HOW DARE THE NATIONALISTS DENY ME MY PLACE IN TEAM SCOTLAND

IN a day or two we in Scotland will emerge from the most intense, far-reaching period of politics in living memory. Battle commenced in 2012 when we learned that, in the autumn of 2014, we would vote either to save or destroy the Union. Then, with barely a moment to reflect on what we had decided, it raged on, right up until today, the last day of General Election campaigning.

So, how are we all feeling around about now? Invigorated? Stimulated? Engaged?

Those are the kinds of words many politicians fighting for a seat in Westminster – and some, like Nicola Sturgeon, who are not – are employing to describe the supposed healthy appetite of Scottish voters for these deliciously heady times.

And, as the First Minister descends by helicopter for the latest batch of selfies among the next crowd of eager, hand-picked cohorts, it’s easy to see how that impression might take hold.

But it has not been my experience of the past three years. The kinds of words which best describe that are ‘alienated’, ‘disenchanted’, ‘fatigued’.

Tomorrow I will go to the polling station knowing there is little realistic chance of my X helping to prevent an SNP victory in the constituency, whichever of the three main Unionist parties I vote for. And I’d vote for any one to keep the Nationalists out. If the polls are to be believed, most Unionists across the nation face the same bleak prospect.

Evidence

They know the consequences of their predicament. They know the result of the election in Scotland will be compared and contrasted with the result in England and used as evidence of the nations’ incompatibility in a political union.

They know, too, that the large numbers of SNP politicians flocking to Westminster and making good on their threat to vote on English- only matters will antagonise those south of the Border who, after all, will find no SNP candidates on their ballot papers tomorrow.

And they know that will destabilise the Union still further. Nationalists know it as well.

All this knowledge may equate to an unending energy drink for the players of ‘Team Scotland’, Alex Salmond’s dismal shorthand for those who shared his independence dream. But I am talking about life outside the team, cut adrift from the Nationalist belief that dividing peoples somehow represents social progress. I am talking as one of the 55 per cent whose belief in the UK disqualifies them from playing for their home nation.

Here on the sidelines, I look back on the three most significant political years of my lifetime with a more profound sense of what we have lost than what we have gained.

Yes, I daresay that in the year 2015 the average Scottish voter does have a better handle on ‘the issues’ than five, ten or 20 years ago. After three years of unbroken exposure on the campaign frontlines, we may consider ourselves more politically sophisticated than neighbours in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who seem to think a sixweek General Election campaign is a long time in politics.

But prolonged engagement in political discourse of such f undamental i mportance to Scotland’s future has certainly taken a toll on me and, I imagine, others too.

On Facebook and Twitter I watch with almost morbid curiosity as friends and acquaintances score points over one another in ideological quarrels with no possibility of resolution. Views are so entrenched, tribal language by now such second nature, that all notion of objectivity is often lost.

In this febrile atmosphere much nonsense can be spoken and we find ourselves at risk of defining the speakers of it purely in terms of their politics. I would l i ke to regard Eddi Reader mostly as a Scottish singer whose music I enjoy and only a little bit as a fervent Nationalist with whom I so passionately disagree. That becomes harder when she tweets balderdash, as she did this week, suggesting that Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy was asking for trouble by campaigning in ‘a Yes city’.

Resentments

After the referendum last September I could no longer bring myself to comment on politics on Facebook. Perhaps I should never have commented in the first place. None of my friendships was forged through shared politics. Why should any founder on political differences?

And yet, in the new ‘engaged’ Scottish politics, friendships really are suffering, resentments festering.

I resent the heads-I-win, tailsyou-lose gall of the Scottish Nationalists, the glaring hypocrisy of seeking to bargain with Labour in London while seeking to bury them in Scotland, and of imagining they should call shots in England without a mandate after howling for years about other parties doing just that in Scotland.

I resent the fact that, in the grand political sweep, little other than the constitutional future of Scotland divides Labour and the Scottish National Party. And yet their enmity is so bitter, so toxic we are now practically normalised to the intimidation and verbal abuse which spills over in the streets and on the internet.

Most of all, I resent the way three years of political warfare have made me feel about being Scottish. I thought we were supposed to be a rational, canny even sceptical bunch. Yet our supposed political sophistication has brought us to the point where the most vacuous of Miss Sturgeon’s pearls is greeted like a doctrine f rom a political visionary.

The more SNP seats we get, says she, the stronger the voice in Westminster for Scotland. Seriously? For which country does she i magine the other parties’ Scottish candidates plan to speak?

Time and time again over these three years, what is beneficial for the SNP and what is beneficial for Scotland have been conflated. And we political sophisticates no longer seem to notice.

That is simply fatigue, not engagement.