This is a first (actually, maybe second) draft of a sample piece of writing with which I’m going to apply to and OurKingdom internship, so please check grammatical/political errors. All suggestions welcome.
You can’t have a real country unless you have a beer and an airline — it helps if you have some kind of a football team… but at the very least you need a beer.”
Frank Zappa
Of course in these post-post-national times it all gets a bit more complicated than that. Kronenbourg is brewed in Edinburgh by Heineken, but Scotland still has some real beer. The Iraqi-Dutch-Spanish-Greek Air Scotland is no more (the CIA being your only chance of a direct flight from Prestwick to Baghdad) but as Mike Small reports at least we now have matching trains.
It seems more and more that Scotland is a national identity without a nation, a country in all but actually being a country. The Scottish Government may well be fooling itself along with George Foulkes that its concerted re-branding really is “independence by creep” but it’s not, it’s a substitution.
Much to everyone’s surprise the SNP have proved themselves quite capable of managing the powers devolved to Scotland, to the extent that most people seem quite willing to let them have a go with a few more. However, the whole of Europe is suffering from constitutional inertia, and all the brand/national-identity in the world wont change that. No one will take to the streets to demand a Scottish six o’clock news. For the SNP these things may be important first steps but if they are serious about the leap to independence then what is required is not Management, but Politics.
The danger is that the SNP will play it safe, and Scotland will be left with a creep to independence that will never actually arrive. As Alex Law points out in Glasgow’s excellent Variant:
“amidst the unselfish altruism of nationalist rhetoric, the social base of nationalism often rests on groups that are suitably positioned to gain from it – not just politicians but also cultural workers like writers, academics, lawyers, journalists.”
Independence will appear in culture to be managed by the cultural elite but a popular independence that would empower people to decide what they want Scotland to be will not therefor emerge as a result.
A independence movement that can bring the majority of people along with it cannot be based on culture management. It needs to be based on an active, engaging politics which shows that a Scotland on its own can allow what is missing from the apolitical Union, democracy.
If the SNP are serious about independence they must realise that it will take more than a National Conversation to convince the Scottish people that the risks of full, permanent independence are outweighed by the potential Scotland would have as a real country. This is the test of the Scottish Government, not whether people like, trust or support Salmond enough to let him run the country but whether they can convince the people of Scotland that it’s worth them taking the real, personal risk on their own self-determiantion.
