19th September, 2014

On the 19th of September 2014, I wrote a piece entitled “under the low sky.” It is an evocative line – stolen – from a book I read years ago about the experience of living in the Netherlands, where the horizon presses down on you, without the thrown elbows of mountains to keep it at bay. But the phrase seemed apt to the slate-grey Glasgow afternoon which the indyref left in its wake, and the half-throttled sense of sadness I felt, as the long day wore on, accumulating sorrows. 

Unlike many folk, I felt no real hope or anticipation that the Yes campaign would carry the day two years ago.  Defeat, even a narrow defeat, seemed almost inevitable. When Clackmannanshire declared, the night was already dead for me. I know some folk waited and waited up, in hope and expectation, but Don Quixote’s horse had already been shot out from under him. Sancho Panza was floating, face down, in the Clyde. Being right wasn’t much of an emotional salve, it transpired. 

As the Orcadians said No, I escaped from Pacific Quay into the cold but fresher night air, as the wind chased down the currents of the river and the BBC building behind me fizzed and sweltered and thronged. Big Kevin McKenna, built like a Renaissance cardinal, was sucking a sanguine cigarette outside. We talked, briefly, only to be interrupted by the jubilant figure of Margaret Curran. I remember the Labour MP did a kind of jinking danse macabre as the majority No vote accumulated, a sort of hirpling Scottische. You shouldn’t begrudge your opponents their successes, I suppose. But that little jig. I’ll never, ever – quite – be able to forgive Margaret Curran for her little jig. 

(Though I suppose, as the saying goes, she’s not jigging noo. “Even victors are by victories undone.” In the aftermath of the 2015 general election, I happened to bump into the former Scottish Labour MP in a pub in Oxford during a flying visit. Sauntering past her as she walked in to the Lamb and Flag, I was stunned to hear myself say “You’re Margaret Curran. Tell me. How are you bearing up?” As luck would have it, Curran clearly had no idea who I was, or any clue about my separatist politics. I left her with a kind word, undisabused, as an apparently sympathetic Scotsman, safely south of the wall.)

But back in Pacific Quay, in the early hours of the 19th of September 2014, Margaret was still jigging. I decided to leave before the emotion of the moment overtook me, and I said something I might come to regret. Abandoning all hope of securing a friendly cab out of there, I made my escape on foot, marching out along the banks of the river, an unsteady, half-gralloched figure, lurching between sorrow, rage and resignation. 

My company for the first part of this journey – perhaps curiously – was Adam Tomkins. The Glasgow law professor was cutting his way along from the BBC towards Better Together’s victory party in the Hilton, where the corks were already popping.  Adam behaved with all the kindliness and consideration you could expect from a political opponent at their moment of victory – much more, really. The balance of the way home I spent alone, eyes stinging, bitter, sad. I turned in, and slept a dull sleep without dreams. It is only election night I’ve been unable to see through. 

I’ve never known at atmosphere like the one I woke up to in Glasgow the next day. The result hung over everything. It leached all the social colour from the day. The weather provided an obligingly grim backdrop. The gloom was general. I live in the south side of the city, Nicola Sturgeon’s constituency. The Yes vote prevailed here - one of the few reassuring things about the immediate aftermath of the poll. The national picture may have been disappointing, but amid everything else, at least you read your own community correctly. 

I sat in a pub. I watched Alex Salmond resign before a dumb room, eyes all fixed on the telly. A man ordered another double shot of strong liquor. A fourth pint suddenly seemed wise.  And for those drinkers who quietly concluded that independence wasn’t a sure bet, who voted no? It was a scene of victory without jubilation. It must have been an odd experience. An unseen hand kept squeezing away at my throat. I made rash promises to myself that I’d never write about Scottish politics again. That I was done with it all. I might take up something wholesome like gardening instead, or skydiving. Half an hour later, I’d written this blog. It is often a painful – even embarrassing – thing to rake back over your old prose. This, at least, evoked the experience I remember. 

I am not one of life's joiners, despite my partisan inclinations. I'm not a marcher.  I didn't find myself, politically, during the indyref. I am a crappy and a complacent activist. An inactivist, essentially. The experience didn't transform my ideas of politics. But like many folk of my generation, it was, and remains a profoundly important - even seminal - moment from which it will be difficult to escape for some time to come. Whether or not we revisit the national question later rather than sooner, the autumn of 2014 will cast a long shadow for decades. But where are we now, two years on? Whither now, for the calculating Scottish nationalist with the long view? It has all become tremendously complicated. I wish I could see my way through it all more clearly.

The sentimental European

Purists hate the politics of the big coalition. This much seems uncontroversial. Divide a country - any country - of sufficient bigness, richness and complexity into two massive tribes, and you form uncomfortable, often incoherent coalitions. You quickly find folk vote your way for reasons you disagree with, and worse, which you disrespect. You find people you think of as your political fellow travellers voting for the other side, because some detail -- piffling to you -- torments them, some wrinkle in their soul, a different perspective. 

Purists also - in their bones - hate the cynicism of political campaigns.  It isn't my reasons for believing in Brexit, or supporting our continued membership of the EU that matters. Not to the instrumental activist. What matters is the arguments and reasons which might convince you, rather than those which convince me. And if I happen to hve an unpopular ideosyncratic view, unless I can bracket my own sentiments, unless there are a lot of people who share my outlook, I can't be an asset to your cause.

On the 18th of September 2014, I spent much of the day standing outside a kirk near Queens Park, Glasgow. The area was Yes inclined. It was a pleasant -- but doomed -- way to spend the day.  I'll never forget the woman who left the polling station, buoyant. "If we vote Yes, we automatically leave the EU" she said, having swallowed the Better Together line, hook and sinker. When she bounced out into the balmy afternoon, she had cast her Yes ballot. There was no use remonstrating, no use suggesting she'd misread the arguments of reached a - truly perverse - conclusion based on the two campaigns. I waved, dumbly, as she toddled down the street, having put up token resistance to her analysis. It wasn't worth it: her ballot was in my pile.

The EU referendum has brought out the awkwardness of the big coalition in spades. Pro-European Scottish Nationalists have watched a scorched earth economic case, orchestrated by the same folk in the Remain campaign who assured us that Scottish independence would result in an economic crucifixion. It has not been compelling. On the other side, eccentric - perhaps - but good-hearted, unbigoted leave campaigners have found themselves aligned with an often odious campaign, with which - I am sure - many would rather having nothing to do in any other circumstances. As I say: big coalition politics is difficult. It is often uncomfortable. It often feels a little dishonourable. And it makes for strange, incoherent coalitions. 

It is important to understand and scrutinise both campaigns - and both arguments - in this light. Different arguments will convince different people. There is no necessary hypocrisy in this. I would encourage you to vote Remain tomorrow. But the reasons which persuade me may not be reasons which persuade you. Some other advocate -- on either side -- may more effectively speak to your concerns than I can. Heed them. Follow your own best judgment. We are large. This is a country of several million people. Domestic politics is still diverging in the home nations. We contain multitudes.  

But speaking solely for myself: the European ideal still seems to me a noble one. The academic world is full of European citizens. I am surrounded by folk who live here, love here, work here, labour here, raise and educate their children here, because of the free movement of people. In the 2014 referendum, European citizens voted on the constitutional future of Scotland because -- at its most simple -- they are part of us. They choose to live here. They persevere here. They have their pleasures and their pains here, their friends and enemies. They have sparkling evenings, and dull times, they share laughter and kisses and rows and sorrows. They do precisely what the rest of us do. You may say this is sentimental. Very well: it is sentimental. But quietly, undemonstratively, this decision was one of the noblest things the SNP has done in office.

I cannot look at these people in the eye tomorrow - these colleagues, these allies, these friends - and vote to Leave the European Union. Unlike Jim Sillars, I cannot and I will not prosecute my indyref feuds with the European Commission and European governments by turning a cold shoulder on my comrades, who are part of us, who live with us, whose children are our friend's children, who elaborate Scotland and Britain's still largely monochrome tapestry.

They are immigrants and emigrants, just as Scots have traipsed across this globe for centuries, inflicting their lousy patter on the peoples of the world on the banks of the Hudson, in the scorching territories of Australia. They are people -- people who I have watched suffer, largely in silence, through this referendum. Tomorrow too, they will be silent in the ballot boxes, their votes missing. But one of my Dutch friends, who has lived in Britain for fifteen years, put it horribly starkly. "I will never forget the headlines. Stay or go, I will never look at you the same way again."

I believe that Scotland has a European destiny, inside the UK, or outside of it. For me, this is existential. Despite the slurs and the sallies, the wits and the wags and the denigrators, ours is not and has never been a separatist movement. I have no interest in narrow nationalism. Too often too isolated in this debate, the leadership of the SNP has forthrightly made the case for immigration, uncowed, unbend, courageously. They are to be commended. Alex Salmond recently put it well in the Oxford Union. We know being involved in mankind is nothing to fear. We know that the lean sphere of sovereignty is a boyhood fantasy. We aren't afraid of negotiating, even negotiating hard-headedly, in our collective interest. We abjure easy solutions to complex problems. 

Confident people -- truly confident countries -- do not hirple through their collective lives, cramped and shivering. They do not go into the darkness of the future with fear. They are emboldened by their own best traditions. They are fierce friends. They don't cringe.  They see opportunities, more often than they tremble. As a Scottish Nationalist, I am soaked in pessimism about the United Kingdom. This much you know. But this is a land with a better tradition which tomorrow will be weighed in the balance. I have no confidence about what the result might be -- but I know this. 

Despite my long-standing pessimism about the UK, I'll be exiled to the doldrums of unhappiness on Friday, if Britain crashes out of the European Union. The bottom will - once again - be speared out of what I thought was a bottomless bucket of disappointment with Britain. This may seem perverse. You are right. The force of those multitudes again, I suppose. But in my bones, I'm an optimistic soul. I remain a Scottish nationalist with regrets, still somehow stubbornly attached to the possibility of a better Britain. It will be a painful to discover my most harsh suspicions about this union are true. I'm not trying to be cute. I will be horribly unhappy to be confirmed in my prejudices.

Tomorrow is one of those days in our history which will try Britain's soul. It is difficult, even to begin to calculate the consequences of a vote to leave. Yet I cast my ballot, more in hope than expectation. And I cast it for my friends, sentimentally perhaps, but unrepentantly, a European.

Triggers

Inevitably, much of the political coverage this morning has descended into a game of personalities. Its detail undigested, interest in the achievements and failures of David Cameron's apparently hard-won European Union deal has already dissipated. The papers and politics shows are full of who is backing who, and the high ambitions and low animal cunning which might explain why.

For my own part, I'm contemplating the approaching referendum on Britain's EU membership with a mounting sense of dread.  More, perhaps, than I anticipated. The promised poll has been rumbling towards us like prostate cancer for months - years - now. But as the grisly encounter approaches, I find myself grow increasingly pessimistic.

The smart money says that the establishment choice carries the day. The smart money sees the country briskly carpet bombed by corporate fear and menacing metaphors - and the British people shrugging their way back into the European Union, lovelessly, but without much animating antipathy either. I'd find this more impressive - and more reassuring - if the self same savvy pundits hadn't been wrong about more or less every significant development in British politics in the last five years.

A Tory majority in 2015 was nigh unthinkable. It happened. Corbyn was an outside candidate, a chortle for which hard-pressed hacks were grateful. He won. Scots would never in a million years vote for independence. An intensely negative campaign squandered a massive lead and gave David Cameron's administration its first cardiovascular incident. In the wake of the independence referendum, the SNP would descend into bloody civil war. Instead, Scottish Labour experienced an almost entirely unanticipated collapse.

I realise nobody is a prophet in their own country, this isn't exactly a list of events to instil confidence in our powers of divination. This isn't a motes and beams thing. I'm no good at making predictions either. You can try to be self aware, but invisible prejudices and preoccupations always cloud your vision. You can't always discern what your blind spots are, and where they lie. But I can't be alone in finding bluff confidence that the "remain" vote will carry the day remarkably complacent.

The campaign to frame the EU -- and hold to it fairly and unfairly responsible for Britain's perceived ills -- did not begin yesterday, with the unleashing of Cameron's divided cabinet. It has been playing out for weeks and months and years, in the pages of the press, and amplified by the powers of the broadcast media.

And in trying to anatomise my anxiety, much of it comes, I'm afraid, from intense pessimism about the politics of England. This is probably characteristic of those with the liberal Scottish nationalist outlook, and doubtless represents a crude and unnuanced depiction of the dominant political attitudes of both England and Scotland. It is probably exaggerated. But it abides.

Always ready with a striking phrase, in the 2014 campaign, Jim Sillars memorably remarked that "the referendum is about power. On 18 September, 2014, between the hours of 7 am and 10 pm, absolute sovereign power will lie in the hands of the Scottish people." I suppose one can say the same thing of this summer's referendum, when Europe is put to the question. After a burst of sound and fury, the people of the United Kingdom shall decide.  

But in grisly contrast with Sillars' formulation, I'm currently troubled by an all too familiar, all too overwhelming feeling of powerlessness. England's gonna do what England's gonna do. Them's the rules. That's democracy. This is precisely what the majority of our fellow countrymen and women chose, in the exercise of that dawn till dusk sovereign will. Months have sped by, but all of this was perfectly foreseeable over a year and a half ago.

But now the idea of Brexit is a real, rather than a remote possibility? Now it is an imminent moment of choice, rather than a hypothetical question? I'm surprised by the intensity of my first emotional reaction.  I can understand the intellectual critiques of the European Union. I can see the case against it from a democratic point of view. I can see, from the perspectives of a left-wing politics, how a Europe of competition and corporations and property, represents a sometimes challenging atmosphere in which to thrive. I don't have an awful lot of time for Michael Gove's quixotic, romantic critique -- but I have a lingering soft spot for the earnestness of the Lord Chancellor, despite himself.

But although I am sure Britain can survive and thrive beyond the European Union, I find the idea of a Scotland and Britain outside of the EU intensely depressing. That Scotland remains in the Union is to me personally a matter of regret. This much, you knew. But to remain in a Union outside of Europe, for the reasons advanced by the odious Chris Grayling, and the gormless Priti Patel? To leave, rudderless for the golden island which float in Nigel Farage's imagination, or in George Galloway's? To leave because of victim fantasies, the modest and overwhelmingly constructive free movement of people across this continent? To leave because of this? 

It is all just too ghastly, too retrograde, too shabby.If this is what Great Britain is to become, if this is what the Great British public vote for, I want out. More than ever. With more passionate intensity than ever I felt in 2014. Without regrets.

But supporters of Scottish independence shouldn't kid themselves on, and chortle behind their hands at the prospect of a "trigger" being pulled on a second referendum. Let's be honest: the SNP's European policy during the 2014 campaign was an absolute boorach, a mess. We faced difficulties with some of the economic messaging, but in terms of badly researched positions badly presented, the European stuff was up there. Now, let's not be hypercritical. Mistakes are innocent made. Details are missed. In the heat of the moment, and under pressure, loose lips say silly things. But on Europe, we don't yet see much evidence of a maturing Scottish nationalist analysis.

It was with some anxiety that I watched the Commons debate after the Prime Minister's statement on the draft European deal a few weeks by -- and saw that the Nationalist delegation had nothing to say, nothing to say, about the substance of European policy. We heard bleating about the conjunction of the EU referendum and the Holyrood poll, but next to nothing about substantive questions of European policy. This isn't good enough.

If Britain does choose to depart from the European Union, the version of Scottish nationalism which has sustained the SNP these last decades takes a fundamental knock. Make no bones about it. It will necessarily prompt a reappraisal of a vision of Scotland in Europe which has been fundamental to the party's mature thinking. This vision represents a riposte to allegation that independence is about narrow nationalism, about separatism, and the reclamation of a fantasy-land 19th century political sovereignty.

Where does the social and economic interests of an independent Scotland lie, if its key trading partner sits outside the confines of the European Union? These questions are acute also for the Republic of Ireland, which must be contemplating our big democratic summer with increasing anxiety. Is EU membership a question of honour, of identity, for Scots -- or is it also just a heartless commercial calculation? And if economic interests and questions of identity and international solidarity pull in different directions -- which of these should the SNP privilege? Which is more important?

The result of this referendum won't just shake the Conservative Party: it has the real potential to sew disorder - and open up fundamental decisions - for the SNP and the wider independence movement. It may not come to that. But for the next few months, I suspect I shall be mumbling Yeats, in fear and trembling, in exaggerated pessimism, over and over.

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." 

A roughly familiar beast?

It has been a summer of Yeats. A year of Yeats, I suppose. In the wake of the independence referendum, much seems "changed, changed utterly." I'll commend to your better judgement whether a terrible beauty has been born or not.

For some, it has been a political year vexed to nightmare. For others, the political hour seems to have come around at last. The political machine of Scottish Labour has been reduced to a smouldering slagheap. The SNP, for long the party of what seemed like a crackpot minority - remain in the ascendant as the 2016 Holyrood election begins to peek over the horizon. 

As a Scottish National Party tribalist -- all of this is thoroughly gratifying. But the experience has also been a curious and curiously unsettling one. Scottish Labour's hubristic and ultimately catastrophic sense of entitlement - I now realise - found a precise perverse reflection in my own political imagination. 

During the referendum, I wrote a series of pieces for the Drouth - visiting the hipsters for independence to the over-refreshed unionist Old Soldier. In a long read in the new edition of the arts periodical - themed around the Contemporary - I try to get my head around some of the continuities and discontinuities of politics in Scotland after the general election. Here's a taster:

"Much of what once was solid in Scottish public life has melted into air. Our politics, which for so long seemed dominated by steady and dependable assumptions, has become strangely contemporary.  The old maps and charts give out. Poles have reversed, polls have reversed, and the compass doesn't understand its points."

You can read the whole piece here.

Update: by popular request, you can find an easier to read PDF version of the article here.

Be critical, have patience

If you are serious about securing Scottish independence, beware of passion. Beware of the unselfcritical and the impatient. Beware projection. Beware the thought that other people think as you think. Be suspicious of your motives. Test your claims. Follow the evidence. 

Beware those who see the defeat of the Yes campaign as entirely the fault of other people. Beware those who point an accusing finger only at Project Fear and a biased media, and who have nothing to say about where Yes Scotland and the White Paper went wrong. Beware those who can't begin to understand why people voted No. Beware those who see the Scots as credulous, taken in, but now smarting from buyer's remorse. Beware those who believe it was only the Vow what won it. 

Beware of those who behave like a drowning man, scrabbling for something -- anything -- to justify a second referendum. Beware of those who think they speak for a pro-indy majority which marches only in their imaginations.  Beware of those who still refuse to recognise that only a single poll in the entire campaign ever put Yes - very marginally - ahead. Beware those who will not see that no poll has shown a sustained or substantial majority for independence since. If you seriously thought we were going to carry the day on the 18th of September, beware your own judgement. Have a healthy skepticism. Question the limits of your social circle. Learn its lessons. 

Beware the activists who told you the Yes vote in their constituencies was all sewn up, and who stood, crestfallen, when dawn rose on the 19th of September, with their local campaign trailing miles behind. Beware those living in areas which voted Yes, who seem indifferent to the fact that the majority of the country did not. Beware those whose enthusiasm for a second indyref seems unconnected to any evidence that the campaign is actually winnable. 

Beware those who see the 2015 election result as firing another starter's gun. Beware those who see the election of 56 SNP MPs as a referendum proxy. Beware those indifferent to the 160,000 lost votes separating the 2014 and 2015 results. Beware the self-deceptive logic of "one last heave". Beware those who want another referendum to recall a feeling, to recall hope, to recall purpose, but with no analysis of what went wrong, or what has changed. Beware old men in a hurry.

If you are serious about securing Scottish independence, you must beware all these things. If you are serious about accomplishing this task, you must beware squandering our best, last chance to realise it. You must have patience. A second referendum cannot be held to make people feel better. Too many generations of my family, and many families in this country, have campaigned for this old idea for it to be consigned under the sod forever in a doomed spasm of feeling unsupported by any analysis. 

There's no point in igniting a false hope - only to extinguish it forever. There is nothing noble about destroying the cause you care about through soft-headedness. I can understand your anger. I can understand your frustrations. I can understand the mounting despair you feel at this majority Tory government and its plans for the country. But sentimentality is self-indulgence. A second referendum cannot be for the true believers who are already on side, but must speak to those whose minds have changed, for those who can be persuaded. It cannot be an act of sheer frustration -- however understandable that feeling may be.  

Nobody has even begun to explain to me what has changed since the autumn of last year to transform disaster into triumph. Nobody has explained how the generational gap has or could be addressed. Nobody has explained to me how the sceptical people of Clackmannanshire and Aberdeenshire and Inverness and Argyll have been won over. Nobody has produced, or can produce, any evidence of any kind that there has been a decisive shift in constitutional opinion. 

My only operating principle here is this: if another independence referendum is to be held, it must be won. A second referendum must not be held unless it is clear that it is winnable. By all means - let's have a reasoned argument about strategy. About what to be about in the meanwhile. Through the encircling political gloom - there are reasons to be cheerful. The idea of Scottish independence is mainstream for the first time since 1707. The 2014 referendum campaign has not stabilised the Union. It has not provided a decisive answer to Scotland's separatists. The Smith Commission compromise and Mundell's Scotland Bill look incapable of doing so. The No campaign has not persuaded Scots that we are "better together" for the next ten years, or the next twenty or thirty years. 

But cool your jets. It is time for hard heads. Time for reflection on what went right and what went wrong last September. My plea to you is this. Always demand evidence. Hold even the most sincere, the most touching and deeply-held emotional appeals in suspicion.  Be critical. And always, always -- have patience.

WANTED: Scottish Nationalism with a head as well as a heart

The 2014 referendum was a premature confrontation between Scottish Nationalism and its ambitions. In a long campaign, Yes Scotland managed to achieve something remarkable. The Yes campaign was defeated and defeated handily, but support for Scottish independence roared into the mainstream of political opinion. Even victors are by victories undone. Short term advantage is sometimes bought at the expense of a disaster tomorrow. The Better Together campaign is a case study in the perils of short term thinking. 

Last Friday, we observed the aftermath of a stricken Scottish Labour Party, sinking beneath the waves, demasted in the crosswinds of political opinion, hull bust, lifeboats swept away, leaving a sole survivor in Ian Murray. Now the ship's skipper has finally done the decent - and probably necessary - thing, leaving the battered boat directorless and directionless heading into the long campaign for Holyrood in 2016. For the partisan SNP supporter, a squirming feeling of schadenfreude may attach to Labour's immediate challenges, but we must continue to take a longer view as the People's Party are gripped by their own internecine conflicts and disputes. 

The brutal fact remains -- if we held another independence referendum today, tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year -- we would still be defeated.  Scotland is not awash with people feeling buyer's remorse. The poll wasn't fixed. The anxieties which delivered a No majority on the 19th of September have not been answered. The doubts of the folk outside the enclaves that supported independence by a majority - Clackmannanshire, Aberdeenshire, Perthshire, the Highlands - have by no means been allayed.  

Any indisciplined rush into a second referendum can lead only to disaster.  Exuberance in the wake of an exciting General Election campaign, I can understand -- but it must be checked and scrutinised cold-bloodedly. I would suggest that that scrutiny urges only one conclusion: the fundamentals are still agin us. Vital, it may have been, stimulating and new. But we must be honest with yourselves: on too many issues, the intellectual case for Scottish independence was never won in the long referendum campaign of 2013 and 2014.

One of my long lasting anxieties about the 1998 devolution settlement has been the kind of politicians it would produce. As a party which has rooted and grown in Holyrood since the turn of the century, the SNP has historically been particularly exposed to the limits of devolved thinking. A national parliament with an important range of powers, but one shorn of responsibility for economic affairs, for monetary and international affairs, defence and welfare.  For the unionist majority in the Smith Commission, the problem with this set-up is the lack of "responsibility", connecting decisions on spending with decisions on taxation. But for an independence-supporter trying to take a longer view, the issues are different. 

Devolution risks producing politicians with attitudes towards a great swathe of state policy which is at best intellectually underdeveloped and at worst empty oppositionalism and sloganising. These "big things" become someone else's problem. This attitude may cut the mustard in the forgetful ordinary run of politics. In the compressed formats of telly and radio, your spokesmen will find things to say, outraged soundbites to coin, but a slogan is not a policy. 

Slogans may work day to day, but they are bound to be seriously shown up in something as fundamental as a long referendum campaign. By no means am I suggesting that the SNP is the vacuous party of empty protest its opponents sometimes suggest -- but these reserved areas have often been our weakest suit. There is no shame, and no downside, in being frank with ourselves about that.

Take one example. You can understand the thinking behind the White Paper's currency policy. Folk wanted to keep the pound. The focus groups urged it. So the Scottish Government decided to back it. But in practice, the policy amounted to giving your deadliest enemy a loaded revolver and saying, "please don't shoot me with this". The rest is history. Osborne pulled the trigger. Salmond foundered in the first debate with Darling. Credibility was never demonstrated or gained. We lost. I could go on.

The election of the 56 is no mandate for independence, or even another referendum, but it is a remarkable opportunity to begin working quietly on these tricky fundamentals and to resist the narrow field of policy vision which devolution sometimes encourages. The Short Money is flowing in, up from a modest £187,000 to £1,200,000 a year, excluding any additional party levies on the new MPs' salaries. That is a formidable war chest which the SNP must put to work in pursuit of its short and longer term aims.

The intellectual, technical case for Scottish independence must be strengthened in the longer run if it is ever to be won. The target is moving. The issues are not static. But if -- when -- a second referendum comes along, we now have no cause and no excuse to run a campaign which is vulnerable on critical questions of reserved policy. Tough choices will, inevitably, have to be made and policy battlefields selected. But for the first time in its history, the party now has a formidable Westminster machinery and staff, scrutinising the reserved issues, with resources to think fundamentally about its approach to central issues in the economy, and choices in monetary policy and regulation, defence, welfare, international affairs.  That's an opportunity which cannot be squandered.

23:59

That Scottish Labour slogan in short: "Vote for us to avoid an illegal referendum which nobody is proposing which we would shoot down immediately." #WinningHere.

Work for you?

On Andrew Neil's Sunday Politics sofa, senior Labour MP and shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Chris Leslie, just told the BBC that his party would block any further independence referendum in the next parliament. Neil suggested to him that #indyrefs remain "reserved matters" under the Scotland Act. "Absolutely," Leslie responded, "there is not a way that we would want to see a repetitious repeating of something that has been decided for a generation." 

A couple of days ago, I asked Scottish Labour leader a fairly simple question: does he or does he not believe that Holyrood has the legal authority to hold another independence referendum? Answer came there none. But Leslie's comments this morning confirm what Mr Murphy would not: the UK Labour Party clearly still believe and maintain that the Scottish Parliament currently does not have the power to hold a second referendum, that Westminster consent is necessary, and that Westminster consent would not be forthcoming in the next five years. No minority Labour government, no majority Labour government, no Tory and no coalition government would currently be prepared to put its name to another section 30 order, along the lines of the text adopted after the Edinburgh Agreement, paving the way for a second poll.

But here's big Jim, still galloping around the country, giving it his "24 hours to save the Union" routine.  “You only have 24 hours to stop a second referendum. The clock is ticking,” a leaked leaflet yelped. "Only Labour can STOP ANOTHER REFERENDUM." Caps lock is,  clearly, cruise control for TERROR.

As his helpful colleague just made clear to Andrew Neil, however, Murphy's threats are all empty. And he knows they are empty. His colleagues south of the border know they are empty. The wisp, the spectre, he hopes to frighten the electorate with has no substance. None of this ought to be news. It echoes Miliband's earlier statements that he would not accept another referendum any time soon.  But if there is zero prospect of a second referendum in this Westminster parliament, how the devil can you make that the central plank of your campaign against the SNP in the last two weeks of the campaign? If you maintain that the Scotland Act - here since 1998 - blocks an independence poll, why on earth do we need Scottish Labour MPs to "stop" it?

Several consequences logically flow from Leslie's comments, none of which seem particularly helpful for the Labour Party.  If you dp want a second referendum at some point in the future, I doubt you'll much appreciate this high-handed talk of "blocking" and permission refused. But then again, January's big plan to "reach out to" those who disagreed with the Labour leadership on the referendum seems to have gone the way of all things already. Instead, democratic socialists are despatching epistles to Tories in their constituencies, while Jim "I have never been a unionist" Murphy hopes to survive in East Renfrewhshire by attracting unionist votes. 

Alternatively, if you are swithering about voting for the Nats because of concerns that a second referendum might result - despite Nicola's repeated denials - you can heed these comments and rest easy. Whether or not you vote for the Labour Party, the Tories, the Liberals or for the SNP, no second referendum will result in this parliament. An SNP vote is risk-free on that score. Even if you disbelieve the First Minister, and sense that plots for a second plebiscite are brewing - Leslie reassures you - the unionist majority in Westminster can and doubtless will ensure that the question cannot be put.  The Union doesn't need the People's Party to save it once again. Constitutional law as already done the trick. Spectre, exorcised. 

If you didn't know better, you'd think that the left hand of the Labour party doesn't know what the right hand us up to. (Or, as one reader just suggested, that left and right hands are busy, fighting each other...)

Murphy's unanswered question...

"Mr Murphy, you have raised the prospect of a second independence referendum on several occasions now during this campaign. This week, you have launched a desperate end of days poster campaign, based on this claim. But can you tell us now, do you believe that Holyrood currently has the legislative competence - the legal right - to call a second independence referendum?" 

It is a question which none of the press pack seem to have put to the Scottish Labour leader, but as I blogged about here last week -- it is becoming a central question in the party's ailing general election campaign which Murphy will not and cannot afford to give an honest answer to. 

Why not? Because on Jim's own analysis of the Scotland Act, supported by his former Westminster colleagues, and his Better Together allies, even if the SNP sweep to power in the Scottish Parliament in 2016 or 2020 or 2024 with a political mandate for a further referendum, unless the Scotland Act is amended, Holyrood doesn't have the legal power to hold the poll. This analysis remains debatable as a matter of constitutional law -- but during 2011 and 2012, Murphy, David Cameron and his Liberal Democratic allies maintained a united front and spoke with one voice: no consent from Westminster, no referendum.  (The same analysis can be applied to the spectre of full fiscal autonomy, which could only happen, if a Westminster majority voted to endorse it. The SNP cannot - even if they wished to - realise and deliver this policy alone).

On Jim's own legal analysis, Westminster had - and still retains - a veto.  Which, to put it another way, is to say that Jim believes that an SNP majority, of whatever scale in Westminster or in Holyrood, cannot force another referendum through. Which, to put it another way, is to say that Jim is being economical with the actualité in his frantic and dishonest efforts to suggest that another referendum is pending - whatever Nicola or any other senior member of the SNP maintains about their political intentions. Which, to put it another way, is to say that the central plank of Scottish Labour's election campaign in its dying days is predicated on a falsehood, a fiction, a fib.

It might be nice if one of the tribunes of the press took him to task on it. 

A legal query for you @JimForScotland, do you believe that Holyrood has the legislative competence to call a second independence referendum?

— PeatWorrier (@PeatWorrier) May 1, 2015

Harnessing the 55%

While toddling through Shawlands this week, I chanced across the Labour's Glasgow South candidate, Tom Harris, campaigning outside the local Co-op. Having politely explained that I wasn't with him in this election, I took the opportunity to ask him about a letter which has been circulating in the constituency, inviting folk who voted No on the 18th of September 2014 to save his bacon on the 7th of May. 

"I thought Jim had said that Scottish Labour isn't a unionist party?" I enquired. "But I'm a unionist," he said. In his affably bluff way, Tom explained that he needed every vote going, and if that involved putting the fear of god up the Tories of Newlands, he'd make no apology for doing so.  "And I suppose you're pretty right-wing too, so - " I quipped, for villainy - "I suppose I am," he responded, with unexpected candour. I sidled on. Good luck to him. He'll need it.  

But the encounter made me think a wee bit about the assumptions lying behind Tom's letter, and being pushed nationally by Liberal Democrats in tight spots, that the Better Together alliance can be cobbled back together to save their skins."55% of people voted no, back me to stop the Nationalist juggernaut." John Curtice has been pouring buckets of icy water over the idea that tactical voting represents an effective anti-Nationalist strategy over most of the country, arguing that the sums just don't add up. As Professor Curtice points out, there aren't enough Labour, Tories or Liberal Democrat voters in the overwhelming majority of seats to make a decisive difference, even if folk were inclined to lend their vote to a Better Together ally. 

But the thinking behind this isn't just numerically problematic - it also flies in the face of what the referendum taught us about the reasons and attitudes lying behind the No vote. Tom and the Liberal Democrats seem to have forgotten who the 55% are, and why they voted against independence last September. The recent findings of the Scottish Election Study suggest that the No lead did not come down to British identities, or optimism about the Union, nor widespread pessimism about independence, but fear, risk and uncertainty. 

The study concludes that identities - Scottish and British - provided core support for both Yes and No campaigns, the outcome was decided by perceptions of economic risk. The most recent tranche of survey data from the study suggested that feelings of Britishness or attachment to the Union account for just 29.5% of the No vote. To put a more concrete number on that, just 590,568 of the 2,001,926 votes attracted by the No campaign seem to have hinged to any significant extent on British identities. 

This chimes with my own experiences. If this referendum has revealed one thing, it is that Scots allegiance to the British state is - perhaps disturbingly - provisional. A popular, winning, organic unionism has not emerged. If anything, the Conservative and Unionist Party seems hell-bent on salting the earth across the border, to ensure no sprouts grow. 

For some folk, a sense of Britishness is essential, a part of their identity, the object of passionate attachment. Some of the best pieces from pro-union writers during the dying days of the campaign spoke of these themes in a way that the cynical, anxiety-generating apparatus of the official campaign never even attempted. But like the identity ultras on the Yes side, these are minority enthusiasms. The Better Together parties looked deep into the eyes of the Scottish people, and found dealer's eyes peering back at them, unsentimental, commercial, counting the pennies, weighing the odds -- and won the game on that basis.  

A gulf of feeling separates this dicing of the economic odds from the anti-Nat ardency which this new Better Together alliance hopes to ignite. And if you voted against independence on the basis of these cool calculations, what the devil are you to make of the plaintive efforts of candidates like Christine Jardine and Tom Harris, addressing you like a union fundamentalist, a loyalist, re-running September's poll? 

This stands at odds, not just with the numbers, but what we know about the key motive forces of the No vote. It may peel off ultra montane No voters, for whom the national question has acquired new and critical salience, but seems likely to strike a dud note for those opposed to independence who do not share these intense attachments. It is a case of pro-union political leaderships, projecting their own antipathies onto a more ambivalent, less ferociously negative, public. Scotland is not a land of Effie Deans. 

It is a phenomenon which surprised SNP canvassers are experiencing on the doorstep. Over the weekend, I was having a blether with one of the SNP candidates in the city about what, if you read the media, you probably regard as an improbable phenomenon - the No voting SNP supporter. Why? For some, it is buyer's remorse. But for many more, they voted no on a more conditional basis: "not yet", "not ready", "not convinced by the arguments" - but none of this is proving decisive in determining which party they believe will best represent them in this parliament in Westminster.

For electors of this kind - the overwhelming majority of the 55% - the #indyref cannot be comprehensively "weaponised" in the way Liberal Democratic, Tory and Labour campaigners in East Dumbartonshire, Glasgow South and Gordon - increasingly desperately - hope, believe and pray. 

The return of the monster

So, let me get this straight. From 2011 until the Edinburgh Agreement of 2012, senior figures in the coalition government and in the Labour opposition were as one: Holyrood did not enjoy the legal power to order an independence referendum on its own authority.

The SNP may have claimed a thumping majority in Holyrood, the party may run the Scottish Government, and they might claim a political mandate from their 2011 election victory - but in law, at least, any referendum required Westminster's consent. The referendum "related to a reserved matter" - the Union - and as such, was beyond the powers given to the Edinburgh parliament in the Scotland Act of 1998.

Advocate General and Liberal Democrat peer, Jim Wallace, gave a speech at the University of Glasgow, setting out this legal analysis:  "The UK government’s legal view is that the Scottish Parliament has no power to deliver a referendum on independence." The cross-party Scottish Affairs Committee, under the unabashedly partisan headship of Glasgow South West MP Ian Davidson, endorsed Wallace's analysis, claiming that it was crystal clear that the proposed referendum fell outwith Holyrood's legal competence and would almost certainly be struck down in the courts. David Cameron echoed the threats and menaces of his Liberal Scottish legal advisor.  

Neither the Labour Party, nor the Liberal Democrats and Tories wanted to block the poll - they accepted that there ought to be a "legal fair and decisive" vote - but the Better Together chorus was at one on the illegality of any unilateral attempt by Holyrood to order a poll without reference to the Mother of Parliaments on the banks of the Thames.

The Edinburgh Agreement and the subsequent order under s.30 of the Scotland Act cleared up this legal uncertainty, explicitly authorising a referendum on independence, subject to the conditions that the Electoral Commission was involved, that no "devo max" question appeared on the ballot -- and that the poll was held by Hogmanay 2014.  

The constitutional hour glass having run out on the 2014 referendum, you might imagine that Labour, Tory and Liberal Democratic parliamentarians would believe that we had returned to the ante referendum status quo. At least legally. If they had any faith in their legal analysis in 2011 and 2012, they would draw comfort from the thought that no future #indyref is currently possible, without negotiated consent from Westminster. You might have thought that they would feel pretty damn pleased with themselves. The only risk of another independence referendum, in their legal analysis, is if the overwhelmingly pro-Union majority in the House of Commons voted to allow one.  So why the exaggerated air of snark and panic?

But truth, reason and fidelity to their past arguments seem to have gone out the window in these heady general election days. In a last desperate gambit, Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat candidates and ministers are blundering around the country, and blethering to their fellow travellers in the media, screeching that the perfidious Nats are plotting to inflict another separation poll upon the Scottish and British people. This, you know, despite categorical statements from senior SNP sources that none of this is on the cards. 

But on their own legal analysis, the only route, the only viable legal path to another independence referendum is if the overwhelmingly pro-union majority in the House of Commons and Lords voted to authorise one. The only danger of Jim Murphy experiencing another referendum is if he slurps too much Irn Bru, and in the grip of a sugar high, gallops through the wrong lobby in the palace of Westminster. According to his government's legal analysis, Nicola can no more force David Cameron to endure another referendum, than she can introduce a Scottish minimum wage, or unilaterally seize control over Scotland's social security net.

If there is, as senior Labour folk all argued, a crystal clear UK lock on granting or refusing an #indyref, why the manufactured panic? It couldn't be a desperate ploy, could it? A last ditch, knowing and winking nonsense designed to put the fear up credulous people who know no better? Heaven forfend.  

What's that coming over the hill? Is it a monster? Is it a monster?

Jockophobia

The Scottish people may have a right to self determination, but as a matter of international law, we have no right to secede from the United Kingdom. A couple of weeks back, I delivered a lecture to our honours students on the concept of territorial integrity in international law, and that, in a nutshell, was the inconvenient, take away message from the class.

Unless a "people" is forcibly redeeming itself from colonialism, the oppressive domination by an alien people, and denied equal access to government, international law remains leery about recognising the right of sub-state communities unilaterally to blast apart the borders of recognised states, like the alien wean popping out of John Hurt's belly.  As the Supreme Court of Canada said, in the Quebec reference of 1998, in international law:

"... the right to self-determination of a people is normally fulfilled through internal self-determination - a people's pursuit of its political, economic, social and cultural development within the framework of an existing state. A right to external self-determination (which in this case potentially takes the form of the assertion of a right to unilateral secession) arises in only the most extreme of cases and, even then, under carefully defined circumstances."

Would-be Napoleons know that international law will not now permit territory to be acquired by force. But as the Russians have demonstrated in Ukraine, and the effective annexation of the Crimea, the discourse of self determination, married to dirty tricks, can allow looming territorial neighbours to abuse salami-slicing tactics to de facto acquire territory which could not be won de jure with a tank or at the barrel of a gun. 

That is one of the reasons that the General Assembly of the United Nations has recently adopted this resolution, reaffirming the principle of territorial integrity and that the Crimea remains, as a matter of international law, part of the Ukraine. The breakaway territories of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, raise similar anxieties, both in terms of the Russian influence, but also in terms of the basic principle that international harmony is best promoted by upholding the integrity of states within their recognised borders. 

Kosovo, and the judgment of the International Court of Justice on the legality of its declaration of independence from Serbia, may have undermined traditional conceptions about the preconditions for unilateral secession, but even taking these into account, Scotland enjoys no right to secede. If you cast your mind back to the Crawford and Boyle UK government paper of 2012, on international law aspects of the referendum, they talked about "negotiated independence" as opposed to secession. 

But if the UK government had decided to cut up rough, to block the referendum, or ignore its outcome, they would be behaving entirely within their rights under international law as it is understood today. Replace the word "Quebec" with Scotland and the word "Canada" with the United Kingdom in this section of the Canadian Supreme Court Quebec secession reference, and you get the idea. 

136.  The population of Quebec cannot plausibly be said to be denied access to government. Quebecers occupy prominent positions within the government of Canada.  Residents of the province freely make political choices and pursue economic, social and cultural development within Quebec, across Canada, and throughout the world. The population of Quebec is equitably represented in legislative, executive and judicial institutions. In short, to reflect the phraseology of  the international documents that address the right to self-determination of peoples, Canada is a "sovereign and independent state conducting itself in compliance with the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples and thus possessed of a government representing the whole people belonging to the territory without distinction".

The students looked a bill shell-shocked at these tidings, certain that they would find in international law some recognition for the basic democratic rights that they had all exercised last September. But you won't find any such recognition. Self determination, at last legally, does not mean what most of the punters think it means. But after class, I find myself lingering most over this idea of "internal self determination" in the context of the rampant Jockophobia presently gripping elements of the Conservative Party and their friends and allies in the tabloid and broadsheet media. 

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Tories were not running candidates north of the Tweed, so outraged are they by the prospect of David Mundell setting the political agenda for the Plain People of England, and subjecting the Nats to "no platform" style rhetoric, in the hopes of appealing to the English folk who blether to Matthew Parris, who formerly did not "harbour any feelings, positive or otherwise, towards Scotland", but who are now feeling got at, cantankerous and queerly victimised. 

In the hopes of pleasing these people, and of undermining the chances of a minority Labour government being formed, we are seeing a vigorous attempt to tar and feather the SNP as unconscionable, crackerjack, wabbit-eyed separatists, and illegitimate actors in British politics. "We refuse to negotiate with any political party, unless and until it renounces its separatist agenda and lays down its commitment to asking irritating questions about how Britain is governed." But take heart. International law tells us, we must press for internal self-determination. Inconvenient, it may be. Awkward, no doubt. But  England must expect the Nationalists to strive to dismantle and to rebuild the foundations of the British state from within. 

Although the Nats are the explicit target of these Tory diatribes, their real objective is to pre-emptively de-legitimise the idea of a minority Labour government taking office with Nationalist votes, even if such a government would command stronger support in the Commons than a Tory minority.  The real victims in all of these antics are not the SNP - but the pigeon-hearted Labour Party, who predictably enough, seem content to go along with their own annihilation at the hands of Fleet Street and Conservative Central Office.

The exaggerated polarities of Yes and No are a clumsy prism through which to see the ambivalent and warring sentiments and preferences at work in the 2014 referendum. They are even less apposite, less helpful, in trying to think through and act constructively in its aftermath. As international law reminds us, self-determination is not only about independence, and the creation of a separate state, but about how we are governed within the United Kingdom. As Shakespeare did not say, a real and meaningful union must be one "which alters when it alteration finds."

Have a very peaty New Year!

Admissible tipples include: Benriach, Laphroaig, Lagavulin, Ardbeg, Caol Ila, a fag and a jeroboam of Glayva - or the Big Peat. Alternatively, pop your artisanal hand-shaped "durty" burger in a blender along with its charcoal mayonnaise, blackened gherkins and scorched molasses relish -- and quaff with just a tincture of pineappleade and a liberal dusting of bisto granules.

Guaranteed to evoke sense-memories of the effluent pipe and the savour of the nicotine-clouded howff. As ever when worrying peat, approach with caution, exercise sound judgement, and always have an exit strategy. Think, What Would Tom Weir do? Either that, or chuck the lot and have a gin and tonic instead. The quinine keeps the fever at bay. Hogmanay essentials.

Although I've been largely mute this December - I think I caught my statutory #indyref slump late after the activities and diversions of September and October - 2014 has been a stimulating and sometimes difficult year. It was also one marked by kindness, struggles, setbacks, successes and happy accidents. A year like any other, I suppose.  Like many folk of my generation, I spent a chunk of 2014 wrestling with the frustrations of unemployment, hopes raised and dashed. Again and again. And repeat, sometimes seemingly ad infinitum.

Nature's blessed me with an essentially cheery disposition - but the chance to scribble here was a nourishing outlet during these tricky months, and helped to keep me sane and lift any flagging spirits. Many of you dug into your pockets to support my wee crowdfunder at the lee end of the summer, and I'm eternally grateful for your generosity and your contributions. Happily, I've now secured a more permanent means of keeping myself in stockings and gin -- a great relief -- but for me, the referendum campaign was backlit and coloured by a these personal challenges.

Although saddened by the outcome on the 19th of September, I was not surprised. This poll was always - arguably - a premature confrontation between Scottish Nationalism and its ambitions. If it has achieved one thing, it has planted the formerly crankish-seeming case for independence firmly in the mainstream of Scottish life. That has never happened before. Its roots won't be easily pried loose.

Taking a longer, generational perspective is also a source of some comfort. As I blogged about at the tail end of the summer, both my grandmother, and her father, believed in Scottish independence, and both went to their graves with their aspiration unrealised. Since the result, those I've found most stricken by it were those newer converts who thought victory was assured. Tough leathery old Nats, by contrast, seem to have greater reserves of fortitude to draw upon. For many who lived through the difficult days of the 1980s and 1990s, defeat, and not triumph, is the old friend and familiar. 2014 is etched in beside a rich and varied catalogues of Nationalist setbacks and false dawns. And what does the future hold? Who the hell knows.

At the moment, I find myself feeling a bit saturated by politics. Mired in it. Energy sapped. I'm sure I'll bounce back. The referendum has left us with a series of bad-tempered binaries in our public debate which I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with. Barely a day seems to pass at the moment without serious issues being hijacked, and their kernel of their importance overlooked in a wild and whirling exchange of words.

When the sickness of ebola, and the sudden, unexpected descent of tragedy in Glasgow, is analysed ungenerously through the cracked prism of the referendum and the political antipathies it has generated - I don't know what folk think they are achieving. Hatred rots the soul, and often as not, the brain too. I don't really want Scotland to have a thundering, charmless, unreflexive, unempathetic, and cartoonish civil war politics. We deserve better.

So for 2015, let's aspire, all of us, to emit little less heat, and a little more light. Many thanks for your attention and consideration these last twelve months. Have a grand, well-peated Hogmanay, one and all. Lang may your lums reek.

Civil War Politics

When I was naught but a nipper, Old Man Tickell once caused a fight in a pub in Kerry with what he thought was an innocuous question. Always interested in the politics and history of the Republic, he guilelessly asked one of the friendly locals, "what's the difference between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael these days anyway? Ideologically, what separates them?" Cue one mighty stramash, as the punters around him fell out, and fell out dramatically, about what distinguished Ireland's two biggest parties ideologically.

The cynical answer might be: not a lot. But the orthodox answer is a historical one, rooted in the bloody, divisive and unnecessary experience of the Irish Civil War. The great houses of Fianna Fáil fell in behind Eamon De Valera, and the principle of an Irish republic. Fine Gael represented those who struggled for the Irish Free State, gradualism, and the awkward compromise Michael Collins struck with Lloyd George in London in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. The Free State may have won the war, but under the premierships of the scheming and reactionary Eamon de Valera, Sean Lemass, Jack Lynch, and the odious and greed-rotted Charles J Haughey, the Fianna Fáil machine crushed all before it for decades -- until 2011. 

Just as Scottish Labour was swept out to sea, the Soldiers of Destiny found themselves kicked into the soup by the Irish people, outraged and disgusted by the recklessness, incompetence and corruption of the Cowan government, and the poisoned legacy of profligacy, incompetence and mismanagement which  the cute hoors of Bertie Ahern's cabinet had abandoned the country to.

To the British political anorak, peeking across the Irish sea, the idea of structuring contemporary politics along civil war lines, rather than political ideology, seems bizarre. All of our large political parties are coalitions of opinion - a spectrum within which compromises must be struck - but organising your contemporary political struggles according to whether your great-grandfather favoured De Valera or Collins seems bonkers. It obscures, rather than illuminating, the key schisms dividing political points of view. 

But in Scotland, increasingly, I wonder if we aren't drifting quietly towards our own - peaceful - sort of civil war politics, with the splits and divisions of the 2014 referendum running deep, papering over the more significant political splits which untie and divide the country. Alex Massie has the droll but slightly horrifying gag that the electoral battle between Labour and the SNP is to decide "who gets to be Scotland's Fianna Fáil." I begin to suspect that this is truer now than it was before the September poll.

And if any figure is likely to reinforce this tendency, and to root it deep, it is Jim Murphy. The smoothest and most media-savvy of Scottish Labour's leadership candidates he may be, but Murphy is also the one most identified with the referendum, and most likely to alienate those who took a different view on the 18th of September. He has made much of his intention, if elected, to unite the country. In many ways, Murphy is uniquely incapable, of the three, of doing so. The memory of those Irn Bru crates won't fade soon.

And art is already anticipating politics. In Stanley Odd's Son I Voted Yes, we look forward to the kind of inter-generational political conversations and expectations which have been the stuff of Ireland's civil war legacy. "My da' was a Yes voter," you can imagine a proud wean explaining to his wee pal, who remembers in turn that his parents voted No. And dimly, in the future, anticipate a fight in some rural pub on this side of the Irish channel, the compliment of history repaid, as an inquiring Irish visitor to our shores enquires: "Can you tell me what the difference between the SNP and Labour is anyway?"

"Well," I'd say, "back in the referendum of 2014..."

From beyond the grave...

Pack up your ghouls and your bogles, your Angry Salmond costumes and your terrifying Jim Murphy masks: Halloween, it is passed - but something else stirs from beyond the grave. It took its last breath at the end of June 2014 - but after being buried in the #indyref interregnum - the For A' That podcast is back on its feet and clawing through the clod, crying "brains, brains." 

For episode 46, I joined Michael Greenwell - as ever - and a brace of frumious Aberdonian cybernats in Gillian Martin and Doug Daniel - to chew the grey matter and and ponder the post-indyref zombie apocalypse, more than a month on from the fateful day, under its low sky. 

On today's menu, the surge in memberships of independence supporting parties: what does it presage? Is a Yes Alliance, a dominating part of the SNP deputy leadership pitches, a viable, desirable or effective political strategy? And which of the three candidates - Constance, Hosie or Brown - is to be preferred? Do we want a balanced ticket? Would it be helpful, in the coming conflict to have a Westminster-based deputy? Or would it send a powerful and desirable message to have two women leading the SNP? 

Over on the red benches, what are we to make of the tribal conflict in Scottish Labour, and which of the three would-be chieftains will drub their opponents and come out on top? And is Murphy really the credible, winning figure much of the press has painted him out to be? You can lend the show your lugs here.

Alternatively, you can download the show directly here, listen to it online at its web page or subscribe via iTunes.

Lost: Labour's love

I can understand those of you who feel a significant measure of cynicism about the Smith Commission process and its capacity to deliver meaningful new autonomy for Scottish institutions. I'm cultivating pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will. There are real gains to be secured here, but they will only be won by the deft application of political pressure, exploitation of our opponents' anxieties, and some cold-hearted lawyering.

It won't be an uplifting process. It can't really be participative. Given the tight timetable, the body is doomed to be dominated by the political parties, and in particular, by the aftermath of the Better Together coalition. That coalition is committed to delivering devosomething only, and nothing like the maximalist vision of autonomy articulated in the Scottish Government's submission to it.

The trick will be bridging that gap - to the advantage of the vision articulated by Nicola Sturgeon. The signs are not without promise on this score. The Vow stoked higher expectations, and seemed to suggest a commitment to more thoroughgoing change. The Tories have since characterised their proposals as a "floor not a ceiling." The Liberal Democrats have historically wanted to further than their allies, towards a federal Britain. Labour ... well, we'll come onto Labour in a minute.

These are green shoots, to be cultivated. But I can understand also why many folk approach that task without enthusiasm. The vernacular dominated many people's experiences of the referendum campaign. Folk got involved, felt emboldened. It was accessible, engaging, even exciting. Technical discussions about how Schedule 4 of the Scotland Act might be amended to extend Holyrood's social security authority while preserving Westminster's reserved prerogatives -- well, they light no bonfires in the soul.

The devolution debate can seem a colourless, lifeless thing by contrast to the lively days of late September. But the detail of what the Commission agrees will be of profound significance for how this country is governed, and what the Scottish Government and Parliament can and cannot do. If the case for independence was about achieving powers for a purpose, we cannot, credibly, be indifferent to an opportunity to redistribute those powers across the United Kingdom. If the case for self-government was rooted in a desire for greater self-government, we cannot treat an opportunity to achieve greater self-government like a sideshow. We may fail to secure what we want, but we cannot afford to be or to seem to be indifferent to the difficult questions which will animate Lord Smith and his fellow commissioners from the SNP, Labour, Green, Tory and Liberal Democrat parties.

If the wheeze is going to go anywhere, and achieve anything, it needs constructive suggestions from those of us who agitated in favour of independence before the 18th of September.  To that end, and with my academic hat on, today I sent this submission to Lord Smith, focussing on two areas which have already been highlighted on the blog: (a) securing greater autonomy for Holyrood in the field of social security and (b) giving permanent recognition in the Scotland Bill to the basic democratic principles, expressed in the referendum process, and accepted by the UK government.

This submission focuses more on the doable than the desirable, and offers a few detailed ideas about how these proposals could be realised in a new Scotland Bill. I caution you now. It isn't interesting, or uplifting. Ian Smart was complimentary earlier, in describing it as "very boring and very interesting at the same time." I hope so. It is practical-minded, narrow, focussed. There is no great rhetoric in it, or a smouldering first-principles case for maximum autonomy. The Scottish Government has already made that case effectively. Hopefully these more limited, and more achievable plans, can contribute usefully towards the discussion.

Heaven knows, the Commission could do with a helping hand. This weekend's developments shuffled another wild card into Lord Smith of Kelvin's deck. Behind the Brownite waffle, the "home rule" rhetoric and and the invocation of federalism, Labour are in a directionless mess. Nimble as ever, the party decided to submit their widely derided and watered-down proposals to the Commission entirely unamended last month. No updates, no restatement of more ambitious plans, zip.

While there are noises off, encouraging the party to embrace a more substantial platform of powers, it is far from clear who is calling the shots, or is to be persuaded, if Labour is to be coaxed into a bolder offer over the next thirty days. With the implosion of what might politely be described as Johann Lamont's "leadership" of the Scottish party, and the outbreak of internal factionalism, denials, turf wars and recrimination in Labour's ranks, it is far from clear who might be coordinating the party's response, or who is giving the party's two delegates to Smith - Iain Gray MSP and Gregg McClymont MP - their marching orders.  Nobody seems terrifically sure.

Labour hope to appoint a new leader by the 13th of December. The interregnum continues till then, under that hefty visionary and elder statesman, Anas Sarwar. On the current timetable, the Smith Commission hopes to cut a deal by the end of November: two weeks before the next chieftain takes over the stone bonnet and the flogging stool.

Perhaps the Eds hold the whip hand till then, as usual. Perhaps Sarwar. Perhaps any number of competing grey eminences, scheming for influence and power, behind the scenes, Will any of these people feel emboldened - or even entitled - to depart from or to elaborate on the party's lukewarm offer of last year? It is an open question. If the party looked vulnerable to stumbling blindly into a bear trap before Johann's ill-tempered departure, now without a leader, and without a plan, in their headless disarray, the pitch of the Labour Party's engagement with the Smith Commission is anybody's guess.

Will they retrench, stubborn and oppositional, clinging onto Westminster's welfare prerogatives for grim death? Will the nasty surprise of Lamont's departure focus minds on a more fundamental rethink? Can those of us advocating a more substantial level of autonomy be able to take advantage of their bewilderment, to railroad the reluctant?

There are everywhere snares and pitfalls -- and opportunities all too easily missed in the melee. I imagine it is difficult to focus on the detail of radical constitutional change when your footsoldiers are busy forming a circular firing squad. It is difficult to be strategic when your leadership decapitates itself, without even a credible puppet dauphin to plonk on the throne. Worse, in the very midst of a politically sensitive, time-pressured and internally fraught process. Every crisis is also an opportunity, as they say. But it remains to be seen which of Labour's warring tribes - the one keen on more devolution, the other deeply sceptical - owns that opportunity.

But Johann has lobbed a primed grenade - plop - straight into the septic tank. Take cover, comrades. The blowback won't be pretty.

You can read my whole Smith Commission submission here.