Terry McDonald: The dream is dead; long live the Scottish dream

Hope is to a group dynamic as Mentos is to Coca-Cola. A hopeful mass creates the hair-raising tingle of an impending thunderstorm, looking for a place and time to touch down. I have been in many hopeful places — election rallies, sporting events, the Occupy protests, but none have had the Tesla-coil buzz that was in Glasgow, the night before the independence referendum.

Glasgow was the epicentre of the pro-independence “Yes” campaign. Blue-collared to the fibres, a place so Tory-antithetical that you can still hear “Thatcher” used as a curse, it was declared by “Yes” campaign and Scottish Parliament leader Alex Salmond as the “Freedom City” home of the independence campaign.

“Give it laldi” shouted the well-imbibed gent sharing a table with a crowd of trim-beard Uni-students and I at The Counting House pub, a stagger-throw from the rally at St. George’s Square – “I’ve never seen my country so alive.” The young folk nod along in agreement, and get back to the intricacies of the vote-breakdown they saw coming the next day. The square, re-dubbed “Independence Square” by the crowd, is being thrown into a progressive frenzy by a local rapper named Darren “Loki” MacGarvey, commiserating with them that as “you see a version of society that does not represent you,” to be bold and fight through the fear of the Westminster-backed “No” campaign, and to build a better, freer society “with a wee bit of compassion and a wee bit of love.”

Hope, though, too creates fear. It gives inevitable rise to a resistance, a desire to quarter no shaking of the status quo. This was the mood from Sarah, a twenty-something waitress and entrepreneur in a much more subdued Edinburgh. Just starting a new business, she didn’t want to lose the Pound, to invite all the chaos that would fashion. She was a firm, polite, “No, thanks”-voter, unnerved by the prospects the next day would bring.

“Independence Square” was a riotous festival for the evening, night, and eventual morning of the vote-counting process - bagpipes blaring, pint cans strewn, “Flower of Scotland” hollered a score. Children climbed statues, giant homemade flagpoles strained against unmeasured weight, bold crowd-surfers on mattresses bobbed along and then thumped to the tarmac, all under the uneasy gaze of a smattering of police. There is no great organized presence here, no stage nor sound nor flashing lights. There is just compulsion – to be where it happens when it happens – and so here they came. The results trickle in through smartphones, and whisper-wildfire through the crowd. A great heave goes up when Glasgow goes yes, but it is a fleeting euphoria. Around 5 a.m., the whispers start trickling, the BBC has called it, Scotland goes No.

Yet, from the ashes, new hope arises. Perhaps the staunchest Yes supporter I have encountered, Peter Cheney, 51, called me the next morning, “absolutely shattered.” That was a dark day, only to be acknowledged by pints at the pub. Talk of the enthusiasm of the 16-and-17-year-olds given suffrage for this campaign was no solace, Peter “wanted to see it in my lifetime.” A few days later, though, the shoots of new growth hope are already showing through.

“I have to say that I still feel my heart has been ripped out, anyway the independence fight is not over by a long shot,” he said.

This optimism was matched, even day of, by others on the Glaswegian ground. “No matter what happened today,” said Martin Cameron, 24, “the country is changed forever. 97 per cent voter registration won’t just go away.”

It was perhaps most simply put, though, by the last man I spoke to at the rally in the now-again St. George’s square. With an arm around his crying wife, he locked eyes and told us all, “Hope is still better than fear.”

Coming soon: Similarities to NL?  

Follow Terry McDonald on Twitter: @Terry_McD

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