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Murphy’s Irn Bru tour for the Union

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A couple of Irn Bru crates to stand on [sometimes]. A mic [occasionally]. ‘Yes’ hecklers [always]. Humour and hard facts [a constant]. And the potential spoiler to end all spoilers – Oban’s seagull whisperer.

These were some of the ingredients in Jim Murphy’s gladiatorial challenge in the streets of Oban yesterday – putting the case for the Union to all comers, as part of his 100 towns in 100 days initiative. Barra and Eriskay are two that beat Oban to the draw.

Murphy in full flow in response to a heckler, catches sight from the corner of his eye of some people passing on the footpath and interrupts himself: ‘Hello. Come and listen. You don’t need to say anything but join in if you like’. Many did.

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The streets are hard. You have to catch your audience, hold it, engage with it, tease it, resist it, persuade it – all against the noise and bundle of a town going about its business.. And the ‘Yes’ campaign is consistently organised to get the claque out to play. Their job is as much to recruit for their own position as to disrupt the opposition’s chance to put  theirs.

One of them yesterday was the Seagull Whisperer. This man can summon a skyfull of seagulls by a series of sounds. He uses chips as well, which is probably quicker – but he has other means of communication with the winged marauders. The whisperer could make a public meeting unmanageable in two minutes flat. He didn’t, as it happened. But he demonstrated his capacity to do so to slack jawed alarm, minutes before Jim Murphy arrived.

A masterclass

Murphy’s performance was something of a masterclass, responding to questions from the hecklers – pitting reason against [often] unreason, sympathetic to those fuelled by the fire of an independence they have waited a lifetime to take a punt at – and never losing his sense of fun.

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At one point, in a skirmish on the linked issue of immigration and border controls, the example of Ireland arose.

  • ‘But Ireland’s not a foreign country.’
  • ‘The UK doesn’t have border controls against Ireland.’

Without, just now, going into the weaknesses of understanding behind these perspectives [although the facts that the Queen made a state visit to the Republic of Ireland in 2011 and that a land border is a very different matter from separation by water], the argument in Station Square this afternoon took a swerve to Ireland’s legendary ability to raise its population by its own efforts.

One braveheart said: ‘They have more children in Ireland – because they can afford to have them.’ Murphy is not ‘Murphy’ for nothing. He was quick on the particularly Irish nuances of large families. ‘But that means more sex’, he cried, ‘More sex’. ‘Oh you can joke about it’, said the braveheart, sourly. ‘I just have’ said Murphy, ‘More sex. That’s how it works’. To much laughter from the crowd – including the hecklers, he said, ‘But I’m no expert’.

A woman challenged the MP on what would be better if Scotland chose to remain in the United Kingdom. ‘It wouldn’t be better’, said Murphy. ‘It would be bigger’. And that, of course, is the point, succinctly put.

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There was an almost surreal mateyness about the way the hecklers went about their job. Irrational and disruptive as they often were, Murphy was still no alien but one of their own. Every fusillade was topped or tailed by a ‘Jim’. [Second from right above was the wizard with the seagulls. Last on the  right was a 'Labour for Independence' supporter.]

A session on the rightness and wrongness of specific wars [starting with Blair and Iraq and ranging widely over time and place] took a few odd corners. Murphy turned this neatly to the need – and cost – of a Scottish naval and air defence.

The bravehearts declared Scotland would need no navy and no air force. Murphy pounced on this gift, fast as a cheetah: ‘So how will you defend all those oil rigs way out there with no navy? Silence.

‘Of course Scotland will need a navy, an air force, embassies, passports…’, said Murphy. ‘It wouldn’t get around to all of these in the first few years though – the experience of other countries that have gone independent shows that dealing with the fracture takes up most of the first five years.’

That word ‘fracture’ hit the ether hard. This word and its meaning were felt in the bones.  ‘Fracture’ is physical, real, painful, slow to heal and needing recovery time. That recovery time is down time for a nation that would need to get moving in short order; and self mutilation for a country that already has the best of both worlds. There was clear pause for thought on ‘fracture’.

Using the space, the MP pursued the issue saying, with conversational reasonableness, that it is just hard to see how Scotland could manage to deliver all that was being promised.

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Through all the heckles there was always humour. ‘I see you have your friends with you’, one cried – pointing to some people from the Labour party to which Murphy belongs [local MSP Jackie Baillie; Kieron Green, Labour candidate for the Ward 5 by-election for Argyll and Bute Council - on 17th July; and Labour candidate for the 2015 General Election, Mary Galbraith].  ‘I’m a politician‘,  shouted Muphy. ‘I have no friends.’ Laughter all round.

By now the rhythm of the session had changed. Having exhausted themselves in all out instant conflict, the bravehearts went quiet. The discussion became focused but the laughs kept coming One heckler tried a tired sally. ‘I don’t see your ‘Yes’ badge’, countered Murphy. ‘Wear a bigger one or we’ll wonder if you’re under cover.’ At this, the badgeless one threw his anorak open to reveal a Saltire blue t-shirt with the word ‘Aye’ flaring white across the chest. Everyone roared with laughter at Murphy’s divination.

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A dispute arose between two bravehearts. ‘Don’t heckle each other’, said Murphy. ‘You’re here to heckle me.’

He was asked by one member of the audience, if people were right who thought Scotland could vote ‘Yes’ and then get back into the Union it if didn’t work. ‘No’, said Murphy. ‘If you vote for a government you can change it in five years’. If you vote for independence, it’s for good’.

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A woman held the MP’s attention with a serious question on a new issue – why the political parties do not return able MPs, like Murphy, to Holyrood. She wanted to see him there. This is a matter of real concern. Devolution leaves less of concern to Scotland to be managed at Westminster. The general level of capability at Holyrood is low rent. There are government ministers who would be no more than Parliamentary Private Secretaries to ministers at Westminster – if that.

There were exchanges about the pound, with Murphy making it clear that a shared currency cannot happen. The bravehearts simply insisted they’ll be using it, post-independence.

That sort of thing gives us a serious problem. Anyone who understood the issues over a shared currency, with the level of risk from such an arrangement to the continuing UK, would understand that, with the hedges against risk that would have to be built in to any agreement,  it is highly unlikely to be of interest to either side.

But how can anyone who dismisses facts as of no account talk with any credibility about wanting to  be in a country where ‘we’ll take our own decisions’?

You can’t take a sound decision if you don’t understand the facts of it – and the first decision to be taken on the basis of not understanding the facts will, for too many, be voting to take the country into independence.

Were that to happen and were that to fail, it would be -  ironically,  the braveheart cannon fodder who would generally be the most vulnerable to the consequences.

 Talking to Jim Murphy afterwards

With the adrenaline running, following one combative street contest and another of the same coming up fast, we talked to Jim Murphy over a quick cup of tea in the Royal Hotel.IMG_7925

He made a range of observations, very much to the point.

‘All nationalists are patriots’, he said, ‘but not all patriots are nationalists’ – a graceful way of highlighting the racist abusiveness of the ‘anti-Scottish’ charges flying around, even in the chamber at Holyrood.

We asked him, on a scale of 1-10, how he would rate the pro-union campaign to date. ‘We started slowly. 2-5 maybe?’, he said. ‘But we’re going much better now. 8-9?

‘Where are the remaining two points going to come from’ we asked. ‘We’re on the right track’, he said. ‘But we need to find the passion. The nationalists have the passion but not the reason.’

‘What would you say the most powerful card in the pro-union pack is’, we asked. ‘Reason’, he said. ‘We’re putting the facts of the case. But we do still  need to find the passion’.

When we asked what he thought the strongest card is for the pro-independence campaign, he came up with a sharp surprise. ‘David Cameron’ – which we immediately queried. ‘But they keep on using Cameron as a frightener’, he said.

‘But Cameron hasn’t got the substance to be demonised’,  we said. ‘He’s much too slight’. ‘Not like Maggie Thatcher’, he said. ‘She loved it.’ And she did – the original ‘Bring it on’ PM.

For the record, Murphy decided finally that the strongest card for indy is, in the light of other countries who have chosen independence, the nationalists cry: ‘Why can’t we have it?’.

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The problem with politics in general, is that elected representatives get seduced into seeing a world with themselves at the centre of it.

The pro-indy campaign may well use Cameron as a dog-whistle scarer of an emblem – but the major card the ‘Yes’ campaign has to play is excitement. The prospect of starting over is fun. We know too many people who know perfectly well that the indy prospectus is a puff – but who don’t care and who intend to vote ‘Yes’ because ‘We can sort it out afterwards’. [Good luck with that.]

This flies in the face of reason but perfectly intelligent people are thinking this way. Those same people need to see an alternative – interactive – process for working together to renew the union itself, for making it fairer, more inclusive, better structured, less riddled with anachronisms and less deformed by the disease of patronage.

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Scotland did start over, of course, with the devolved Scottish Parliament starting on 12th May 1999. What did Scotland do with that chance to begin anew? Donald Dewar as first First Minister and David Steel, as first Presiding Officer, between them sold a pliant Scotland the English parliamentary model: party political, adversarial, with all the sophist procedural curlicues of the old way of doing governance.

Why does anyone think that today’s Scotland is any more original in its thinking than it was only 13 years ago?  After all, the indy prospectus  is to keep the Queen; to keep the pound; to let the Bank of England continue to run Scotland’s monetary and fiscal policies; and is in thrall to the Norway of decades ago. There is no evidence to suggest that Scotland is apt to think for itself today any more than it did from 1997-1999 when the operations of devolution were being framed.

But the political point is that people think it will be different this time and are excited by the gamble; therefore the pro-union campaign has to grasp the imperative of the renewal of the union, offering the excitement of the collaborative reshaping of a union capable of working as a coming together of equals and of answering the demands upon it of life in the 21st century.

As it is, the union may, reasonably, be reassuring but the familiar cannot be exciting. The counter to the thrill of the white knuckle ride of indy  really is not about throwing more tax controls at Scotland as unenticing enticements. Jim Murphy rightly thinks that devolved welfare is more powerful than devolved tax controls – but if you can vary one you need to be able to vary the other to pay for it, since ‘variation’, inevitably means ‘more’ in both cases.

As it stands, the governance of the union today is about the preservation of tradition rather than about renewal. Formaldehyde preserves but absorbing it creates the semblance of life at the expense of the real thing. It has to be recognised – urgently – that the union itself has to change rather than wait for change to be forced upon it by a departing Scotland.

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Watching Murphy in action yesterday on the streets of Oban was revelatory. Few politicians have the ability to be essentially respectful of their opponents, as Murphy was with the bravehearts – while politely but robustly demonstrating the weakness of their position. Few have the stomach for the raw combativeness of working in the street. Fewer again have the ability to think as fast on their feet in these circumstances, to slog away on the ground-strokes and aim for unreturnable first serves, while remaining urbane and funny under volleying. Holyrood isn’t even on the starting blocks.

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There is an amusing footnote to this event. Before it started, in a signal of what was to come, a pick up with a Saltire across its rear end ploughed through Station Square and went on down the pier.The Saltire looked as if had been engaged in some roughhousing in the not too distant past. If there’s another van in the town with a Union flag on its – rather battered – front end, maybe there’s some sort of contemporary single handed combat going on in Oban?


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