Serious and not serious – Bella Caledonia

There's an iconic scene in The West Wing where President Bartlett, as his re-election campaign approaches, is given a lecture by Toby Ziegler, his communications director, on the real purpose of the upcoming campaign.

He warns his candidate against pretending to be lightweight and popular. You are a heavyweight. Make this campaign an engaged campaign and not a serious one and an educated campaign and not an educated one.

To which Martin Sheen responds that he does not want to be killed.

This scene jumped out at me because one of my other summer pursuits had been reading Tim Shipman’s trilogy (so far) on the British Conservative government and Brexit. As I read, I wondered what a group of essentially frivolous and unserious people had been in sole charge of the UK’s national destiny since 2015 until the other day. Even before the patent and predictable absurdities of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, there was a sense that people like Theresa May and David Davis acted in a completely theatrical way in government and in negotiations with the bemused adults in charge of the European countries, that the people who ran Britain were profoundly and patently unserious about who they were, what they were doing, and who they claimed to represent.

This was the general context in which post-referendum Scottish politics took place. Let’s be honest, every day seemed a gift to the independence argument. And yet, stubbornly, the polls never budged – we seemed stuck with a referendum that had been numerically clear but culturally indecisive. And many on our side of the binary dialectic believed very sincerely that with one more push, the independence argument would achieve the weight of electoral certainty. Mandates were claimed and Nicola Sturgeon’s seriousness compared to the ridiculous corruption of her British opponents seemed clear.

And yet

It was abundantly clear, in electoral terms, that after the SNP’s semi-disaster in the 2017 general election, any talk of reviewing the 2014 referendum was purely performative from the top of the nationalist movement (including Alec Salmond’s thankfully aborted attempts) and wishful thinking from below. The political trap we fell into, it is now clear, was taking far too seriously what we felt or pretended to feel – which was something that nearly happened in September 2014.

Looking back on the referendum campaign now, it was only once, on a Sunday morning in September 2014, when I happened to bump into one of the serious campaigners (not from the SNP, in this case), that I heard anyone seriously say that they thought the Yes side would win.

That same day, while I was doing a Get Out the Vote performative campaign in a hard-to-reach building in my neighborhood – where even on the 18thth In September, it seemed like a lot of people were hearing that something was happening that day. I went into a storage room to restock on leaflets and standing there all alone was Nicola Sturgeon, someone I had admired for years, by the way, and with whom I had never had a one-on-one conversation where there weren't a lot of people around.

And what did I do with this dramatic opportunity? Did I say anything encouraging or optimistic? Well, her face told me not to. Her face, as drawn and tired as I had ever seen it until the day she quit, told me to get out of here quickly. So I did.

And of course, I now draw a line from that moment of September 18th.th 2014, when I knew we had lost, and I knew she knew we had lost, until March 28, 2023, when we definitively lost her and the campaign she ran for.

It was the end of an era in Scotland, but it was also the end of a performance. Let’s be clear, we were NEVER going to win for Yes in 2014. And the period that followed, when we were faced with a deeply unserious British government, with Brexit, Covid and Cakeism, fooled some of us – okay, okay, me – into thinking that the British project was surely over and that we in Scotland would soon find ourselves in need of a lifeboat for democracy, social justice, dealing with the climate emergency and the movement of people it would cause, and well, SERIOUSLY!

We now find ourselves at a time that both demands a little honesty and, let's be honest, gives us a little time. The question remains whether Starmer and others The 2011-2023 referendums are in fact serious people, or just performatively serious people. (I have very much appreciated the pragmatic attitude recently displayed by opportunistic and performative fascists on the internet about their cynical manipulations during the recent riots.) It is entirely possible to reinterpret the 2011-2023 wave of referendums as themselves performative, themselves unserious. That we were doing our tartan act in a Trumpian spectacle of populist pretension. That the historic role of the SNP, which exists to pressure Labour from the left (which was always why I voted for them from 1987 onwards), was still in fact the only game in town. That we live in an extractive economy, not just in terms of hydrocarbons, but in terms of extracting British government spending (including devolution) to compensate for the devastation of our real industries. And so the independence debate was just a blip that didn't really change anything.

After all, the Blairs are back in charge of Britain (according to one interpretation) and Democrats in the US have abandoned the basic, Trump-like unseriousness of Joe Biden to actually tackle the racial and gender issues that have seriously defined American political culture since Clinton and especially Obama.

So, are we now in a predicament, having tried the Humza and Green coalition experiment, back in the safe hands of John Swinney, awaiting developments in the real world inside the M25? Do the events of the last month (as I write) – the ejection of the fascist boil in inchoate reaction to the horror of Southport – mark a moment for the British government to get serious, and therefore for us to get serious about what to actually try to DO about devolution? Is new realism the only option in town right now?

Honestly, seriously, I don’t know yet. I think we have changed, that this is not the same kind of Scotland that it was ten or twenty years ago (not to mention the exclusive assumptions of the Scotland I grew up in). Will the SNP reinvent itself enough that we will actually want to vote FOR it in 2026 as a new government, rather than half-heartedly limiting itself to a future defined by nothing better? Or will it sink further into the lack of seriousness that has characterised it for some time now? Will the British Labour Party deliver, despite the doubts that I have and know, based on the best historical grounds? Again, no one really knows at the moment. And I don’t think that sniggering before you’ve set foot under the cabinet table is a wise cultural or political decision, however justified it may be.

But a serious program to address serious problems might be a start.