The Early Days of a Better Nation |
Ken MacLeod's comments. “If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Saturday, October 11, 2014
But by the last weekend before the referendum it wasn't at all obvious which side would win. It had come down to the wire. Any criticisms I might have of my own side were irrelevant. You fight with the army you have. I'd argued, debated, spoken, blogged, tweeted, re-tweeted. It didn't feel like I'd done enough. So on Wednesday 17th I joined a Better Together get-out-the-vote team in Corstorphine. I used my bus pass and arrived at the street corner in Murrayfield before anyone else. The rest of the team turned up in ones and twos to make a dozen. Most looked like they'd qualify for a bus pass. The two Better Together organisers looked like they'd have to show proof of age to buy a drink. A brisk confident woman, older than them and much younger than me, seemed to know what to do. She drove off with three of us, the board (a ring-binder of contact names and addresses from earlier canvassing) and stacks of reminder cards. She parked in a back street, scribbled names and numbers on slips of paper, gave us her mobile number, pointed to streets on the A to Z and sent us off. It's been so long since I'd done anything like this that I'd forgotten how get-out-the-vote works. I phoned to check if I really was meant to just knock on two doors in a long street. Yes I was. Knock, nobody in, leave a card, run to the next house on the list, run back to the person with the board. Repeat, over and over. I'll say this for get-out-the-vote: it's healthy exercise in the fresh air. The area is very middle class. I was gloomy at first, then warmed by smiles from elderly people and firm statements that they didn't need a lift to the polls. On our way back to the meeting point I asked our impressively competent team leader if she'd ever done election campaigning. No, she said - she'd first volunteered two weekends earlier. People like her, galvanised by the one poll that showed a Yes lead. People with bus passes. Striplings with clipboards. That was the ground operation the day before the vote. Carol and I went to vote at lunchtime on Thursday. Then I caught the bus in to the Edinburgh Central office of the Labour Party, on the ground floor of a tenement building in Buccleuch St. The small rooms were crowded with people coming and going, some with rosettes for polling station duty (a rough gig in some places), most in teams of three or four with boards and leaflets and reminder cards. I recognised some local Labour councillors and activists but most there were young volunteers, a lot of them Labour students up from England. My first team was me and two Scottish guys. One didn't know the area but he knew how to run a board so he took charge and I led the way to our patch, which was Cannongate, the bottom half of the Royal Mile. (It looks like it's all shops and offices but there are flats and also lots of wee alleys that access apartment blocks behind the street.) We headed there through crowds along Clerk St and South Bridge, then turned into the Royal Mile. It was a day of low cloud and drizzle. As I looked at the High Street's hazy towers I remembered the phrase about Edinburgh from Iain Banks's The Bridge: 'ghost capital'. The Mile was awash with Yes badges, placards, and saltires. A joyous rally had begun outside the Scottish Parliament and people were coming and going to the pavement cafes and bars. It was like Yes had already won and were celebrating. Most people whose doors we knocked or rang at were out. We returned with slim pickings indeed, though one or two people had asked us for badges or stickers (which we didn't have). A van went past covered with the latest Yes posters printed in mimickry of Labour's signature red-and-yellow: End Tory Rule Forever. As we neared the office a guy walking unsteadily waved to us across the street: 'Bye-bye! Tomorrow you'll be gone! Into oblivion!' The office was still a slow churn. Two young guys in the main room sat at desks with computers and stacks of returned boards. Norma Hart was sitting in the side room where the sandwiches were, dressed even smarter than usual and with a rosette on her lapel. She gave me a warm welcome and (over my protestations) made me an instant coffee. As I sipped it and ate a triangle of sandwich I listened to a young Labour student from Yorkshire, who looked shell-shocked. 'We knew it was bad from the polls,' he said. 'But we never imagined this. It's like Yes Yes Yes everywhere.' 'I assure you it's not as bad as it looks,' I said. 'You notice all the Yes badges but most people aren't wearing badges and most of these will be No. Every window without a poster is a likely No vote.' A councillor sitting on the sofa beside me said: 'It's like Jim Murphy said, "windaes don't vote". And even some houses and flats with Yes posters have No voters in them.' My next team was one of the guys from before, a young local Labour woman, and a Labour party regional organiser. We piled into her car, stuck a Labour flag on the window (after figuring out how the clip worked) and set off through rush-hour traffic to Craigentinny. The streets we had to cover were mostly grey blocks of flats. As we stickered up and she dealt out packs of the final-evening reminder cards the organiser said: 'Solid Labour area. We've had good returns here.' And so it proved. We soon ran into a group of five smiling mums not even on our list who'd all gone together to vote No. As we went around I noticed and pointed out that there were hardly any Yes posters. And this was exactly the sort of working-class area Yes had targetted. The only sign we saw of the Yes campaign was a white van covered with placards and blasting out folk-songs as it cruised the streets. The organiser worked the board and two of us ran up stairs and the young Labour woman (who hadn't been well and still wasn't) did the ground floors. Nearly all responses were good. Some people had switched, some wouldn't say how they'd voted (especially not, I guess, to a stranger's voice on their stair intercom). But most had voted or swore they were about to and were solid No. As one of us remarked, we were racing to get out the vote in a poll where everyone was voting. We finished after 7.30 and I got dropped off at the top of Leith Walk. I headed for the bus station but saw a tram about to leave York Place, so for the novelty took it to the West End, then the first coach going out past the Forth. (Ah, the joys of a bus pass.) The driver saw my sticker and asked how I thought things were going. I said I didn't know how the votes were going but the No campaign's get-out- the-vote operation was going well. 'I'm glad to hear that,' he said. On the bus back I felt very strange. The five mums of Craigentinny had been my first real indication that there was still a steadfast block of working class votes for No and that #LabourNo was a real thing. But in the dark and fog the landscape itself seemed in an undecided state. 'I hope we wake up in the same country,' I said to the driver as I got off. He gave me a grim look. As I walked along the back street in our neighbourhood I saw a couple of people with Yes badges in a heated conversation with someone, and a bit further on a woman clutching a polling station card as she got into her car. Not much more than an hour to go. We got a take-away. Just after ten I tweeted: 'For the next few hours we are Schrodinger's country, liminal. You'd need a 5th colour to map us.' We waited up, watching this and that and following Twitter, until at about 1:30 the first result came in: Clackmannanshire. Yes: 16350 No: 19036. From Michael's two years on the Wee County News we knew that Clacks is a microcosm of Scotland. We went to bed, setting the alarm for 7:00. I woke before it, and hesitated a minute or two before checking STV news online. I woke Carol and told her, watched more news, then wrote: 'Opened the box. The cat is alive and having kittens.' 28 Comments:I'm worried about what's coming next. I've seen good, thoughtful socialists denouncing the majority of their compatriots as liars, fools and lackeys of imperialism - it's all a bit reminiscent of Serbia before the fall. If the SNP sweeps the Scottish Westminster seats next year - which seems entirely possible at the moment - it's not going to be a nice country to call yourself British in (never mind English!).
Adrian, Tom - thanks!
Ken in the aftermath of the No vote now we've had a bit of time to reflect can you tell how us how you feel about the UK and the way it appears to be shifting very much to the right given we have just picked up our first UKIP MP?
So you won
Topper - Yeah, there may well be something quite depressing, because it depresses me. I vote Labour not because I think it's wonderful but because it's the actually existing mass party of the British working class.
Duncan - the Tories might win, though the odds are still against it. And even if Labour wins, it'll probably still be pretty tough.
"Not as tough as it would be in an independent Scotland with John Swinney making cuts while Eddie Reader sings patriotic songs, however."
Scotland as an independent nation
A campaign with no activists on the ground until the last week, that when it looked like it would lose changed the offer to make a No vote into a "devo max" vote, that relied on fear and lies to persuade people, and you are proud to be part of it?
The No campaign had activisits on the ground all through. It didn't change the offer to 'Devo Max'. It didn't rely on fear and lies. But you do get one thing right: I'm proud to have been even a small part of it.
Pretty hard line stance there Ken, absolutely no appeal whatsoever that you couldn't even find under a microscope? Ah well moving on.
Topper - I can easily imagine an independent Scotland with aspects I would like (a republic, land reform and/or land value taxation, etc) but I think any independent Scotland would most likely be one where a lot of the currently poorest would be worse off for at several years if not longer. Now there may be a case for that, on a nationalist or republican or free-market basis, but it isn't the case that was made, and especially not by the Yes left.
I'm going to get nowhere here, but on the facts:
Neil - as far as I can make out, the 'vow' promises what was already htere, already legislated for or already in all the main parties' proposals. If Ruth Davidson offered 'devo super max' (and this is the first time I've heard that) she was either over-egging the Conservative proposals or well out of line with her party. The official No campaign ended by just shouting louder about the same powers that they had said were on offer from the beginning.
The questions I would like to have answered are
I'm beginning to wonder how much attention you were paying to the campaign.
Link to research
Thumbs up from me Ken.
Thanks, Charles. Well said.
That's the problem with the vow, no-one is clear what it means.
Hi Ken
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/30/scottish-no-voters-referendum-labour?commentpage=1
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Great post. Had a stomach churning day in Glasgow myself - a slight disgust at the way flags were used to mark out territory, depression at Labour voters opting for Yes, the joy you feel when a total stranger thanks you for doing what are doing and looks to you for reassurance.
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Saturday, October 11, 2014 1:30:00 pm