A Letter to my Niece, about Scotland

Dear R

The Referendum on 18th September will be your first ever vote. So it's a good opportunity to find out about how politics works. I mean how it really works, not the theory.

You can see a good example of how it works in the "Plan B" issue that has been top of the news this week and last. As you know, this is about Scotland and the pound.

Alastair Darling asked Alex Salmond 20 times, during the infamous TV debate "What is your Plan B?" 

In interviews and statements, Mr Darling and his BT colleagues have focused on the "lack of a Plan B." And now there is a poster campaign about the lack of a "Plan B."

What is going on?

Mr Darling is a clever politician. He knows that it is relatively easy to make people worried. You just have to find out what scares people - so he and his team will have been surveying and questioning people to find that out. And they will have discovered that (as Bill Clinton said) "it's the economy, stupid" that most people are concerned about. So they have picked something big and obvious like "the pound in your pocket" (these are favourite politicians' phrases - hence the inverted commas), and a catchy phrase about "Plan B." This is propaganda.

Propaganda just means information that is used to persuade people of a point of view, or to act in a particular way. It has been used for good and for bad through history, and comes in every flavour, shape and size. The "Plan B" campaign is a good example:

How Do I Know It's Not Butter?

You can check whether or not something you hear, read or see is propaganda. Here are some easy tests:

Is this stuff everywhere?

Effective propaganda is widespread - so you can expect to see it everywhere. You'll see it in Facebook and on Twitter, in the newspapers, on the TV and in adverts in the street. "Commentators" will talk about it, long and often. "Analysts" will appear to, er, analyse it. Propaganda works when it is everywhere.

Are you feeling emotional?

Propaganda is often designed to make you feel emotional. So emotional that you stop being rational. I hope that you never live through an era when there is the worst type of propaganda - that which engenders hatred - but you may feel twinges of fear or anger. The "Plan B" story makes people worried, and that may be enough to trigger them to vote "safely" for the status quo.

Is someone trying to make me do something?

All through history propaganda has been used to make people do stuff. Before you were born, Mrs Thatcher created a war with Argentina over a tiny archipelago of islands called the Malvinas. I remember standing in Charing Cross Station in London seeing the Sun newspaper headlines about the "Argies" and realising that I was in the middle of a propaganda campaign. The Government wanted me to feel that Argentina was our enemy. But I knew that Argentina had for years been a friend of the UK. There was and is a huge population of Britons there - I think it has the largest population of Welsh-origin people in the world (I mean, more than are in Wales!) But the newspapers, the TV, the radio, were full of bad stuff about the "Argies." This was propaganda.

Look the other way, at the stuff they are not saying

If you think you are being fed propaganda, look the other way. Think about the stuff that is NOT being talked about. Politicians often try to hypnotise us - like rabbits in the headlights - and the "Plan B" campaign is just such a trick. BT are shouting about the lack of a "Plan B" but they are NOT talking about, well, everything else! They are NOT talking about the health service, or poverty in Scotland, or the £4bn-per-year Trident missile, or making a fairer society, or free university education, or… 

Get the idea? Propaganda tries to grab your attention. Turn away, and think.

Think it through, for yourself

What happens when you think it through for yourself? Can you see the flaws? Walk through, in your mind, what would happen if Scotland voted Yes on 18th September. There would be a massive negotiation afterwards. England would want some oil, Scotland would want rid of the Trident nuclear bombs, England would want access to Scottish fishing grounds, Scotland would want a currency union on the pound… It would all be negotiated.

What the politicians are doing now is they are preparing themselves for that negotiation. They are trying to get into the best position to negotiate with the winning side. Scotland can use the pound if it wishes - it's an international tradeable currency and can be used anywhere in the world. But the Scottish Government wants more; it wants a currency union. Darling knows this, so he is making it hard to get. Salmond is also focusing on the pound because he wants the voters to support Scotland's demand for currency union. No-one is admitting to any Plan B, Plan C or Plan D because to do so would look like weakness in the negotiations that will follow the vote.

When I think it through for myself, and look away from the propaganda I see Scotland's poor. I know we could have a better Scotland in which the poor are not abandoned. That's why I want a Yes vote.

And This, Too?

And you'll have worked out the logical conclusion. It's all propaganda. This letter included. 

So what do you do? Think for yourself! How do you want your country to be governed, in your lifetime? (You know my answer!)

Love

C

The Catalan Question

We are "a party divided" no longer "united in our diversity."

The words of Pere Navarro, leader of the PSC (Partit dels Socialistes del Catalunya, http://www.socialistes.cat/) in his resignation speech earlier this month.

The cause of his sudden departure? The Catalan Question, mainly. The nationalist movement here is led by the left. As a result the PSC, the mainstream socialist party, has haemorrhaged votes to the nationalist left. Like Gordon Brown in Scotland, the PSC has tried to outline a federal future, but like Mr Brown's version it sounds neither clear nor likely. Voters are not buying it.

The Catalan Question is dominating Madrid politics. Our new king, Phillip VI, made an oblique reference to it in his coronation speech on Thursday. The Catalan Question seems more important in Madrid, than the Scottish Question is in Westminster.

In part this is because of different ideas of nation and thus nationalism, defined here by language, by street protest, by youth participation in Assembleas and Casals. Catalonia has suffered from a history, still in living memory, of bloody oppression.

The images of the nation are different, too; there is no equivalent here of the postcard-packaged image of Scotland (castles, lochs and kilts). Catalonia is harder to package.

Language is central to the debate. In the village in which I live almost everyone speaks Catalan. Our kids go to school in Catalan: a teacher in Mallorca has just finished a hunger strike as part of a mass protest against the imposition of Castellano in state schools there. Catalan is the starting point in any debate. Open your mouth and we know which side you are likely to be on. Harder to do that in Scotland.

We have a generation of protesters to rely on. At the village festas, and most other mass events you'll see a busy wee stand, the Catalan Senyera fluttering, surrounded by a group of older people talking animatedly. This is the Assemblea Nacional Catalana (ANC, https://assemblea.cat/), the campaign of signatures for a referendum. The ANC volunteers are, many of them, people who were case-hardened under the 'porres' (batons) of the oppressive Guardia Civil under General Franco. There have been hilarious scenes at demonstrations of the modern police trying to move them on, caught between respect for the elderly, and their orders.

Protest seems much more natural here. People fly the Estellada (Catalan independence flag) at every Barcelona FC match. We couldn't understand why Alex Salmond was criticised for doing the equivalent when Andy Murray won Wimbledon.  Extraordinary numbers of people here join the mass protests. For the Via Catalana http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_Way) 1.6 million people held hands along 480km of our coastline on 11 September 2013.

The great gasping maw of a difference is that in Scotland you can vote. Here, we can't. The Madrid Government refuses to give the Catalans a vote, and both the main parties agree. Artur Mas, Catalan President, has laid plans including ordering 6,000 ballot boxes for the referendum he plans to hold on 9 November.

But Madrid will not allow Catalans to vote and refuses all talk of a referendum. We can expect a summer of discontent followed by an autumn of protest, with the 11^th September, Catalan national day, a special focus.

The Catalans will celebrate their day just one week before the people of Scotland vote for their independence.  We’ll be watching, with envy.

Power Corrupts...

We've hit an interesting point, politically and historically, in the referendum campaign for Scotland. Catalonia and any other place with pretensions to separate will hit the same point sooner or later.

It's the conundrum of power.

Politicians from the three main parties at Westminster have said in the last three weeks that Scotland cannot be independent and 'keep' the pound, join the EU, share intelligence and safeguard pensions. We can expect more of this, and we'll be told that we can't have the BBC, the Queen and fish from our seas.

Which illustrates one half of the conundrum. Because these assets are ours. The pound, the pension insurance schemes and the Beeb are (currently) the property of all UK citizens.

But when a politician from Westminster says we can't have them he (it is always a man) is saying "These assets are mine, not yours. I say who gets them. Not you." He is underlining exactly why a country would want to separate - to win back the control it thought it had over its assets. The people who vote Yes in September are saying "No, not yours. These assets are owned by the people."

What else can a Westminster politician say? His or her only strategy is to say to the Scottish children "We'll take back our sweeties. Even if they are half sucked." And the minute she or he says that they are caught in the conundrum of power, trapped into admitting that these assets that we believed were owned by the people are in fact under the sole and absolute control of Westminster. Politically, it's checkmate.

Could it be different?

A little humility would be good. To say, for example, that thanks to all that Scottish ship-building in the 19th century, and those Scottish financial brains, and the steam engine, the television, golf and football and Silicon Glen and Charles Rennie Macintosh and Iain Banks and James VI and the Scottish regiments and..., that thanks in fair part to Scotland's contribution we have all these lovely assets. And we would now like to work out how better we might share them with the five million who live in Scotland. To accept that politicians are servants of the people, not key-holders of the Crown jewels.

But Westminster politicians are locked into the conundrum of power. They will not offer humility, nor power sharing. 

Everyone who votes Yes on 18 September, is saying "no" to the arrogance of Westminster.