After the election
there was nothing left to write. The battle had been fought and the SNP had won
nearly all the seats. But they had lost the war. The nightmare scenario of a UK
Government propped up by Scottish nationalists had been avoided. Unfortunately
for the SNP and for the Left in general, the same nightmare will apply next
time, too. Expect English and Welsh people to continue to vote for anyone but
the SNP.
There will be further
battles, but they are relatively far ahead. The Scottish parliament will have
an election, the SNP may win another majority, but will they want to hold
another independence referendum? Would they even be allowed to do so? I suspect
the answer in both cases is ‘No’, or at least not for the foreseeable future.
The numbers just aren’t there. Even those who want independence will more and
more come to recognise as things calm down that we can’t afford it. Nothing is
going to change that anytime soon.
The EU referendum
likewise is far away. We can only talk vaguely about it. Britain’s role in the
EU anyway is going to change in ways we cannot predict, because the EU may
itself change in ways we cannot predict. Cameron’s attempt at renegotiation of
the membership rules looks rather like tinkering at the edges while the club
decides in what way it is to exist. No-one knows what is going to happen to the
Eurozone in the next year or two. Is it going to move closer together or
further apart?
The EU is at one of
those see-saw moments which may set it on the path to becoming a United States
of Europe or going back to being a Common Market of independent nation states
who happen to trade together. Deciding on whether the UK wants to be a member
of this club at the moment or trying to change the rules of our membership
looks rather foolish. Who can predict what the EU will become in the next few
years, so the question becomes: member of what? Events in the Eurozone will
anyway far more determine the nature of our future membership rather than our
votes.
In any case whatever
happens, Scotland will go the way of the UK. We have seen how the EU can crush
a small country and we have seen what happens when you try to have monetary
union without a political and a transfer union. No-one is going to allow the
same sort relationship to happen in the UK. It doesn’t matter what Scots vote
for; that is not going to happen. As we have seen in Greece you can’t vote for
a contradiction (they voted both to keep the Euro while rejecting the condition
for the possibility of remaining in the Euro). The vote was meaningless.
A future Scottish vote
for “independence” might see Scotland kicked out of the poundzone, which would
be a disaster both for Scotland and the UK. If anyone thinks leaving a modern
currency union is straightforward for any of those involved, they should think
about why Greece does not already have the Drachma. More likely a vote for
Scottish independence would lead to the poundzone retaining some sort of
political and transfer union. In that case we would become the United States of
the UK or some such nonsense and Scottish “independence” would amount to little
more than flag waving. There isn’t a third option.
The debate therefore
has become sterile. We were all scared of the SNP winning so many seats. But
look, they won them and nothing happened, but a game of musical chairs and some
clapping. Who’s afraid of the big bad SNP?
So it just isn’t
possible, or at least there is little point, writing a blog every week
rehashing arguments that are already familiar to those with whom I agree and
are like pebbles thrown at Nicola d’Arc. They just bounce off her shining
armour.
But of course it is
vital that Pro-UK people keep up the fight. If we all retreat into silence,
where will we be when we next need to fight a battle? But we need to fight
differently and we need to write in another way. It is for this reason that
after the election I took the chance to expand on something I wrote soon after
the referendum. It was called “It’s Scotland that needs rescuing now”. At that
point I told the story of my experience in Russia of trying to rescue someone
from involvement in a religious cult. I compared that experience with how
things feel in Scotland today. I now expand on that story and develop the
comparison. The result is a long piece of writing in the form of a memoir, but
with a final section that amounts to a summing up of all that I think about
Scottish nationalism. It’s only by reading the whole that you can properly
understand the conclusion.
In the course of
writing so extensively about Scottish nationalism, I have compared the SNP to
many historical phenomena, including the Communist party in the USSR and the
Confederacy in the USA. It would be hard to think of two groups that were more
opposite. It is therefore worth remembering that these comparisons should not
be taken too literally. That is not the purpose. When I say something is like
something else, I also logically imply that it is different. Otherwise it would
be the same. I don’t think the SNP are communists, nor are they Confederates,
still less are they Hare Krishnas, but it can be illuminating to make
comparisons. The reason for this is that such comparisons can reveal something
that is otherwise hidden, and a tendency towards which a political movement is leading.
In order to write in
detail about these matters, I had to use my experience, but it is memory
filtered through the present and conditioned by what has happened in Scotland
in the last few years. I do not allow memory to limit what I write. Rather a
thought leads to another thought and soon I am describing something that did
not happen or I am ascribing a thought I have now to a time when I had not yet
worked it out. I do not particularly wish this long piece of writing therefore
to be limited by its name. It is an act of remembering, but it is in the form
of a novel, yet much of it involves argument, so it is a sort of very long
blog. Call it what you will. It matters little to me what you call a thing, it
matters only what it is.
I believe different
forms of writing can be useful in trying to get across different truths. But is
it true? That is always the question some people ask of certain types of
writing. Yes some of it is true and some of it isn’t. It says as much about me
as it does about my experience with the Hare Krishnas and my experience with
Scottish nationalism. It tells a lot about how I ended up living in Russia and
it says something about what I did there. The purpose, however, is to try to
explain something about Scotland now. Everything is for the purpose of
comparison. It doesn’t matter for that purpose what happened or didn’t happen.
It matters only that within itself the writing has truth. How it relates to
anything else is largely a matter of indifference.
As you read you may
find yourself thinking is this all relevant? You may intend to read about
Scottish politics, but find yourself in a different sort of story. This is
sometimes the way with writing. Sometimes one story can only be told in the
context of another. So if you read, you will have to forgive me that there are
some long digressions and that the story has a tendency to go backwards and
forwards. I play some games with the story, but that, too, is a way of describing
a truth that can only be reached in different ways.
In the end, I relate
the whole thing to Scottish politics. You could by all means skip to the
epilogue if you are only interested in this aspect of the story. But something
would have been missed by doing this. Everything that is before the epilogue
enables it to be understood from within. I have tried to get inside the
mind-set of Scottish nationalism by describing something that I find to be
similar. There are differences, of course, but the comparison is illuminating.
Anyone who has been
following my blogs and is curious will find out much in the course of reading
this long piece of writing. It is only because of my life in Russia that I am
able to write my blog at all. It gave me the perspective from which I write. So
if you want to better understand my blogs from the past and those I may write
in the future, here is the key.
