[Robin McAlpine Blog] The Past is Gone: Part Two – squabbling

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The Past is Gone: Part Two – squabbling

Yesterday I argued that we need to get over all our emotional reactions to the anniversary of the independence referendum and all our own emotional baggage of the last ten years of failed progress towards independence. But there is something which keeps those emotions raw and at the forefront of our minds – the ongoing squabbling.

To move on we need to stop it. To stop it we need to stop regenerating it. To do that we could all try to just ‘be kind’ (like they say these days) or ‘just leave it out’ as popular imagination of the problem often has it. Don’t get me wrong, I encourage you to do both. I try to. But it won’t work, because humans are humans and we carry resentments like personal armour.

But there is one thing and more or less only one thing which will work, has worked often in the past and works for a very specific reasons. That one thing is what we need if we’re to get moving again.

To explain it, let me give you an analogy I’ve used a couple of times before. There is a wonderful TV miniseries by the creators of the peerless The Wire which illustrates my point really well. It is called Generation Kill and it covers a six-day deployment of a team of US soldiers in Afghanistan at the height of the conflict, seen through the eyes of an embedded reporter. (It is based on the real-life memoir of a Rolling Stone journalist who did just that.)

Much of the series is set in the claustrophobic armoured transports and military vehicles that act as the ‘safe space’ for soldiers in conflict. At every moment, throughout, they are constantly, permanently at risk of death. But despite a racist and a black man in one vehicle and lots of little acts of bickering and teasing throughout, they remain focussed and united and together.

At the end of the operation they return to camp. They haven’t actually faced an enemy, been fired at, had to fight. They were at full alert throughout, high on stimulants and adrenalin. Now they’re home, safe. They play a recreational game of American Football to unwind. They virtually kill each other so bitter and brutal is the game.

You see, they are a bunch of young men filled with fight-or-flight instincts who have suppressed all their built-up antagonisms and enmities because they were a small group under attack (potentially) from a much bigger force (potentially). Then they weren’t. Then they were a bunch of young men with aggression to spare and nothing to do with it. It all finds its avenues of escape.

Marching your troops back down the hill is the most dangerous tactical manoeuvrer there is

I repeat this all the time but I knew this was our inevitably destination the second Nicola Sturgeon announced a ‘second referendum’ on Brexit morning. It’s not just that she said it would happen (which was unlikely), it’s that she set a timetable of holding it before the end of Brexit negotiations (which was entirely impossible).

People around me were jubliant and I knew it was all an illusion, that it would all come falling down. And worse, I knew what would happen when it did all fall down. Marching your troops back down the hill is the most dangerous tactical manoeuvrer there is. Your troops end up in a field buzzing with adrenalin and nothing to do with it.

This anger should have been turned back at the SNP leadership but instead they kept stringing out their promises and, worse, deliberately and actively sought to deflect the anger away from themselves by directing it at others. Strangely, I was the subject of a lot of people’s anger for correctly saying there wasn’t going to be a referendum, anger which at the time did not direct itself at those who made the promise and then failed to fulfil their promise.

But I really don’t particularly want to put this all on the shoulders of Nicola Sturgeon. She’s to blame for an awful lot of things, but the pattern I’m describing above is all but universal. If you go and look at any campaign or movement that didn’t achieve everything it wanted a first ask, you will see the same things.

The Indian independence was beset by bitter internal feuds for years. So was the US civil rights movement. So was the early fight for Irish independence. So were the suffragettes. So was the South African anti-apartheid movement. When you’re primed to fight for your future and you have no-one to fight, you fight among yourselves.

So how do you get out of this? In a very, very small set of instances you can possibly identify the ‘one great leader who stepped forward and took us to the promised land’. You just about perhaps might make that case for Gandhi, but that would underplay decades of hard organising and agitating that came before and spread the momentum Gandhi helped create.

But even towering figures like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King or Emily Pankhurst were as much figureheads for a wider structured movement as they were the messiahs who delivered victory alone. Movements are never one person.

And yes, sometimes events fall out of the sky which, for good or ill, propel causes forward to a new place. It’s a horrible reality that had it not been for the atrocities of the concentration camps and the gas chambers, the Zionist movement would not have gained the momentum and success it did.

Yet those too are rare, or at least they are almost always insufficient. Brexit was a Black Swan event that should have propelled us closer to independence and it didn’t. You can’t wait around for sheer luck.

Having common purpose means something much less than all agreeing, but equally it means a lot more than all wanting to achieve the same thing

So what does it? What is it that brings squabbling to an end? The answer is contained in the story about why it happens in the first place. Rewind to the bit where I’m describing the bitter, brutal American Football match in Afghanistan. What don’t the participants have? Now rewind a bit further to when they are in those armoured vehicles. What do they have now that is different?

It is really easy. What they have is common purpose. It’s that simple. I don’t mean ‘common purpose’ in the general sense of ‘all want the same thing’. I mean it as in ‘sure they want the same thing but if they’re going to get through today alive because they’ve got each others’ backs and trust each other and know each other will do their part’.

Having common purpose means something much less than all agreeing, but equally it means a lot more than all wanting to achieve the same thing. Common purpose is something you can do which others can do with you towards achieving a specific and achievable goal today.

Wanting to throw a party isn’t common purpose. Knowing you have three hours between five of you to decorate your village hall for your party is common purpose. And the independence movement is busy throwing dozens of parties we don’t invite each other to attend. There is no common purpose, no common action.

This was cynically the case with the SNP which actively wasted people’s time with make-busy stuff to give the illusion of common purpose. It was also used variously cynically and naively by organisations in the movement, some because they really believed that if everyone just pitched in for their initiative it would definitely work, others just funding their new ‘indy lifestyles’.

None of that was true common purpose either. You can all talk all you want about truth and reconciliation or being kind or walking away from conflict or whatever you want to talk about. It might even be useful here or there (I know some groups that would benefit from some structured air-clearing like a kind of mini truth and reconciliation initiative).

But at the top level it won’t do anything to end the squabbling. Like I say, every movement ends up at this point. Every movement goes through this, some of them for decades. And then all the successful ones come through the other end and are able to put it behind them because they find a common purpose.

That is what saves the independence movement from this solipsistic, circular firing squad of rage and resentment we seem to have created for ourselves. Until we’ve got something collective to do that we actually believe is going to work and which we all have a part in, we’re just a bunch of people pretending to chuck a ball about actually externalising our impatience and frustration and directing it straight at each other.

That isn’t healthy. You don’t get out of that place by wanting to. We need something useful to do. Together.

Source: The Past is Gone: Part Two – squabbling