Joyce McMillan: Independence is not about the past
This week, the celebrity hairstylist Nicky Clarke popped up on a BBC news strand, suggesting that Scots who are thinking of voting Yes – that’s around 40 per cent of us, according to the latest polls – are doing so because they have been blinded by “romantic Braveheart stuff”, and don’t understand economics. His interviewer agreed that “that is what we’ve mainly been hearing so far”; then they moved on to other matters.
Now in a sense, the comments of two people in London talking about the current referendum campaign without any real knowledge of it do not matter very much. This particular exchange is revealing, though, because it highlights one of the most interesting aspects of the current campaign, barely understood in the rest of the UK; and that is the Scottish home rule movement’s huge shift of emphasis, over the past 30 years, from dwelling on history to thinking about policy, and from brooding over the past to imagining the future.
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