The game-changer.
Every day I walk past St Bridget’s Hall, the wee church next to Stonehaven Old Town where last week I placed my vote for Scotland to become an independent country. For as long as I live in my current home I’ll be reminded every single day that my fellow Scots decided Scotland wasn’t really a country at all.
That Thursday afternoon my wife and I took the short walk down the High Street – home to the world-famous Hogmanay swinging fireball ceremony – towards the polling station. We had big nervous smiles on our faces, our steps full of anticipation, hope and wonder. Couples with thunder on their own faces walked past us as we almost skipped towards St Bridgets, my wife proudly carrying half a dozen colourful Yes Scotland balloons. A group of elderly residents kindly held Michelle’s balloons as we entered the church. I can’t speak for her but I wasn’t emotional when I crossed the box marked “Yes”. To me, it felt like business. Two years of talking, reading, writing about nothing else, and all it came down to was a couple of seconds marking a flimsy piece of paper.
For a split second I tried to imagine what it would be like to cross the “No” box. I shook my head and got the job done.
Afterwards we wandered into the town centre – passing the fish bar which gave us the worlds first deep fried Mars bar – and bought a few things for the evening gathering we would be hosting while the referendum results came in. We bumped into Green Yes campaigner and local National Collective organiser David Officer, reminding me both of the incredible work of NC over the last two years, as well as the amount of shafting the Scottish Greens suffered from the media across the same time-frame.
Our short walk later took us along the beach – not far from the Cowie area in which a 430 million-year-old fossil of the planet’s oldest breathing creature was found; and back home – only a few cliff tops away from the same iconic Dunnottar Castle which safeguarded the Honours of Scotland when Cromwell invaded.
There were flags everywhere. Even on the actual day of the referendum, there was a dramatic rise in the number of Yes signs, posters, stickers and Saltires in the town centre compared to the day before.
On Friday, the day after, almost all of them were gone.
On rare occasions I am a conductor/tourist guide for Stonehaven on its new Land Train – a dinky little Italian-made vehicle which takes tourists and locals up to the castle, through the Old Town and the harbour, along to Cowie and then back to the Market Square. People forget how much history lies in such a small area. This week I was back on the train, telling Scots and English, Americans and Australians, Germans and Austrians about Stonehaven – birthplace of the founder of the BBC; the eastern point which marks the end of the Highlands and the start of the Lowlands; and of course the town of the aforementioned great balls of fire and battered chocolate.
Every single time someone on the train pointed out one of the remaining Saltires this week, they have said, without fail, “oh look – there’s the Yes flag.”
And it’s not just from tourists. People who live in Scotland, who live in Stonehaven, have started calling our country’s flag “the Yes flag”. The flag of failure.
Flags don’t mean much to me. But after the result came in early Friday morning I started to see our one in a different way. I couldn’t get the word “Cornwall” out of my head and still can’t. It looked cheaper. Phony. My mates, huge football fans, were raging over how embarrassed they’d feel trying to sing Flower of Scotland next month when our national team takes on Georgia next month.
Stonehaven harbour
The flag isn’t the Yes flag, of course. Everyone had different reasons, but whenever asked to explain my reasons for Yes in a sentence I’d always say “Because Scotland is a country, and a very rich one at that – why not?” As the majority of us voted No, I’m struggling with the concept of Scotland really being a country. It fights against the entire reason why I voted Yes. We’ve decided not to fully govern ourselves.
Over the last week I’ve seen articles popping up everywhere about the new power and energising potential of the 45% who voted for independence. Campaigns and groups who fought so hard for a Yes result won’t simply go away. There are vast amounts of people never before involved in politics who will stick with it and try, somehow or some way, to influence things.
On the other hand, however, there will be a vast amount of people who just got involved in the last few weeks of the campaign, were quickly persuaded to Yes, and who will never be back. The one time their vote could make a difference – it didn’t. Why bother trying to do anything again? These young new groups with the hope of pushing for a second referendum within a generation have to get these people back on board. Meanwhile, the No side will enjoy the obvious tactic of pushing the idea that the oil will be running out even sooner than the last time around.
As previously mentioned, the No campaign contained the biggest bunch of utter bastards any country has had the misfortune to have clogging up the mainstream. It was shocking the amount of people who came up to me in the last week or so of the campaign, who had only just paid attention to it all, who were beyond angered at the BBC’s editing of a youth debate; at the fact George Galloway was representing the official No campaign; at Nick Robinson trying to stitch up the First Minister; that the main UK parties came out with a “vow” of more powers during the campaign’s purdah period. Cameron, Miliband and Clegg are hated the country over. Their parties are hated. Westminster is hated. Illegal wars, pissing around with the NHS, massive austerity and nuclear weapons are hated. Yet the majority of people in Scotland voted for this to continue.
I will never understand that.
About a year ago I spoke to an MSP from the SNP and explained my concerns that the Yes campaign wasn’t doing very much to persuade pensioners to move towards a Yes vote. The MSP explained that he wasn’t concerned with that age group, and that if their strategy to get the kids on board was successful, a Yes vote would come.
It didn’t quite work out that way. The lowest age group voted for independence by the biggest margin, but it wasn’t enough. The No campaign tactic of scaring the elderly into believing their pensions would be destroyed with a Yes vote worked. Campaign director Blair McDougall admitted as much after the vote. I’m no expert but I think that is what swung the decision, not the “vow” of more powers from Westminster.
Be in no doubt, then – the bad guys helped win this.
I met plenty of people in the last few weeks who were voting No and had one decent reason for doing so, on the face of it. When presented with actual evidence showing that their reason was usually because the media had told them lies, they acknowledged that the actual evidence was probably right. Most told me afterwards that they still voted No. Not because they love Britain, or love the current political structure or the use of the pound. It was because the media had drummed into them for two years that their country running its own affairs would be disastrous. There must be something out there which will stop oil-rich, energy-rich, fish-rich, renewable-rich Scotland from being a success story, they whined.
Actual evidence wasn’t enough to change their minds.
And now, in Aberdeenshire at least, it’s back to business as usual. These vibrant central belt-based groups with high hopes for holding the establishment to account may indeed harness the energy needed. But good luck in trying to expand towards the Aberdeen area. It wasn’t until around the time of the Commonwealth Games that the general public around here started realising a referendum on Scotland’s independence was just around the corner. Sure, there were a couple of events and weekend stalls before then, but nothing on the scale of the regular events in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Same newspaper, same day…different regions. Which is it, huh?
Today, it’s like the referendum never happened. People will suck up what is happening and get on with it. All those people who never paid attention in the first place barely recognise that, within a week of the vote, Scotland has yet again been completely forgotten about. There are more dire warnings over the NHS. There are billions of budget cuts coming no matter which UK party is in power. Just today Parliament is debating over yet another bunch of air strikes and God knows what else in Iraq. And the BBC has magically remembered how to report positive things about having lots of oil.
There were many on the Yes side who constantly attacked the BBC for their referendum coverage (and, really, their coverage in general). Even though the coverage was absolutely terrible, I wanted to continue to watch to see what they’d do next. I wanted to compare BBC reporting to that of, say, Sky and STV. With Kay Burley calling a Yes campaigner “a nob” live on air, and the BBC failing to spell “Ayrshire” correctly, it was frustrating yet amusing seeing these giants of our great British media trying to out-do each other any time they left their London comfort zone. STV will get more of my attention and support in the future, even if some of their coverage feels quite regional in scale and quality, compared to the big guns of Sky and the BBC.
Which is quite fitting now, probably.
I no longer want to watch the BBC, especially the News Channel. I feel sick every time I tune in. Oh, here’s George Galloway and Nigel Farage getting a billion times more air time than they deserve. Oh, and there’s Norman Smith and Nick Robinson clearly not understanding what they’re going on about. I tried one more time last night, sitting through Question Time and then a small portion of This Week. The latter featured Andrew Neil asking Michael Portillo and Jacqui Smith about the huge events of the past week at the top of the show.
Smith chose to speak about some guy in Jordan, while Portillo acknowledged there was only one real story over the last week…how great David Cameron’s speech was on Friday morning. Nothing about the close shave of the UK splitting up, the giant kick in the arse British politics was almost given, the millions of Scots who had transformed how politics was done during the referendum campaign. Nope – just a few gloating words about the Tory Prime Minister sticking it to Ed Miliband with promises of looking at more powers for…England.
Who knows what will happen next. We have a general election next year, and I’ve no idea how anyone not already aligned with the Tories or Labour could bring themselves to vote for them. The SNP is now the UK’s third-biggest party thanks to an incredible surge in membership since last week. This is great news, but how will this stop SNP MP’s in the House of Commons being bullied and laughed at as usual? The bigger parties will ridicule the SNP even more than before – not just because they will be a bigger presence, but because they failed in their ultimate mission. This will be brought up each and every time an SNP MP stands up in the Commons. Even if they aren’t all SNP, the insinuation will be there – the big parties will be sneering at the 45% of people living in Scotland who voted to leave, and failed to do so.
The Yes campaign wanted Scotland’s future in Scotland’s hands. The people living and working in Scotland have decided that what we really want is our future in the hands of these other people instead.
I’m sorry, but it’s going to take a long time to get over that.
Tagged: BBC, better together, Blair McDougall, Conservatives, cornwall, David Cameron, dunnottar castle, House Of Commons, iraq war, Kay Burley, Labour, London, National Collective, NHS, scottish greens, Scottish independence, Sky News, SNP, Stonehaven, STV, Trident, Westminster, Yes Scotland
