Thursday, 2 October 2014

We are Devo

With apologies to Devo*. Altered image © Eidetic Memery.
See James Cook's Article on BBC
I’d been listening out all day on the 1st October for something to mark the start of work on the Vow. Scant mention of it, I’m afraid. Of course maybe there’ll be something by the end of the month. I thought, maybe there’d be a word somewhere in the vast media machine that made so much of Scottish affairs a mere two weeks ago.

Still, it IS business as usual down there, where important things are decided. The conference season is heaving with promise. Ed and Co last week - austerity, ‘save the NHS from the Tories’, reassurance for big business, raising the minimum wage in six years; Dave and Co this week - deficits (when they spring to mind), tax give-aways, ‘how the Health Service will be saved’, terrorism and extremists (rebellious Scots to crush?), foreign wars to prosecute… Oh, and every one gives the nod to us woadies in the heather. The Vow will be honoured. Then silence.


So the media has nothing to report, has it? Apart from William Hague on Radio Four on the morning of the 1st, adroitly reinforcing the promise: it will be delivered. More powers, more powers.


Never mind that a week ago he confirmed to Andrew Neil that if Scotland receives, say, £5 billion worth of extra tax raising powers, the Barnett formula would be reduced by the same amount. Barnett, incidentally isn’t going to be the part of any legislation because it already exists. And, it’s not in statute anyway. It’s an instrument (if that’s the right word) of the Treasury with which, I suppose, they can continue to torture us, or at least fiddle with to do whatever they like.

At the Tory conference, the BBC showed Dave heaping praise on Ruth Davidson for her sterling Tory efforts. No mention of the content of her actual speech, though. In it she said the Smith Commission should rule out discussion of Devo Max (which would deliver everything to Scotland except foreign affairs and the Armed Forces). Now that’s what I call going back on a promise. Significant new powers! She loves Scotland, apparently. She’d do anything for love, but she won’t do that

Late evening on the 1st, the BBC also showed a potted history of the Referendum, How the Campaign Was Won. You could see the slant from the start. Still, Lesley Riddoch remarked in the programme, the BBC don’t understand how balance works, they have no sense of ‘equivalence’. Hence their ham-fisted bias toward NO, one that NO exploited. If NO didn’t take part in debates, the BBC would have to omit any YES viewpoint ‘for balance’. Add to that an ingrained institutional leaning toward the status quo and moribund, slack journalism: there you have it.

No conspiracy, just a sloppy one-sided-ness where no-one asked the deeper questions, nor probed, nor got in behind the issues. Everyone can still say, hands on palpitating hearts, oh, we never even knew we were doing it. Like institutional anything, sexism, racism, whatever, it’s a product of closed minds.

So, even in the lightened mood post-ref, this programme still glossed over so many critical points and moved selectively through the story. Some players were barely mentioned. Derek Bateman and Robin MacAlpine, for example, not al all.

In the end, with a sense the story had been told, but abridged like a Reader’s Digest reprint, I liked Alan Little’s summary. I’d already seen his pieces on Britishness in which he linked that to the sense of belonging we had, particularly in working communities, when we had a ‘British’ industry. It was that, he suggested, gave us the feeling we were in a common project, better together.

Thatcher took all that apart. In the decline, Britishness has withered away, leaving a stump of jingoism and the same saccharined sentiment so many pointed to in their stereotype of the Scots. Britishness an amputated emotion; its only remaining sensation is like a phantom limb: long gone but still as real in the mind, itching and hurting, longed for by many.

Alan Little reflected, the Union still has to wake up to the need for something positive to replace it.

All the promises, pledges and vows don’t address that one thing. As time goes on those who remember the days of British Steel, the Coal Board and Shipbuilding learn to live with their loss or else, being older, take their broken dreams to the grave. The younger Scots only saw their pain second hand and don’t have the same sense of belonging, the more so when Westminster rides down the working people who carried Britishness in their hearts. So the young, the working people are waiting to be convinced. Still waiting.

So the 1st of October came and went. On the morning of the 2nd I read Pete Wishart’s letter to the Speaker of the House of Commons. So far, on the 16th, there’s to be an adjournment debate on the promise, a mere half-hour.

“A solemn vow made by the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition must surely rank as one of the most important joint statements delivered by the House in recent times. A half hour adjournment debate is, therefore, clearly insufficient to consider all the issues concerning this ‘vow’ to the Scottish people.”

Is this what they call a ‘consultation’? Hardly. Scotland’s back in it’s box where it belongs. Not worth anything except lip service. The arrogance is astounding. It’s a bloody insult.



*With apologies to Devo, of course. Here's their story. Subversive. Oh, yes.


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