This election is, in practice, the second referendum on Scottish separation from the United Kingdom.
It is also the people’s election, the ‘people’s vote’ for independence – and the alternative ‘people’s vote’ for union.
The dream of oneness
It’s easy to understand – and to identify with – the attractions of independence: the anarchic; the fresh; the opportunity; the new; the shrugging off of old clothes; the thrill of change; the setting of values, the spice of the scent of scorched earth; the framing of ourselves as we would wish to be seen – and perhaps as we would wish to be.
It is equally easy to understand the attraction of the monoculture: living with people who think the same, see the same; who respond to the same cultural prompts, share values, language, heritage, humour, taste; who bond against a perceived common enemy.
This is the dream of oneness, of exclusivity, of unchallenged ease, of intuitive and mutual understanding, of a common cause, a common rhythm, a moving as one – fundamentally this is the dream of belonging.
The trouble with this sort of dream is that it cannot be realised. It exists only in myth.
There is no enduring oneness. There are comings together in specific moments of oneness – which are real and true – just inevitably temporary. The joy of these moments is, ironically, the joy of recognition of union, the intriguing shock of the fleeting compatibility of the different.
Individuals – people, are not consistent because they change and grow, for better or worse. They change in adaptive response to the context in which they find themselves – which itself changes in response to so vast a fluent combination of external factors that it is uncontrollable.
Yet the dream of a monoculture is a dream – a fantasy – of enduring oneness, sameness and control. And life resists that compression because it is so various, so elusive, so fleeting – and so frustrating.
The political enactment of a monoculture can therefore only be fascist: centrally controlled, forcibly shaping, requiring uniformity, resistant to difference – offended by it and finally, intolerant, destructive of it.
Life is richer lived more loosely than that.
In the extreme, ISIS is an attempt to realise the dangerous dream of oneness. In saying this there is no intent to offend nationalist or separatist sensibilities – simply to state a fact.
The positivity of difference
The alternative is not a competing dream but an acceptance of the worth of the inescapable reality of difference, of variety, of otherness.
This is about recognising the value of inclusivity, of largeness, of the revelations born of disagreement, of creative conflict, of collegiality, of teamwork, of relishing difference, of being curious in learning from the other, of sharing responsibilities according to relative strengths.
Anyone who has strategically built a good team and anyone who has had the privilege of working in one knows the incomparable calibre of what it can produce, what it can do – because each member is different from any other, often radically so.
Together they cover the options, with no weak links. Like a good orchestra on song, they lift experience and achievement beyond what the best playing of the best single instrument can reach.
Good teams, like healthy bodies need the irritation of fibre in the gu;t and need both acid and alkali. A masked monoculture – a diet of a wide variety of acid foods – is still an unbalanced and unhealthy body.
Even a good team is not easy or comfortable. Difference is difference. There are passionate arguments, huffs, departures, replacements, returns – but in the end a well constructed and focused team will come good.
When that happens there is no exhilaration like it, because the team has not only won, it has defeated the greatest enemy of all – the seductive cultural incest of the myth of oneness.
Plurality is always healthier, its gene pool more robust, its capacities more numerous and more various.
The alternative ‘people’s vote’
In the independence referendum campaign not one politician [George Galloway came closest], not one political party spoke for the Union, spoke of its core worth, attempted to offer any vision of its renewal.
In the current election campaign the same thing is happening.
We are unfortunate to live in a time of machine-made political minnows who can speak of nothing outside a parroted parti-pris scripted mundanity.
But because those who ought to be able to speak of it and for it – and who ought to understand its need, like any organism, to change and grow, are today unable to do any of these things, it does not mean that the concept of union has no place in our continuing political life; and can be binned with impunity.
The unity of otherness, of difference in a good team is of incomparable value and is unquestionably worth commitment, worth fighting for, worth voting for and worth renewing.
The United Kingdom as it is today is anachronistic, tired, shabby, mutually disrespectful, factional, fractured, fractious, conniving against itself.
That does not mean that it ought to be shrugged off like old clothes.
It is an ill-clothed body just now but it is itself the body, the corporate representation of the union of difference, the irreplaceable envelope for the collective fashioning of change.
If the Union – if the notion of team – is supported by the alternative ‘people’s vote’, the potential for an adult and positive embrace of difference will be kept alive for us to strive and struggle and achieve within.
It will take its shape from the direction and force of those internal struggles. This is as it should be. It ought not to be a straight jacket confining those within it. It needs to be an ever maturing embryo in the foetal sac, taking its own shape within the flex of that protective envelope. It ought always to be embryonic, never fully formed and resistant to change. Infinitely mutable.
Politically there is a tide behind the separatists today. It is cool to be for indy. It is uncool to be for the Union. It is therefore easy to be for indy and takes courage to be for the Union. A vote for indy – for the SNP in any election [and they will all be referenda now] – is today seen as ‘the people’s vote’.
But there are other ‘people’ and there is an alternative ‘people’s vote’. This separatist tide needs to be stemmed in the interests of a future with a richer being.
It can be resisted now only in one way – through the alternative ‘people’s vote’, through exercising One Vote for the Union.
Scotland’s BIG voice
That One Vote is for nothing else but union and, apparently contradictorily, it will not be one vote but many votes – with One Vote within each constituency.
This is about tactical voting, about accepting what is recognised in Scotland if not beyond it, that this election is a referendum on Scottish independence. It is about overcoming one ‘people’s vote’ with another ‘people’s vote’- not about throwing up a fast dispersing smokescreen of confetti votes.
It is about being unashamedly proud of that alternative ‘people’s vote’ – of its value, its largeness, its inclusivity, its welcome of difference, its acceptance of struggle, discomfort and disagreement, its mongrel health, its adultness.
It is more about the valuing of the nature of life itself – which is helplessly, wonderfully various – than it is about political values.
Practically, it is ultimately about setting aside all party political affiliations and, in any one constituency, choosing the One Vote for whichever party is most likely to win for the future of union.
This is a time to be proud of having the courage to be different, of having a genuine alternative vision of the future, of being part of Scotland’s BIG voice – while respecting the right of that other, louder ‘people’s’ voice. It may be wrong – it is wrong – but it has its own dignity and, as with all things, it has a purpose to serve.