Scotland’s young, feisty yes generation has nowhere to go
There is a political vacuum in working-class Glagow, which is echoed in English and Welsh cities and across southern Europe
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These were kids drawn from an age group that across Scotland had voted by 71% to 29% to leave Britain, and from a working-class city whose majority had defied its Labour heritage to vote likewise. Their bid failed, but my time in that mosh pit – incongruous in being middle-aged, sober and without face paint – became a nightly seminar in the modern politics of identity.
Scottish politics has been about class, community, land and nation. But the working-class youth of Clydeside found themselves cut adrift from these traditional markers. This is a generation born when the death of communism was already a finished fact; when Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History was already in its paperback edition. To them, neoliberalism was not a spectacular historical eruption but simply the world around them. As it destroyed the remains of the industrial society their fathers knew, rendering the stone churches and granite docksides as meaningless and depopulated as medieval ruins, they did what they were told to do: get an education and a low-paid job.
And then, in 2008, neoliberalism broke down. We are five years into what came next: a broken economic model; an educated and technologically empowered young generation whose future has been cancelled; and a political elite that is aloof, clueless and whose roots in common society have withered. The result is discontent – and the Scottish referendum was just the latest iteration. But what is it doing to identity?
During the few manic nights when Glasgow’s youth thought they could win independence, they wrapped themselves in three kinds of flag. The first was the saltire with a neat “Yes” superimposed, the offical logo of the independence campaign. Young women charged from pub to club late into the night wrapped in them, hollering “freedom”.
The second is really interesting. It’s a saltire on tartan – but the tartan is psychedelic, in Day-Glo colours never worn by a clan and as yet unlisted on the official register. It was digitally printed, as were the two lions rampant that flanked the central image. And the central image? Well, technically it was supposed to be Robert the Bruce, but it looked like a Scotland football fan in a ginger wig, kilt and tam o’shanter, groggy with drink and arms akimbo. It looked, in short, like some of the blokes who were waving the flag, whose design was completed with the word “Freedom” in a shoddy, pixellated digital font.
It looked like the kind of one-off banner the touts print for big football games. But as a statement of identity, it captured perfectly what this section of young Scots were feeling. They were montaging their present on to their past. The Scottish “national” symbols were so jumbled on that flag that a traditional Scottish nationalist could have taken affront. There were no traditional class symbols at all – except for the central figure, facing the world alone, surrounded by Day-Glo.
The class symbolism, instead, lay in the clothes the kids were wearing: football shirts – usually the Scottish national team shirt to avoid sectarianism; hoodies themed around heavy house and techno culture; and for some foolhardy lads, just tattooed bare skin. It lay also in the language. It was not just coarse: people reverted to the broadest possible local dialect; the pit and shipyard patois of their grandfathers. One advantage of this was the looks of utter confusion on the faces of TV reporters trying to interview them.
And the third flag? In this historic space, the heartland of the “Red Clyde” where the British government in 1919 sent tanks to attack a 90,000-strong workers’ demo, I didn’t see a single red flag. That, as far as this movement is concerned, has gone. No, the third flag was the estelada – the red and yellow banner of Catalan separatism. Wherever it appeared toted by actual Catalans, they were mobbed – so by the end, there were plenty being carried by shirtless Glaswegians. The symbolism, again, was clear – small nations of feisty people, fed up with remote elites, should stick together and disrupt the global order.
So where, now, does the disappointed Yes generation go? Not to the SNP, for sure – or not in large numbers. And not to Labour: a big part of the marginalised urban poor of western Scotland has had it with them. The revolt on Clydeside was a swing to a form of populist leftism for which there is no adequate political expression. The lefty activists who had done the legwork for Yes were muttering, come Friday morning, about a new party. But it would have to be something far broader than Tommy Sheridan’s old Scottish socialist formation to be attractive to this generation.
So while there is no political vacuum in the posh suburbs of Edinburgh, or among the elderly, there is a pretty clear one among Scotland’s youth. The same political vacuum exists in English and Welsh cities, and is very clear across southern Europe. It is born not just of economic hardship but the absence of any coherent narrative, or alternative, to the narrow range of possibilities on offer.
Political dislocation and improvised identities are fine as long as there’s stability. If there’s instability, and political structures break down, then we may regret the fact we offered this generation no clear alternative to Day-Glo flags and skunkweed.
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