Kevin McKenna: Scots grasped independence but the SNP dropped it

They had originally wanted this to be an official hustings event, with designated speakers from both Yes and No. Yet, despite having tried to reach out to the respective organising groups, they had not been given the courtesy of a reply and so had simply decided to hold their own event.

The lack of response from the official campaigns seemed to typify the manifest failure of Scotland’s political classes – over several generations - to address the class-based problems in places like Govan. Several were survivors of male violence, but with families to raise and protect, they’d had little time to dwell on their traumas, save for the kinship of an organisation such as Tea in the Pot.

Most of these Govan women were politically non-aligned and possessed none of the connections that might have elicited a response to their original requests. Yet, they had a solid grasp of the big issues in the independence campaign and were asking all the same questions as the print and broadcast media: could we afford independence; what would our relationship with England be afterwards; would independence give communities like theirs a better chance of sharing in Scotland’s affluence?

Their debate was of a gold standard. There was no grandstanding and none of them were trying to become legends in their own lunchtimes. It proceeded with elegance and dignity.

Pro-independence campaigners along with MSP's march through the streets of Edinburgh to Carlton Hill in 2013 (Image: Stewart Attwood)

Put simply: these women, like many other working-class people across Scotland, had found their voices during the independence campaign and discovered – often joyously – that they were at least as well-informed and articulate as the professionals and the activists. That sound we could hear across the land was of an entire class of people celebrating their own eloquence and – for the first time in their lives – daring to hope that positive change was coming down the line.

Unsurprisingly, most of them were sympathetic to the idea of Scotland being an independent country. The Yes campaign had resonated much more than Better Together in working-class communities like this because, well … life for them had manifestly not been better together in a Union with England. It wasn’t that they were ardent Nationalists: just that the prospect of independence didn’t scare them. How could it? It’s not as if they were bathing in milk and honey under Westminster rule.

As it became clear though, that people who’d been detached from mainstream politics, were now finding their voices it brought forth a disdainful response from the Scottish Labour party and the Conservative establishment. For the purposes of defeating independence, these two had become close allies, but it was Scottish Labour who had sold the greater part of their souls.

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Along with far too many of my journalistic colleagues in the political lobby they began to create a rather wretched and spurious narrative. This suggested that the Yes vote was rising on a tide of nastiness and ignorance which was leading to division and all manner of beastly behaviour. Some commentators began to describe these people as Zoomers, simply because they didn’t express themselves as smoothly and bloodlessly as the professionals.

But let’s be honest here: those who self-identify as political savants, whether they be journalists or politicians, like to think of themselves as being the sole arbiters of political taste and who alone can interpret policy for the masses. Their jobs, quite literally, depend on this. The only rising tides (apart from the Yes vote) were the levels of panic among the political elites at seeing many thousands of people becoming engaged for themselves and being just as well-informed.

And so, Better Together resorted to Project Fear in which they portrayed Scotland as a backward, Third World Nation populated by excitable savages and which would always need the civilising hand of Westminster. When Jim Murphy, Labour’s hapless leader was pelted by an egg (maybe two) in Shawlands he seemed ready to call in UN peacekeepers. Someone should have told him that in some of Glasgow’s edgier arrondissements being pelted with eggs is akin to foreplay.

A few weeks later, in the early hours of September 19 it had become clear that the No side had won. And on the steps of the BBC Scotland’s headquarters at Pacific Quay I witnessed the most sickening scenes of the entire campaign. A group of Labour politicians were celebrating as though they’d won the National Lottery. Margaret Curran, tribune of the old Labour aristocracy was skipping down the steps like a woman greeting her husband after a 20-year stretch in the pokey. Labour and Tories making common cause just as they’ve done ever since.

Jim Murphy led the campaign against Scottish independence (Image: PA)

Just one week before this, I’d briefly allowed myself to believe that Scotland would grasp her shot at independence. I’d been invited to accompany Alex Salmond and his senior aides on a helicopter tour of north-east Scotland, calling in at Dundee, Aberdeen and Inverness. Mr Salmond had just been informed of a Sunday Times poll putting Yes ahead in the polls for the first time since the start of the campaign.

Yet, even in the euphoria of the moment he’d expressed caution and wondering aloud if this was a ruse designed to shake some Unionists out of their complacency and to spark one last gigantic push for the British Empire. A few days later, Glaswegians were treated to the bizarre spectacle of dozens of English C-list celebrities disembarking at Central Station and walking up Buchanan Street to tell us that they loved us: they really really did: supercilious weapons that they were.

Incidentally, if you require any evidence that the political elites always fail upwards, look no further than Blair McDougall, Better Together’s campaign chief.

This chap presided over a voting collapse on a scale few could previously have imagined. In little more than a year and with the serried ranks of the UK media, armed services, Big Business and the banking sector behind them Better Together lost more than 20 percentage points. In July, he became a Labour MP on £91,000 a year.

My own journey from No to Yes had proceeded uncertainly throughout the course of 2013 as Westminster’s rhetoric around austerity betrayed a thorough contempt for working-class communities. Labour’s genteel and utterly feckless grandees then offered little in the way of resistance.

The Yes campaigns balloon eventually burst (Image: PA)

I concluded that such was the grip of the hard-right and their ethnic exceptionalism over English politics that the only way Labour could ever regain power would be to become like the Tories. I could never be considered the most stalwart or committed of Scottish nationalists but at least, I thought, independence would give us the opportunity of making something better, despite all the risks and unanswered questions.

One year later, on the day after the 2015 UK election, Nicola Sturgeon stood in front of the Forth Road Bridge with her 56 MPs. “We will not let you down: that is a promise,” she told us. But in the ten years that followed, they’ve done nothing but let us down.

I remember talking to Kevin Pringle, then the party’s Communications Chief, at an event in Edinburgh later that same evening to celebrate the SNP’s success.

“Congratulations,” I said, “independence can only now be a matter of when not if.”

Mr Pringle though, was a little subdued. “I don’t know an awful lot about some of these people,” he said. Well, he kens noo. And if he really was harbouring doubts about the pedigree of some of them, then it seems his caution was entirely justified.

Many of them failed miserably in “standing up for Scotland” and succeeded only in embarrassing the country by pursuing Nicola Sturgeon’s obsession with identity politics as a means of masking their inability to improve the lives of the majority of their fellow citizens.

They drove out thousands of activists and supporters who helped put them in Westminster. These included many feminists whose sacrifices had created the opportunity for Ms Sturgeon and her devotees to become politicians.

Ten years ago, Scotland and its people were alive with the possibility of reclaiming her status as an independent nation.

Everything seemed possible and we should cherish those memories. For, owing to the narcissism and foolishness of the SNP, it’s the nearest we’ll ever get to an independent Scotland in this generation or the next.