Astonishingly
nobody’s solicited my opinion on the Scottish referendum. Everybody else in the
UK has been consulted: economists, journalists, MPs, people on the street, the
Prime Minister, your local chemist, politicians from Scotland, politicians from
England, politicians from Canada, the guy in the bagging aisle at Sainsbury’s, Sean
Connery – but not me. What gives?
“Maybe it’s because you’re an English person
with nothing whatsoever to do with Scotland, Dale,” I hear you cry. Well, okay,
but when has that ever stopped anyone writing an article about something? Or
simply crop-spraying social media with badly-spelled bluster? Google #scottishindependence
and you’ll see an army of gobtrepreneurs howling out factoid-fuelled opinion
until they go blue in the mouse pad. Google anything
remotely controversial and you’ll see an army of gobtrepreneurs howling out
factoid-fuelled opinion, in fact: all over the press people are paid to have an
opinion about something, because, in an age where digital developments are
gathering to demolish the last standing pay wall, what used to be known as
“journalism” is becoming harder and harder to fund.
The answer is an ocean of provocative
click-bait that’s cheap to produce and draws in the eyeballs: grazing grounds
for the commentariat, who can then howl out more factoid-fuelled opinion in the
comments sections. And someone can respond to them, with more factoid-fuelled opinion. And so on.
Here’s my take on Scottish independence: I don’t have one. Or to put it another
way, I think the question of a referendum is a phenomenally complex bag of socio-political
thorns that probably needs unpacking by an intelligently chosen army of technocrats,
planners and economists. Neither Yes or No campaigns used that one for some
reason. But I feel strongly about being ambivalent. Ambivalence isn’t indifference
– it’s ignorance. And the proud admission of ignorance is the bedrock of
scientific enquiry. How can empirical investigation proceed without first
doubting absolutely everything you’ve assumed? A world that admits its
ignorance is a world better poised to actually know something. So yes: I’m passionate
about being ambivalent. Forget Yes and No. What the independence debate is missing
is the “Don’t Really Know” vote.
This is partly because either alternative is
kind of dismal. Support Yes and you align yourself with Cameron and an army of swivel-eyed
nationalists, bullying corporations and the kind of people who buy dollhouses
for their children with Union Jacks hanging out the windows. Support No and you
let the warnings of high profile economists get swallowed in arguments tinged
by patriotic sentiment; more sinisterly, you’re complicit in perhaps the smiliest
positivity-based marketing campaign this side of the Scientology AGM.
An extra
terrestrial visitor stopping off on planet Earth for the weekend might assume
from all the YES signs everywhere that Scotland was a sophisticated emotional
dictatorship engineered by an unelected ruler called Alex Salmond. Indeed
there’s been so much positivity that even I
briefly wanted to become independent from England, and I live there. These
are the limits of political for or against: you’re caught between a rock and
hard place – or rather you’re stuck on a rock that wants to become two rocks.
Democracy is a demanding beast. The politics of
“not really any of my business” has little currency in the modern world, where
in the course of little more than a century we’ve gone from only being allowed
to vote if you owned a castle and the wives of half a dozen peasants to one where your
opinion is a sharable commodity and must be exercised at maximum volume on a
minute-to-minute basis. Or else nobody
will click Like. Of course not everybody’s that enthusiastic about
expressing their democratic right in determining the fate of the
not-entirely-united Kingdom – as we saw last time with the plebiscite on the
alternative vote, when millions passionately stayed at home to ignore the
future of a breathtakingly boring electoral change which you’d have had to be a
qualified political scientist to understand how it affected you.
And good for them, I say. Our ambivalence is
something worth fighting for. If we should feel strongly about anything, it’s
the right not to feel strongly about anything. I wish the Scots all the best in
deciding their future, but I’m not going to pretend to have an opinion about
it. On that one I’ll put my foot down.
