What has Scotland got a decade after the independence referendum?

WHAT have we got a decade after the indyref? Are there “wins” for supporters of independence – have cultural attitudes changed 10 years on?

Well, that’s tough. Meanwhile, what we haven’t got is blindingly obvious. So, we dwell on it.

We haven’t got independence, a route map to a second vote or political agreement about using an election as an indyref proxy. We haven’t got the most important policy papers promised about the shape of an independent country.

We haven’t got a fresh, eager new government able to conjure up eye-catching moves like axing tuition fees, axing bridge tolls, using planning law to push wind energy or transforming devolution overnight with a simple name change from Scottish Executive to Scottish Government.

We haven’t got blind faith in the SNP as a bold, innovative, progressive and effective party of government – though we’re fully aware that a hostile media will always amplify mistakes and shortcomings that are perfectly normal and unremarkable elsewhere.

We have marched a lot, strategised a lot, educated ourselves enormously about alternative structures and better functioning countries and systems, particularly our neighbours – revitalised Ireland and the hugely successful Nordic nations.

Yet none of that has produced radical policy debate on big, stuck problems at Holyrood – independence-supporting think tanks and experts have grown used to being ignored.

It’s a lot of loss. So, what have Yessers got now? It’s a big question.

So, I’m gazing through the huge plate glass windows of Dunfermline’s Carnegie Library across sunlit gravestones towards the ancient Abbey, daydreaming and displacing.

Ten years ago, this modern annexe to the world’s first Carnegie library didn’t exist. And I would have no reason to seek it out, living an hour away in north Fife.

Equally, in 2014, when I’d just started learning Norwegian to finish a PhD, I would have walked down Maygate and Kirkgate and failed to notice their pleasing symmetry with street names on the other side of the North Sea.

But over the past decade, I’ve walked these gaits many times. For a Yes rally in Pittencrieff Park, a conference commemorating the 4000 accused witches in 17th-century Scotland, an exhibition of paintings by the renowned Alexander (Sandy) Moffat, the opening of Dunfermline Yes Hub and filming there by keen young Yessers.

The city I once flew past on trains, buses and car journeys is different now – an anchor stone in the jigsaw of meaning that is Scotland. And most of the country feels like this to me now.

Hitherto, epic annual trips from Belfast to visit families in Banffshire and Caithness, and later years as an Isle of Eigg trustee, meant I have always known certain routes very well.

But since 2013, when the independence campaign began, my connection with Scotland has grown wider and deeper. More personal and more emotional.

Now, absorbing the stories that birl around each ancient place and feeling the continuity with artists, poets and campaigners past and present, I feel the cultural weight and substance of Scotland everywhere. Its gains and losses. The many stands and setbacks.

Each one feels like an aspect of my own story. Every place feels like a facet of home.

Connection. That’s what I’ve got from the past 10 years. And hope. Something I haven’t lost.

Of course, that may be my own particular experience, travelling around to launch books, films and attend events, enjoying hospitality and craic on overnight stays in spare rooms and leaving thoroughly re-energised.

But I suspect it’s more general. Naturally, an indy-free decade and the SNP leadership turmoil has left Yessers with feelings of loss and disorientation.

But those 10 years have also given us a massive and enduring sense of connection – with place, neighbours, marching routes and, above all, with one another.

And that’s vital. The main thing working against independence has always been festering doubt about our own collective capacity to thrive.

Connection helps us dislodge it.

And connection – delight in it, desire for it, experience of it – is the heart of Scottishness. On our best days we are a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns. We know it … and are ready to act upon it.

In May 2021, a powerful sense of connection produced the most beautiful sight on Scottish streets for a decade. Two Sikh men – chef Sumit Sehdev and mechanic Lakhvir Singh – walking free from a Home Office van surrounded by thousands of cheering Scots.

The Kenmure Street siege saw networks to protect asylum seekers combine with Govanhill locals to prevent the deportation of two neighbours in a Home Office van for supposed immigration violations. Immediately, neighbours surrounded the van. The men were Indian nationals in their 30s who had lived in Scotland for 10 years without official leave to remain.

With the vast numbers involved and the clear, unapologetic challenge to distant authority, that sit-in on Kenmure Street had all the ingredients for trouble.

But there was none. No rage. No violence. No lapse in self-discipline by the thousand-strong crowd. No arrests. There were cups of tea and sandwiches brought out by neighbours. There was the famous but unnamed “van man” lying beneath the van to make sure it didn’t drive off.

There was mediation between activists, lawyer Aamer Anwar, Police Scotland and the Home Office. The stand-off lasted eight hours. But folk were quietly determined. They waited and trusted the process. And won.

Sumit and Lakhvir were released and still live locally.

It was a huge result for them, for Kenmure Street, community relations and everything progressive Scots hold dear.

But for independence? There is no direct connection. Kenmure Street was independent-mindedness personified.

Independence from a British mindset (both Tory and Labour) that presumes neighbours will shop neighbours, treat asylum seekers with suspicion and feel no connection to folk from different ethnic backgrounds.

I’m not saying Scotland is bereft of racism. And I’m not saying the Kenmure Street siege “belonged” to Yessers. It absolutely didn’t.

But actually, that’s what made it (and a similar, successful stand-off in Edinburgh’s Nicolson Square) so very impressive.

There was no Scottish Government minister present, no formal party-political organisation and no local Yes group leading the charge.

Kenmure Street was a well-organised act of solidarity; Glasgow citizens protecting New Scots through a strong sense of personal connection, empathy, decency and agency.

Far beyond Govanhill, we all felt the power of that act.

Without any huge fandango, Kenmure Street asserted Scotland’s distinctive political culture and its gallus determination to include anyone who calls Scotland home.

Or more correctly, Kenmure Street reasserted it, because that inclusive definition of citizenship was formally established by the indyref. The Scottish Government decided anyone who’d lived here for three months could vote. Exiled Scots – like the Bahamas-based Sean Connery – could not. And hardly anyone complained.

If you’re here, you’re in. It remains the simplest and most powerful evocation of Scotland’s civic nationalism, in which ethnicity plays no role. The contrast with British citizenship laid out two years later in the Brexit referendum couldn’t have been greater. Westminster decided only British, Irish and Commonwealth citizens could vote – excluding hundreds of thousands who’d always regarded Britain as home. The Brexit vote was ethnic. The indyref was not.

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Kenmure Street and Nicolson Square and the strong position taken by pro-Palestinian demonstrators and Humza Yousaf on Gaza – these post-2014 moments have reaffirmed and made explicit the importance of solidarity. Something we knew but hadn’t really recognised as the vital glue in Scottish society 10 years ago.

And society is based on the power of human connection.

Connection lets us discover shared strengths. It gets us out of class, ethnic and gender bubbles – at least for the duration of a meeting, march or chat. It even got Rangers and Celtic fans to create that brilliant banner – Old Firm fans for Yes.

In short, over the past 10 years, personal connection has helped us to embrace diversity and equality – not just talk a good game.

It’s incredible now to remember the formal launch of the Yes campaign in 2013 at an Edinburgh cinema without any women speakers. It took the separate organisation of Women for Independence and proof of a substantial indy gender gap before men learned to wheesht, promote women’s voices and occasionally take a back seat themselves. Not always.

But holding back takes effort. And it has paid off. Today, the gender gap has reversed.

In a 2021 poll, 56% of women (42% in 2014) and 49% of men (51% in 2014) backed independence. Some commentators attribute that to Nicola Sturgeon, others suggest Brexit removed any sense of stability from the Union and made an independent Scotland within Europe look like an equally “safe/unsafe option”.

Fa’ kens.

The point is that the look of Yes has quite literally changed.

There are still some people with anger issues, and naysayers with powerful and sometimes amplified memories of discord from 2014.

But the vast majority of active Yes supporters now have muscle memory of a different reality – the value of co-operation and self-policing over years of long, large, city-centre marches and rallies with no more than a handful of arrests and patient, respectful conversations with the unconvinced. Jane McAllister’s excellent film – To See Ourselves – about her fabulously polite but dogged dad Fraser is a case in point.

And that change in the “feel” of independence is borne out by research.

According to Lindsay Paterson, professor emeritus of education policy at Edinburgh University: “Independence has come to be associated with the future in demographic and ideological ways. It reflects Scottish nationalism’s rhetoric that Britain is stuck in the past. That ideological message is now so entrenched among younger, educated voters that the transient fortune of individual politicians is unlikely to have much impact.”

Indeed, Paterson predicts 60% plus support for independence by the early 2030s, based on an analysis of voting trends since 1979.

He told the Sunday National: “There has been quite a lot of writing, usually from outside Scotland in the last 10 years, which suggests Scottish nationalism is a bit like Trump or Brexit. In other words, a rebellion by the ‘left behind’ against the elites. My view is that is simply not tenable, that is not the nature [of] independence.

“The enormous changes that have come on the back of educational expansion mean that … the core of the independence supporting electorate now are well-educated, liberal-minded graduates and that makes quite a different sort of social movement from, say, the National Rally party in France.”

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Indeed. And coming from an academic without evident sympathy for independence, that’s quite something.

I’d also suggest that this knowledge makes it easier to connect with former No voters.

Of course, some are dismissive of this 10th anniversary and angry that the “threat” of constitutional change has not completely evaporated.

But I’d say No voters are now vaguely respectful of “the other side”. Could that be because the route to indy is so hard that “winners” can afford to be magnanimous?

Could it be the kind of ironic admiration bestowed on fans of totally hopeless football teams – a deeply sardonic salute to their indefatigability?

Could it be folk who pragmatically accept the status quo but still want someone to keep the seat warm and the indy exit door open?

Could it be that decoupling of support for independence and the SNP means the cause now clearly transcends the party – a real turnaround from 2014 and proof positive that the goal is the thing, not the often-grubby domestic politics encountered en route? Perhaps disillusion with the SNP coupled with unhesitating support for independence may be giving sceptics pause for thought.

Especially when it’s so clear that the community activists, musicians, artists, poets, writers and, above all, the young are overwhelmingly convinced about the urgent need for a different independent future and are ready to go.

Supporting the Union is not a zero-sum game. There’s a clear danger that stumbling along with this adversarial society built around corporate greed and the interests of professional, older, wealthier citizens will mean losing our young people along with their energy, hope and talent.

It will mean losing Scotland’s best chance to kick the habits of a deeply unequal and unhealthy past. Betting against the future is risky. And 10 years on it’s clearer than ever – that future is independence.