Next week, Scotland may vote to end the 300-year union with England. If it happens, it won’t just change Scotland, but England as well, and there are legitimate fears than it will unleash ugly forces that will leave the remainder of the UK far less of a green and pleasant land.
Superficially, the removal of 60-odd Scottish seats from Parliament appears to benefit the Tories, who have barely existed as an electoral force north of the border for a generation. But it’s difficult to imagine the break-up of the United Kingdom not changing the political landscape south of the border. The possibility of England lurching to the right after Scottish independence is certainly possible but is by no means inevitable.
Another possibility is that it will provoke a backlash against the same forces that were seen as driving Scotland away from the UK, and are as true for Wales and the English regions. If the London-centric ruling elites are found guilty in the court of public opinion of destroying the union just to line their own pockets, there will be blood. Hopefully just metaphorical blood, but….
If we’d had electoral reform years ago we wouldn’t currently be facing the possibility of the break up of the UK. We would not have been electing governments who could afford to ignore entire regions of the country because a handful of marginal constituencies were all the mattered in elections. And we would not have been electing governments with a mandate to enact far-reaching and irreversible changes with the support of just 40% of the electorate.
I’m a former Liberal Democrat voter who’s currently politically homeless. I have always considered myself left-of-centre but I have never trusted the authoritarianism that was never far below the surface of the Labour Party. But, whatever Scotland decides next week, if Ed Miliband promises electoral reform as a manifesto commitment, he will have my vote.
This is a much more perceptive article than most of the mainstream media have managed. They have portrayed the Yes movement as the SNP, or “the Nationalists”. The truth is that if it had been only the SNP and only about nationalism then it would have been a walkover for No. Not even all the SNP voters are committed to independence. Many people voted them into power in the Scottish Parliament because they were seen as competent administrators.
Many Labour and some Lib Dem voters are voting Yes. However, the really interesting thing is how many people have become active who are totally outside normal party politics. The Yes campaign is genuinely grass roots, which makes it impossible to organise, control or discipline when things do go too far. The wider Yes movement is also far more radical than the SNP. All this is happening largely through social media. The mainstream press is overwhelmingly backing the No campaign, and I think it’s starting to dawn on some papers that they are now utterly irrelevant to politics in Scotland. The campaign has left them howling on the sidelines, ignored and mocked.
Although I voted yes in the end it was with mixed feelings. I tried to explain them in this article.
http://claro2.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/being-british/
I think (I hope not just wishfully that your second possibility is more likely. As George Monbiot writes in The Guardian today, the YES vote, even if it is just in the minority, represents a triumph of ordinary people against the massed NO of the Media and the Establishment. Will not the Scots inspire greater participation in politics by the English and Welsh? If so, it will be up to parties of The Left, whoever you include in that, to seize the moment.