Panorama.S2014E32.Scotlands.Decision
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00:00We are a few days away from the people of Scotland taking control of the future of our
00:08own country.
00:09I want to know what plan B is, so do you.
00:16In three days' time, Scotland will decide whether or not it wants to be an independent
00:20nation.
00:21Don't listen to the lies and scaremongering of the SNP.
00:27A generation ago, independence was a fringe obsession.
00:30Today, it's a mainstream ambition.
00:34What the Scottish people value is under threat if we don't vote yes.
00:39Scotland is on the cusp of making history.
00:42The eyes of the world are upon Scotland.
00:46It has shaken the British political establishment to its roots.
00:49Why has it happened?
00:51I would be heartbroken if this family of nations was torn apart.
01:11My name is Alan Little.
01:13I've worked for the BBC for more than 30 years, reporting from all over the world.
01:19Refugees have been flooding here since the fighting began, 50,000 so far.
01:25Alan Little, BBC News, Beehatch.
01:32But Scotland has always been the place I've called home.
01:37This is the village in Galloway in rural south-west Scotland where I grew up.
01:42I was born here in 1959.
01:46I left when I was 18, and I haven't been back to the house I grew up in since.
01:54I've come to meet Peter Ross, the current owner.
01:57Hello, Peter.
01:59Hello, Alan.
02:01Nice to meet you.
02:03Can I have a look around?
02:05Of course, yes.
02:09Our old house was built around 1900 by two Scottish brothers who had spent most of their lives in the British colonies in Africa.
02:15They gave the house a name that, to me, carried the exotic stamp of empire.
02:20It celebrated our remote little village's connection with the projection of British power around the world.
02:27What struck me even in the 70s when I was living here was that Scotland still felt connected to the empire rather than to Europe.
02:34Yes, absolutely.
02:36And there's all these linkages going back and forward across the empire that's gone, really, isn't it?
02:43For my grandparents' generation, the empire bound Scotland to a powerful British identity.
02:50But the empire on which the sun never set is long gone.
02:53Can it really be true that the sun might soon also set on the union between England and Scotland?
03:01Whatever the outcome of the referendum, the political landscape here and across Britain will never be the same again.
03:08So how, in the last 40 years, did we get to where we are today?
03:13In 1974, if you'd said, in 2014, there will be a referendum so close that Scotland might become independent, people would have recoiled in disbelief.
03:27For much of the 20th century, Scotland's shared sense of Britishness was powerful, an identity most in Scotland didn't even think about challenging.
03:52Britain is an island nation.
03:54On its shores, generations of craftsmen have made great ships for the world, but nowhere in such profusion as on the River Clyde in Scotland.
04:10Drive along the banks of the Clyde nowadays and you see that only the ghosts of an industrial past remain.
04:17When I was growing up in Scotland, the British state counted for an awful lot.
04:23It bound the British together in a common purpose, a great kind of shared enterprise.
04:29The British state dug coal, it milled steel, it built ships.
04:33There were shipyards all along this stretch of the river here.
04:37It even manufactured motor cars.
04:41But by the 1970s, all that had begun to change.
04:46I think the idea that the UK was going to be a welfare state that you could be proud of, that would look after its citizens from cradle to grave,
04:56I think that was seen as a very creditable mission for the kind of modern British state that was supposed to emerge after the Second World War.
05:04And I think that up until the mid-1970s, people generally felt that that was being achieved, but at that point, things began to go wrong.
05:13I can only give you one gallon, sir.
05:17That'll get you to your nearest carriage.
05:29In the early 1970s, Britain suffered a series of economic shocks.
05:33In 1973, a gallon of four-star doubled in price to hit 73 pence.
05:43Standards of living dropped.
05:47People started to see that in the post-imperial world, they were subject to forces beyond their control.
05:53In Scotland, North Sea oil, recently discovered, acquired political symbolism.
06:01Now back to the election campaign here in Scotland.
06:06In the October 1974 election, Conservative Deferential Rural Galloway, where I lived, returned a Scottish Nationalist MP to Westminster.
06:18I remember the shock of it.
06:22The Nationalists claim that they're now the fastest-growing political party in Europe, and that they've doubled their vote in every election since the war.
06:33Nationalists saw oil as Scotland's economic route to independence, but most Scots seemed unimpressed.
06:41In the 1970s, the SNP was a classic catch-all party.
06:45It wanted to win support from Labour voters, Tory voters, from anywhere.
06:49It didn't like to define itself on the left-right spectrum, because it was a Scottish National Party, first, last and always.
06:55And I think that caused enormous difficulties.
07:00It hadn't really settled on what kind of political party it was, beyond believing in independence.
07:06But there was something wrong with the Britain that most Scots still adhered to.
07:10It seemed preoccupied with managing its own decline.
07:14In my first year at Edinburgh University, as the winter of discontent took hold,
07:18the most pressing question we debated in our politics class was whether Britain had become ungovernable.
07:27My old university friend, Laurie O'Donnell, got involved in the student union with me.
07:31He went on to become a Labour city councillor.
07:35We had some SNP friends back then, but neither of us thought they'd become the dominant force in Scotland.
07:41How would you characterise the SNP of those years?
07:45They were a bit madcap, really.
07:47They were mixed. There were some really good people in there.
07:49But they did attract a bit of a lunatic fringe as well.
07:53They tended to be a bit, certainly anti-English.
07:55There was a real sense that they were anti-English.
07:57Nationalism in Scotland has never been ethnic.
07:59It's never been linguistic.
08:01And, of course, we, the English, are irritators.
08:03I mean, they're perfectly lovely people.
08:05The only problem is that, with Scotland, five million, they're 58 million.
08:09They're far too many of them.
08:11And somebody once said that, you know, if an elephant is in bed with you,
08:15it will roll over in the middle of the night and flatten you.
08:20But it doesn't intend to, and doesn't even know it.
08:24Scotland's first real flirtation with devolution came in 1979.
08:28It was the first vote I ever cast.
08:30I was 19 years old.
08:36The referendum that year offered an elected Scottish Assembly.
08:40Scotland didn't say no and didn't say yes.
08:42It said, um, maybe, well, perhaps we'd better go homeward to think again.
08:49Scotland voted narrowly in favour,
08:51but the vote fell short of a 40% threshold that Westminster had demanded.
08:55And more than one in three Scots didn't even vote.
08:59It was an odd period.
09:01I mean, history has rewritten it to an extent,
09:05but at the end of the day, the turnout was low,
09:07the majority for a Scottish Assembly was slim,
09:11and there was really no broad-based appetite for it at that point.
09:18The day after the referendum,
09:20the Glasgow Herald ran a cartoon that summed up the mood.
09:23The idea that Scotland the brave had, when tested,
09:27in fact been feared, entered the national narrative.
09:32In 1974, in the second election of that year in October,
09:36the SNP won, I think, 10 or 11 seats.
09:39But by 1979, these seats had virtually all disappeared.
09:45The Scottish opinion, I think, veered from one direction to another.
09:49So having made kind of a breakthrough,
09:51the SNP rather lost their way towards the end of the 1970s.
09:56Nationalism failed to take hold.
09:59Most Scots were either indifferent or overtly hostile to independence.
10:05In fact, in the general election that followed that failed referendum,
10:09one in three Scots voted Conservative.
10:12Easy to forget now.
10:15In 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power,
10:19there were 22 Tory MPs from Scotland.
10:22Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.
10:26Where there is error, may we bring truth.
10:29Where there is doubt, may we bring faith.
10:32And where there is despair, may we bring hope.
10:35Margaret Thatcher set out to make Britain governable.
10:39She would represent a radical break with her predecessors
10:43in the management of decline.
10:45She would take on what she saw
10:47as the excessive power of the trade unions,
10:50the unions that had recently almost brought Britain to a standstill.
10:54A turbulent, decade-long journey lay ahead
10:57that would reshape Britain and Scotland's place in it.
11:09Newton Grange is the kind of pit village
11:13that breeds mining legends.
11:15For nearly 100 years, it sent its sons underground.
11:31In 1984, there were 21,000 coal miners in Scotland.
11:35Now there are a few hundred.
11:37When the miners took on the Thatcher government,
11:41the Thatcher government won.
11:43Today, it's the heritage industry,
11:45like this former mine-turned-museum,
11:48that employs miners now.
11:53Britain was an island of coal.
11:55It was built on coal.
11:57Coal, like empire, was a shared British experience,
12:00a common enterprise.
12:04Nicky Wilson went into a pit near Glasgow in the late 1960s,
12:08at the age of 17.
12:11I used to love sitting and listening to the older men
12:14and talking about the hard times they had,
12:16the struggles they had to get decent wages, decent conditions.
12:20There's never been a Scottish miners' union
12:22or a Welsh miners' union.
12:24We had our areas within the union,
12:26but the Britishness was always important.
12:28It's a national union.
12:30That was where we're strengthly.
12:32These industrial communities were tough places
12:35for the SNP to win support.
12:37Working-class voters would say to nationalist activists,
12:41we need something called the National Coal Board,
12:43or British Steel, or British Shipbuilders.
12:45That's what pays our wages.
12:47Our factories are integrated with plants elsewhere in the UK.
12:51Are you really going to unpick all of that?
12:57But it was to be unpicked anyway.
13:00Mrs Thatcher wanted a modern, lean, productive Britain.
13:03There was no place in it for old industries
13:06that had lost their global markets
13:09but slowly, something else would be chipped away
13:12as the old industries fell into the dust.
13:15A culture, a way of thinking, a set of loyalties.
13:19Nicky is still proud of the principles
13:21he spent his whole working life fighting for,
13:24the cross-border solidarity of the old trade union movement.
13:28He will not be voting for Scottish independence.
13:31Does it spring from that experience of shared solidarity
13:34with miners elsewhere in the UK?
13:37Yes, we were always taught by my mentors
13:40and experienced people within the union
13:43that a fight for one is a fight for everyone.
13:46The minute you start to splinter and separate,
13:48then you weaken yourself.
13:50And that goes against the grain of everything
13:52we were taught within the National Union of Mineworkers.
13:55My parents' generation were born in the 1930s.
13:58The Britain they inherited had emerged with enormous moral stature
14:02from the shared struggle of the war.
14:06We grew into young adults in the Britain of the nationalised industries
14:09and the post-war welfare state.
14:12That Britain was now changing fast
14:14under a reforming Conservative government.
14:21We can argue about the de-industrialisation of the 1980s,
14:24whether it was necessary or inevitable or needlessly brutal,
14:28but one unintended consequence was this.
14:32These industries were great pan-British enterprises
14:35and the communities that sustained them were bedrocks
14:39not just of Labour loyalty
14:41but of British identity and solidarity in Scotland.
14:45And they've all but gone.
14:47And with each year that passes,
14:49they recede further into the middle distance
14:51of our collective memory.
14:55I think at the moment when they gained power,
14:58allowing people to sink or swim
15:01or supporting defunct industries and all that,
15:03even if the community consequences of that were devastating,
15:06I think at that moment, unbeknownst to themselves,
15:09because they just didn't have a subtle enough understanding
15:12of the politics of the Union,
15:14they began the kind of break-up of the old Britain.
15:18As the old industries followed empire into history,
15:21a new Britain was being born,
15:23reshaping some of the values by which the country lived.
15:28In that new Britain, the market would drive wealth creation.
15:31The frontiers of the state would be rolled back.
15:34And increasingly, the market is global.
15:37The company that lights your home now
15:39probably isn't even British anymore.
15:41Jaguar, a British icon, was taken over first by the Americans
15:45and this Jaguar was made by an Indian-owned company.
15:53Some people say that we're not a Scottish party,
15:57but neither are we an English party,
15:59nor a Welsh party, nor an Irish party.
16:02We're a party of the whole United Kingdom.
16:08In the 1980s, Scotland began to rebel against this new Britain.
16:12In 1987, support for Mrs Thatcher fell off a cliff.
16:16Her 21 MPs were cut to ten.
16:19The perception, the deep perception was,
16:22industries, many traditional industries were being closed,
16:26they were doing nothing to protect them,
16:28that she was anti-Scottish and her party was anti-Scottish.
16:31CHOIR SINGS
16:47In 1988, Margaret Thatcher
16:49addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland,
16:53the closest thing the country then had to a national parliament.
16:56Christianity should be about spiritual redemption,
16:59she told them, not social reform.
17:02And she quoted St Paul,
17:04if a man will not work, he shall not eat.
17:07Clearly, she thought this was an opportunity to,
17:11well, deliver a sort of sermon.
17:14I mean, it was a sort of theological self-defence, almost.
17:20There is no creation of wealth that is wrong,
17:23but love of money for its own sake.
17:26The spiritual dimension comes in deciding
17:29what one does with the wealth.
17:31My reaction, like many other people there,
17:34was that she's got this wrong,
17:36she hasn't really understood the mood of the nation at this time,
17:40or the nature of this occasion.
17:43There is no hierarchy in the Church of Scotland,
17:46no priests, no bishops.
17:49There is no equality of all believers.
17:52Ranged against Mrs Thatcher that day
17:54was a Scottish egalitarian spirit
17:57in sober Presbyterian flesh and blood.
18:00Certainly confirmed that Margaret Thatcher herself
18:05and her government's policies
18:07and the values that underlay these
18:10were uncongenial to Scottish people.
18:15You could almost hear the bonds of union loosening
18:18under the impact of this extraordinary confrontation.
18:24It was a key moment in Scotland's long journey to where it is now,
18:28because many saw it as emblematic of the divergent paths
18:31that Scotland and the United Kingdom now seemed to be walking.
18:35You could sense the dismay in this hall,
18:37even among small-c conservative church-going Scotland,
18:41the values that they'd come to associate with Mrs Thatcher's Britain.
18:45Had there been a form of one-nation tourism
18:50of the kind that had been evident
18:53in some of the previous Conservative governments,
18:57the move towards devolution and independence
19:00wouldn't have happened so quickly.
19:03In 1992, the Scottish Conservatives
19:05increased their representation at Westminster
19:09from 10 to 11 out of Scotland's 72 MPs.
19:15Scotland was still voting decisively against Conservative governments
19:19for the fourth consecutive time,
19:21and on each occasion, a team of Conservative ministers
19:24appointed by and answerable to the Prime Minister in London
19:27moved into St Andrew's House to govern Scotland.
19:31Opposition MPs and grassroots activists
19:34began to talk of a democratic deficit.
19:37Some argued that Conservative policies
19:39supported by an English electorate
19:41were being forced on Scotland,
19:43despite having been repeatedly rejected at the ballot box.
19:47The very legitimacy of Westminster to govern at all in Scotland
19:51was now being challenged.
19:53There was a strong feeling that Scotland's different
19:56and Scotland's differences,
19:58the needs, hopes and aspirations of the Scottish people,
20:01aren't sufficiently being taken into account by Westminster government
20:05and by a devolved Parliament.
20:07The belief that Westminster had no mandate in Scotland
20:10became common currency.
20:12Labour, by far the largest party in Scotland,
20:15walked onto that territory and claimed it.
20:19It was Labour, rather than the SNP,
20:21which really pushed the argument
20:23that there was a democratic deficit,
20:25that the Tories were illegitimate,
20:27that Conservatism was an alien ideology.
20:30And that, of course, was a nationalist argument.
20:35To make the public best lukewarm about devolution,
20:38Labour were now its champions.
20:40Ten years on, and with Labour back in power,
20:43devolution's time had come.
20:47On July 1, 1999,
20:49the Queen led the ceremonies
20:51at the opening of Scotland's first Parliament since 1707.
20:56It had been backed by an overwhelming majority of voters.
21:00But this, above all, was Labour's baby.
21:04Sir Donald Dewar was its founding father.
21:08Walter Scott wrote that only a man with soul so dead
21:11could have no sense, no feel for his native land.
21:15For me, and I think in this I speak at least for any Scot today,
21:19this is a proud moment.
21:21Scotland's Parliament was created to end constitutional uncertainty,
21:25not to become a stepping stone to independence.
21:28Devolution within the UK, Labour resolutely believed,
21:32was the settled will of the Scottish people.
21:34This Parliament would meet their democratic aspirations.
21:37Above all, it would see off the SNP as an electoral threat.
21:41In the words of George Robertson, Tony Blair's Defence Secretary,
21:45it would kill nationalism stone dead.
21:47One of the great problems was that there was an expectation
21:50that once you had the Parliament, that would be the end.
21:53It would be all that the Scots wanted.
21:55I think there was a failure to appreciate
21:57that the creation of this Parliament
22:00gave the SNP the opportunity to become a governing party
22:04for the first time.
22:09For in the hands of Alex Salmond,
22:11the SNP had become a very different kind of party.
22:14He led the SNP from a fringe movement.
22:17When he took over as leader in 1990, it had three MPs.
22:21They were not a serious force and they were not taken seriously.
22:25And at that point, if you said that Independence Scotland
22:29couldn't survive economically,
22:31no-one or very few people would have disagreed with you.
22:34While Labour's top Scottish talent went back to Westminster,
22:37believing the nationalist threat had been seen off once and for all,
22:41the SNPs, for the most part, stayed at home and prospered.
22:45In 2011, the Nationalists astonished even themselves
22:48by winning an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament.
22:52The SNP have been restored trust by the people
22:56in a way that no party ever has before in a Scottish election.
23:00We'll take that mandate and that trust forward.
23:05That SNP victory made a referendum on independence inevitable.
23:11But when the referendum terms were signed,
23:13there remained disagreement on one thing.
23:16Alex Salmond wanted a third option, enhanced devolution,
23:20but still within the UK.
23:23Polls suggested that that was what most Scots wanted.
23:26The same polls said support for independence was stuck around 30%.
23:30So David Cameron said no, no third option.
23:33The choice should be decisive, independence or not.
23:45If Scotland votes yes on Thursday,
23:47will David Cameron regret shaking hands with Alex Salmond on that deal?
23:53There was very much the sense of the time that this issue,
23:56independence or not independence,
23:58was so clear-cut in the choice it posed
24:01that it was necessary to focus on that.
24:04With the benefit of hindsight, which always gives an advantage,
24:08then perhaps an additional question might have been appropriate.
24:14All three Westminster party leaders
24:16have argued passionately for the union.
24:18But are they making errors of judgement?
24:22It is a momentous decision. It is a decision forever.
24:25It's not a decision you can make now and undo tomorrow.
24:28If you're fed up with the effing Tories,
24:30give them a kick and then maybe we'll think again.
24:32This is totally different.
24:34Don't listen to the lies and scaremongering of the SNP.
24:38They are fighting Alex Salmond, the SNP,
24:41and what they see as narrow nationalism.
24:44But is that their real enemy?
24:47This isn't about the SNP, it's not about me,
24:50it's about the right of Scotland to have a government of our choice.
24:58I see the changes that have swept Scotland these 30 years
25:01reflected in many of the friends of my youth.
25:04After we left university,
25:06Laurie O'Donnell became a Labour councillor in Dundee.
25:09He fought the SNP.
25:11But now the nationalists are no longer the only ones
25:14who have embraced the Yes campaign.
25:17Laurie has too.
25:20I'm not a nationalist, I'm not an SNP voter,
25:22but they're anti-trident.
25:24They support free education for all.
25:27All of that seems to me to be a core of what I believe in.
25:3130 years ago, I would not have believed
25:33that you would have been a supporter of independence.
25:36Well, I think you probably weren't listening to me then.
25:41Because I've always said it's a matter of,
25:43it's a democratic question.
25:46People should decide how best they govern their lives.
25:51For me, it's not about independence, it's about democracy.
25:57There is a mystery about this.
25:59Social attitude surveys reveal
26:01that Scots do not seem to be more left-wing,
26:04issue by issue, than anyone else, at least not by very much.
26:08Why, then, does Scotland make
26:10such radically different choices at elections?
26:14Why does this central Edinburgh constituency
26:16return a Labour MP dependably at election after election?
26:20When I first lived here,
26:22this was solid Conservative territory, utterly safe,
26:25and Edinburgh was by and large a Conservative city.
26:30It seems to me there has been a long, slow revolt in Scotland
26:34against what is perceived here
26:36to be the growing inequality of British society.
26:39I am struck by how little of this debate at grassroots level
26:44is about social identity,
26:46and how much of it has been driven by the idea
26:49that an independent Scotland, rightly or wrongly,
26:52could be a fairer, more equal society.
26:54If Scotland votes no on Thursday, what is the future for the Union?
26:58Will the genie of Scottish independence
27:00just go back into its bottle?
27:02One view is that devolution is just a work in progress,
27:05a staging post in a long journey
27:07that will one day end in independence.
27:10But there's an alternative view.
27:13A Conservative activist told me quite confidently
27:16that this was the high watermark for independence,
27:19that after a no vote, the tide will go out.
27:22When, he said, will the nationalist stars
27:24be so perfectly aligned again,
27:26with an unpopular Tory government at Westminster,
27:29the tail end of a long recession,
27:31austerity cuts in spending,
27:33and an SNP majority at Holyrood?
27:36When will that happen for them again, he said?
27:40But what is the glue that holds the Union together now?
27:43Can it compare with the power of empire,
27:46the shared enterprise of the old industrial heartlands,
27:49the building of a new Britain after the war?
27:52The sentiment of Britishness endures, for sure.
27:55Many Scots still feel British to their core.
27:58But how many?
28:00If Scotland votes no this week, is that it?
28:03Is the Union saved?
28:07If we've learned anything from reporting this campaign,
28:10it's this, that future generations of Scots
28:13will need reasons to love and trust the Union,
28:16as our parents and grandparents did,
28:19rather than simply to fear the alternative.
28:36Oscar Pistorius, The Truth.