Five: Being Different
Up until this point, everything has been about planning for the future – how we get a second referendum, how we prepare a prospectus for the future Scotland and how strategically we give people the confidence to vote for that prospectus. And this has been the currency of the Yes movement – ‘just think of what we could do if only...’.
And so it should be. We are a movement of hope which believes that if we have the power to control things we don’t currently control we can use that control to make our world better. Hope is much mocked in politics and imagining what can be done with tools we don’t have is dismissed as ‘grievance’ by people who don’t want us to have those tools. They can mock and dismiss all they want – I am still driven by the belief that we can do better than has been done to us. In fact, it quite often gets me out of bed in the morning when I think about what bloody Westminster has done to us and what we could have done instead.
However, there is more than a hint of truth in the claim that we are so busy looking ahead and focussing on what we can’t do that we’re not looking to now and focussing on what we can do. I know some will argue that there are different tasks and it’s not for the Yes movement to fix things in a system they fundamentally disagree with. And of course for the movement as a whole (and not the SNP in particular), there is some truth in that too. Many of us are involved in more than one campaign and each can have a different focus. The fact that by staying active in your local Yes group you are focussing on the future does not mean that by becoming active in your local anti-poverty campaign you do not want to see the present as a better place.
The mistake for independence supporters is to separate these two things – because they are not separate. The future is always – always – born out of the present. It is never a wholly new invention, a clean break, a fresh start. The seeds and the roots of what we are to become is always found in what we are now. It is true individually (those people who thought that if only they could live somewhere else then finally they could be a different person, only to get there and discover that they’re much the same as they ever were). And it is true collectively (the collective delusion that we can have one war to stop future wars...).
But it is never more true than it is psychologically; the idea that if one other thing could change (a new job; a new partner; a new pair of trainers) then finally we’ll get round to going to the gym. Nonsense. The only thing that will get you going to the gym is the act of going to the gym. It isn’t someone else’s fault that we don’t do the things we should do and that we do things we shouldn’t (though the influence of others can be substantial). It is our fault if we act and it is our fault if we don’t. Excuses are mechanisms for letting ourselves off the hook. You do something, and then you do it again, and then you do it again – and then that’s what you are. Or you don’t do it – and then you’re something else.
So are we – as a nation; as a society – independent? Do we act independently? Do we do things independently? Can others see us as independent? Because the more that we act independently and the more that others see us acting independently, the more independent we become. There is a very thin line between feeling different and being different, because when we feel different we act differently and when we act differently then that makes us different. That St Augustine line – ‘Lord make me chaste – but not yet” – is a curse for the independence movement. I absolutely accept that we should always be clear about what it is that we can’t do because we don’t have the powers and we should always point to the limits of the Scotland we can become as a result. But I do not accept that it follows that we should therefore do as little as possible and keep all our independence for some day in the future: ‘I want to be independent – but not today’.
A thoughtful, London-based writer wrote during the referendum that he thought that, sooner or later, Scottish independence was inevitable. Why? Because he identified that when you arrive in Edinburgh from London, just like when you arrive in Dublin from London, it feels like a different place. That intangible, subliminal sense that you are ‘no longer in Kansas’. That sense is a result of devolution, a combination of the different expectations, different institutions and different outlook that comes from making more of your own decisions. I have always said that 70 per cent of people who think we are gradually, inevitably, becoming an independent country is worth more than 51 per cent of people who are ready to vote for it immediately. It is a sounder foundation for our future if most of us really believe we’re different.
It is a very important psychological phenomenon; the normalisation of difference. When I was a child, the back of an airplane was the smoking section. I told a colleague this a few years ago and she point-blank refused to believe me. She thought I was winding her up. The idea that you could climb into an air-bound metal box where you’d be forced to inhale other people’s recycled nicotine for hours on end just seemed incomprehensible. It is only a few years ago where quite a lot of people seemed to believed there would be genuine civil unrest if they weren’t allowed to smoke in a pub. Now, when Nigel Farage proposes reversing the policy, it just sounds nuts to most people. Who wants to go back to stinking of tobacco every time you go for an afternoon pint with your family?
So who wants to go back to a tiny handful of Tory ministers imposing the Poll Tax on us despite Scotland voting overwhelmingly against? Not many takers? Or who really wants to reverse some of the specific changes of devolution like access to universities based on ability to learn not ability to pay? Or who thinks that there is a giant public attitude in favour of making people pay for medicine again? (A clue – these are all the same people...). When you make a reality – and particularly a reality that people like – they begin to define themselves by that reality. When you talk to your nephew or cousin from England and they tell you they’re struggling with massive student debt, when you think about your own daughter or yourself and you think ‘thank god we don’t do things like that up here’, you start to see yourself as, at least in part, a person that comes from a place which is like that.
And it comes to feel normal very quickly. Which is a great advantage for independence supporters because the more we can normalise our difference from the political agendas of London, the less we see ourselves as part of that agenda. The more we see ourselves as different. As independent. The more our institutions belong to us and are seen as a response to our specific needs, the more we become aware that our needs are indeed specific. The greater becomes the awareness that actually one size does not really fit all when it comes to responding to social and economic reality. And when it is better, when it is popular (and forget what you read in newspapers which oppose independence, most of what the Scottish Parliament has done differently is very popular), people come to see that as being where their interests lie. If we have a society and a politics which behaves independently and delivers what people want, those people themselves come to feel independent. The bigger the difference that exists, the smaller the step to independence feels.
Now, I can feel the contempt of any unionist commentator reading this. I am not saying that we should all be sent out to paint the roses blue just so they are not red or white. I am most certainly not suggesting that creating pointless, meaningless differences just so people will be ‘mesmerized’ into some kind of unthinking trance from which they will awake in an independent country as if by some kind of magic. I am being the opposite of cynical. I’m suggesting that, if we think Britain is getting it wrong, we should put our money where our mouth is and do something different. If we’re right, if Britain isn’t good for Scotland, then why aren’t we doing something about it? Why follow the same path if we believe the path is wrong? And if we follow the wrong path (going along with British policy through expediency or lack of courage), why would we expect to reach the correct destination?
I know that some people have argued that radicalism is too dangerous to attempt until after a successful Yes vote. There seems to be either a feeling that we might get it wrong or that we might scare the horses or that we might be better letting things get worse so we can promise to make them better later. The first of these arguments is to show the world our utter lack of confidence in ourselves – if we can’t get ambitious projects right as we are now, what qualifies us to run our own country? The second seems to believe that the best way to get someone to make a big choice (voting Yes) is to precede it by making no choices whatsoever (while in reality the best way to get someone to make a big choice is to get them used to making choices over a period of time). The last argument is not only deeply cynical and fundamentally unjust, it also assumes people are stupid – you think that there will be absolutely no blow-back if we go five years and things get worse?
The more that we create policies, institutions and attitudes which can stand on their own two feet, the better prepared we are to stand on our own two feet. I cannot emphasise this enough – confidence is infectious. If we pursue a strong, distinct politics in Scotland now we give people the confidence to believe we can take the next step. If we are timid and cautious and small-c conservative, we will effectively create others in our own image. And relying on asking timid, cautious and small-c conservative people to vote Yes is a very bad plan. So of course you’d expect me to be pushing for a more exciting, innovative and radical politics because that is in my nature and has been the focus of my political life for 20 years. But the fact remains that we need confidence to get us over the threshold of independence and confidence is as confidence does.
I do not plan to go over a full policy programme for what a more different, more independent Scotland would look like. Common Weal has already published that book (A Book of Ideas, available from the shop at www.allofusfirst.org). It contains over a hundred substantial proposals for things we can do now with the powers we have now. But I want to pick two from either end of the spectrum to illustrate what confidence could mean in practice.
At the technical, pointy-headed end of the spectrum I’d suggest that there is no bigger national priority than setting up a Scottish National Investment Bank and a People’s Banking Network. Common Weal (along with Friends of the Earth Scotland and the New Economics Foundation) has published plans for how these can be set up. There would be a single major national investment bank which would quickly become, proportionately, one of the biggest state investment banks in Europe in terms of its lending capacity. This has major and immediate consequences for all sorts of things. Funding public sector rental housing immediately becomes easy. In fact, we could start building a range of top-quality houses for affordable rent almost immediately, limited in scale only by how many people want to live in one (and I think demand would be very high indeed). Emerging Scottish businesses at the large end of the scale could immediately get access to patient, safe, secure funding to help them grow and enabling them to stay independently Scottish owned without having to sell out to overseas equity capital. Local authorities and even the Scottish Government would have a reliable and mission-driven source of borrowing for national infrastructure projects.
But the benefits do not end there. A bank of that scale could be further capitalised in advance of an independence vote. If there was the confidence that a Yes vote was approaching, that capitalisation could be extended to prepare it to be possibly even the key lender for the transition period during the establishment of an independent Scottish state. It genuinely is true that international money markets would raise borrowing costs for a newly established Scotland (though by less and for shorter than has been suggested). It’s just that there is much less need to source borrowing outside Scotland than people understand. Running to international lenders in the free market is the automatic default position of free-market obsessed Westminster. In Scotland we could choose instead to create substantial borrowing capacity of our own. There are enormous pension funds, substantial personal savings, money in credit unions. All these can be offered a safe, reliable home in a national investment bank and leveraged (sensibly) to give very substantial borrowing capacity to a new Scottish Government on independence without the need to go to international money markets (though it is likely we would still need to do that for some of the big costs such as setting up foreign currency reserves).
And it goes beyond borrowing power. Our proposal is that a Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB) would also have the responsibility of coordinating and capitalising a People’s Banking Network. This would be a series of local banks which were tasked to do nothing more than provide good basic banking facilities to people and small businesses on a mutual basis and seeking not to profit from them. The SNIB would regulate and manage that banking network. This immediately positions it as halfway to being a central bank for an independent Scotland and a regulatory overseer of a Scottish banking regulatory system.
The People’s Banks would offer people a safe, non-exploitative place to keep their money and do their banking. If international experience is anything to go by it would quickly become the prime lender to small businesses and would be designed specifically to see the long term success of those businesses as their own success (unlike the existing banks which measure success only in how much profit can be squeezed out of customers over the short term). They could provide an enormous economic stimulus very quickly. But they do something else – they create a safe, continuity banking system in Scotland. Because they would be managed either in the public sector or on a mutual, community-minded basis, they would be tasked to ensure that there were always solid, secure banking services available in Scotland as it moved to independence.
Let me be clear here – the banks were never really going to pull out of Scotland, close down their branches or switch off their cashline machines. That was political activism on behalf of the banks. But if we pursue an ambitious domestic agenda now and create a solid banking system, then if the banks behave in the same way during the next referendum we can simply call their bluff and wave them goodbye – their customers will all have somewhere better to go anyway. And very importantly, people will all know they will be confident that there will always be somewhere they can get their money from. It is a confident response to the threats of the banking community.
So that’s a very economically-focused policy from the technical end of the spectrum. Let me also suggest a much more esoteric policy from the wellbeing end of the spectrum. Our surroundings have a very strong influence over our general perception of life. The people of the Soviet Union stacked into endless, identical grey high-rise blocks of flats for miles on end could not possibly have failed to feel small, insignificant, regimented, lacking individuality and generally apathetic about the chance of change. My experience of Reykjavik in Iceland couldn’t be more different. The houses are all brightly coloured, individual, different, oozing their own personality. The people are the same (very recently they once again congregated on their Parliament and forced their Prime Minister to resign over corruption – which is my idea of a real democracy).
Many Scots live in pretty characterless housing estates which themselves are rows of grey harl boxes lacking individuality and coloured to feel drab and unexciting in our often grey-tinged weather. The landscaping is minimal and functional, the infrastructure of their communities in decline. Public policy has given very little impression that it cares very much. What if it did? What if we invested a bit in bringing the environment of these communities to life? We could engage in the widespread ‘Tobermorification’ of Scotland (after the Mull town where every house is a bright, colourful contrast to its neighbour). We could plant trees and plants and make the place feel alive. We could start to invest in local infrastructure and rebuild. We could improve insulation and make houses warm and cheaper to heat (work which pays for itself). We could make sure everyone has really good quality broadband. We could make them feel like they live in a community which is ‘on the up’ in a nation which is itself reaching upwards in a time when we want people to feel ready to reach even higher.
Knocking out a White Paper with lots of details of how an independent Scotland would work and offering to post it to people is a kind of sign of ambition. But somehow it does not spell ambition half as much as rolling up our sleeves and actually trying to make people feel like they are living in a country with ambition right now. Taking for granted communities which live in patched up houses in patched up streets with patched up infrastructure does not scream ambition. Make no mistake, it is these communities and not the bankers of Edinburgh who will deliver our independence. They will invest in us, so let’s invest in them. Let them feel that Scotland is changing before we ask for their help.
I give these examples only to show what is possible. It might be creating first-class childcare. It might be replacing Britain’s broken Council Tax system. It could be fixing massively wrong-sized local democracy. It might be a radical approach to land reform. It could be a step change in renewable energy generation and technology. It could be all of these things. But it really ought to be something. The future we want people to vote for is ambitious. Timidity won’t get us there. I don’t want to be independent later, I want to be independent now. At the very least I want us to behave as if we are. That is in our hands to do right now. Caution and fear serve the independence movement poorly. Boldness and confidence is our strongest weapon.