Mike Small: Day to day, we didn’t exist. Yet all of a sudden, here we are

FOR those of us who believe in self-determination, the explosion of interest in the independence issue this past week has been enlightening. Scotland has emerged from the shadows. Radio news programmes with actual coverage of Scotland? “National” newspapers with the issue explored (often with wild inaccuracy and ridiculous analysis)? So what new territory is this in which we actually exist?

There is the idea that nations are born, or “imagined’ once they have been charted in books, plays and films. We had a good start inventing the novel itself (Scott) and with classics such as Kidnapped, this idea of a place that you named and could travel around and have a shared experience of has been seminal in shaping a shared cultural experience. We’re mapped. From Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992) to Stephen Greenhorn’s “road movie for the stage” Passing Places (1997) and Alan Warner’s The Man Who Walks (2002) we have located ourselves. But day to day, in the Anglosphere, we don’t exist. Yet here, all of a sudden, we are.

First we have Nick Robinson framing the debate on “national” UK telly as Salmond v Cameron: “Have a referendum and we’ll take you to court.” Then we have Faisal Islam on the (normally better) Channel 4 News, who suggested it was unreasonable for the SNP to expect to take 90 per cent of the oil from the North Sea yet only 8.4 per cent of the UK’s total debt. The logic of which – if you haven’t followed it, because there isn’t any – is that either Scotland should take 90 per cent of the UK’s total debt or 8.4 per cent of North Sea Oil.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Confused? Well the London media are. Setting aside the foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Scottish outpourings of the Mail, Express and other outlets for off-the-leash Jock-Baiting – and the new manifestation on Twitter, it’s clear that we’re now entering a feeding frenzy of disinformation, misinformation and propaganda. At the start of the week, Patrick Wintour writing in the Guardian seemed to be re-producing Tory press releases: “Salmond has been talking about holding a referendum to coincide with the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn (1314)”, a claim which had no basis whatsoever but neatly allowed Danny Alexander and Michael Forsyth to raise the straw man of Bannockburn.

But there’s another element to the new reality than having an awkward presence on the media landscape. There’s an indignant confidence growing. How did this happen? I think you can chart it not just from the very same Forsyth’s botched efforts to pass off rising nationalist sentiment by returning the Stone of Destiny in 1996, but from the Stone’s liberation in 1950 to Sheena Wellington’s rendition of A Man’s A Man For A’ That at the opening of the Scottish Parliament. We’ve shifted from stone to song, from something solid, static, a sort of relic of ourselves to something capable of song and movement. Something in flow. The independence movement is in flow and the problem for the British State and its supporters is that they represent something dead, inert and static.

The very idea of Britain has died between 1950 and today, and it will take more than Pippa Middleton’s bottom, Seb Coe’s (eye-wateringly expensive) running track and yet another bloody Jubilee to revive interest in the notion. Scotland means possibility whilst Britain seems more and more like a chintzy idea from the 1950s, where only Kirstie Allsop belongs. This week there’s hope for the future.

• Mike Small is editor of the politics blog Bella Caledonia and secretary of the Scottish Independence Convention

Related topics: