The Scottish independence referendum: what happened and what next?
| Position | ROUNDTABLE |
A collection of rocks in the North Atlantic
Adam Ramsay, Co-Editor of Our Kingdom on OpenDemocracy and author of 42 Reasons to Support Scottish Independence (2014)
I'm Scottish, but I live in Oxford, and as such I had a rather strange perspective on the referendum, wanting to be at home but finding myself in this little corner of the South East. The result was that, as the one Scottish person everyone knew, I always got the same questions. The first of those was: 'Why don't you have a Scottish accent?'
I often found that was quite a useful way to explain the answers to a lot of the rest of the questions. There's a long version and a short one, and the long answer is that in 1609 King James VI, as we call him, gathered together the Scottish nobility on the Island of Iona and made them sign a treaty, the Statutes of Iona, which, among other things, said they had to send their sons to English rather than Gaelic-speaking schools. The Statutes of Iona were the start of a process of the anglicisation of the Scottish elite, and thus the construction of modern Britain as we know it. The short answer is: 'I'm a bit posh'.
The point is that, if you're trying to understand the Scottish referendum, then there are at least two prisms we need to look at it through. The first of those is the rise and fall of the British Empire. That's a process which, to an extent, begins with James VI going south, right after he's forced everyone to sign the Statutes of Iona, which was a conscious part of this process. Then later the Act of Union over 100 years later, which in many ways was about that British elite coming together so they could better conquer the world. Of course, as we all know, they were very, very good at that for a very long time. That empire, from the middle of the twentieth century, has been gradually declining.
If you look at the Scottish referendum through that prism, then it begins to make sense. The British state, when you compare it to any other West European state, isn't really in any sense an average, normal government. Half of the land for which the British state is responsible is in the southern hemisphere. Britain is still responsible for by far the biggest network of tax havens around the world, which are the enclaves of our empire. What we did is turn our empire from a geographical empire into an empire of capital, which still, in a sense, we are located at the centre of, and which is slowly dying and being replaced by America and by China. We could all talk for hours about that story of global history. I think if we're trying to understand the Scottish referendum, then that's the first bit of history to think about. This is one sign of the breaking up of what was once the most mighty empire in the history of humanity.
The second important bit of global context it's worth thinking about is a whole range of frustrations which have bubbled up in hundreds of different ways all across the world since the global financial crisis. We could talk about this, again, for hours. We could talk about Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. We could talk about the massive rise of workers' struggles, even in China. We could talk about its expression in America in different ways and so on. It's a familiar story.
My job before my current one was training student activists. The way I saw this happening in practice was that, after 2008, what happened, particularly in England, was that there were initiatives like Occupy, the student movements and this flaring up of anger, particularly after the 2010 elections, which then of course dissipated because people had nowhere to channel it. What happened in Scotland was very different because it was right at that moment in 2011 that it became clear there was going to be a referendum and so all that energy went in a different direction. It went into people saying, 'Well, we have the chance to build something new'. These people went off and they organised a whole plethora of campaigns and they expressed themselves in a whole range of different ways. We're talking about, for example, the Radical Independence Conference, which a few months ago got 3,000 radical leftists together, which is a bigger gathering, comparatively, than you've had in England for that kind of radical politics in a very long time, a bigger gathering than the Labour Party in Scotland could manage, and has been able to manage for a very long time. So I think the second important context for the referendum was as another one of those expressions of the anger that was felt after the 2008 crisis, and of the social movements responding to the austerity and rising inequality that came with it.
I think when you understand the interaction of those two things, the decline of the British Empire up against this massive collapse in global capitalism and the reassertion of its dominance through global austerity, the whole phenomenon makes a lot more sense. It's not surprising that that was a movement able to mobilise 45 per cent of the votes in the end. It's not surprising when you again think about the familiar stories around the change in the media and social media and the internet destroying or very much changing the way people get information, that this is a movement which led to a mass education of people, a huge self-education, a replacement in a sense of much of the old media. We can discuss to what extent that's a good thing. Obviously a lot of these things are very problematic. People believe total nonsense. Often people who, like me, voted yes believe a lot of total nonsense, partly as a result of that. So if the question is: what happened? I think that, to give at least a very partial answer, understanding those two bits of global context is at least a beginning.
In conclusion, I will also say something about the future. At least half of that story about empire was an expression of the failure of the British state to renew itself. We haven't had a serious renewal of the constitution of the British state since mass suffrage in the 1920s. If the British state is to survive, if we're not going to have another referendum--I don't mind having another referendum, but for those who might want to keep it together--it's going to have to utterly renew itself. That means that when Labour are promising a constitutional convention, if there is a Labour government, then they're going to have to have a very serious constitutional convention which really does renew the British state. We're going to have to see a very deep cleansing, an understanding that we are a collection of rocks in the North Atlantic, not a great empire in the world anymore. If we ask ourselves that question and we look at how we should govern ourselves in the modern world in that light, I think we have a chance of Britain running itself in a sensible way. If we don't, I think we're going to see another referendum in the next 20 years or so and Scotland will probably vote yes.
The case for Scottish independence
Ben Jackson, Editor of Renewal and Associate Professor of Modern History at Oxford University
The movement of opinion in favour of Scottish independence registered by the referendum now makes it very important to pay close attention to the arguments put forward by Scottish nationalists. Whether you agree with them or not, these arguments are highly sophisticated and designed to subvert key ideas held by the broader progressive British left.
I want to start my analysis by remembering the great Scottish Labour MP, John Mackintosh. On the threshold of the Donald Dewar Room of the Scottish Parliament, some words from Mackintosh are...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
