Andrew Tickell: Here's how 2021 will shape our political memories

Call it naïve, call it uncynical if you like – at its most basic, democratic politics is the art of mediating our disagreements peacefully, using nothing more radical than a scrap of paper and a scrub of pencil. Whatever certain political parties might tell you, there’s nothing more unpolitical – more anti-political – than the idea elections are about “ending division”. Elections are about recognising what we disagree about in a transparent, public, egalitarian way, and working our way through those disagreements. Elections are a way of managing our social tensions – not ending them.

The anticipation, the uncertainty, the anxiety, the optimism – the endings, good and bad. Even without the traditional election night carrying you through into the wee small hours – with its characteristic combination of frayed nerves, mild intoxication, unseemly gloating, crushing despair, and sausage rolls to keep your spirits up – I still find elections entirely compelling. Even ones like this whose conclusions drippled slowly in over the course of Friday and Saturday afternoon.

Who we include in the democratic conversation matters: who decides to include themselves in it is equally important. That Scots turned out so handsomely to vote last week is a clear and simple vindication of the significance Holyrood’s decisions have on the lives of everyone who lives here. This isn’t a second fiddle parliament.

Some of those voters were new to the electoral roll. If any part of you felt politically jaded as you trudged to your polling station on Thursday, seeing youngsters casting their votes was a real tonic. There were proud parents sharing the experience with the sons and daughters, and confident teens marching in alone to make their political voices heard for the first time – in a country which is interested in what they have to say. The ­contrasts with “know your place Unionism” couldn’t be sharper.

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Even more heartening were the stories of new Scots exercising their right to vote for the first time after Holyrood decided to give almost everyone who makes their home here the opportunity to decide who represents their community in parliament.

Some of these new voters were refugees, making new homes here having escaped from despotic regimes. Some were people who have lived and worked here for decades, but who always found themselves at a slight angle to the political system – facing the impact of political decisions, but powerless to shape them. All of them finally had the opportunity to have their say last week about who governs Scotland. It is easy to overlook the significance and the symbolism of this democratic gesture.

The extension of the franchise has been one of the quiet stories of this election campaign – but one of the stories I’ve found most moving. The Syrian ­refugee, the Kurdish activist, the Brazilian student – including these people in our ­democratic life is an eloquent expression of the kind of country Scotland aspires to be. Confident, inclusive – leaving the door ajar to the world, recognising the common humanity which undergirds all our civic rights.

“We the people who live here” is a powerful – and a radical – idea in a United Kingdom determined to narrow the circle of our political sympathies, in the context of a political discourse which all too ­often seems determined to regard and talk about young people as woke, brittle, good-for-nothing.

You don’t need much of a sense of history to look back across the recent span of Scottish political history, and to be struck by the remarkable changes which have played out in our politics since section 1 of the Scotland Act first enshrined the idea “there shall be a Scottish Parliament” in 1998. I feel the changes of these years particularly acutely, as they were more or less the formative few decades of my political experience. “Nostalgia” would be the wrong word – but “reminiscing” isn’t quite right either.

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Our lives have different waystations. Sometimes it is Hogmanay which makes folk reflective. Sometimes it is the anniversaries of significant births and deaths in our lives. But whatever your personal waystations are – you’ll know when they are, those milestone moments which put you in pensive fettle, and find yourself reflecting on everything which has changed in between. Elections are one of life’s ­inflection points – at least for me.

Maybe it is because in the Tickell ­family elections have always been ­family ­occasions. Down the generations, we have been a clan of political obsessives – from my great-grandfather Dr Angus ­Millar who joined the SNP in the 1930s – to my granny Janet who went to her grave a few years ago with the party badge on her ­order of service – to old man dad who had the misfortune to live through the 1980s when the SNP were in Nowheresville going Nowhere slowly, as Scottish Labour shook its fists forlornly from across the House of Commons as the Iron Lady went to work.

ONE of my earliest political memories was the election night in 1997 when – 24 years ago now – Tony Blair finally upended the seemingly endless decades of Tory domination. The SNP put on three seats to their modest Westminster delegation that year – taking the party up to six constituencies in the House of Commons. Back then, my home seat of Argyll and Bute continued to send Ray Michie south, representing the Liberal Democrats. Depending on how long in tooth you are, doubtless you’ll have your own political memories written in letters of fire – 1974, 1979, 1983, 2007, 2011, 2014.

Tony Blair took on Tory dominance

On Friday afternoon, my dad watched Evelyn Tweed retain Bruce Crawford’s seat in Stirling for the SNP, with a mass of 19,882 votes and a margin of 6895 over her nearest rival. In 1987 when I was just a babe in arms, the SNP took just 4897 votes in the constituency and ­Stirling returned the sinister figure of Darth ­Michael Forsyth, who still haunts ­Westminster in his ermine jumpsuit, with villainy still twinkling in either eye. ­Argyll is no longer a Liberal Democrat fastness either, with Jenni Minto taking up Mike Russell’s mantle.

Since 2007, the permafrost of Scottish Labour domination has melted in a way which once would have seemed impossible. Having tasted something of these years of failure, watching the SNP constituency results roll in over the weekend will never be anything other than surreal to me. But the youngsters? At moments like this, you can only reflect on how different our political experiences have been to people who have come to political consciousness in the last 14 years.

One of the things I like most about my day job – teaching the next generation of students about the law of their country – is that your weekly encounters with youngsters can – if you’re prepared to listen as well as talk – really challenge your worldview. It is all too easy, I think, for all of us to get stuck in our perspectives, conditioned by our shared political ­experiences.

This is true across political parties. As has already been vividly demonstrated this weekend, Blairites like Peter Mandelson think the solution to Labour’s current predicament is to immerse the withered skeleton of the former Prime Minister – mullet and all – in a restorative bath of goji berries and phoenix tears. Blair will emerge pristine and new, to solve the political problems of the 2020s with the political solutions of the 1990s. On the opposite benches in the House of Commons, you never have to look far to find a dreamy-eyed Tory backbencher who thinks calling up Thatcher’s ghost is the solution for all their party’s political ills.

But this is political necromancy. You can’t make the dead walk again. The world moves on. The idea that political challenges of post-Brexit Britain facing Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues could be addressed by Cool Britannia re-branding of the Labour Party is as fanciful as the idea that you will find the future of electorally-successful social democracy in Britain at the Durham miner’s gala.

That this weekend’s election results felt like the most natural thing in the world shows how far our political world has tilted on its axis.