Joan McAlpine: Gingering up the argument for independence

It’s always hard to say goodbye, particularly for the second time. When I last said farewell to The Scotsman, back in 1996, it was like leaving home. Certainly the transition from scholarly broadsheet – it was quite literally a handful – to a red-top tabloid, took some adjustment. The Scotsman was my first national newspaper, having joined as a reporter in the Glasgow office in 1989. I came of age there, professionally speaking. My current move – this is my last column for these pages – will be less of a culture shock, having been round most of the Scottish media houses in the intervening period, both as an editor and commentator.

I appreciate the opportunity given to me by the comment editor Peter MacMahon and the editor John McLellan to play a leading role in the debate on Scotland’s future. The Scotsman’s Perspective pages are rightly acknowledged as the leading platform for the exchange of political ideas in the country’s print media. In an era of scant newspaper resources, the breadth and quality of opinion is in no small part due to the talent and ingenuity of the commissioning editors.

I will not miss the Cyber Brits who leave sexist, abusive comments at the bottom of my columns. Other people complain of being bullied at school because of red hair. It’s not something I encountered in the rough and tumble of my Greenock comprehensive. But my ginger gene seems to bring out the worst sort of spite in those of an ultra-unionist persuasion, whose anger is only fuelled by their political alienation from the mainstream of Scottish opinion. My carrot top, as much as my pro-independence views, seemed to act as a beacon for their malice.

Cyber abuse wasn’t a problem when I first joined the paper, several months pregnant, in the 1980s. But journalism in the age of the typewriter had its limitations too. There was no Google, only one’s own general knowledge, contacts book and files of newspaper clippings meticulously assembled by the team of dedicated librarians in the old North Bridge building. Then again, the lack of instant electronic references meant there was little of what we now disparagingly refer to as “churnalism”. Research was gathered the old-fashioned way, by talking to people on the ground and keeping careful notes.

My formative years at the paper were a time when anger bubbled over after more than a decade of Margaret Thatcher’s geographically and ideologically remote Conservative government. Scotland’s sense of itself was attacked, first in the run-down of manufacturing industry, the accumulation of wealth and power in the south-east of England and the decision to introduce a punitive poll tax to Scotland before other parts of the UK. Yet out of this destruction came the absolute determination, of both people and politicians, to reconvene the Scottish parliament.

Although the concept of popular sovereignty is an ancient one in Scotland, the 1990s saw it revived by the unionist parties as well as the SNP. Labour returned to a rhetoric not heard since formative years during the Red Clyde – that the UK government did not have a mandate to impose the poll tax in Scotland, had no democratic right to privatise our water, or close down our industries. To some extent, even the Tories tacitly accepted this, with patrician figures such as the late George Younger arguing privately that Scotland required special handling. The Conservatives refused to budge on devolution, but the other unionist parties’ decision to sign a Claim of Right, asserting the Scottish people’s right to choose their own form of government, was more significant than we knew. It reverberates to the present day having been endorsed again this year by the Scottish Parliament. It may well have more influence on Scotland’s future than its past.

The journalists who most influenced my writing at the time were Joan Didion, whose chronicles of late-Sixties West Coast America are unsurpassed in capturing the mood of a time and place; Ian Jack, the London-based Scot whose feature writing examined the social upheaval of the Thatcher years without descending into cliché; Neal Ascheron, a brilliant mind who put Scottish aspirations in a historical and European context, and George Orwell, the novelist whose talent for reportage is too often overlooked. When I moved into the little cubbyhole above Fleshmarket Close that was The Scotsman features department, it was these people whose cuttings cluttered my desk.

Under the direction of the late features editor Bob Campbell, we had space, time and encouragement to chronicle our country in a pivotal period. It was a privilege to speak to people and hear their stories. The kind of personal contact with communities and individuals that comes from being an MSP reminds me of that time.

This most recent period at The Scotsman is a strange mirror of those earlier times. Like the 1990s, there is a desire for change. But then it was born out of anger and loss. Now, it rides on a wave of optimism. My first column on rejoining this paper in 2010 looked at the fiscally autonomous region of the Basque country in Spain as a model for Scotland’s future. Almost two years on from that column, the Campaign for Fiscal Responsibility, which I signed up to in 2010, is at the centre of the political debate.

Some of the same people are behind devo-plus, the middle-ground option launched in Edinburgh today, although they appear to stop short of what the Basques have long enjoyed. Whether it will be enough for the people of Scotland remains to be seen. In many ways, independence is easier to understand and explain.

It is independence that people ask about in schools, pubs, hairdressers and workplaces. And that is why I am moving on, to take the independence message to the readers of a mass circulation paper. The next two years promise to be just as exciting as the past two decades.

• Joan McAlpine is an SNP MSP for the south of Scotland