Cat Boyd: I'm a socialist and believe in independence

I’m from an Irish-Catholic background and grew up in Lanarkshire, so my experience of life isn’t particularly unique for the west of Scotland. My grandparents were miners and domestics, but my parents benefited from free education, good housing and post-war social mobility. Like lots of others from the same background, they worked in the public sector, were card-carrying members of the Labour Party and read the Herald every day.

Like any good teenager, I railed against this new type of Scottish middle class. I was politicised by the illegal invasion of the war in Iraq. Days after my 18th birthday, Baghdad lit up orange with ‘Shock and Awe’. So, my memory of that Blair government represented something very different than it did for my parents’ generation.

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Fewer wage guarantees and devolution, more war crimes and the murderous complicity of centre-leftism. I joined Stop the War Coalition, an organisation I still support and defend today.

When it became clear that independence would be a major part of Scottish life after the SNP victory in 2011, I set up the Radical Independence campaign alongside others from the anti-war movement.

Our arguments for a Scotland freed from NATO, the monarchy and the current economic system dominating the globalised West were not particularly popular at the time. But, in 2014 RIC maintained that independence was an issue of social class, and it was the richest who were voting No.

After 2014, myself and a minority of socialists realised that the SNP would now consolidate the working-class vote, and would, like their New Labour predecessors, sit on those voters and take them for granted. This risked crushing the positive energy of the independence movement. I stood as a candidate for an outsider, newly formed left-wing party: once more, popularity wasn’t our strong suit.

But truthfully, politics has never been my all-encompassing passion. I’m also studying Creative Writing at Glasgow University, writing mostly poetry and making films and art. It’s my sanctuary from an activist life that I wasn’t really cut out for.

Since 2016, on both a political and personal level, my ideas about the world have changed, particularly on things like identity politics. But I’m still a socialist, and I still believe in independence, just not the version of it espoused by our current government.

What’s the point in being independent if NATO controls your foreign policy, the European Union controls social policy and the Bank of England makes the economic decisions? That’s no kind of independence at all. I’m not a member of any left-wing group any longer and I feel free to express myself as I wish.

My daughter was born at the nadir of the 2022 strike wave, and it forced me to face the political landscape with hope again. Nick Cave once described hope as ‘having optimism with a broken heart’: it might be the wisest motto I've heard.

Occasionally, I’m not really sure what I think. I refuse to be part of the Outrage-Industrial Complex. Hopefully, you’ll find a sense of intellectual curiosity over ideological certainty in my columns. Too much is lost when everyone feels they must be right all the time.

A few years back, I had a weekly column in another newspaper and each piece was charged with a righteous anger that I just can’t afford today. Anger is an important energy, but not at the expense of sanity or tenderness.

Today, I’m a much softer person by virtue of experience, through loss and psychological pain, but also through learning that true, meaningful connections, like solidarity, are forged when I let my guard down a little, show humility, have self-doubt, forgive others and try to believe, however difficult it might be, that people I disagree with genuinely think they’re trying to do the right thing. I write everything in good faith, and I hope you can read it that way too.

READ CAT BOYD TOMORROW