Previously I proposed 2020 as a suitable date for another Scottish Independence referendum (see Indyref 2020). But recent events have altered circumstances and we now require this to be radically accelerated. Brexit has changed everything. I used to think we had four or five years leeway with respect to the timing of Indyref 2. Now the UK people voted to stay in no longer exists and time is a luxury we no longer have.
There are lots of reasons to hasten Indyref 2. I want to focus on just one for the moment.
One outcome of the EU referendum has been a rise in the number of hate crimes. The papers are full of examples. Two Muslim women in Bethnal Green had eggs thrown at them on the street. A halal butchers in Walsall was firebombed. A Polish community centre in London was vandalised. Laminated cards reading “No more Polish vermin” have been posted through letterboxes in Huntingdon. The list goes on. True Vision, a police-funded hate-crime reporting website, saw a 57% increase over the four days immediately after the referendum. Police in England and Wales reported a 42% increase during the week before and after the referendum. It is likely that the next set of figures will be even more depressing. It has been described as the worst increase on record. The incidence of verbal and online abuse, vandalism, assault and fire-bombing of property has risen alarmingly. It should be stressed that hate crime is not new, and this sudden increase is superimposed on what was already an upward trend.
Irrespective of whether people who voted for Brexit were motivated by intolerance or not, there is a now a section of society which feels its prejudices, previously regarded as anti-social and subject to some degree of inhibition as a result, have been endorsed by the result of the referendum, and that they have now been granted permission to indulge these attitudes without restraint or threat of censure. Mark Hamilton, head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) said “some people took [the result] as a licence to behave in a racist or other discriminatory way. We can not divorce the country’s reaction to the referendum and the increase in hate crime reporting." Paul Bagguley, a sociologist from the University of Leeds, has observed “there is a kind of celebration going on; it’s a celebratory racism.”
Although the issues being debated during the EU referendum were complex, and there were many arguments other than bigotry to persuade people to vote Leave, and although many people will therefore have voted Leave for progressive reasons related to, for example, EU reform, this doesn't matter when it comes to curbing hate crime.
I understand the anguish of those who will feel they are being tarred unfairly with the same brush as people whose behaviour they would normally abhor. But it is not enough to state one is not a racist if one's actions have emboldened racists. We are confronted by the reality of re-invigorated right wing extremism regardless of our intentions, and we must deal with it first instead of trying to exculpate ourselves. Fascism is not interested in the reasons and arguments of those with whom it may temporarily have found common cause. It will manipulate any shared platform to claim wider legitimacy and then leave its erstwhile allies behind in the wreckage if it must.
We are fortunate in Scotland not to have witnessed the same surge in hate crime as in England, although there is absolutely no room for complacency. Incidents of Brexit related hate crime have also been reported in Scotland and we must not allow explicit or implicit racism to go unchallenged. But the EU referendum campaign was conducted in Scotland on an entirely different basis partly because the anti-immigration rhetoric used by the Leave campaign was intended to provoke and cultivate an English nationalist response south of the border and would not have been persuasive here in the same way. The reliance of the Leave campaign on this rhetoric, and the response to it, to carry it over the finishing line once the economic argument was defunct, defines the outcome as an English nationalist success, and from now on post-EU Britain is an English nationalist project.
Nevertheless we still have friends, neighbours, family, and colleagues here in Scotland who are EU citizens all of whom are impacted by this outcome. It is acutely embarassing to think of the insecurity and anxiety they may be experiencing now as a consequence of the referendum result.
It is fortunate therefore that we have within our power in Scotland at least a partial remedy.
The toxic sentiment that has been unleashed, and has resulted in the assassination of an MP (see The Hinge) and the deluge of hate crimes mentioned above, was first tolerated during the Scottish Independence referendum campaign. Everyone was exempt from criticism by the Unionist media and the No campaign as long as they subscribed to and promoted the British nationalist objective of a No vote, and so the extremist elements thriving on their new found legitimacy today enjoyed their first shared platform with mainstream politicians back then, and Labour MPs rubbed shoulders with members of the National Front on the high street as they handed out Better Together leaflets.
This culminated in the George Square riots of 19th September 2014, which was a triumphant and aggressive British nationalist show of strength, despite how some sections of the British media chose to characterise it at the time. The premises of a newspaper sympathetic to Scottish Independence were set on fire and Independence supporters were attacked. It was a "celebration" of the sort Bagguley describes. The perpetrators escaped the appropriate degree of official condemnation because it would tarnish the UK government's victory in the Independence referendum. They couldn't rain on that parade, because it was their own.
The genie of British nationalist extremism was let out of the bottle in Scotland by the No campaign and the first Project Fear during the Scottish Independence referendum. During the EU referendum, with no positive campaign to curb it (see Project Fear Squared), it prospered.
But just as the current cycle commenced with the irresponsible negativity of Project Fear during the First Scottish Independence Referendum, Indyref 2 will give us an opportunity to bring it to a conclusion.
Just as the Yes campaign made positive, progressive, inclusive, outward-looking, future-focussed arguments during the First Scottish Independence Referendum, a successful Indyref 2 will allow us to articulate a powerful rejection of the negative, corrosive ideologies encouraged by the first Project Fear and released by Brexit. In Scotland we have a unique opportunity to make a start, at least, to putting the lid on this. Indeed we have responsibility to do it, not just for ourselves, but for the whole of Britain. Indyref 2 let's us once again present a positive inclusive prospectus and gives us a chance to deliver a formal verdict at the ballot box that delegitimises once more the prejudice and bigotry that is flourishing in the wake of Brexit.
No comments:
Post a Comment