On Thursday, 18 September 2014 I sat at my then-desk in SCVO’s Mansfield Traquair Centre and wrote two stories. One was about the reaction of Scotland’s voluntary sector to a yes vote in that day’s referendum on Scottish independence. The other was its opposite – charities reacting to a ‘no’ win.
Obviously, only one of those stories went live on our website the next day.
OK, as a piece of alternative history it’s hardly The Man In The High Castle. But there have been occasions (when I’ve been at an extremely loose end, it has to be said) when I’ve looked at the draft of that unpublished story and (after fighting back the urge to hit ‘publish’ out of sheer bedevilment) wondered where we would be now if these were the tracks we had moved along.
Who knows? One thing I do know is that even at the time, in the bleary morning of 19 September, it never felt like this story – or rather, one similar – would go unpublished.
The inward pressure of the contradictions which have caused the outward cracks in the UK state have not lessened since 2014. The wound-up tensions do not heave less after the experience of successive Tory governments and Brexit – the opposite, in fact.
The unresolved national question has had a deforming impact on Scotland’s politics but it has not shut everything down. Stasis is a word often ill-used. Taking its scientific meaning, it has come to mean deadlock. But its original, political meaning, was more dynamic, being used to describe periods of unresolved civil strife and tension in the Greek city-states.
This stasis and Scotland’s constitutional conundrum has come to the foreground yet again following the most recent Scottish Parliament elections. In one way, this might seem curious. When it was all over, not that much had changed, give or take a few seats here and there.
What seemed to be different, however, was the realisation that the Scottish people had – yet again – voted for a parliament with a pro-independence majority. The word ‘mandate’ is being used a lot. The Covid crisis and its aftermath will take a long time to get over, but it cannot supress everything forever, and it was inevitable that talk of another independence referendum would rise from a hubbub to a shout.
There’s a long way to go of course. Bearing mind that this is a purely personal view, but I am unsure that Nicola Sturgeon and her ruling group are as keen on upsetting current arrangements as Douglas Ross would have us believe they are.
But that notwithstanding, events could propel us down this road again – and it’s here that Scotland’s charities and the whole of the country’s civil society will have to find their voice.
We can’t be bystanders in the debates to come. But that does not mean that we necessarily have to back one side or the other.
As in all of these issues, we have to use it to form and articulate our own vision of how we want the world to be shaped.
Speaking out isn’t always easy – and it’s this sensitive subject that we explore in this edition of TFN.
But just because something’s not easy doesn’t mean you shouldn’t engage.
There will be more stories written about this – some will go unpublished. But let’s make sure our voice is heard in every version..
Graham Martin is editor of TFN.
