Hear! Hear!

Politics as usual. Men, mostly, lean back on the benches. Fewer women. The men in their anonymous suits and the women in their power-dressed finery hold a discourse. One speaks and every few sentences the lounging purple-faced, post-prandial figures wave ballot papers and moan. This moan is the barometer of disagreement or approval. Jeers and laughter for the first; a mumbled wave of ‘hear, hear’ for the last. Even the approval, a smug caterwaul, sounds like the mumblings of a colony of drunks. Which perhaps they are.

Hear, hear! It’s an instruction; an adversarial instruction. These are people who never hear anything, they only tell others to hear what they say.

This is a feature of political habit, as someone pointed out, unchanged from before the days when women under 30 had no vote. It’s braying confrontation, the self-satisfied assumption of privilege. Even when some have crawled up the ladder of achievement, borne aloft on the coat-tails of others, the finger-wagging, accusatory, groaning hubris of it all is really the creak of the ladder being pulled up behind.

This is a caricature, of course. Yet I fear, despite a principled few, we’re ruled by a Westminster institution which is already a caricature.

Here we are, the Scots, the devils of the North, asking the unthinkable. We have the temerity to demand our voices are heard. We’re waking up to the truth. For all the hear-hear, yah-boo-sucks exchanges made in the corridors of power in London. Hearing is the last thing that goes on there.

It’s telling, in more ways than one, when you scratch the surface, the purpose of government is to tell us what to do. Otherwise, why the spin? Why have we built a political process where every pronouncement has to be explained and re-explained; where every word from an opponent is spun into a testimony of failure from their own lips; where every statement is polished to eradicate the flaws and pushed into our awareness, a hard, black thing without a shred of heart? This is dishonest.

We’re not alone in wishing to build social justice. In Scotland, we’re just in a position to be able to take a step towards it. We might well achieve that step in two weeks time. What follows, though, has to be a different dialogue. We have to abandon the cynical, fingers-in-lugs, la-la-la discourse we have in Westminster.

I believe we have the nub of it now. What sets YES apart in my view is the way it's e engaged so many people and how we’ve drawn voices in that engagement from a wide range of political views.

That’s not the same as the defensive wall of NO’s apparent cross-party solidarity. There's just a cheap trick, a sham that’s strangled them from the start. Their separate voices can’t be heard and the single voice they project is a construct, at best a dry message. They have no unifying vision to bind their collective differences so they can speak out without stumbling as they avoid no-go areas and politically unutterable truths.

Future politics in Scotland has to be about continuing to hear our collective voices, separating out each individual part, and hearing what it wants to say. We don’t need to end disagreement. We can actually build on the strength it brings. It is, after all, the basis of democracy; the right to disagree and be heard. Compared to that, our present politics of silenced voices, produces no democratic profit, only a fake consensus and strangled justice.

I think we can do it, despite the claims of division from shrill pundits and vested interests who have little interest in democratic disagreement, I’ve seen and heard a lot to keep me optimistic. I’ve had heated debates and they’ve remained respectful. I’ve never wanted to silence those I disagree with. I expect and receive the same in return. We might try to persuade each other and change ideas but we can only achieve it by listening.

We’d do well to remember the maxim: ‘I disagree with what you say but I’ll defend your right to say it.’ That was Elizabeth Beatrice Hall, aka S G Tallentyre in her biography of Voltaire in 1906. Sounds like a good basis for the pursuit of freedom, social justice and democracy: not the right to agree, always the right to dissent.

There’s the task for the future, then. Build on our engagement. Confront disagreements and listen. Then we might turn away from those far-away, snorting fools whose ears only hear what they want and drown out the rest with their dissonance. Then we might free our own voices to capture our diversity and let everyone be heard. The only way to make a difference is to embrace difference itself.