The universal fuss our news media are making about the forthcoming Scottish Independence referendum is bemusing; even baffling. So many scribes and hacks revealing the gaps in their long-term memories, and never one mention of the last referendum, which was fiddled by Jim Gallaghan's Labour government, losing Labour that weight-shifting traditional Scottish vote in the subsequent election and ushering in the Thatcher years. Ultimately an own-goal for Labour.
We who do remember find the current air of excitement irritating, as if it hadn't already been that way back in the 'seventies. But Labour insisted that the yes vote must be, not a majority of the actual voters, but (just to complicate it) rather 40% out of the total number of those entitled to vote. And even before we got that far, the ballot paper question was not the expected, "Do you want independence?" but "Do you want devolution?"
"Do we want whaat?"
Devolution had not been debated or even publically mooted, and for too many of us it was a blank neologism. I guessed (correctly) that it could mean anything and nothing. To make matters worse, American avant-garde pop group Devo was currently riding high in the charts with a single and album ironically celebrating 'devolution' by which they meant the dumbing-down of western culture. Having supported nationalism (and nothing but) ever since I came to voting age, I voted no.
Since I published this, the difference between the two referenda has become more obvious. First time, the politicians hardly bothered arguing over details like (for instance) the economy, and The Press was giving the referendum hardly more than a quick look. We can only guess now that the insiders knew it would all come to nothing.
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