Every statement about the Scottish independence debate is missing the point. Including this one.
Normally, in a political debate, you agree or disagree with a politician, then you back the one you agree with. Unless you really distrust them - then you still won’t back them even if you agree with them. You wouldn’t support someone who answers the question, ‘Should we have nuclear weapons?’ with the answer ‘Kittens are furry,’ however much you go along with their kitten stance. It’s just possible they have something to hide.
The Scottish independence debate hasn’t been like that. Neither side’s statements have been easy to agree or disagree with. But, unusually, neither have they sounded like cynical evasions, calculated to conceal the truth of their devilish plans. It just sounds like they don’t know how to talk to us about this kind of stuff, or possibly we just don’t know how to hear it. The most natural response to every single point made in the independence debate is, ‘No, that’s not it’.
The first mistake was to view the debate as Salmond vs Darling. Voting Yes is likely to get you a bit more Salmond, but there’s no guarantee a No result will get rid of him. And whatever you vote for you won’t get Darling, you poor lovelorn fools. But we understand personality politics, so those instincts kick in. There will still be people voting No because Alex Salmond reminds them of their school bully, or Yes because they swear Alistair Darling once pushed ahead of them in a Wimpy.
In an election, your preference of one person over another is a valid element of your decision. If one of the candidates looks a bit shifty, maybe they are - well done you for noticing and voting for the other guy. But this isn’t an election, it just feels like one because it happens on a Thursday, and all the usual Dimblebys are excited.
Our next instinct is to say that politics should be about policies, not personalities - because that’s something people say. So, when Salmond/Darling started to get a bit personal, that corrective instinct kicked in, and the argument shifted to things like the NHS. The Yes campaign focused on the evils that a Tory government has visited on a non-Tory Scotland.
But the referendum question is not about policies either. Hating the privatisation of the NHS - or any Tory policy - is no reason to vote for Scottish independence. ‘Scotland’ and ‘Tory’ are not opposites. Scotland has voted Tory before and - however unlikely it may seem from where we are currently sitting - it may do again. The Conservatives got half of the Scottish votes and seats in 1955. Even Margaret Thatcher got nearly a third of Scottish votes in 1979. Stranger things have happened than the resurrection of the Scottish Conservative Party. And if that happens after independence, Scots who voted Yes because they hate the bedroom tax might feel a bit silly.
Voting for constitutional change because you think it will benefit your party can come back to bite you. Ask the Labour ministers who backed Scottish devolution in 1997 because they assumed the resulting Scottish Parliament would be a permanent Labour stronghold.
The No campaign has also talked about policies. Issues like currency, where the banks’ chairmen have their offices, and the prices in John Lewis are all of vital importance. But they are so much smaller than the question of whether the country should be independent or not. If they vote Yes, the Scots will use the pound, somehow; or much less likely, the euro; or even less likely, some brand new Scottish invention. And it will play out over the first few years of the independent nation’s existence, and then it will die down. None of these issues are central to whether that country should exist or not. All the policy-based arguments will be relevant for five years, maximum. They are details that concern the launch of the nation, not its on-going seaworthiness.
So it’s not about personalities or policies - it’s about democracy. Alex Salmond (who I’m sure, like Mr Ferguson, used to be called Alec) has said to Scotland that, under independence, “We will get the government that we vote for.” It’s not true, of course. “We” don’t vote at all: I vote, you vote, and so do lots of other people - though not prisoners, the insane, or Russell Brand (Representation of the People Act 1918). The collective will of the people is then imperfectly aggregated into a series of regional decisions, and then even more imperfectly into a national decision. Democracy is messy.
Non-Tory Scotland may have got a Tory government, but so did non-Tory Peckham. The fourteen Tory voters in Peckham didn’t get the MP they wanted, but they did get the government they wanted, though their votes contributed nothing towards the victory. Did democracy give them what they asked for? Not really, but then democracy doesn't give everyone what they want. If you could give everyone what they want then we wouldn’t need democracy.
Democracy is such a universally agreed good thing that’s it’s easy to forget what a complicated nuisance it is. Everyone agrees that the people should be ruled by the people. We don’t like it when the people are ruled over by one person (monarchy), a few people (oligarchy), the best people (aristocracy), God (theocracy), or clever robots (technocracy).
By deciding on democracy as a system of government, you’ve effectively agreed to make life enormously complicated for yourselves. Unless you live in Athens about four or five hundred years before Jesus got away in his manger, democracy needs a lot of mechanisms, concessions and fudges to work.
Having the vote in Athens didn’t just mean they got to vote in elections. It meant they voted on the second reading of the Supply and Appropriation (Main Estimates) Bill, the lucky blighters. Everyone - apart from slaves and women, obviously - got to vote on everything, by a show of hands, in a very large hall. Now that’s democracy.
These days, people queueing up for elections is the definitive sign that democracy has arrived in a country. To Athenians, nothing could be less democratic than having an election. “Choosing someone to make decisions for us? No thanks, I prefer democracy,” they would have said, almost certainly in Greek.
Democracy has got a whole lot less Athenian since then. Due to the increasing populations of cities - or possibly our decreasing ability to build enormous halls - this method has fallen out of favour. Now we use democracy only to decide who the deciders are. Then the deciders choose one person who gets to decide almost everything, despite the fact that only half the inhabitants of one town in the country directly voted for him (or, in one disastrous case, ‘her’).
Democracy often sounds like a thing of purity and perfection. But it is a messy, muddled mish-mash. Someone has to draw the lines of the constituencies. You have to decide how often an election will happen. You have to decide what falls to local government and what to national government. You have to decide what colour the voting paper will be, and whether you write an X or some numbers.
And you have to decide when you stop counting - when you say, ‘Right, that’s everyone.’ And that’s a country.
Everyone wants to get their way - that’s only natural. Democracy serves that desire, and mediates around the fact that it is impossible. Saying, ‘We will get the government that we vote for,’ is a gross simplification, but it’s probably the one statement in the independence debate that has come closest to expressing what the referendum question actually means.
The question is really something more like this: “Often you will not get what you vote for, because lots of people disagree with you. Are you content for this to happen because some of those people live in Surrey?”
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