the new Scots establishment happy as the Westminster parliament admitted it had won her (Scotland) and were not about to let her go, under any circumstance. Another bribe.
A Company of Scotland and a Scottish state that had suffered legal sabotage by the English parliament for the previous 70 years prior to the act of union, with Scottish trade and relationships actively hindered by the English Parliament’s laws and navy’s actions. A Scotland that suffered agricultural calamity in the 1690s devastating the populous and the nobles who ruled over them and leaving her and those same nobles vulnerable to the offers of English gold.
Not colonised you say, but the Scots language removed from official documents, then the upper classes as they embraced the centers of power to the south at the cost of their integrity, then the middle classes as they aped the upper, and finally long attempts to eradicate it from all remaining working class Scots as enshrined in educational documents and guidelines from the 19th century on. The incorporation of the locals educated in English systems of learning into the bureaucracy of the larger imperial power, to become loyal house jocks is the same system the British Empire used in all their colonies – it was used in Scotland too.
The line is blurred – parts of Scotland did profit from Empire – well I remember Phil’s oft brought up quote about the amount of wealth from India brought into Scotland. Scots did go to every corner and again did act in the Imperial fashion as functionaries, bureaucrats, and traders, contributing to the emptying of Scotland’s native people from its shores over the last 300 years, as Scottish boys were often first in line to die in British wars, more Scots per capita dying than anywhere else in the then union during WW1, part of a by then long and unfortunate tradition.
A few Scots profited from Empire, most were rendered poorer. The slums of Glasgow produced steel, railway engines and ships at the turn of the century, (and yes, that involved a large number of immigrant workers, many of them Irish, just as it did the descendants of dispossessed gaels, and lowland Scots put off their land for the cities) turning a massive profit for the crown, none of it reinvested in Scotland. If Scotland was not supposedly de jure a colony, it was a de facto one, treated as such by the new British state which was to all intents and purposes the old English one writ large.
Our history is not clean, we have been both oppressor and oppressed. This is something Scotland shall have to reckon with, in the fullness of time, if independent. Strange though, for a country that is not a colony, that Scotland and her people are so clearly ignored and her potential unfulfilled by a Westminster government that is only interested in benefitting from Scottish assets whilst giving a pittance back. For a supposed equal, Scotland surely is treated like a possession, and a neglected one at that.
Brilliant comment Roderick, sums up Scotland’s position within the British Empire perfectly.
Time for a new chapter within these British and Celtic Isles.
Scotland is not Ireland. It is unlike many other countries. The simple facts are, that Scotland is & will be, for the long foreseeable future, better off as part of the UK. It might not be a palatable truth for 40 odd percent of the population but facts are facts. Get over it & get on with it. IYKYH.
That is an economically illiterate statement highlighted by the yoon theivery corporation draining billions from our local communities. Result is the current inability to pay for basic community services. Hope your happy being part of the partitionist economical beneficaries who feel privaleged with their crumbs instead of ensuring everything, made, extracted and generated in Scotland’s pre Blair territories is produced, bottled and taxed in Scotland for Scotland. R Mac has it and you need to be a lot less lazy in your grasp of history. There is a very obvious contemporary analogy to this debate in the significant contrast of fortunes between the health and wealth of Glasgow’s Celtic FC and the Sevco New Poundlanders.
“Facts are facts”, without one fact to back up that statement.
It was also well documented that in the early hours during the vote count at one point the Yes vote was in the lead and a number of shadowy types with laptops were running about in blind panic probably updating their masters in London before the vote turned their way eventually but strangely there wasn’t much made of this at the time or Yes votes in their ballot boxes dumped at the side of roads etc etc , if anyone truly believes it was a fair vote without interference then they need their heads examined.
That would be naion! Not natation!
Political ignorance, tribalism, gullibility and fear done for Scotland in 2014, and in the recent General Election. ‘Twas ever thus.
Alas, can only ponder upon The Republic of Ireland’s post brexit GDP, and holler it could have been we.
The eejits trusted Liebour with their “Devo-Max” shite.
And 10 years later, they’re trusting them again!
We missed the boat back in the 70s when oil was discovered (revenues Saved Thatcher Government later) we could have been as wealthy as Norway..same population same topographical challenges/weather. No pot-holed roads, no litter strewn streets, but big wages, world class hospitals.. sadly back then and in 2014 too many happy to remain “Northern Engurlund”
Alex Salmond said he would keep the Saxe-Coburg’s on so independence would not have changed that. It is an attractive idea but the SNP had an economic basket case of a plan for the currency no idea about currency.
The most attractive thing was being in the EU, no agreement on that. Too many serious issues unanswered. The problem with the SNP is that they are big on rhetoric poor on detail. Maybe someday they recruit bright enough people to plan for independence.
For me, you’ve hit the nail on the head with the five words “Too many serious issues unanswered”. I’m far from the Motherland but expect to return in the relatively near future, so had no horse in the race, so to speak, in 2014, but that was the thing that struck me. A lot of key questions existed that nobody on the ‘Yes’ side seemed able or willing to answer.
The scare campaign done for the Scots. That and having everybody and their granny eligible to vote.
EU nationals and other UK born votes swung the day in favour of No. That is a proven fact.
This is why the UK government refuses to sanction another vote. They are aware that the numbers are against them.
The SNP in Westminster played into their hands. They should have recused themselves from the UK Parliament on the day they were elected.
As for the Sax-Coburg cabal. That is a vote for another day. Hopefully on day 1 of the independent Scottish Parliament.
Spot-on Anton, there were and still ARE however too many of our fellow Catholics who are soup-taking YOONS and to be fair, Protestants who are pro-Indy. The SNP became a busted flush under Nicola Sturgeon’s divisive leadership where she passed up mandate after mandate for Indy Ref 2, instead putting GENDER politics before the fight for independence. That’s why thousands of us left the SNP, many like myself to join Alba. Phil, as I am also a member of Sinn Fein, I’m VERY confident of a border poll before the end of the decade. Scottish INDEPENDENCE??? Not sure I’ll live to see it in my lifetime and I’ve only just turned 56.
Don’t bet you house on a border poll in Ireland resulting in unification. Many Catholics will vote remain, particularly if they have serious health problems. The much maligned NHS is still a big draw to many.
I have mixed feelings on this myself. Emotionally I’d love to see a united Ireland, but the pragmatic side of me says that such a scenario could, see a mass migration of unionists to the British mainland, particularly to Scotland where the ties are strongest. This would spell an end for ever to any chance of independence.
As a fellow Scottish born exile in Ireland I share much of your perspective. I moved over in 2021 by which time I’d had a gutful of post-brekshit Tory broken Britain with Scotland a vassal to Westmonster.
Ireland has her (many) shortcomings as you’ll be aware mo chara – yet I value being in an independent state and part of the second largest market in the world in the EU. In spite of my Irish roots – I would consider a return to an Independent Scotland – but not before that inevitable (imo) eventuality. I pray to whatever gods may be that I live to see it.
It’s your right to self-define as a “Scottish born exile”, no one has the right to tell you what you are.
On the same basis you don’t get to co-opt me into that category.
I’m home.
This has always been home.
Is Éireannach mé.
It was ever thus.
Is Éireannach mé 🇮🇪🍀🇮🇪
I truly believe that leave or stay can only be answered honestly if you look at the situation in reverse, were Scotland an independent country, would we want to join with England today? Would we join see our Gov moved 400 moles away with very little representation? Would we join and voluntarily send our revenue to said ‘foreign’ Gov? I honestly think blind bigotry got the better of common sense in the referendum.
I’m not at all convinced that bigotry played a major role. Okay there’s many Orangemen blindly tied to the Royal family – who, incidentally, don’t give two fucks about them – who never would and never will vote to leave the union. Equally there are many Catholics who would vote independence even if it was the equivalent of suicide. But I have to say, I probably know more Protestants than Catholics who voted to leave. To the best of my knowledge only myself and my daughter voted to leave in my entire extended family.
They fairly take the huff when I call them unionists!!
Or Baroness Mone.
We may have had control of our destiny but England had control of our minds leading to a loss of control of our bowels.
To this day we still don’t know what currency we would have been using and rejoining the EU takes time, it not one day you’re not in it, the next day you are back in it.
We were already in the EU as part of the UK and had been for decades. As such, we had already adopted and were fully compliant with the full body of EU laws, regulations etc. As a result, the whole acquis communitaire alignment/adoption process that genuine new members (e.g. Poland in the past, possibly Ukraine in the future) have to go through before joining would not have taken anywhere near as long, or could possibly have even been bypassed altogether, as it was not necessary.
On the currency, the pound could have been retained (at least in the short term), possibly while progression to euro adoption was begun – albeit both would not have been without consequences (good and bad). Other small countries use other people’s currencies as either de facto or shadow currencies, so it’s not unheard of to just unilaterally do this, whether the currency owner likes it or not. Besides, while it is managed by the Bank of England, the pound is a UK currency, not just an English one.
The break up of many former Eastern Bloc countries after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union also shows that, although not easy, setting up your own currency from scratch as a newly independent state is not impossible. So a fully independent, new“Tartan Pound” would have been another alternative.
You’re right though. Much like the Brexit debacle, much of the detail was left up in the air, so no one knew exactly what they were voting for (or, more precisely, the exact consequences of a vote to change the status quo).
I think the EU card was the biggest lie in the entire campaign. “You can only stay in the EU by remaining in the Union!” I think that was complete bollocks! We were already EU citizens, with EU passports, and to the best of my knowledge there is NO mechanism within the EU for stripping EU citizenship from any individual unless their natation is expelled for some major transgression of the rules. That would NOT have been the case. Frankly. I believe that with some legal status adjustments, it would have been business as usual with the EU.
We in Scotland actually do know what colony status entails, the thing is the word is used in a derogatory manner by many Scottish people in an attempt to get others off their collective “bums” and get thinking about the true situation that they are in. I myself had no higher education and left school at 15, but I have to tell you that I resent the reference to illiteracy and folk being offended by it, I do think you may resent folks not putting an x in a certain box in the ballot booth, perhaps because other folks have had to force another country to give them partial independence.
My one abiding memory of watching that count, was the Stirling result!! At the time, I couldn’t believe they shat it, the home of William Wallace, actually, shat it! I quickly realised, that what happened was, the influx of white settlers, swaying the vote.
That, and the postal vote fraud, done us!
Stirling is the home of the monument, Wallace was born in Renfrewshire, Elderslie I think.
The people who thought they could run a country couldn’t build two ferries or an eye pavilion . We dodged a massive bullet.
Yet you live in Brexit Btitain, with its elite-controlled press (whose infantile distraction headlines you parrot here). You presumably enjoy having an aircraft carrier costing Brexit British taxpayers $3.7bn and an HS2 that cost you (as a Scots taxpayer) yet which would never benefit Scotland. Your rights to Freedom of Movement were taken away in 2016 thanks to racists from Bury & where the European birthright was once the opportunity to live, work, study in Florence, Krakow, Barcelona, Berlin, your kids horizons have been reduced to Middlesboro, Coventry & Lincoln. Ferries?
1000% correct
You’ve confused independence with an SNP government. These are very different things.
Voting for Scottish independence doesn’t mean anyone has to vote for the SNP at a Scottish General Election. Once Scotland regains its independence, we’d get to elect the incompetent numpties and crooks who form our government instead of having them chosen for us by the UK electorate that controls 90%+ of the seats at Westminster. It’s that simple.
Vote for independence and once that’s happened, we will always be able to vote for the politicians #in Scotland# who can best represent #our# interests. Which is another statement of the bleedin’ obvious.
Phil, we can thank the Unionist parties for spinning lies telling old folk they would lose their pensions also be taken out of the EU, vote rigging. Bussing up activist’s from England to spout their shite. Also the Orange Order had a big say in proceedings. The SNP never helped themselves with the carry on with Alex Salmond ,the smear campaign against Nicola Sturgeon who hasn’t been charged but the Polis still stayed outside her house for three days. Don’t see them going after the Tory and Labour MP’s claiming all sorts of expenses and not declaring any gifts
Spot on, and sheep will be sheep.