Ordinary People - Where Did They Go?

Weeks and weeks ago, when all this began, everyone was ordinary. At least, that was the claim. I remember the new websites, the blogs, the media scoops. The people we heard about were always ordinary: single mums, pensioners, office workers. Every one was concerned about our future but none claimed special status or importance of any kind. Never mind that some turned out to be activists, well-heeled party donors, the great and the good climbing their respective greasy polls to influence and office.

This was a very much a feature of the NO campaign and a bit suspect, part of a duplicitous urge to misrepresent.

But I remember thinking, who's ordinary? What's that about? I'd followed National Collective, and lots of other YES sites, and found the tone of stories there tended more toward how extraordinary ordinary people were. There didn't seem to be much need to claim some just-plain-folks label to give political choice validity.

So, what was the deal with ordinary? I felt it sprang from a need to hide the hand of power as it fiddled about and manipulated. It presented ordinariness as a front which, in the end, said to me, they think ordinary people are puppets, hollow, lifeless shapes to be animated by an unmentionable purpose.

I believe the YES side emphasised the opposite: people were amazing, creative, different, welcoming difference. Paradoxially, it said, we're in this together and embraced everyone from company directors to labourers and didn't make a fuss about it.

That was how it was and the status quo, NO, was represented by figures, unassuming, normal, just like the rest of us. Except they weren't. Under the surface, there were the vested interests, those who wanted us to accept a smokescreen of the same-as-you when that was so far from the truth.

All very well. We saw the rise and fall: the Vote No Borders nonsense, embarrassing attempts to puff a whiff of the grass roots from nothing; the intransigent flannel from Scottish Labour, trotting out discredited horror stories from the mouths of the faithful; the long line of put up jobs and corporate jobsworths showering gloom on our heads like some dismal rain.

And now we see it. A northbound in-flux of Westminster might, the charge of the great hundred galloping to our rescue. Messages of doom wrapped in this strange love-hate they have. The long line of bankers and business big cheeses giving us their lines of prospective failure, temporary good times, long-term decline and, generally, our complete uselessness and hopelessness in the face of a future we can't comprehend and certainly can't handle.

Now, amongst all these prominent figures, who's no longer there? Mr, Mrs and Ms ordinary. These poor sods, once pushed to the front, are floundering in the wake of the figures who are really important. They've outlived their usefulness. Nobody needs their homespun sincerity, even if it was manufactured, They're dead ducks. They can't save the Union. They never could, but for a while, they served to stave off the notion of independence.

Now that strategy's stopped working, the big guns are wheeled out. The ordinary, the closet NO activists, the party faithful, a few door-chappers, the flag-knitters and wavers, all of those folk, doubtless sincere in their way, are left by the wayside. Now's the time of the ones who matter: the bankers, the party leaders, the business executives, tame academics, mandarins and apparatchiks, the fantastically wealthy. They're the ones who'll save the Union. Sod the little people.

I hardly wondered where the ordinary folk had gone. I'd half-expeected them to be swept aside. Expendable. I'm truly sorry for them. They must have lent their names, their faces and their heartfelt beliefs to the cause, only to find the seven hundred horsemen of the establishment ride over them like a wave, also too wee, too poor and too stupid to make a difference. We knew you never could. You were the electoral cannon fodder, the diversionary tactic, the dispensable and gullible troops in our war of blind self interest. Stand aside for the elite!

Truth to tell, there are no ordinary people left. NO has trampled them under their parade of the important. YES has never thought ordinary was any way to describe people who engaged themselves in our different visions of a collective future. All I can say, to all the ordinary NOs, don't be so easily sidelined. Vote with your hearts (and I, for one, will respect it) but don't fall for the disrespectful trick that raised you up and chucked you aside when the chips were down.

To YES, I say, go on. Be extraordinary, surprise us, principally yourselves. Ordinary was never a word to describe any of us. Rise to the occasion. Be as magnanimous in victory as you would be proud in defeat. Honour the same in your opponents. We have a country to build. None of us are ordinary people. We're so much more.