In Scotland, we need to appeal to people’s hearts, as well as their heads

I hate it when Labourlist’s Editor asks me to write about stuff where my response is emotional rather than analytical. This is one of those occasions.

The Scottish Independence Referendum is a very weird thing to watch from Oxfordshire.

On the one hand, it is “none of my business”, in that as an Englishman who has never lived more than a couple of miles north of the Thames I have no locus to interfere in how the Scots determine their future statehood.

On the other hand, it has everything to do with me because it proposes a fundamental change to the size, borders, nature, status and culture of the state I will be living in.

For family reasons (my great grandfather moved to Kent from Dumbarton in the 1920s) I was brought up to feel an emotional connection to Scotland, with my great grandparents’ house being full of Scottish kitsch ranging from books of clan tartans, music boxes playing Scottish songs, shortbread and strange Scottish fizzy drinks to tearful reactions from my grandmother and her sisters whenever they heard bagpipes. This bears zero relation to the real Scotland that millions of people actually live in, but this Scotland of nostalgia and imagination is part of the sense of who I was and where I came from that I was brought up with, so the idea of it belonging to another state and my family story becoming one of international not internal migration is one that hurts.

Similarly, because I grew up with a fairly obsessive interest in all things military, the role of Scots in British military history loomed large in my childhood thinking. I find it difficult to imagine that the Charge of the Scots Greys (called in a less PC time the Royal North British Dragoon Guards) at Waterloo as part of the Union Brigade (named thus because it also included English and Irish regiments) with the 92nd (Gordon) Highlanders clutching onto their stirrups, immortalised in Lady Elizabeth Butler’s painting “Scotland Forever!” might soon become part of another state’s history. Again, this is nothing to do with the reality of today’s Scotland, but it’s important to my sense of what my country’s history is.

Closer to reality, I am depressed by the idea that independence might mean people I grew up with in Labour Students, where in my generation Jim Murphy and Strathclyde University Labour Club and its neighbouring FE colleges were something akin to the Praetorian Guard, and who I look forward to seeing every year at Annual Conference and at by-elections, could soon only be attending Labour Party Conference as international visitors, not voting delegates.

And the things I am proudest about regarding the rump country I would be part of were all achieved by Scots and the rest of us working together: the NHS, trade unions, the welfare state, the Labour Party founded by a Scot, Keir Hardie, quite aside from the shared history of victory over Nazism in WW2.

That all that good shared history isn’t resonating enough with approximately half of Scots to make them want to stay in the UK means we have a problem of legitimacy even if we win the referendum. My hatred for the Thatcher governments is made even stronger by the realisation that getting the pit and steel mill and shipyard closures and the Poll Tax imposed on them by a government they did not vote for is at the root of Scottish disquiet with the UK. I would implore Scots to remember that the people fighting with them against Thatcher did not end at Hadrian’s Wall. This narrative is not helped by Owen Jones and others on the left presenting the Blair governments as a kind of lite continuation of Thatcherism with an equal disconnect with Scotland when in fact they were full of Scots, elected with enthusiastic Scottish support, and delivered a range of policies Scotland wanted, from devolution to the minimum wage to massive investment in public services.

The above are all emotional reasons to want a No victory next week, but given the Yes campaign is entirely based on emotion I see no reason why we should not also appeal to sentiment. Clearly the dry arguments about jobs and currency and interest rates have to be made – people need to make a informed decision when the entire future of their country is at stake – but we also need to appeal to people’s hearts as well as their heads. I don’t want to share my country with people who feel locked into a loveless marriage because they need to pay off the national equivalent of a mortgage, I want them to feel some kind of shared patriotism – love of country – about Britishness that over arches and doesn’t conflict with their Scottish, Welsh or English patriotism.

Ideologically, we are on a rather sticky wicket. Labour has always sided with Irish nationalism to the extent of not organising in Northern Ireland until very recently and still not running candidates against our nationalist sister party the SDLP. I am sure that there is a good though convoluted logic to why we are Unionists when it comes to Scotland but we were not in regard to Ireland but I haven’t thought of it yet. Similarly in international matters one of my guiding principles is the self-determination of peoples, so I support Jewish Statehood in Israel, I hope to see a Palestinian state alongside it, I want to see the Kurds and Tibetans achieve national liberation. I am left in the uncomfortable position of supporting Scotland’s right to independence whilst praying they decide not to exercise it.

I don’t buy the argument that we need to fear perpetual Tory government in the rump country minus Scotland. Labour is less dependent on Scottish votes and seats that people imagine. In terms of seats, the post devolution reduction in Scottish representation at Westminster to the same level pro rata as for England means the days of 50 Scottish Labour MPs are gone, even before you take into account the possibility of any losses to the SNP. Labour has 41 of 59 Scottish MPs so Independence would mean the gap between us and the combined other parties grows by 23 – problematic in a close election but not insurmountable and in fact in every election from 1979 to 2005 inclusive the same party would have won a majority with Scotland as without. In terms of vote share there is even less impact: the last couple of opinion polls show removing Scotland either narrows Labour’s lead by 1% or according to YouGov actually increases it by 2% as we are doing better in the rest of the UK.

The impact on Labour’s talent base for providing impressive government ministers would be bad though. I don’t want Labour to be deprived of Jim Murphy or Douglas Alexander. Scotland has persistently punched above its weight in recent Labour governments: imagine not having had Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, Robin Cook, John Reid, George Robertson or Donald Dewar as ministers, or John Smith as a key figure in Labour’s return to electability.

I don’t view the potential for Scottish independence as an apocalyptic thing. There are plenty of successful countries with a 5 million population, and even more successful countries with a population of 58 million like the rump UK will have. But the risks Scotland would face economically are well catalogued and the risks to the weight we all have collectively diplomatically and militarily in a very uncertain world are also huge. It all seems a messy distraction from the huge social, economic and security challenges the whole UK should be focused on tackling together.

To me the old-fashioned socialist idea that a working person in East London has more in common with a working person in East Glasgow than either has with David Cameron and his ilk is the bottom line – we have achieved and can again in future achieve great things together for the common good.

My sense is this referendum will narrowly support the Union for reasons of pragmatism and “better the devil you know”. That may be enough to win, but it is not good enough for a sustainable UK. If the UK hangs together those of us on the left need to deliver governments and outline a shared vision that make people across the UK proud of and idealistic about their shared country, as they were in 1945, not grudgingly tied to it by fear of the unknown.