Got the Point
I like Hugo Rifkind's regular columns in The Times because they are nearly always funny, self-deprecating, well informed, argumentative yet balanced and reasonable, with a political point to make, though seldom a tribal party one.
Hugo's got his fingers crossed for a No vote in the Scottish referendum on independence, but unlike many of our politicians north and south of the border, I think it's fair to say Hugo's one of the few journalists who's really got the point.
OK, I admit it: the Yes camp does have a point
By Hugo Rifkind - The Times
Behind the garbled slogans of the independence campaign lurks genuine unease about the country we have become
‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” In 2004 they put those words up on the side of the new Scottish parliament, attributing them to the novelist, artist and poet Alisdair Gray. And you could not walk past without feeling a shiver in your spine.
Six years later they got out the chisel again and changed the name to “Alasdair”, because that’s what he’s actually called. By then Gray had also pointed out that he’d paraphrased the line from a poem by the Canadian author Dennis Lee, but nobody wanted to know. That’s the thing when a building costs £414 million. You don’t want to scrape off more than you have to.
Hell of a line, though, eh? The early days of a better nation. Oof. Who wouldn’t want to vote for that? You will find a lot of the modern Scottish soul, I think, in that short, taut phrase. The other day, fresh off the train and browsing Twitter as I sat on my suitcase in the hall — just in case I had missed any important developments, you understand, on the four-minute walk from the bus stop — I saw that the Scotland on Sunday journalist Euan McColm had found a young and prominent independence activist who was broadcasting this glorious prose to the world. Or at least trying to.
“Vote,” this guy had written, “like you live in the better days of a world.” And I started laughing, not very nicely, and I just couldn’t stop.
I’m tired. That’s part of it. It’s hard to convey, perhaps, the sheer, bleak, anxious, miserable, killjoy weariness of being a Scot who thinks “no”. You’re the grit in every bright eye; the pish, as they say, in every bath. All around you is hope and glorious anticipation, and your only role is to ask it to stop. There’s something about that garbled phrase — “vote like you live in the better days of a world” — that just seems to sum it all up. So earnest. So hopeful. Such nonsense.
In Scotland all the good arguments against independence are practical. It’s all very well going on about shared history and cross-border love and the general undesirability of two mixed peoples on a crowded island suddenly having divergent aims, but the simple fact is that nobody north of the border gives a toss. It’s too late. “It’ll be bad,” is the only real argument left. The currency thing won’t work, the businesses will suffer, the money will shrink, the oil might end, all of that.
Project fear? Sure. Because it’s frightening. Imagine Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling in pith helmets, leading a posse of Scottish voters down a jungle path and coming to a fork. “There’s a tiger that way!” Darling would say. “Project fear,” Salmond would retort. “But it’s, um, right there,” Darling would quail, pointing. “Stop patronising Scotland!” Salmond would declaim, and lead the group blundering on. Then all you’d hear was the shrieks.
People who don’t see the tiger are people who don’t want to see the tiger. Deep down, they must know that it is there. It’s not them who trouble me, though. It’s the younger Scots. It’s the ones who just want to live in the better days of a world. Because, amid the nonsense, always, there’s a hook.
Certainly they’re nationalists. They say they aren’t, sure, but nationalism is the line — or the thing that makes you see a line — between Salmond’s vision of independence and devo-max. Still, if there was a chance of changing all of Britain, I think many of them would take it. They look out and they see an ossified, unfair country, with food banks, an aloof elite and a state that seems in hock to huge businesses that it can’t even tax. And they don’t want to be a part of it. And that’s when I start getting edgy.
Perhaps so much optimistic guff has spouted from various “yes” orifices these past two years — secret oilfields, redeveloped seaboards, the dead rising up to till the land, etc — that the goal of merely building a new Jerusalem (obviously without the song) has started to seem relatively modest.
Yet it troubles me that my only response to their idealism is to point out that an impoverished, wobbly, independent Scotland would likely be far worse at dealing with all of this stuff than our stable, relatively prosperous Britain. Because here and now, let’s be honest, Britain doesn’t really seem to be pulling its thumb out.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Britain. Having lived in various bits of it I also feel that I know it quite a lot better than many Scots do. As a Londoner, particularly, I resent the characterisation that the south increasingly has in Scottish politics, as a selfish, inegalitarian, Farage-ish place. Often, I think that Scotland simply projects on to the south the things it cannot reconcile about itself, with its Orange lodges, homophobic billionaires, smug, impenetrable professions in the central belt and lingering feudalism in the Highland glens. Yet for all that, I cannot say that I feel any great enthusiasm in Britain as a whole to be a better nation. And I wish I could.
An independent Scotland would — and perhaps will — have a savage, painful, nasty awakening. Reality wouldn’t just bite; it would swallow these dreams whole. But the rest of us should see that passion and be shocked by our complacency. How the hell has it come to this? How can our wonderful country contain so much to which people can reasonably object?
We all know what the problems are. We have half a parliament that isn’t elected, a capital that looks after itself and justifies this by writing cheques, and regions so unpractised at governing themselves that most of them no longer even want to. We have a financial system that seems to move ever farther from accountability of any sort and foreign policies dictated by the scribbles on napkins from three generations ago. And, worst of all, we have a pervasive fatalism — left and right — that this is just how it has to be.
I don’t normally feel like this. Perhaps it’s a function of defensiveness and will ebb away. But I hope it doesn’t. I simply don’t believe that an independent Scotland could afford to be a better nation, even if it genuinely wanted to be and that’s why I’d vote “no”. The United Kingdom could, though. So, if it survives the next week, I really think it’s time we pulled ourselves together. We’d better.
Behind the garbled slogans of the independence campaign lurks genuine unease about the country we have become
‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” In 2004 they put those words up on the side of the new Scottish parliament, attributing them to the novelist, artist and poet Alisdair Gray. And you could not walk past without feeling a shiver in your spine.
Six years later they got out the chisel again and changed the name to “Alasdair”, because that’s what he’s actually called. By then Gray had also pointed out that he’d paraphrased the line from a poem by the Canadian author Dennis Lee, but nobody wanted to know. That’s the thing when a building costs £414 million. You don’t want to scrape off more than you have to.
Hell of a line, though, eh? The early days of a better nation. Oof. Who wouldn’t want to vote for that? You will find a lot of the modern Scottish soul, I think, in that short, taut phrase. The other day, fresh off the train and browsing Twitter as I sat on my suitcase in the hall — just in case I had missed any important developments, you understand, on the four-minute walk from the bus stop — I saw that the Scotland on Sunday journalist Euan McColm had found a young and prominent independence activist who was broadcasting this glorious prose to the world. Or at least trying to.
“Vote,” this guy had written, “like you live in the better days of a world.” And I started laughing, not very nicely, and I just couldn’t stop.
I’m tired. That’s part of it. It’s hard to convey, perhaps, the sheer, bleak, anxious, miserable, killjoy weariness of being a Scot who thinks “no”. You’re the grit in every bright eye; the pish, as they say, in every bath. All around you is hope and glorious anticipation, and your only role is to ask it to stop. There’s something about that garbled phrase — “vote like you live in the better days of a world” — that just seems to sum it all up. So earnest. So hopeful. Such nonsense.
In Scotland all the good arguments against independence are practical. It’s all very well going on about shared history and cross-border love and the general undesirability of two mixed peoples on a crowded island suddenly having divergent aims, but the simple fact is that nobody north of the border gives a toss. It’s too late. “It’ll be bad,” is the only real argument left. The currency thing won’t work, the businesses will suffer, the money will shrink, the oil might end, all of that.
Project fear? Sure. Because it’s frightening. Imagine Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling in pith helmets, leading a posse of Scottish voters down a jungle path and coming to a fork. “There’s a tiger that way!” Darling would say. “Project fear,” Salmond would retort. “But it’s, um, right there,” Darling would quail, pointing. “Stop patronising Scotland!” Salmond would declaim, and lead the group blundering on. Then all you’d hear was the shrieks.
People who don’t see the tiger are people who don’t want to see the tiger. Deep down, they must know that it is there. It’s not them who trouble me, though. It’s the younger Scots. It’s the ones who just want to live in the better days of a world. Because, amid the nonsense, always, there’s a hook.
Certainly they’re nationalists. They say they aren’t, sure, but nationalism is the line — or the thing that makes you see a line — between Salmond’s vision of independence and devo-max. Still, if there was a chance of changing all of Britain, I think many of them would take it. They look out and they see an ossified, unfair country, with food banks, an aloof elite and a state that seems in hock to huge businesses that it can’t even tax. And they don’t want to be a part of it. And that’s when I start getting edgy.
Perhaps so much optimistic guff has spouted from various “yes” orifices these past two years — secret oilfields, redeveloped seaboards, the dead rising up to till the land, etc — that the goal of merely building a new Jerusalem (obviously without the song) has started to seem relatively modest.
Yet it troubles me that my only response to their idealism is to point out that an impoverished, wobbly, independent Scotland would likely be far worse at dealing with all of this stuff than our stable, relatively prosperous Britain. Because here and now, let’s be honest, Britain doesn’t really seem to be pulling its thumb out.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Britain. Having lived in various bits of it I also feel that I know it quite a lot better than many Scots do. As a Londoner, particularly, I resent the characterisation that the south increasingly has in Scottish politics, as a selfish, inegalitarian, Farage-ish place. Often, I think that Scotland simply projects on to the south the things it cannot reconcile about itself, with its Orange lodges, homophobic billionaires, smug, impenetrable professions in the central belt and lingering feudalism in the Highland glens. Yet for all that, I cannot say that I feel any great enthusiasm in Britain as a whole to be a better nation. And I wish I could.
An independent Scotland would — and perhaps will — have a savage, painful, nasty awakening. Reality wouldn’t just bite; it would swallow these dreams whole. But the rest of us should see that passion and be shocked by our complacency. How the hell has it come to this? How can our wonderful country contain so much to which people can reasonably object?
We all know what the problems are. We have half a parliament that isn’t elected, a capital that looks after itself and justifies this by writing cheques, and regions so unpractised at governing themselves that most of them no longer even want to. We have a financial system that seems to move ever farther from accountability of any sort and foreign policies dictated by the scribbles on napkins from three generations ago. And, worst of all, we have a pervasive fatalism — left and right — that this is just how it has to be.
I don’t normally feel like this. Perhaps it’s a function of defensiveness and will ebb away. But I hope it doesn’t. I simply don’t believe that an independent Scotland could afford to be a better nation, even if it genuinely wanted to be and that’s why I’d vote “no”. The United Kingdom could, though. So, if it survives the next week, I really think it’s time we pulled ourselves together. We’d better.
