Ok, here are my final thoughts on the referendum before I put this all to bed and move on. Its also my longest ever, so read on if you care to. Im not a nationalist. Having never been a separatist or an independence fundamentalist, waking up on Friday in the union wasnt the heartbreak for me as it was for many others. I voted Yes and campaigned hard for a Yes vote on sound moral & intellectual reasons. We are all human and were all patriots to some degree, so I wont say emotion wasnt a factor either. But it was a healthy love of Scotland, not a hatred of the Union, that was the formation of that. Channel your anger positively A lot of people are deeply angry and highly strung at the moment, which is not only understandable but reasonable. But folks, you must channel it reasonably. You can combine passion with reason. Ive had dozens of people tell me I helped sway them to Yes. If you want this to happen in your lifetime, you must also sway dozens. Just have a think about how you think you can achieve that. In this regard, as a hard headed non-fundamentalist realist, I cant even guarantee Ill be a Yes voter when - as I suspect it will - the next referendum comes. I might 99% be sure I will, but its merely speculation. I will base my view on the reasons at that time, as I did this time. Will you be engaged in politics outwith the referendum? Scotland just had a few too many No voters who blanket refused to budge from their stance throughout the 2 year campaign. But many did turn. Hardly any went in the other direction. That was a reflection on us having the better arguments. So, if you want to win the next one, ask yourself this: how involved in politics was I before this referendum? I personally think I saw too many late-comers to the referendum. Where were you 2 years ago? Where were you this time last year? I often felt like a bit of a lone voice at times among my peers and via social media up until around a few weeks ago. Just sayin like. The timid and ignorant vote of the 65+ age group Where was it really won and lost? I was shown a demographic breakdown of a YouGov poll before the referendum and it was clear that the kingmakers were the elderly. Not the female vote as had been suggested. The group who use the internet and social media the least, therefor the the group least likely to have a perspective not offered by the staunchly unionist media. Its no coincidence. Ally that to a natural sense of caution that comes with age and a generation who hold (possibly outdated) emotional ties to the concepts of Britishness, Queen and empire. Any future referendum will be played to an electorate with much greater access to information and a healthy mistrust of the mainstream media. It stands to reason based on my own experience. Where I looked around me, where I saw internet trends, Yes were winning this by a landslide. What I couldnt see where the elderly, sat in their homes, not on the internet. The real silent majority. But silent as muh as closed off is what Id argue. The referendum as a class war So brings me to my real personal sense of treachery among Scots in this referendum. Not flags, not anthems, not identity. Class. 2 of Scotland biggest cities, Dundee and Glasgow, voted Yes. Its no coincidence they have the worst poverty rates and are areas of traditional industries now destroyed by successive Unionist governments. There was a cry out for help that cities like mine, affluent leafy Edinburgh, totally ignored. More than ignored, rammed the door shut in their face. The terms working class and middle class for me are not a simply a measure of ones wealth or comfort of living. For me, its a socio-political mentality. I am working class, always will be. No matter what successes I achieve in life, monetary or material, I will never change. Having had no material wealth to begin with, I have no fear of losing any. The middle class mentality is to safeguard what they have been given by birth and circumstance. Middle classes object wholesale to tax rises. Working classes object much less so, which is ironic given they are the ones with most to lose proportionately. The thing that angers me about the attitude of the middle class is they dont even realise the logical and economic fallacy of protectionist self-preservation. Certainly not at least in a long term sense if they wish that prosperity to last more than a few generations in their lineage. Paying a higher penny towards the maintenance of free education, the NHS and the eradication of poverty will more than likely increase their overall material wealth, not diminish it. If you eradicate inequality, you unleash potential across the nation. A Yes vote was undeniably the best opportunity we had to eradicating socio-economic inequality. Yes voters are self evidently more altruistic than No voters I truly believe that most Yes voters did so because they thought it would better the people around them. And they did so even if it meant a negative impact on them personally. I personally did not think independence would have adversely affected me, but I was more than prepared to do it even if it did, because I was certain it would have taken hundreds of thousands out of poverty. No voters, and certainly middle class No voters (and boy therere a lot of them) did so for purely self serving selfish reasons. The No vote was the politics of me wheras the Yes vote was the politics of us. Yes or No, Scotland is diminished without Alex Salmond We didnt just lose the referendum, we lost the strongest campaigner for Scotland in over 3 centuries. Salmond was the towering intellect and fierce competitor we needed heading into potentially messy negotiations with rUK. With Salmond, I believe the Scotlands Future white paper was in the most part, achievable. Without him, Im not sure where we can go. The country is bigger and more important than any one individual, but we have lost the single best individual this country has ever had. Nobody on either side, who has to now live in a devolved Scotland as we now must, should under-estimate just how potentially weakened we are as a nation without him fighting our corner. Everything we needed to start up an amazing new prosperous & fair new nation was there. Not only have we never had a better chance, no nation in the world throughout history ever had a better chance as a new nation. It was lost through a combination of selfishness and ignorance. That to me is the biggest shame of it all. Thanks for taking the time to read this. H
Posted on: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 11:27:03 +0000
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