Scottish independence through the eyes of some ‘familiar faces’
Gordon Brown first waded into the controversies of Scottish devolution as a 24 year old with his Red Paper , a radical engagement with the phenomenon of nationalism. Today he returns to the subject, again out-flanking quite a few in his party with his prescription for how far devolution should go.
It’s much closer to Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont’s views than those of some senior Scottish Labour MPs. Gordon Brown has pitched in at the “max’ier” end of the devolution market and that is bound to have an effect on what Labour eventually offers as its alternative to independence.
I didn’t get to chat to Gordon Brown, but I have just recorded some chats with some of the other most familiar faces of the decades long argument over Scotland’s constitutional status. They coined some of the most memorable phrases of that debate: George Robertson, Jim Sillars, Tam Dalyell and Gordon Wilson. I asked them, with six months to go, what they make of the epic referendum campaign so far and if they stand by their own much-quoted thoughts from the past.
Tam Dalyell famously said in the run-up to the failed 1979 referendum on devolution that a Scottish Assembly would be a “motorway to independence with no exits”. Meeting him at his ancestral home, The Binns, looking out to Rosyth, he still holds that was pretty good prophecy given that the SNP run Holyrood and have been a vote-gobbling machine in recent years. But he now thinks there could be an exit and says he’s a bit less pessimistic. He also thinks that Alex Salmond himself, deep down, probably doesn’t want full independence and is perfectly comfortable doing his current job.
Jim Sillars used to debate Tam Dalyell in a combative double-act touring Scotland during the 1979 referendum. He’s now in the SNP, no great ally of Alex Salmond, and says the first minister does show signs of being in the Holyrood bubble. But Jim Sillars is convinced his old sparring partner Tam Dalyell is wrong and that the passion for full independence still burns strongly in Mr Salmond.
Back in 1992 he slammed the Scots as “90 minute patriots” who didn’t translate their passion in the football terraces into politics. After a depressing, flat start to the “yes” campaign he thinks there’s now electricity around and says he’s 100 per cent convinced Scotland will grasp independence in September. He’s the most active of the old stagers in this referendum, giving regular speaker meetings and with a new book, “In Place of Fear II” hot off the presses.
When Scotland was offered devolution a second time in 1997, George Robertson boasted that it would kill nationalism “stone dead.” Even with the once unimaginable SNP dominance of Holyrood, he believes that his prophecy will yet come true. He predicts defeat for the “yes” campaign and tough times ahead as the party falls into internal feuding.
We found a clip of him debating the 1979 move in a TV studio with Alex Salmond in which Lord Robertson says that Holyrood, even if it had an SNP government, would not be able to call a referendum on independence. He was technically right but London felt it couldn’t sit on the reserve powers given the size of the SNP majority and the manifesto commitment so we have a referendum approaching which many in the SNP leadership didn’t expect right now.
That’s why Alex Salmond’s immediate predecessor as leader of the SNP, Gordon Wilson, gave the “yes” campaign a mark of three out of 10 for its first efforts. He feels his successors at the top of the party have been sucked in by running their departments in Holyrood, have been sucked into managerial stuff and what he calls “mogadon politics”.
He feels the campaign’s picked up more recently but that victory is still only “possible not probable”. For those, like George Robertson, convinced the Scots will have had enough and will want the whole thing put to bed if there’s a “no” vote, Gordon Wilson warns that after initial depression the issue will be back in “five to ten years”.
You can hear their thoughts in the report above.
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