It was never about the money

I’ve watched this long enough, from the sidelines. All this endless money talk. I understand it now: it’s the narrative or bribery and corruption. Everything is reduced to a price, an inducement, the threat of losing out, or untraceable fivers in the night, secret transactions through which we’re confused, browbeaten and ultimately bought and sold.

Scottish independence, any kind of independence, is never really about the money. Yet that’s what they bang on about, the No folk. Their clamour drowns out any other, deeper debate. What kind of country are we living in? Can we have a government we actually vote for? Can we control our own affairs? Are we doomed to vote in election after election to have, at best, a thin red line of our own politicians to fight off the wayward policies of a capital and city-state remote from us?

All they talk about is money, so that the argument is perpetually bogged down. It’s as deliberate as plugging their ears with their fingers and chanting, ‘La-la-la’. So the litany goes. Currency. Fiscal arrangements. Interminable and intractable chatter, an awful jargon designed to intimidate. You don’t understand this stuff. Stay well away from it. Let the bigger boys decide. We can handle it.

Yet, behind the economic pronouncements, the subtext leaks out. This is the too wee, too poor, too stupid mantra. You can’t do this morphs into you can’t afford it. All of which sits on top of the economic diatribe as if it makes sense. We’re being asked to belittle our aspirations in the light of unimaginable piles of money. Our personal stakes in them a mere fraction but dizzyingly cast before us as a future where our lives are in tatters, a long slide from riches to rags.

What’s seldom asked in the Pro-union camp is, what kind of country do you want to live in? No-one there reflects on the long slide from riches we’re already on. Austerity, food banks, and the like punish the poor and vulnerable and turn them into scapegoats. The seeds of mistrust flourish and a pernicious jingoism throws its shadow across our lives with every measure to draw the line between the deserving and the undeserving.

The answer to our question comes back: no matter what you want, aspirations being all very well, you can’t afford it. In the money-game it sounds plausible. In the cut and thrust of money-markets and financial big-hitters, maybe we do run risks, there’s always uncertainty. This shuts up some, scares quite a few but it doesn’t make the argument.

You can’t afford it. I asked myself, are they really saying, we can’t afford social justice, or a fair, civic society, or politics with integrity and conscience? Or is it the mirror-argument: that the present state of austerity, corruption, nepotism and ingrained inequality is the price we must pay for economic well-being?

The last position brings us to a place where the rich progress over the backs of the poor. The beneficiaries are lined up in order of precedence. Those with material wealth come first. Wealth creates wealth, they say. The rest of us line up behind, happy perhaps, that we are seen as deserving unlike the stragglers who wait in the sidelines, damaged, unproductive and ultimately demonised.

The lack of justice here is manifest. Some invest material and money, some time and effort, some fall like chaff, the swarf of our industry. We were once, as so many politicians have glibly said, in it together. Once we had an arrangement, however fragile, but now it’s in shreds. When the by-products of success are human, the producer never pays.

This isn’t a picture of any place I want to live and I won’t be told we can’t afford to create something better. What’s more, if there’s a price to pay, I’m willing to pay it. I’ll put my own blood sweat and tears into it. That’s the real point.

It was never about the money. The money is a distraction, a side-issue, a kind of thought-experimental bribe. Its arguments are an inducement not to stray from the primrose path. Avoid the road not yet travelled for the wide highway paved with too many dashed hopes.

And it was never about person or party either. The Yes movement isn’t party-political, nor is it charisma of man or woman. It’s about something shared, on a different scale, where we can own our choice, be it man, woman, party or ideology. Our choice, our successes; our mistakes, our own solutions.

Independence is state of mind. It’s about self-determination, not nationalism: it looks outward as much as in. It’s inclusive, open, honest. Vote No? No, thanks.

NO Vision: No Vision

I thought I’d wait forever. But we don’t have that long now.

I started out swithering over independence. Call it prudence. I didn’t believe in declaring too early. And maybe there was a benefit. I kept an open mind. I wanted to hear both sides. I went looking.

How do you judge these things? Head or heart? Dig through the hyperbole and rhetoric? Listen to the sound debate makes? Look for the unexpected and new as people point the way ahead?

So I found, maybe as I’d expected, the tone of Yes was more positive, more open and welcoming. I’m not saying there are none who rave and rant with the irresponsibility of true Twitterati. There are, but the feeling at most levels of discussion is engaged, innovative.

Contrast that with No. Again accepting the stark, raving social-media ranters as mere sideshows for our recreational outrage, I listened to their acknowledged spokes-people, figureheads, policy makers and thinkers. All I heard was the same stereotyped political noise that emanates from the lobbies of Westminster.

I heard no understanding of the grievances ordinary people might have, no openness to new ideas on how to find a way forward within the Union they're so passionate about. In fact, I found no real passion. Where people had doubts and fears, No rubbed those tender sensitivities raw. Poured fear upon fear. If anyone admitted to uncertainty, the response seemed to be wait till you hear this, you’ll be terrified.

Still, I waited, because I wanted to hear a positive vision for our union that wouldn’t inflame our concerns but would show us a way ahead. I wanted to hear a coherent commitment to social justice, a new approach to economic affairs that didn’t pander to corporates at the expense of the vulnerable. I hoped I might hear it in fragments from the different UK political parties, from each according to their philosophies.

I heard one voice saying nothing of the kind. One voice so in unison I knew there were no philosophies behind it. Apart from the huge cry of dismissal, a cry of how dare you? Apart from party political evasions putting off commitment for ever, the eternal 'wait and see; it'll be in our manifesto'.

After that, more of the same. Continued caustic attacks based on character assassination not argument; facts dressed up in political spin; interminable repetitions of how dreadful independence will be compared with the warm and fuzzy union. But no positive future, no acknowledgement of actual concerns, no empathy, no will to understand. We, the misguided, were fools to even hope for change, rogues and vagabonds to cry out for it, dupes to ever believe there was another story we’d not been told, traitors to suggest it.

What I’m left with at the eleventh hour is this. Vote No and you will get more of the same. This is as better together as it gets. It won't be the status quo but more fear (because that’s their only currency), more deaf ears, more scapegoats and demons than you could shake a stick at. The rich will get richer and the poor will for a short time still be with us. They too will disappear into that oblivion where non-persons, the lazy and crippled, are consigned. We might remain but horribly cowed by the thought that, we too, might fall from our precarious grace and follow them.

To think, I would have had to write a positive vision of the union for myself if I’d been so inclined. All the things we still need in the greater union but which have been ignored or stripped away already. I’ve decided, I can’t wait forever. If there are unanswered questions still for us on the Yes side, they reflect a necessary uncertainty as we try to decide our own future. In the No camp no-one has even asked those questions of themselves. Better Together, mired in the same old morass, going to hell in a handcart? No thanks.

In the end, it’s simple. Yes, the wider movement, the groundswell of grassroots groups, this unlikely coalition of shades of political opinion, business alliances, civic nationalists, internationalists is redrawing internal relationships. It will redraw external ones too, between regions and nations in these islands, maybe even elsewhere in this fearful and conflicted planet. However you read this paragraph, it amounts to a vision of sorts, some of it mine, some borrowed, some shared. A vision of a positive future.

The No vision is just that: no vision.