Not divisive? Sorry, Nicola but I’d sooner believe in eating cake to lose weight

Jonathan Brocklebank

LAST weekend, in a joyous celebration of our culture, four splendid Scottish MPs led the Tartan Day Parade as crowds cheered and Saltires fluttered in the Manhattan breeze.

It was a huge success. Everyone said so. Now roll on the trade and tourism benefits which will surely spring from this worthy excursion.

I can offer an alternative version of this story. Last weekend, in a cynical bid to promote their own cause, four MPs went on a jolly to New York at taxpayers’ expense and politicised a nonpartisan event by flaunting an SNP banner. Crowds which knew no better cheered; Saltires fluttered, but back home thousands cringed. The Scottish National Party had mistaken itself for Scotland’s Party yet again – and we were paying.

Which version you prefer will largely depend on the wiring formed in your brain over this past half decade or so we have been arguing non-stop about independence. The wiring has become so super-efficient in many of us that we need hardly go through a reasoning process any more. Our reaction to Nationalist or Unionist activities is instinctive and increasingly intemperate.

People are starting to notice. The MP Pete Wishart goes halfway to making the point with his ‘SNP bad’ refrain, intended to lampoon kneejerk attacks on his party. If he wanted to go all the way he would open his ears to the ‘Tories bad’ broken record that his own and colleagues’ discourse has become.

Hollow

So here we are, entrenched, irreconcilable and, in my case at least, sorely in need of some sweeter air above the stagnant wastes of slung political mud, hungry for intellectual stimulation away from the over-rehearsed, ever more shrill arguments.

During Britain’s darkest hour, a political leader spoke of the broad, sunlit uplands which awaited at the end of it. We reached them.

I do not suggest Scotland’s troubles are anything like what Britain’s were then, but that is not the only reason Nicola Sturgeon’s message of hope rang singularly hollow this week. The main reason is it was patently untrue.

Don’t worry folks, she said in apparent sincerity, a second independence referendum need not split the country.

‘Campaigns and politics are only divisive if we make them so,’ the First Minister told the Political Studies Association annual conference in Glasgow. ‘We should be determined, all of us, not to make it so.’

Miss Sturgeon has been a leading player in two referendums in the past three years and now argues for a third on the same issue as that which failed to yield her preferred answer in the first.

She knows exactly how divisive all this has been for a nation stuck on perpetual referendum footing since 2012.

She is keenly aware of the polarising effect of binary plebiscites with lifelong consequences for all of us, not just because she has been in the thick of these latest chapters of our social history but because it would be impossible to be a sentient politician and remain unaware of it.

So she cannot be telling us referendums need not be divisive because she believes it. It must be because she thinks others will believe it.

Perhaps we are to believe, too, that more cake means less obesity, that the longer underwater the fewer will drown.

It is not only the deteriorating standards of behaviour among some of her fellow parliamentarians, or indeed of candidates in next month’s council elections, which give the lie to the First Minister’s insouciance – although they do, emphatically.

‘Traitor’, ‘quisling’, ‘unpatriotic’ – these are fevered, hysterical referendum words.

‘Silly wee cow’, ‘stupid little cretin’ – the abusive language of a Tory council candidate bent out of shape in referendum times.

Poison

It is not merely the shameful attitude of certain politicians towards those they are supposed to represent – the MPs who block all critics on Twitter whether polite or not, those who wish plagues on the houses of businesses whose bosses dared to express an opinion.

Nor is it just the poison directed towards politicians and public figures by militant keyboard warriors with no rational perspective on what is making them behave like monsters.

Still more concerning than all of that is the impact of referendum times on the way we relate to each other. In years gone by, if we were interested in politics, we found our place on the spectrum by engaging with those to the left of us and to the right.

Now we are Nats or Yoons, Saltire or Union Flag wavers trotting out the competing mantras of our creeds, now learned by heart. If we are lucky we are still talking to people across the divide but less warmly, with a vague discomfort tempering our tones.

Dinner party invitations fly less regularly across the Yes/ No divide than they used to across the Left/Right one and I am not surprised. Left and Right-wing governments come and go. The prize of independence is permanent – as is the shattering of our family of nations.

Those broad, sunlit uplands are still out there somewhere but I think Winston Churchill was trying to say we got there by pulling together.

Our First Minister wants to lead us to a better place by pulling us apart, but nicely, respectfully. Sound like a plan to you?