Venom flows through Scotland’s widening fissures Whatever the vote, Union supporters are feeling scarred and nervous at what comes next as new hatreds emerge, writes Tony Allen-Mills Tony Allen-Mills Published: 14 September 2014 Voters backing independence disrupt a rally held in support of the Union attended by the Labour leader Ed Miliband in GlasgowVoters backing independence disrupt a rally held in support of the Union attended by the Labour leader Ed Miliband in Glasgow (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images) The doom-laden warnings are multiplying, the opinion polls are wavering, but Scott Campbell has spent the past two years pounding the pavements of his home town of Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, arguing the case for Scottish independence. He thinks that Scotland — and the rest of Britain — is in for a big surprise. “The momentum is with us,” declared the 20-year-old student who first went door-to-door canvassing at the age of 16 and was the Scottish National party’s youngest candidate in the 2012 elections. “The number of volunteers we’ve had out on the streets here has doubled, trebled and quadrupled in the last couple of weeks,” Campbell added. “All those rich bankers telling us to vote ‘no’ or else, it just sounds like the other side is panicking.” As he spoke a team from Generation Yes — the youth wing of Alex Salmond’s pro-independence movement — were swarming through the warren of alleys and council estates that surround Cumbernauld’s notorious town centre complex, once dubbed the “worst building in Britain”. They were in search of voters such as Ryan Laird, a 16-year- old who recently caused a national stir by becoming the youngest defector from the Better Together campaign. A pupil at Cumbernauld Academy, Laird was recruited by his local Labour MP to argue the case for Union with Britain. But when his postal vote arrived he told local reporters: “I just knew I had to put my cross in the ‘yes’ box — yes for independence.” Laird said later that he had been “taken in by the ‘no’ campaign’s scare stories about all the terrible things they said would happen. But I ended up feeling this was too good an opportunity for Scotland to miss.” As Salmond ploughed noisily across the country on a helicopter tour of northern cities on Friday, Scotland’s first minister was banking on that sense of historic opportunity to resist the avalanche of doubters predicting all manner of economic gloom should Scotland seek to go it alone. “We’re not going to be bullied by big London government,” Salmond roared. “We’re not going to be bullied out of our opportunity — our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — to create a more prosperous country. There is going to be a decisive ‘yes’ vote next week.” If the “yes” campaign was bursting with excitement — sometimes too much excitement as clashes between rival camps broke out in several cities — the mood among the “no” voters could scarcely have been more different. Bitterness, resentment and an overwhelming sense of sadness at the polarising effects of the referendum debate have scarred many supporters of Union with Britain and left them feeling nervous and angry about the prospect of further division, whatever the result on Thursday. The pushing and shoving started early in the former Labour stronghold of Rutherglen, South Lanarkshire, last week. It should have been fertile territory for the Better Together campaign, but the referendum has fractured old loyalties and forged new hatreds. “We’re here for a peaceful discussion, not a fight,” yelled Barry Clarke, a Labour party activist, as “yes” voters bent on disrupting the meeting jostled for position amid cries of “disgrace” and “shame on you” and a string of curses. A couple of Labour stalwarts ploughed their way through very short speeches to noisy barracking from the crowd and the meeting quickly dissolved into an unseemly scramble. It was scarcely an advertisement for Scottish democracy and as the politicians pushed through the crowd to the safety of a nearby cafe, a middle-aged woman stumbled into a shop down the road. “I’m a cancer patient,” she gasped, “and someone just shoved me right in my tumour.” It was not quite so ugly a few days earlier when Trish Davis, a retired teacher, joined a small group of Better Together volunteers to canvass voters in the former mining villages of Newtongrange and Gorebridge, south of Edinburgh. Yet even in these sleepy semi-rural outposts there were signs of the venom that has seeped into the debate as voting day approaches. Davis recalled a meeting with a Newtongrange housewife who had seemed receptive to a doorstep discussion — until her “other half” came to the door. “He was all ‘damn you to hell, we’re voting yes, get off my property’,” Davis said. “I felt sorry for the wife but I had to turn away, there’s no talking to people like that. It’s got so bad that people here are scared to put up ‘no’ stickers because they don’t want bricks through their windows.” Another volunteer, Judith Strong, a retired district nurse, said she was “very sad” that so many voters she met “just don’t want to know about the risks [of independence]. I think Alex Salmond has divided the country in a way that Westminster never did.” Strong has experienced that division first hand: “I can’t talk about this to my sister any more, because she’s married to an SNP chap and they just aren’t open to debate.” The latest opinion polls suggest that the barrage of warnings about disappearing pensions, rising prices, a collapsing pound and a shrunken NHS may have slowed if not reversed the dramatic recent swing to the “yes” campaign. Gordon Brown, the former Labour prime minister, summed up the latest shift in the polls with an echo of a quote by Abraham Lincoln: “I say to Alex Salmond, you can try to dismiss some of the warnings some of the time, but you cannot dismiss all of the warnings all of the time.” Yet to the horror of the pro-British side it is not just deceitful politicians or bully boys from the political margins who are opting to disregard the risks. For every Scottish businessman preaching doom, there was another shrugging his shoulders. “I know you are hearing a lot of scary stories coming out, but they are not real,” said Jim McColl, a Scottish tycoon whose investment company has just sunk £60m into a rescue bid for Ferguson Shipbuilders, the last commercial shipyard on the Clyde. Why shouldn’t Scotland be independent? It’s a different country Gerard ButlerWhy shouldn’t Scotland be independent? It’s a different country Gerard Butler (Caroline McCredie) At Gaindykehead Farm near Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, I talked to Jim Brown, a 74- year-old cattle breeder who sells 90% of his Angus beef south of the border, most of it to English branches of Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer. He seems the last man in Scotland who would gamble on an uncertain future for his farm, his family and his fortune. Yet Brown will be voting “yes” to independence and last week he held a meeting at his farm for at least 30 neighbours who will be doing the same. “I’ve been frustrated with Westminster’s attitude to Scotland since I entered agripolitics in 1972,” said Brown, who fell out with Margaret Thatcher over milk quotas and has nothing but contempt for David Cameron. “Cameron got the feeling of the Scottish people completely, totally wrong. He was convinced independence was never going to happen. They’ve created this problem and now they’re on shit street.” Lynn Casey, a young Glasgow mother with a three-year-old daughter, Caragh, had also seemed a perfect candidate for the Better Together recruiters. Women voters have been shown by polls to be more averse to risk. Yet Casey is voting “yes” and laughed off suggestions that her daughter’s future might be jeopardised by a reckless gamble on independence. “I’m not a stupid person,” she said. “My husband’s an engineer and he feels the same way that I do — we don’t want Scotland to be shackled to Westminster any longer. I’m not taking a risk for my daughter; we are a rich country and we’ll be even richer if we run it ourselves.” If there is one thing both sides agree on, it is that Thursday’s turnout is likely to be a record for a British poll and that more than 80% of Scotland’s 4.2m eligible voters will cast a ballot. That means tens of thousands of Scots from the age of 16will be voting for the first time. The “yes” campaign describes them as “uncharted territory” for pollsters who may not have been able to assess accurately the intentions of a group with no prior voting record. In Cumbernauld, Campbell said he had found that teenage voters were “a lot more engaged and enthusiastic than their parents”. He added: “The old ones might be fed up with the same old political parties, but their kids are telling them this is our chance to take control of our own affairs.” But that youthful enthusiasm has come at a price. “We are getting so angry with each other,” a Scottish friend told me as we hiked up Arthur’s Seat, the rocky summit that towers over Holyrood Park in Edinburgh. She looked down at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where Mary Queen of Scots married, where Charles I was crowned and where George V turned the estate into the British monarch’s official residence in Scotland. “I suppose if there’s a ‘yes’ vote it will become our new president’s residence,” she said, only half-joking. “But whether the vote is ‘yes’ or ‘no’, there is poison now between us Scots. Our country will suffer for it.”
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 19:06:58 +0000
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