Carry on up the Khyber?

There’s a war memorial outside Inverness station.  It lists around 120 young men who died in a largely forgotten war in Egypt in the 1880s and it carefully differentiates those killed in action and those (the vast majority) killed by disease, and goes to the trouble of naming individual places they were fighting in, including the rather painful sounding deaths ‘up the Nile’.

The debate over Scottish independence is increasingly and surprisingly becoming about a somewhat idealised and backward looking vision of Britishness versus an equally idealised critique of post Thatcherite neoliberalism and the yawning democratic deficit.  It’s becoming an extraordinary debate driven by the Scottish left and completely out-flanking both the peculiar alliance that is Better Together and the somewhat distasteful Scottish Nationalist movement who we can thank for awakening the nationalist cause in the first place.

On the YES side it's increasingly about freeing Scotland from the Westminster political elite and bringing power back to the people.  There’s an irony here – given that the Scottish Nationalist Party has gone to great lengths to remove powers from local authorities – centralising power to Holyrood.  But so much of this debate is free from party politics – the independence movement now has virtually nothing to do with the SNP and while the much despised Mr Salmond allows himself to be distracted by the nonsensical scare mongering of the NO campaign, many of us are starting to dream of something much much better.

It would be interesting to chart the family trees of the Westminster politicians and especially the civil servants who in the 1880s thought that sending men to their deaths up the nile was a good idea.  How many great great grandchildren and great great grandnephews and nieces are still walking those corridors today?  Quite a few I’d be willing to wager.  These are the people who thwarted British labour governments in the 1960s and 70s and they are the men and women who send armies to Iraq and Afghanistan.  Feelings of superiority and Empire are almost genetically wired into their thinking.

There are no such ingrained delusions of British superiority at Holyrood.  Holyrood is far closer to a meritocracy than Westminster ever was or ever will be.  There is no bullying pompousness fostered by the English public school and Oxbridge elitism.  Holyrood will be far more reluctant to send its young to distant wars.  Holyrood knows that we live in a small country and that interfering in the affairs of other countries rarely leads to the desired outcomes.

So maybe those poor souls who died so far from home in the name of a long gone empire didn’t die in vain.  Maybe they can remind us that it’s not the people who want these wars, it’s the political elite.  And maybe, just maybe, a breaking away from that political elite is something worth voting for, worth risking all for in a peaceful revolution through the ballot box.

C’mon Scotland.  We can do this!