I’ve just watched a passionate, informed debate about politics taking place on a street corner between three ordinary people. I’ve never seen that before. I should be thrilled, but instead I’m not. Why?
That debate followed the first bad language and bad feeling I’ve personally witnessed while following campaigners from both sides of the Scottish independence debate around in Glasgow and Lanarkshire. I was with two ‘Yes’ activists, Jim Flynn and Neil Molloy, in Kelvin today, watching them delivering leaflets to residents of the gorgeous tenement blocks near the river.
Most of those who opened the door were friendly: a Green ‘Yes’ voter, a cheery young mother backing independence, a woman leaning to ‘No’ who was happy to chat for 10 minutes whether freedom from Westminster really was all that, and a couple of men who said that ‘whatever you tell me or put through my door, you won’t change my mind. I’m voting no’. Another said ‘I’m saving my country from you’, but that was as bad as it got on the doorstep.
But just before we walked up another flight of steps into another tenement, a young woman crossed the road in front of us. She saw the ‘Yes’ slogans on the T-shirts Jim and Neil had pulled on, their ‘Yes’ bags and ‘Yes’ leaflets, disappearing into the block of flats. I was lingering on the pavement, Yes-less, but clearly with the activists. And then she looked at me, and said ‘fucking get out of my way’. A few steps down the street, she turned back and told me I was ‘scum’.
Then she came back, just as the campaigners were leaving the block. She wanted to know what their reasons were for campaigning for ‘Yes’, she said, visibly upset, bristling a little. Her baby was upset too, but she stayed to talk to Jim and Neil, telling them that her family’s jobs were at risk because of independence. She said she was ‘always crying’ after people questioned whether, as someone with an English accent who has lived here ever since university, she should have an opinion on this. She’d had ‘Yes’ campaigners tell her that the ‘No’ balloon her little boy was carrying was the ‘wrong balloon’ and that he needed a ‘positive balloon’, trying to hand her one with ‘Yes’ on. She now doesn’t wear ‘No’ badges. ‘No-one does,’ she said, claiming she’d been shouted at, and insulted as she went about her day.
They didn’t just talk about the identity debate that is splitting Scotland whether or not it goes for independence. They talked about jobs, pensions, currency, promises. All three of those people on the pavement knew what they were talking about and were passionate about it. Well, Jim was passionate about it, but he spent more time pulling amusing faces at the baby to keep him from sobbing while Neil and the ‘No’ voter chatted.
So here’s the funny thing. Since I arrived in Glasgow yesterday, that upset young woman is the only abuse I’ve personally seen. I’ve clearly been in the wrong places for abuse as I chose to follow campaigners around rather than attend all the set piece events, but the rest has all been second hand anecdote. I’ve had taxi drivers who are voting ‘No’ tell me they’ve been accused of being paedophiles and told to get out of their cab to ‘discuss it properly’. I’ve been told by ‘No’ campaigners that they’ve been followed by ‘Yes’ campaigners who film their exchanges with voters.
Jim and Neil were as charming, informed and respectful as the ‘No’ campaigners I followed yesterday, but though they expressed their frustration with some of the campaigners who don the same T-shirts as them, there is a problem here. The bullies might not represent the ‘Yes’ campaign, but they’re hardly being condemned by those at the top. Whenever Alex Salmond is asked about allegations of intimidation, or instances where politicians have been heckled and threatened, he has insisted that this has been on the whole a positive and civilised campaign. But he never goes further and condemns anyone in a ‘Yes’ T-shirt who is letting the side down. Perhaps he feels he needs those activists too much, or perhaps he thinks the ‘No’ camp are sitting in a greenhouse chucking stones at the roof when they make these allegations. Perhaps he thinks that by ignoring the allegations, he can stop them gaining credence. That would be easier if so many of them hadn’t been filmed by the media thronging around politicians and campaigners.
But it’s not just a failure to condemn. It’s the language Salmond himself uses. ‘Team Scotland’ means you’re a ‘Yes’ voter in Salmond’s world. He uses the term himself. If you’re ‘No’, you’re not on ‘Team Scotland’. Your patriotism is lacking. You’re not a real Scot. He fails to condemn and encourages that dangerous identity game that lesser men than he then play on the streets. They let down people like Jim and Neil and all the Yes Kelvin activists I met this morning, who are charming (if wrong about the benefits of independence).
What came first, the chicken or the egg? This morning in Kelvin, the verbal abuse I saw was something that had been incubated by the behaviour of others. And the problem is that though everyone seems desperate now for this campaign to be over, the divisions that have arisen from it won’t just seal up again on Thursday. They are a grotesque shadow to the enthusiasm and engagement that everyone has been so thrilled by during this referendum campaign. And whatever the result, Scottish politicians and voters need to work out how to move on. And that will require a dramatic change in behaviour from Salmond.
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