Indyref2 ... if at first you don't succeed, try try again

I recently read in The Herald a persuasive, beautifully-written article by Rosemary Goring entitled ‘We might not like it, but we have to abide by the Brexit vote’. But no, I don’t think we do. And those Bruce-ish spiders came to mind.

Just as it was with the referendum verdict of 2014, we must not deny it, we must not walk away from its consequences and, above all, we must learn respect for those who voted as we may not have wanted them to. But if – like me – you thought both majorities mistaken, then it’s time to store up more silk, wait for the right breeze and begin all over again.

Long ago, in the months of the Prague Spring, I had a colleague with a tattoo down his arm. A Slovak Jew, he had managed to escape from Auschwitz with the help of the Communist network there. But now his Party made him sarcastic – especially its rule of ‘democratic centralism’, which meant that the minority in any decision had to shut up and give total obedience to the majority. In the great reforms we both watched in Czechoslovakia in the year of 1968, that gagging rule was set aside - until the Russian tanks came and put it back.

My friend grinned and shook his head in disbelief, as one Communist dogma after another was pushed out of the way. ‘Die Welt dreht sich’ he would say, in his rusty German – ‘the world is turning’. Soviet Communism was supposed to be final, unchangeable. But now every two-legged spider in Bohemia and Moravia and Slovakia was trying to leap onto the spinning world and change everything.

The world is spinning again today. Nothing stays ‘done and dusted’. And what about that other cliché which proclaims this or that to be ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’?

John Smith said it sturdily about the devolution he didn’t live to see; Donald Dewar repeated it - though he did warn, drily and accurately, that devolution was a moving ’process’ and not a block of granite. After the independence referendum, some said that the Union was ‘the settled will’. But surely anyone can now see that Scotland’s will is absolutely unsettled. Nobody – well, nobody I know – wants back to pre-1999 Scottish Office rule. But is it to be independence or federation, devo max or Home Rule, out of the EU or getting back into it, a loyal Crown dominion or a socialist republic? The spider swings crazily. Where should it settle ?

Democracy in Britain, land without a constitution, has conventions rather than rules. How binding is a referendum, and how long – how many years – should pass before a new referendum campaign can respectably challenge the previous referendum’s verdict ? Nobody knows. ‘When the time is right’. What sort of answer is that? But it’s the only answer going.

The ‘UKanian’ power doctrine is still the daft old dogma that the Westminster Parliament is sovereign, not the people. So it can ignore any referendum it pleases. A referendum can fairly be argued to be ‘the voice of the people’. But ‘the people’ don’t officially exist, don’t figure, in the Anglo-British power-diagram which consists only of the Queen in the Westminster Parliament (including the House of Lords).

The mighty Victorian jurist A.V. Dicey was England’s 'Moses'. He laid down what he considered to be the law of the constitution. He insisted that ‘each successive generation from the reign of Edward I onwards has laboured to produce the complete political unity which is represented by the absolute sovereignty of the Parliament now sitting at Westminster’. He thought Home Rule for Ireland, let alone Scotland, was rubbish. So were votes for women. ‘Federalism’ for Britain was rubbish too. As an old man, he saw some point in referendums, but only as a right of veto to block ‘the unbounded power of a parliamentary majority’. Not to innovate.

So nobody, neither Moses nor Mrs May, can declare that a referendum is final. And yet instantly to reject its result is unwise, even insolent. It seems to me that English voters have been deceived into hurting grievously the country they love, but they voted with passion and so deserve respect.

Rosemary Goring writes that ‘unless and until there is a dramatic change in our status, we have no option but to make the best of the cards we have been dealt’. Well, one option would be to kick the card-table over and pull a gun on the dealer. How come England is holding all the aces? But we don’t do that stuff. So how about starting a different game?

This one is called ‘As If’. You don’t wait for the status to change. You act as if it had changed already. This is what Nicola Sturgeon is currently doing in Europe. Scotland, as a subordinate part of the United Kingdom, is not yet a free nation-state entitled to construct its own relationship with the EU. But Sturgeon is carrying on as if it already was. She’s playing a brave hand which, sooner or later, will be called and blocked by those unfair aces. And yet that sort of ‘as if’ leaves something behind. Scotland has acted like an independent nation, if only for a moment, and Europe will remember that. So will people both north and south of the Border.

In the last years before Communism fell apart, impatient Czechs, Poles and Hungarians said to each other: "Everything here is a fake. We have fake elections, fake parliaments, fake money and fake media. So let’s ‘do genuine’. Let’s start hollowing out spaces where we can meet and have real arguments, design a real economy, plan a clandestine radio station which tells real facts. Let’s act as if we were free already’."

And soon they were. In one of those spaces, in Gdansk, a few men and women from a shipyard decided to form a Free Trade Union of the Coast. ‘Let’s just behave as if we were a normal union in a free country’, they said. So they started a strike, which became tremendous, took the name of ‘Solidarity’ and changed European history.

Around us in Scotland, but not yet well reported, pockets of ‘as if’ are beginning to form. Alasdair Gray’s borrowed line has become famous: ‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’. But that is just what some people seem to be doing.

A month or so ago, I went to a packed meeting in Edinburgh at which the reform of urban land rights and property law was discussed. Not a protest meeting. Not the Council dutifully reporting to the lieges on rent control. Not the launch of a new ‘affordable city’ policy by a political party. This was simply citizens assembling to argue out a framework of better regulations and housing priorities and controls on developers.

It dawned on me that this was the old Yes campaign of 2014, still running. It was still asking ‘what sort of Scotland?’ - but now it was going on to model some of the answers to that question. Nobody spoke about legal limits on what this Scottish government might do. Nobody seemed to give a thought to whether a radically new housing and local finance policy might violate devolution frontiers. The speakers were talking, calmly enough, as if Scotland could already set about doing what was best for it.

Is this happening elsewhere, in other sectors? Are concerned people meeting after work in Dundee or Oban, to sketch out the details of what the health service of a future Scotland ought to be, or its secondary schooling, or its marginal farming? Here and there, I hear that they are.

Speculation about support for the next ‘indyref’ has revealed that some non-party ‘Yes’ groups are still active, still gathering at odd intervals to discuss events like Brexit or to draw blueprints of the future. I remember during the 2014 campaign a man in Fife saying to me: ‘You know, after this I just feel maybe we are independent already’.

The prospects for a second spider-swing referendum, to ‘complete 2014’, are not yet brilliant. But to start erecting the scaffolding of this new Scotland, to behave ‘as if’ you did indeed work in the early days of a better nation, is to ensure that those days will eventually come.