Happy Valentines Day. Let’s talk about a breakup. Sorry, United Kingdon, but I’m just not that into you. I think Scotland is feeling the same way. One way or another, we are clearly on the road to asking the independence question again. A lot has changed since 2014, but with it, nothing has changed.
I switched sides in 2013. And, as someone with an English accent, whose very identity was being used as an argument against independence, I felt it was my role to be loud and active. I campaigned in Bridgeton – unionist central in Glasgow – and handed out leaflets to people who swore at me, shouted at me, and kept eye contact with me as they angrily put the leaflet in the bin. In February of that year I wrote two blogs -one of which was called An Open Letter to England- that started going viral to such a degree that I panicked and deleted it.
On the day of the referendum itself I stood outside Bridgeton polling station almost all day (I took a lunch break, and finished about an hour before the polls closed). The polling station was in the library, which is next door to the city’s largest Orange Lodge, and on a junction with three of the most hardcore Rangers and Unionist pubs. I was shouted at. Spat at. Called a paedophile. Told to get Alex Salmond on the phone to apologise for a joke someone had seen on Facebook. The polling station manager grew so concerned that he called the police three times -three separate call outs- and on the third occasion they decided to just spend the rest of the day watching the station. A young man from Generation Yes turned up in the afternoon, and his car was vandalised with unionist stickers that the Orange Lodge had handed out to children.
There was a certain level of….of I don’t know what. Trauma is too heavy a word. I don’t want to insult people who’ve suffered genuine PTSD by equating my feelings to their injuries. But for a long, long, time after the referendum, I could feel after-effects of the day. Stray comments during conversations with friends would take me back to the moment someone from inside the polling station came out and told me there was a rumour that one of the local bands were coming to attack me (never happened.) Telling stories from the day would put me right back in the moment strangers hurled abuse at me. I remember someone calmly, reasonably, asking my name, and then comparing it to a list, while talking to me about my tweets. There are people who faced far worse than me in 2014, and people who have carried the campaign for independence a lot longer and further than I have. And as a straight white man, I can’t lay any claim to being targeted or harassed when stacked up against the level of violence and harassment that women have to brave when they speak up on these issues. But I can only speak for myself, and for my own emotional reserves and mental strength, and I know that day in 2014 took a lot out of me.
As we prepare for another campaign, I don’t think I have the same level of effort in me as I did then. I can’t replay the same conversations, starting from scratch with new people, repeating things I’ve already said. And I don’t have the energy to face the same challenges. But all of those things need doing. People need to talk with empathy about their own journeys from No to Yes, and I feel the most effective people for that job will be those who’ve changed since 2014. They are best placed to win round those who can be swayed.
But I can still have one last say about my own journey.
It’s impossible for me to say when my mind changed. Anything I say about my journey to Yes is far more about when I realised my mind had changed. A common complaint levelled at online political chat is that you can’t change anyone’s mind with a Facebook or Twitter post. This is short-term thinking. You can’t change someone’s mind on the spot with a single post. We have emotions and ego. We’re wrapped up in our identities and opinions. It takes time. But with a simple, reasonable, post to social media you can be part of the process. The actual change-of-mind will come later, after quiet reflection.
Scottish independence is not an easy thing to change your mind about. A lifetime of associations, emotions, ties. A whole identity rooted in one version of a country or another. The moment when you realise your mind has changed might feel like a switch has been flipped, but it’s taken a long time to reach that point, thousands of questions and thoughts and doubts. And then, once you admit to yourself that the change has happened, comes the next problem. Saying it out loud. For all of our human faults and failings, admitting to change is as hard as the change itself.
I moved to Scotland in 2006. 26 years old. All of it, up until that point, lived in England. I’d been born and raised there. Married and divorced there. I support an English football team. My identity – to a degree I didn’t realise until much later – was English. There’s a certain bubble you’re indoctrinated in when you’ve been raised south of the border. Without seeing it, without feeling it. No matter how liberal you are, or how far to the left, your views on the rest of the world are still contained within a certain framework. The same patronising English traits that the rest of the world complain about become inherent in you. In the same way that a man needs to learn not to see himself as the default, and not speak on behalf of women, or that white people need to stop seeing their experiences as the normal, with everyone else’s as ‘other’, so English people need to get passed the idea that their experience is the standard. My attitudes about Scotland? Well, I thought they were progressive, I thought they were modern. I thought they were respectful. But I would still be seen using language like If the government allow Scotland to have a referendum… I clearly remember talking to Scottish friends about how much Scotland depended financially on England.
I moved up with an inbuilt anger against Alex Salmond and the SNP (and, well, one of those wasn’t wrong…) I have a clear memory of laying out the newspapers in the shop I was working in, the morning after the 2007 Scottish election, and talking to work colleagues about how the SNP were “anti-English” and anyone who voted for them was saying they hated me and wanted me to go home. In the years that followed I even got in a couple of arguments with strangers in the city, after alcohol, when I felt like I’d detected some kind of ‘racism’ against English people. I wouldn’t have described myself in these terms, but I was a full-on unionist. In fact, I’m sure I once thought I’d been very witty in replying to a pro-independence friend with the line “I’m left wing, I believe in unions.”
I remember storming out of a pub at least once after an argument with a pro-independence campaigner. And the truth is, looking back on it now, I was looking for the argument. If you are of a unionist mind, and want to go out in one of Scotland’s biggest cities, you’ll find someone who will give you the anti-English “racism” you’re hunting for. You can pull the opposite trick in most major English cities, if you want to. Of course these sentiments exist. You can confirm any bias, if you try hard enough.
Somewhere in all of this, my attitude began to soften. The arguments with friends planted seeds. The quiet discussions with my wife moved the earth. Holyrood, by and large, was a calmer, more reasonable place to do politics than Westminster, and there was a majority of people on the chamber who valued free health care, free education, internationalism. At a time when Westminster was resembling Punch & Judy, with shouting, jeering, and cheat shots, it became impossible to ignore that there was a clear difference between the two parliaments. Even still, the political reasons for and against independence were, largely, irrelevant to me (though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, and I now believe the political argument is firmly weighted on the pro-independence side.) It was all about slowly unpicking the threads of my emotional ties. Feeling dressed up as reason. By the summer of 2013 I had reached a point where I would say “I’m not opposed to independence, it’s just not my fight.” I still felt, deep down, that is was a discussion rooted in where you were born.
The first time I became aware of a major change in myself is rooted in tragedy. And not mine. I drank in the Clutha sometimes. It was on my walk home from work. On the night of the 29th of November, 2013, I’d had an epically bad shift. My wife had suggested a night in with a pizza and a rented movie. On the walk home, I did play with the idea of stopping into the Clutha for a quick pint. But I kept walking. A few hours later we paused the movie (Mud) as we both got messages talking about a helicopter crash in town. In the weeks that followed I felt an emotion which I came to realise was grief. The city was hurting, and so was I. Glasgow was home now. I was emotionally invested in what happened here. And if Glasgow was my hometown, didn’t I have a stake in the outcome of the independence referendum?
I picked up a copy of the Scottish Government’s white paper. No mean feat to digest a 650 page document when you’re a dyslexic. I started paying close, calm, measured attention to the political substance of the arguments on both sides. And more than that, the tone. The fear-mongering. The spin. The way that only one side seemed to be branded as nationalists, when the other side were the ones arguing for the retention -and possible use- of nuclear weapons, for the challenges of changing flags, appealing to national identity. One of the main running arguments against independence was how difficult it would be to negotiate with the the UK over the settlement. Seriously? We shouldn’t leave because the other people will be mean if we do? What does that say about the relationship? And hidden away in the white paper was the pledge to close Dungavel – an immigrant detention facility. I’m not a fan of boiling large issues down to simplistic lines. However, I decided, if you can walk into a polling station and tick a box that gets rid of your nuclear weapons and closes an immigrant detention centre, it’s a good box to tick.
Around that Christmas, we took a trip down to the Midlands to see my family. An old argument hit me with fresh eyes. For years I’d been pointing out just how much my home region had been let down by Westminster. The way that successive governments had neglected us. The town I spent most of my 26 years living in had, by 2013, faded to the point that it was being absorbed by the towns around it. The presence of an ASDA was the only noteable thing, and soon my parents address will be “Number 8, The fruit and veg aisle, Darlaston.” The whole area looks depressed and hurt. Brexit, for all that we can argue about racism and nationalism, was created by decades of isolation and neglect imposed on thousands of small English towns. They’re lost and alone. Lied to. And, ever since I had moved to Scotland, that had been my reason against independence. “You think it’s bad here? It is, in places. But you should see where I’m from. We’ve all been fucked over together.” Looking back now, I don’t really understand how long I held onto the fake-logic of “We’re both being fucked, so lets continue to be fucked.” As if there were some magical socialist utopia we could reach if we all pulled together. That’s a long wait for a train that aint coming. Despite all three (as it was) major UK parties having been in power in one form or another during my lifetime, I felt the turnaround was only one good election away. Finally I saw through my own programming, my own bias. If the UK wanted to change, it would have changed by now. But maybe, just maybe, if Scotland broke away -with the tighter democratic control that comes from a smaller population, and a pro-European mindset, and with such potential for renewable energy- the towns in England could see another way. Westminster would no longer be able to play voters in England off against “substinence junkies” in the “provinces” and would, instead, be forced to listen to the angry and forgotten voices in the Midlands, the North East, Yorkshire. (Of course, Brexit has destroyed that part of my reasoning. In 2014 I saw Independence as a route to helping people on both sides of the border. Sitting here now, in 2020, it’s looking simply like the best way to escape a house fire.)
The final moment, the conscious flip of the switch, came on the train ride back up to Glasgow. Two older couples sat on the table in front of us. An English couple, on their way up for a holiday, and a Scottish couple, on their way home. After some polite chatter the English couple asked -as all English people did, during the run up- about the referendum. Their surprise was audible when the Scottish couple both said they would be voting Yes. I could hear it. See it in their faces. Bafflement. Something that was outside of their experience, and outside of everything they’d been told. It was the moment I finally reckoned with the idea of an English bubble, one that I had been in, and had spent seven years working my way out of. They were stunned at the very idea that anybody could want to leave the United Kingdom. The four of them discussed the issue quite amiably, with remarkable restraint shown by the two Scots at the (completely unintentional) creeping condescension of the two English. Until the Englishman said, “well…ultimately, I suppose whether you can afford it or not depends on how much of the oil Mr Cameron lets you keep.”
Oh….
It’s like that, is it?
Switch.
Flipped.
I supported Scottish independence and I was done pretending otherwise, to myself or to anybody else.
Well, not quite. Because that really brings me to the thing I’ve been trying to say. I had changed my mind. I was going to vote Yes. Soon I would realise I was going to campaign for it, to stand up for it. But in that moment all I felt was fear. I felt like I was going to have to publicly climb down off something. I was going to have to change my public identity. I was going to have to tell people I had changed my mind. And that, right then, felt harder than the entire seven-year process I had undergone to reach that point.
So as the conversations all begin again, as we look to dates for a referendum, and the political chess game that will enable it, and as we start to go into every conversation with friends and loved ones trying to judge the yes/no subtext of what they’re saying, just remember this: People can change their minds. But it happens slowly. It happens from honest, good-faith conversations. It happens from treating people with empathy. The actual change will happen in private, likely. In a series of mornings staring in the bathroom mirror, or in long sleepless nights dwelling on an issue that feels fundamental to their identity. It’s a scary process.
Scottish Independence isn’t achieved by making dramatic polling day stands in Bridgeton. And, for all that their work in necessary, it’s not achieved by manoeuvring at Holyrood or Westminster. It’s achieved by treating family like family, friends like friends, people like people. It’s achieved by giving the best, most honest reasons you can when asked for, and by giving people the space they need to change their minds. And above all, it’s achieved by creating a welcoming, supportive, space for people to admit that change.