So it’s now just over a week since the result of the referendum was declared and, if anything, we’re now in an even more confused and chaotic situation that we would have been if there had been a Yes vote.
The referendum has turned everything upside down and nothing can be taken for granted now. What follows is a series of fragmentary thoughts, observations and speculations in which I attempt to map out some of the features of this new landscape. Nothing here is concrete enough to describe as a prediction.
The SNP
In the space of a week the SNP membership has soared to over 60,000, more than doubling it’s size and propelling the party into the position of 3rd largest political party in the whole of the UK (outstripping both the Lib Dems and UKIP). It’s a fair bet that many of those 35,000+ new members are keen to contribute as both funders and activists. The new subscription fees alone will provide a huge financial boost to the party.
But will this surge prove to be a double-edged sword for the SNP leadership? It seems reasonable to assume that all of those new members and activists will be working hell-for-leather to oust Labour, but are they willing to just passively take a back seat and toe existing party lines? Is it not more likely that they’ll be looking to make sure that the party starts making full use of all the powers available to the Scottish Government? Are they likely to be pushing for a more radical policy platform than the SNP have pursued recently?
It’s worth bearing in mind that the existing SNP membership (many of whom will have been party members for decades) are now outnumbered, and could potentially be outvoted, by new members keen to pursue a new agenda. We can probably expect to see some kind of battle over the party’s heart and soul emerging over the next few years.
This problem also exists for the Scottish Greens and Scottish Socialists (who have respectively trebled and doubled their memberships in the same period). I’m not sure that the impact will be quite so huge in their cases though. In part this is to do with the fact that both of those parties pursue more of a bottom-up approach to policy making, rather than the SNP’s top-down structure. This means that they (potentially) have a greater degree of resilience when it comes to adapting to such a huge expansion. At the same time both parties have pretty clear policy platforms that new members are likely to have consciously bought into before signing up. Meanwhile the ‘all things to all people’ approach adopted by the SNP may well be abandoned in favour of a sharp turn to the left.
Labour
Labour may have won the battle, but they needed last-minute reinforcements from the Tories to do it. They also had no qualms about ‘winning ugly’. The frankly disgraceful way in which they conducted themselves over the last two years will not be forgotten or forgiven – not least by the many disaffected Labour voters who are now vowing that they will never vote for the party again.
Attempts to claim the moral high ground after their victory only serve to reinforce the bitterness and resentment on the part of Yes campaigners. The surge in support for other parties is testament to the widespread desire to see Scottish Labour unseated and utterly destroyed.
But is that a realistic ambition? Certainly in the case of the Scottish Parliament it looks unlikely that Labour will be making a comeback any time soon. But if we look at the results of the last UK elections the scale of the challenge becomes apparent. In 2010 only 2 seats changed hands in the whole of Scotland, and in both cases those were seats that Labour were winning back having lost them in by-elections.
Out of the 59 Westminster seats in Scotland only a handful of them constitute marginals. In the rest of those seats it would require a vast swing to unseat the dominant party. This is as true of Lib-Dem and SNP seats as it is of Labour ones. In quite a few cases the SNP would require a swing of 40% or more from Labour in order to clinch those seats. Even in places currently held by the Lib-Dems swings of 20% or more might be required.
That also ignores the complications of tactical voting. For example, if Yes campaigners wanted to unseat Jim Murphy then the most likely means of doing that would be to convince the voters of East Renfrewshire to return a Tory candidate. How likely is it that those new SNP converts will be up for selling that message on the doors?
As attractive as a pro-Yes alliance of SNP/Greens/SSP may sound, the combined votes that it would attract across the country would scarcely be sufficient to swing a single result. In 2010 the Greens and SSP combined polled a grand total of 19,984 votes across the entire country.
While we’re likely to see both Labour and the Lib-Dems taking major hits to their share of the vote next year Yes activists shouldn’t be pinning their hopes on any kind of electoral wipe-out for either party. Bear in mind that the inflexibility and intransigence of the First Past the Post system is one of the things that we had been looking to reform – and there was a reason for that.
The English Left
For me the greatest disappointment of the campaign has been the widespread failure amongst the English Left to support the independence movement. Of course there were notable and honourable exceptions such as Billy Bragg and John Harris, who both seemed to get the idea from the start. A number of Guardian columnists including George Monbiot, Suzanne Moore and Deborah Orr all came over to Yes in the last few weeks of the campaign, but that was too late to have any major impact.
I have to say that a great deal of the resistance from the Left seemed to be powered by nothing more than pure self-interest. Time and again I heard people repeating the complete myth that Scottish Independence would lead to perpetual Tory government for England. Throughout this campaign I’ve consistently received more solidarity from the Green movement, from Welsh Nationalists and from the people of Catalonia than I’ve received from the socialist left. Faced with the possibility of dismantling the entire corporate power structure that is the British state large swathes of the left opted instead to leap into bed with the forces of conservatism. In doing so they also lined up alongside UKIP, the BNP, the National Front and the Orange Order.
In doing so they have largely consigned themselves to a position of complete and utter irrelevance when it comes to shaping the post-referendum landscape – as demonstrated by the constitutional Blitzkrieg that Cameron launched the moment that the result was declared.
The Yes movement
One of the most difficult aspects of the last week has been watching the ferment as people try and re-group and re-organise. On the one hand we have new groupings emerging, often built around a perceived sense of solidarity or maintaining a particular version of identity. I think that this can be seen as a largely defensive reaction as people fight to come to terms with the result.
On the other hand I’m also seeing some movements fragmenting and dissolving as people choose to park their hopes for independence in order to focus and concentrate on specific issue-based activism.
It’s really important for us to acknowledge that none of these reactions is right or wrong – they are simply the inevitable and natural unravelling of millions of distinct individual voices who, for a time, decided to unite in pursuit of a common goal. This is natural and we should allow it to happen. New ideas and movements will emerge, others will fall by the wayside.
The important thing right now is not to allow ourselves to get dragged down into doctrinal disputes that become so embittered that people don’t want to collaborate again in future. If you don’t agree with how other people are organising themselves then find a bunch of people who feel the same and start building something together. Right now we need to focus on what we can construct out of the situation, not set about tearing down the things that others are trying to build.
Scotland’s Indymedia
The last five years has seen an explosion in alternative media in Scotland, which is completely unparalleled anywhere else in the UK. Newsnet Scotland, Bella Caledonia, the Scottish Indyref Podcast, Lesley Riddoch, Derek Bateman, National Collective and Referendum Live TV all became valuable sources of ideas whilst a host of individual bloggers including the likes of Burdz Eye View, Lallands Peat Worrier and (yes) Wings over Scotland started to make regular appearances on mainstream radio and TV.
In the immediate aftermath of the No vote we’ve also seen a number of new groupings emerge, seemingly trying to create a Yes-focussed print press. Whilst it’s great that the enthusiasm is there I do have to ask – why? Print media is gradually on the way out as it is. Why establish a whole bunch of new titles to compete with each other, when we could be growing and strengthening the groups that already exist?
As I’m writing this Newsnet Scotland and Bateman Broadcasting have announced that they’ll be collaborating on new strands of work. Bella Caledonia have announced plans for expansion and Referendum Live TV and the people behind Dateline Scotland are now floating plans for alternative online news broadcasts.
To me this work is really important. Our existing Indymedia has been great when it comes to talking about history, economics. culture and so on. Where it’s been weaker has been in actual hard news reporting – where are still too reliant on disseminating news second-hand from the mainstream outlets.
What we could do with is a nationwide network of citizen journalists who are able to interrogate all aspects of a story – not just place an equally biased ‘Yes gloss’ on stories. If this is going to work then it’ll require an increasing degree of professionalism. By all means go ahead and cancel your TV licence. But if you do then don’t forget to set up a regular Direct Debit to the indymedia channels of your choice.
We also need to look at how we can expand our flowering digital documentary movement. In the last few years films such as You’ve been Trumped, Northern Lights and Scotland Yet have all shown that it’s possible to tell important stories with crowd-funded backing and minimal resources.
We really need to get out there and re-discover the many different faces of Scotland. If rural Scotland and the islands voted so heavily for No then why don’t we let the people there explain why they did that? Likewise let the people in the schemes of Glasgow and Dundee explain why they voted Yes. Scotland has a whole past, present and future that’s just out there waiting to be discovered.
So there we have it – a pretty confused and ever-shifting picture. There is one thing that we can say with certainty though. If anyone thought that they were voting No in order for things to remain just as they were they’re going to be sadly disappointed.
No-one that I know was ever campaigning for independence just for the sake of independence – they were campaigning for it as a means of changing our society. And they’re going to continue working towards that goal regardless of what the final result was.