Pandora’s ballot box
From Pennyburn to Laburnum Grove, a quiet but unstoppable revolution is underway. And Scotland’s political elite have been put on notice, as a leading writer discovered when he went canvassing with campaigners from the Yes and No camps
AFTER a little while the lady of the house agrees to come to the door and an early evening masterclass in selling Scottish i ndependence i s about to unfold. The door was opened by a polite, rosy- cheeked teenager and several minutes have elapsed before her mother appears in a pink dressing gown.
She is wary and there is fatigue in her eyes, maybe a little pain. Perhaps she had been on a nightshift or is recovering from illness. Maybe she had simply been working and was settling down in front of the telly before an early night.
It promised to be an abrupt conversation. She is a handsome woman but you sense that we may have caught her at a fragile moment. I like this woman, perhaps her name is Irene.
Tam Brotherston, a grizzled veteran of street canvassing is a skilled political persuader. He has a big, sonsie face with a beard and twinkling eyes. He wastes no time in getting about his business. ‘I’m campaigning for Yes Scotland and wondered if I could ask you how you intend to vote,’ he says.
The woman, in turn, wastes no time in telling him she’ll be voting No and her delivery seems to brook no compromise.
‘Would anything persuade you to change that?’ Tam asks hopefully. ‘No, my mind’s made up. There’s too much uncertainty and I don’t think the nationalists have answered the important questions.’
Her words are a challenge, though, and Tam eyes a little shaft of light. This woman wants him to engage her. And so he chooses his weapons carefully and decides upon the NHS and public services, perhaps sensing that this is a subject which may resonate with her. He chooses too his register of speech. ‘Our relationship with England is like this,’ he says. ‘It’s like gie’n the wumman next door a’ your wages and then she gie’s you some of it back and then tells you whit tae spend it on. Wid ye consider that to be an acceptable arrangement?’
A dance has begun and, for half an hour or so, they each retreat and advance: Tam gently probing and cajoling, Irene parrying and weaving; maintaining her position. ‘Can we pit you doon as an undecided, then?’ asks Tam, the superoptimist, handing her some leaflets. ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ she says, ‘but you’ve given me some food for thought.’
SHE is smiling now and it’s clear that she has enjoyed the encounter. She gave as good as she got and this, perhaps, has pleased her – this and being taken seriously. ‘My son will be home from abroad soon,’ she says. ‘ He’s a definite Yes, right enough.’ Tam smiles, too, he got his message across and made some progress.
This is the Pennyburn estate in Kilwinning, Ayrshire – a solidly working class enclave in the middle of a proud little town of 16,000 souls. It is known for its elegantly ruined abbey and a fine junior football team, Kilwinning Rangers, nicknamed The Buffs. It’s also known for its Orangemen and for possessing the mother Masonic Lodge of Scotland, but it’s comfortable in its skin, too, and Catholics and Protestants rub along nicely with each other.
Once, in another life, I lived here happily. There are hundreds of towns like it in Scotland, left twisting in the winds of deindustrialisation and globalisation but fighting back and seeking no special favours. It’s on streets like these that the battle between Scottish independence and the United Kingdom will be won or lost.
Tam Brotherston is one of a detachment of a dozen or so Yes activists combing this neighbourhood, most in their late teens or early 20s. Only a few are SNP supporters. They are having a good night. When I leave them Tam has recorded 13 Yeses and his rather more dubious ‘ Undecided’. Gary Parker, the group organiser, insists that their polling in this part of Ayrshire has shown a clear preference for Yes. ‘ But that’s not what all the national polls are saying,’ I venture.
‘I simply don’t believe them,’ he says. ‘I don’t know one single person who has ever been asked their opinion by any of these polling companies, and none of these people have either,’ he says to nods of agreement.
Two weeks previously: a different neighbourhood; different expectations. And, this time, a different message – No Thanks. We are in one of those smart Chardonnay estates that hug the fringes of towns all over West Central Scotland, causing their shadows to fall over our childhood spaces.
This one is i n Condorrat, Cumbernauld’s l i ttle sister. Here there are avenues, not streets and each perversely named after the trees that they supplanted. Is there a Laburnum Grove in each of Scotland’s towns? Here, too, I sense, is where the message of Scottish nationalism f alls on stony ground or is choked by thorns.
Though the houses cost five times those in Pennyburn the people are from the same stock: proud working class and educated in schools that don’t teach rugby. The similarities end there, though. Here there are manicured lawns and landscaped driveways studded with the refulgent accoutrements of fulfilled aspiration: Land Rovers; some private number plates and, over there, emerging from a double garage, a red Porsche. There are even Bonsai trees, for heaven’s sake.
Doctors and lawyers might live here, perhaps a junior mandarin in a quango. Primarily, though, these are the accoutrements of Scotland’s self-made middle classes: self- employed skilled tradesmen who have toiled incessantly from 16 onwards and are now reaping the rewards.
THE Union has been good to them and you sense resentment that we are even having a referendum. This is a sector which seems collectively to say: ‘ We didn’t ask for this war.’
They have gained access to a place unknown to and beyond the imaginations of their parents. Few Tories live here and probably many Labour people. Today they are being solicited by a troupe of very young Labour Better Together campaigners under the tutelage of Gregg McClymont, the local MP and rising star of Westminster Labour’s shadow cabinet as well as being the party’s spokesman on pensions.
McClymont is the embodiment of the values and aspirations which resonate in these avenues. He springs f rom a sound working-class background and attended one of several excellent comprehensive schools in this area before going on to attain a doctorate at Oxford.
Walking through Cumbernauld’s austere and unloved town centre, McClymont is in his element participating in the referendum doorstep challenge among his young acolytes.
‘People here are not buying the nationalist message,’ he says. ‘There is a real community in Cumbernauld, with several generations of families choosing to stay here. It is full of hardworking people and high achievers. They don’t like it when people insult their intelligence by making statements they can’t justify.’
On the doorsteps he is polite and self- effacing and there is rarely a need for introductions: they all know him and you sense a quiet, beaming pride in this lad o’ pairts who has stormed the citadels of the elite. With one exception they are all intending to vote No. At one door the house- owner bounds out to meet us. ‘I’m a No,’ he declares.
He is red Porsche man and he chides McClymont because his emails to Better Together volunteering to be an activist have not been returned.
‘I’ll deal with this personally,’ says the MP. ‘Welcome to the campaign.’ He duly records the email address and phone number of his new volunteer, who owns an IT business. He has body art and on his garage
quiet but unstoppable revolution is underway. been put on notice, as a leading writer with campaigners from the Yes and No camps walls there is ephemera connected to Rangers FC.
McClymont’s volunteers are all still buzzing following an appearance in their midst a few days earlier by Gordon Brown. The venue was a Christian evangelical hall and by the end of Brown’s bravura performance, the old Iron Chancellor seemed to have re-kindled his love affair with politics.
When he left office four years ago, Brown looked sad, beaten and relieved. But before 300 Labour Better Togethers, he looked healthier and happier, roaming around the stage and preaching without notes. ‘Don’t let the SNP tell you that an independent Scotland will be a haven of social justice,’ he roared. ‘It won’t be. Where will the money come from to meet all the needs of our elderly, sick and vulnerable? This is anything but social justice.’
And although there weren’t any Hallelujahs there were sporadic outbreaks of minor flag-waving. Which is about as impassioned as it gets at a political gathering in this part of the world.
The referendum campaign, it seems, has divided Scotland straight down the middle. We were always an astringent and disputatious nation but now families, colleagues, gypsies, tramps and thieves are split, with a recent poll finding that around a quarter of us have argued with loved ones about the independence question. Is this a bad thing, though? Will the country really require a period of peace and reconciliation when it’s all over? When referendum day dawns every single village and town in Scotland will have hosted a campaign gathering of some sort. There have been debates, question-and- answer sessions, women’s meetings, young mothers groups, leafleting and phone canvassing evenings.
The Electoral Commission in Scotland is privately estimating that the turnout on September 18 could be as high as 90 per cent. If so, this would eclipse the turnout for any election in Europe since the birth of modern democracy.
IN Stirling earlier this year I listened as Derek Bateman, the former BBC Scotland political presenter, spoke passionately about independence: ‘I have a belief in Scotland and in the Scots. Nationalism for me is about loving your country. Love, though, is irrational and so at times you may think me mad. But for me it works and it works gloriously well.’
This evangelical sense of purpose is one of the nationalists’ great strengths. But their weakness is that too many of them fail to recognise that other Scots who are happy to remain in the Union can be just as passionate about Scotland. They simply don’t understand this position. And you will always fail to persuade those whom you first fail to understand.
This is what I witnessed and can testify to: a quiet revolution has been taking place in Scotland these last 18 months. The country has become politicised and informed to an astonishing degree. The campaign to win hearts and minds on the doorsteps and town halls is being conducted with dignity, maturity and humour.
Family members and work colleagues with little otherwise to say to each other have begun talking again because of this campaign. Much has been made of the ugly and negative aspects, especially some of the trolling on social media. Yet many of those who behave like this would also abuse you if you were to adopt a position on the best way of dooking for apples.
What I see is democratisation: people who had previously been disengaged or alienated by the workings of political democracy now feel included.
Some of this may be rough and unkempt, but perhaps that’s a price worth paying for freeing politics from the letters pages of the broadsheets and the dark arts of spin doctors and lobbyists.
If what I encountered on these doorsteps and town halls is indicative of the larger campaign then there won’t be bitterness and strife following the vote. Instead many Scots on either side, who had never previously been involved in politics, have found their voices. And some have been eloquent and inspirational. The nation can surely build upon this to scrutinise the actions of those we elect and improve the quality of our political gene pool.
And crucially there’s also this: after September it will be harder for the political classes to evade our entreaties and cause us to look the other way. For professional politicians this is the equivalent of opening Pandora’s Box.
The rest of us ought to know, though, that the last thing released from the box was Hope.
Even before September 18, and no matter whether it’s to be Yes or No, Scotland has changed and changed utterly.