Quintin Jardine's blog

We’ve read much over the weekend of canvass returns, from both sides of the referendum debate.  ‘Yes’ says theirs show them in front, and ‘No’ make exactly the same claim. They both can’t be right, can they?

Of course they can. No canvasser I’ve ever met has questioned a positive response on the doorstep. Don’t waste time, thank the voter and move on. It was one of the unwritten rules, alongside ‘Don’t ring doorbells when Coronation Street’s on.’ The inevitable fact that many householders said what the canvasser wanted to hear was ignored and the positive target voter slips were completed without questions being asked.

The same flaw exists in opinion polls, although people are more likely to speak the truth to someone they perceive to be neutral.

The real pros knew what was happening without the need for knocking doors. I once met an old Tory agent in the north of England, a guy who knew everyone on his patch. As election day approached, he would put on his overcoat and his rosette and go for a walk along the High Street, greeting everyone he saw. By the end of his stroll he could judge whether he as in or out by the number who looked him in the eye, versus those who avoided his gaze.

But not even old Joe would be able to call it this time.

I was born in Motherwell, Lanarkshire, somewhere between VE-Day and VJ-Day, at the drawn-out end of WWII. My home town made steel; it was sustained by the mills, even before the establishment of the Ravenscraig plant that dominated it for decades. It was a sectarian society, make no mistake about it; the religious divide was strictly observed, with us in our schools and them in theirs, and my parents while not bigoted in any way, had been raised within that framework and were part of it. I was nine years old before I met and played with a Roman Catholic child. His name was Phil McKeown; he joined our gang during the sumer holidays and was welcomed because he was a nice kid. It was only in August when we were all returning to school that he told us that he went to Park Street. Looking back, Phil was probably the first Liberal I ever met.

Sectarianism didn’t end in the schools either. In those days we had our own burgh police force; I cannot say for sure that there were no Catholic cops, but if there was one, he must have been lonely. Their job wasn’t that hard. Motherwell was not a rough place; there was a post-war period of twenty years when there was not a single homicide in the town, although the serial murderer Peter Manuel did live not too far away, until he died, suddenly, in Glasgow.

We weren’t rich then, as a community, but we were self-assured, and on either side of the invisible divide, we had the strong sense of identity that is part of my genetic makeup. We were Scottish, and we were proud of it.

However, we were also aware that we did not have power over our own lives. When I was very young, I remember my mother warning me that if I didn’t behave, ‘Mr Gaitskell will get you’. He was only Chancellor then so God knows what wold have happened if I’d done something bad enough for Mr Attlee to come for me.

Then Mr Churchill was Prime Minister again, and for a while all seemed well with the world . . . apart from the fact that our government was very far away, and the coal mines were still dark, dangerous places where lives could be ended by a single act of carelessness, or were taken aware more slowly in retirements limited by the inevitable lung disease, which the Coal Board did little or nothing to prevent. As for the steel works, in those men invented new ways of getting themselves killed.

July meant Elie,  and a month in a rented house, with a new set of temporary friends, mornings spent pulling my dad’s trolley round the golf course, afternoons spent on the beach, more often than not huddled behind a windbreak, staring across the Forth of Forth at the Bass Rock, and unknown to me, at Gullane, where I would spend the bulk of my life.  The saying was, ‘If you can see the other side, it mean it’s going to rain. If you can’t seen it, it’s raining.’

When I was eleven I was sent to Glasgow High School. I hated the daily journey, and I hated (as do my entire class, to this day) my prep year teacher, a frenzied belter whose like were abolished long ago, but I loved the city. I loved its size and its grandeur, and the proud assertiveness of its people. I loved the richness of its shops and the size of its buildings, architectural beauties that were taken for granted. My Grandma Bell called it simply ‘The Town’. And that’s how I think of it still. Yes, Edinburgh was the capital . . . a relatively meaningless status back then . . . but Glasgow was the heart of my Scotland.

I was almost sixteen before I crossed the border. My parents decided that we should have an Easter Holiday, so we squeezed into the A35 and headed South, for London. For a reason I have never come close to guessing, my old man took us into England over Carter Bar. It was snowing significantly at the time; I do not blame the English for that, incidentally. In those pre-motorway days the drive took two days, with an overnight stop in Tadcaster, a brewery town. We arrived at my mother’s aunt’s place in Corby, dumped the car and did the rest by train. (Why didn’t we train it all the way? Dunno, and I never did ask my father that one either.)

My earliest memories of the City on the Thames are mixed. We did the usual stuff, the Tower, Buck House, etc, and Madame Tussauds, but that’s all a blur. Only three things stick in my mind: an overwhelmed, uniformed Scoutmaster failing to control a pack of cubs at the tube station in the Tower, a meal in The Volunteer, a pub in Baker Street which had a  parrot and claimed to have served kidney soup every day since the Napoleonic Wars, and arriving at my folks’ friends flat in South Ken, to find that they had a genuine debutante staying with them, a girl not much older than I was, on the way to being presented at court. Her name was Caroline, and she was sitting in front of the fire drying her hair, which was in curlers. She bolted for the bathroom and I never saw her again. Funny, I can remember the Crown Jewels only vaguely, but that deb is still fresh in my mind.

The other thing that never left me was the sense of being an alien. The staff in our B&B spoke what might have been another language and were of another culture with a quaint view of ours. For example, the breakfast waitress assumed that we would have ‘porridges’, and was visibly disappointed when we declined and had Corn Flakes instead. I suspect that an Indian family would have been offered curry as standard.

These days, things have changed; my imaginary Indian family may even own that hotel. But one thing has not; I still feel like an alien every time I set a foot on English ground.

I am Scottish. The nation in which I was raised has gone, although some of the prejudices still remain. The town in which I was raised is unrecognisable to me. The city I loved has been devastated, and turned into little more than a theme park. And yet they are still mine, my pride, my joy.

The referendum has given me the opportunity to declare my love for my country and my faith in its ability to restore and renew itself. Our society was not perfect then, it is not perfect now, and it will not be perfect on Friday whatever happens. But if we seize the chance we have been offered we can pursue perfection unhindered, as every nation has the right to do.

I have voted Yes because I am me, and there is nothing else that I could do.

So what have I learned this morning, the last Saturday of the Scottish Referendum campaign, from my trawl of the media?

• Richard Branson is against Scottish Independence.
• The Germans still hate Winston Churchill.
• Nigel Farage, who appears to hate everyone who isn’t English, is among us.
• Deutsche Bank’s chief economist knows nothing about Scotland.
• The Orange Order is backing ‘Better Together’.
• London Labour has lost all faith in its Scottish leadership, with 29% of the party’s membership, and rising,  declaring for “Yes’.
• ‘No’ is in deep trouble: when Gordon Brown is seen smiling, you know he’s nervous, when he’s seen laughing you know he’s terrified.
• George Osborne is so concerned about the outcome that he’s saving the public purse the cost of a first class return air ticket to Australia.
• The FTSE 100 closed yesterday on a near record high, and Sterling was robust against the major currencies.

Every one of those is, in my eyes, a plus point for ‘Yes’.

So is the fact that a significant percentage of those sampled by opinion pollsters have declared themselves undecided. Against a background of the most intense bullying that we have ever seen by one side of a national campaign, it is unsurprising that many people are disinclined to disclose their voting intentions.

In the days to come we are promised more dire warnings, of Scottish economic collapse. There is a claim that Scotland lost 6-7% of its GDP during the banking crisis. If so, what else can they do to us? We will be threatened with higher prices in shops and supermarkets. Really? Multi-national businesses will shed their competitive instincts overnight and collude to drive costs up?

The fact is, should Scotland  vote ‘Yes’ on Thursday, an event which Westminster’s orchestrated hate campaign against us makes ever more possible, we will not awaken on Friday to an economic collapse.

The fact is, those from outside  Scotland who interfere in our  debate and seek to browbeat us into submission, do not give a toss about our nation. They are not afraid for an Independent Scotland, they are afraid of an independent Scotland.

Back off, people, and let us decide for ourselves.

This from the Chair of the Wetherspoon pub chain:

“I think there’s been a massive amount of nonsense talked, especially by businessmen, about Scottish independence.

“There’s no reason why Scotland shouldn’t thrive as an independent economy if that’s what the Scots want.

“New Zealand has the same population, Switzerland does very well and Singapore with half the population is an economic miracle. There’s no reason a small country can’t thrive.”

A couple of days ago, I had a Facebook debate with a friend, Jackson Carlaw, who really should be the leader of the Scots Tories. He’s as committed to ‘No’ as I am to ‘Yes’ and I respect his beliefs. He is sure that his side will win, I hope that mine does; that’s a fair summation of our positions, and whatever happens we’ll still be friends next Friday.

He’s a veteran of many elections, and so am I if you go back to the Eighties, so we’re both basing our judgements on the same experiences. However I believe there is one thing that he is not taking into account. In size and scale, this is unlike anything we’ve seen before. The 1978 referendum debate was a pale shadow of this one, plus the game was rigged from the start. 2014 is new, and it may be that received wisdom will not apply.

If I’m right, ‘Yes’ will win. We’ll see in a week, after a further week of debate, and pontification by media ‘experts’ who don’t really know what they’re talking about. Could it be that the people who will decide the issue aren’t listening to any of them?

I wonder if my Tory friends who spent the first part of this week rubbishing YouGov polls will take the same line now that it has published one in their favour. Note: the leads suggested in each are within the margin of error.

Finally it has come clean. The Scotsman newspaper has made a mockery of its own masthead by declaring itself on the side of Westminster.

In fact its stance has been clear from the outset of the campaign, and throughout that period its circulation has fallen inexorably, a so-called national newspaper selling fewer than 30,000 copies daily. In three years it is due to mark its bi-centenary. Will it survive that long? I doubt it.

So, the Royal Bank of Scotland will leave us if we vote ‘Yes’?

The truth is that for all Fred Goodwin’s Folly out at Edinburgh Airport, the policies and decisions of RBS have been driven by the City of London for decades, since someone decided it should become a global player . . . and we all know what happened after that.

So Bank of Scotland will follow suit?

Thanks to a panic-driven reaction by the leader of Better Together, who has been strangely silent for the last few days, Bank of Scotland has been part of the Lloyds group since the beginning of the crisis which he and his predecessor did much to create.

Let me tell you how honest and ethical the BoS has become under Lloyds’ direction. A few weeks ago the owners of a Scottish business turned up for work one morning to find men on their doorstep. The decades-old family owned company had been operating for years with a credit facility from Bank of Scotland. It was rationalising and a programme of asset realisation was under way.

Who were the men on the doorstep? They were sheriff officers. Without the knowledge of its clients, the Lloyds-run Bank of Scotland had sold the debt to venture capitalists. They had decided, as creditor, to put the company into administration, again without consultation. The former owners were history, and the venture capitalists stood to make a nice killing.

A reborn independent Scotland will want no part of such banking practices. Indeed I hope it will make them illegal. So fair enough, RBS, BoS, piss off to London. The functions which you have in Scotland will remain of necessity, for there will be no speedy way to relocate them. Your branch networks will remain, although they may have to operate under a new and more rigorous regulatory system.

For an issue that was always meant to be decided by the people of Scotland, we are sure seeing a hell of a lot of interference from outside. This is being co-ordinated in the main by the London media, although it will be interesting to see how their Scottish editions declare, should the polls on which they lean so heavily show ‘Yes’ in the lead next Wednesday.

One part of their strategy is clear, their determination to focus attention totally on Alex Salmond, and to demonise him in the process. Apart from being as vicious as we have come to expect from what used to be Fleet Street, it is also a gross distortion of the truth . . . another London editorial norm.

‘Yes’ is my campaign just as much as it belongs to Alex Salmond. I had my first flirtation with the SNP when he has just begun secondary school. He was still there when I was in at the birth of the party’s modern era when a diffident Winnie Ewing visited my newspaper office just before winning the Hamilton by-election.

The ‘Yes’ campaign is the culmination of her efforts, and those of thousands more, stretching back to Dr Robert McIntyre, elected in 1945 by my home town, Motherwell, as the party’s first MP. Today ‘Yes’ has millions of co-owners, in Scotland and beyond. For our opponents to focus their venom on one single man is stupid. It is also dangerous, for all they are doing is hardening attitudes and encouraging more and more independence votes, from those who after a lifetime of being bullied by London, are mad as hell and ain’t going to take it anymore.

A point of fact: at this moment Scotland is part of a currency union within the United Kingdom.

Of those who say we can’t keep the pound, I ask this: how do you take such a union apart against the will of one of its participants?

Fergus, a blog reader, posted this as a comment yesterday. It’s beautiful and worthy of the widest possible audience so here goes.

‘I copied this from a newspaper the other day and it seems to me to be spot on, especially the “self-repudiation and self-harm bit.” We need to go for it. I can’t vote because I don’t live in Scotland but I’m with you (us) all the way.’

“Independence, as more Scots are beginning to see, offers people an opportunity to rewrite the political rules. To create a written constitution, the very process of which is engaging and transformative. To build an economy of benefit to everyone. To promote cohesion, social justice, the defence of the living planet and an end to wars of choice.
To deny this to yourself, to remain subject to the whims of a distant and uncaring elite, to succumb to the bleak, deferential negativity of the no campaign, to accept other people’s myths in place of your own story: that would be an astonishing act of self-repudiation and self-harm. Consider yourselves independent and work backwards from there; then ask why you would sacrifice that freedom.”
Twitter: @georgemonbiot

I am not given to whooping with laughter very often, but last night was one of those times, when I heard that Larry, Curly and Moe, AKA the three Westminster party leaders, were skipping today’s PMQs in favour of a trip to Scotland, clad, no doubt, in new brown trousers. Coming on top of Cameron’s bizarre decision to fly the Saltire over Downing Street, this is another pure gift for ‘Yes”.

Are they coming because they no longer trust their Scottish counterparts to get the job done? Looks like it. Shortly before this bombshell, Sky News showed me on my iPad a clip of that trio, on the stump.

I don’t mean to be cruel here, but if (God forbid) Ruth Davidson was involved in an accident anywhere in Scotland, having left her handbag at home, and was rendered unconscious, it would probably take a good couple of hours before anyone recognised her as the Scots Tory leader. As for Willie Rennie, her LibDem counterpart, his profile is indicative of the fact that his parliamentary party at Holyrood could fit easily round a very small dining table.

For me, the most interesting of the three in terms of body language, not personal profile for she isn’t very well known either, was the Scottish Labour Leader, the very nice Johann Lamont. As she made her pitch for Bitter Together, I couldn’t help feeling that her heart wasn’t quite in it. As thousands of her Scottish party members reject London Labour’s arguments and prepare to turn Scotland into a permanently Tory-free zone, is she beginning to realise that she has pitched her tent in the wrong camp-site?

Another misdirected arrow: a joint pro-Union statement by Sir Malcolm Rifkind and the Lords Lang and Forsyth, the three former Tory Secretaries of State for Scotland, who presided over the reduction of their party’s Scottish representation at Westminster from twenty-one MPs in 1983, to zero in 1997.

I knew all of them. Clever chaps no doubt, but not a wise man among them.

It’s not my place to make suggestions to Bitter Together, but here’s one that might win them a few votes.

Let the Westminster Government pledge to rename the Bank of England, The United Kingdom Central Bank, and relocate it to Glasgow, Edinburgh, or better still, Inverness. Let it also pledge to relocate the Faslane nuclear base from the Firth of Clyde to the Thames Estuary.

What better ways to demonstrate the importance of Scotland to the English, and their affection for our country?

Three days ago, on Saturday September 6, 2014, I did something of which I have dreamt all my life without believing until a few years ago that I would ever have the opportunity. Against all the unspoken opposition of many of my friends, disregarding the pleas of an English lady author of children’s books who happens to own a piece of my homeland, ignoring the contemptible vitriol of the London media, (which will never be forgotten in Scotland, regardless of the result) in the face of threats of dire consequences from politicians with axes ground to such a fine edge that they could fell an oak tree with a single blow, I cast my vote for an independent Scotland and committed it to the post.

In all honesty, when I did so, I felt within myself that it would be in vain. Next day the YouGov poll was published, showing ‘Yes’ in the lead. Today another showed the two sides tied. There may be a margin for error, but given the results of previous sampling, there is no doubt that the ephemeral thing called ‘Momentum’ is with the Independence camp. If it continues, Scotland will win, and on September 19, an old nation will be reborn.

Today I read a ridiculous piece in the Telegraph, suggesting that ‘senior MPs’ were urging the Queen to intervene on the side of ‘No’. Of course there are ‘senior MPs’ who are stupid enough to do that, but I doubt very much that HM will be daft enough to listen to them. If Scotland votes ‘Yes’ she will continue to reign over a United Kingdom, as did her ancestor James VI and I. She may have to preside over two state openings of Parliament, not one, but at least in Scotland she will only have to walk across the road to do the job, there being a pedestrian crossing in place already.

Another lie is being pumped out today by the London media, that of panic in the financial markets following the YouGov poll.

Here is the truth: yesterday the FTSE 100 barely twitched, and today it continues to sit 300 points higher than it did one month ago; as for Sterling, today it sits at a healthy 1.61 against the dollar, and as for the Euro, this morning it has bounced back above 1.25.

When Douglas Alexander, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, speaks of imaginary economic problems, he shows why his colleagues are said to have christened him ‘Rain Man’; he has difficulty connecting with reality. The truth, Douglas, is that if Scotland says ‘Yes’ next week, one of the first things that will happen thereafter will be a commitment by Westminster to currency union. That is what today’s reaction indicates, and it is what would be the case, for sure. As for the Footsie, it will be business as usual.

Most bizarre of all, though is Gordon Brown, old Captain Barbossa, stepping forward as the saviour of the Union. That the man who did more that any other to demonstrate the case for Independence by his lamentable performance as Prime Minister, should expect any electorate now to believe a single bloody word he says, well, for me that redefines irony.

You will have noticed that a couple of paragraphs ago, I used the word ‘if’. I am not allowing myself to be carried away here. There are still many sensible people who will vote for the status quo, because they feel as strongly they are right, as I am passionate that Independence is too precious to reject. I have nothing but respect for them; it’s the people who front up their argument, and the tactics of fear that they have adopted, that I dislike.

The momentum may stop here; that’s what the media will declare probably, once they realise that they’ve helped to create it. I am not without experience in politics and one thing I’ve observed is that in the last couple of days of election campaigns there is often a small swing towards the status quo.

Will that happen next week? Maybe so; maybe Captain Barbossa will throw a cloak of darkness over the new ‘Yes’ optimism. But for now, to quote the fictional Rustin Cohle, it seems to me the daylight’s winning.