Erstellt am: 18. 8. 2014 - 17:29 Uhr
"We get to build the country we want"
Denen, die ihn nicht kennen, sollte ich zwar erklären, wer RM Hubbert ist, aber im Grunde hab ich das ja schon vor zweieinhalb Jahren getan, also, wozu gibt's Hyperlinks? Eben.
Davon abgesehen, I'm now going to switch to English, or Scottish, rather. Because here is a conversation I had this morning with RM Hubbert, an extraordinary guitarist who happens to have played or put on shows with almost anyone in the Scottish music scene since the early 1990s, about the subject of Scottish Independence.
As a lifelong internationalist, I've never felt very comfortable with separatist causes, however suppressed or sidelined a smaller part of a bigger country might feel. Underneath all that well-founded feeling of injustice there invariably seemed to lurk a kernel of the old idea that in isolation one's own immediate environment should somehow be predestined to produce a superior batch of humankind.
The mere whiff of such nationalist sentiment has always had me running for the hills (a separatist move of a different kind), and much as I love my Scottish friends, I have indeed spotted statements of the kind on the social networks I frequent in the run-up to the referendum for Scotland's independence on September 18.
Then again, even after taking into account all my precious personal principles, I'm not quite deluded enough to think that all the Scots I have seen come out for independence in the past few months are any less clued-up about their reasons to do so than myself, with my opinions based on the view from er... Kent.
We clearly needed to talk, and I guessed if there was anyone up there who could explain to me why Scotland leaving the UK (and leaving the rest of us in the lurch) would be such a grand idea, it would probably be that wise and thoughtful man Hubby. Turns out I was right. Watch me crumble.
Luke Joyce
It's been a while... Are you in Glasgow?
No, I moved to a wee seaside town in Scotland called Troon last year. It's down on the west coast, it's beautiful.
Because it has occurred to me that today, as we speak, it's exactly a month to the referendum, and I noticed you're one of the people on social media on whose avatars the “Yes” has come up.
Aye!
That's been there for a while, it's a decision you made months ago, but maybe even longer...
You know, it's strange. It's something I hadn't even thought about before the opportunity came up. But it's something that I immediately wanted. I think the independence debate is misunderstood greatly outside of Scotland. Mainly because there has been very one-sided reporting from the news media in general about it. But it's not actually a nationalist issue for us. It's primarily a democratic one and a governmental one. The more I looked into it the more I realised that it just makes sense. It's a normal state for a country to be in. The situation we have just now is abnormal, you know.
You mean the fact that you would have proportional representation in your own parliament, for example.
It's a little-known fact the Scottish vote hasn't actually affected a UK election in the last 70 years. I think there have been two occasions where if you took the Scottish vote out there wouldn't have been a majority rule.
Which is due to the strange arithmetics of the British electoral system.
Yes, but also due to the fact that there's only five million people in Scotland. So, basically, our vote doesn't count. If you take our vote out of the vast majority of the elections we've had in the last 70 years, the result would stay exactly the same. So Scotland is a very low priority to the UK government because basically it doesn't matter what we feel. It doesn't change who gets put in power. I thought that was ridiculous, especially considering that, from an economic point of view, Scotland has put in more money than it takes out for a very long time.
But that's anyone's claim, isn't it? I remember Ken Livingstone always used to argue that Londoners subsidise Scotland. And he was supposed to be a left-winger. Wherever you are people are saying they are the ones putting money in. It's a bit like with the EU, I suppose.
Yeah, it really is. It's a very common thing put forward by Westminster. I'm very conscious that this isn't about the English people for us, or about the Welsh or the Northern Irish people. It's about Westminster. But the fact is that if you look at the amount of tax that Scottish people pay we pay substantially more tax into the UK and take out less than we pay in. It's simply not true that London subsidises Scotland.
Now that's the political and economic argument. I've just dug out an interview that I made with Roddy Frame earlier in the year. When I asked him about Scottish independence he said, because he has been living in London for so long, that he loves London, and I think that's an honest thing to say. But he also said that, instinctively, to him being part of Britain is a cooler thing than just being part of Scotland. However, I get the feeling that exactly the opposite is happening when I look at social media or talk to Scottish friends. Especially artists seem to go for it, as the Scottish identity seems, if I may put it in such banal a term, cooler than the British one.
First of all, I know Roddy, he's a lovely guy. We're still gonna be British. We're still part of Great Britain. Geographically, nothing is happening. We are simply dissolving a political union. We are actually a separate country now. It's just that we don't have control over our resources or how our money is spent. I think you're right there: The artistic community in Scotland does instinctively go for independence for a very specific reason. When the people I know started making music and putting on gigs we realised very quickly that we didn't need the music industry that was based in London. We could basically just set up our own, and it would thrive. You have people like Chemikal Underground and DF Concerts. We decided long ago that we would be independent from those industries, and we could do it ourselves and have a successful industry doing it. So I think when the question of political independence came up it seemed very obvious to us because we had been doing just that for so long anyway.
Do you think there might be a generational difference, because Roddy Frame came from that generation where not only did Scottish artists like him get signed by labels in London, but also Scottish artists took their own labels to London. I'm thinking of Postcard or Creation, they were all things that in the late seventies and in the eighties seemed to have to happen in London.
Yeah, well that changed in the nineties. I think Roddy's about the same age as I am, actually, I think he maybe younger than me.
Roddy Frame is about 50 now, so...
Is he, is Roddy 50? He looks really good for 50! Or I just look terrible for 40. But yes, certainly for my generation who started to make music in the early nineties, we never even considered moving to London. It wasn't a political decision, we just realised we had access to the same resources they did, and we could just do it ourselves. And it's the same with the arts scene. The Glasgow School of Art or Dundee's School of Art as well is world respected, you don't have to move to London or New York to do this stuff.
Then how do you feel about this watering down of independence? Keeping the pound, or even keeping the Queen...
Well, I personally am not a fan of the monarchy, and I would happily join the Euro actually, to be absolutely frank with you, but I don't think keeping the currency waters down independence in any way because any currency that is used has to have a creditor of last resort who sets interest rates anyway.
And if that's not your own?
Well, it kind of is, though. The Bank of England does this just now, and it's partly owned by the Scottish people. I think there's been a lot of emphasis on short-term problems here, specifically with regards to the currency. I think we have to look at the long term. The way I see it, what we're voting for is the right to form our own government and to set our own policies forever. It's not about putting Alex Salmond in charge of all our taxpayers' money or David Cameron, you know. This is forever. We get to build the country we want, and that will take a long time. I'm not particularly worried about the currency issue because that will sort itself out, as to what's going to be better. And also, if the country votes for independence there's no way that London would rule out a currency union because it would be suicidal for English business. Actually, Ed Miliband said himself it would cost about £0.5bn a year in transaction charges if there's no formal currency union, for English as well as Scottish businesses.
How do you think it's going to go? The vote is fluctuating, and like you say, the media tend to report a pro-union stance...
I think it will happen. The one thing that's really, really impressed me is that for the first time in my lifetime everybody is talking about this, and talking about it in a nuanced informed fashion. The Scottish people moved past the unionist and whatever issues quite a long time ago. As far as this discussion goes people are talking about the realities and the details of it in a way that I've never seen before.
And significantly, you are talking not just about the bubble of musicians that you know...
No, I'm talking about in general, in pubs, in cafés.
In your little seaside town.
Everywhere I went in Scotland. I get to travel around this country a lot doing shows, and a lot of people are talking about it. I've not found one person that, having read up on the issues and spent a bit of time researching it, has moved to the No camp from the Yes vote.
And still you get people from the BBC Today programme going round Edinburgh and saying things like: "There's no No posters, and yet No is leading in the polls." Do you think the No camp is just very quiet?
Ummm... No! I don't think they are. In the creative community it's definitely mostly a Yes, and they are the people who will shout about it. It's interesting. Where I live now is actually a conservative part of the country, and even here there isn't a lot of a No campaign going on. There's no real grassroots No campaign. Better Together are basically run from London. The only grassroots stuff you see is “Yes”. I think it's great, but I get worried that there's a slight echo chamber going on around the people that I interact with. I went out and did some shows for a really great organisation that's come up called National Collective. They're all very young people, they're all in their twenties, but they started a creative coalition for the Yes vote, and they organised a month-long tour all over Scotland inviting people like myself and Stuart from Mogwai, and we go and play and talk about independence. And the ones I went to go and see I was very worried that it was just going to be this echo chamber of people that are already going to be voting Yes agreeing with each other. But it wasn't. Because they were going to these small towns in Scotland, and the locals were coming along asking questions. Both of the official campaigns have been pretty bad about putting out real solid information, so people are hungry for this information. They want to make an informed decision because we realise this is the most important decision our generation is going to get to make politically in Scotland. You know this is it. If we say No now, there's not going to be another referendum in our lifetimes.
But even if it is No, something will have changed, right?
Something will have changed, but we will be as powerless as we are currently to do anything with it. I've no doubt at all that if we vote No now, we are going to get screwed over in a way that we haven't seen before. Because the threat of independence, the threat of all of our revenue, be it from oil or tourism or exports, has been our only bargaining chip with Westminster. And if we vote No that's it gone.
Well, as an impartial part in this discussion, living as an Austrian in England, I'm old enough to remember everyone I met in the late eighties and early nineties wanting the Tories out of government. It was astonishing. And it just brought it home to me how, even if you think you've spoken to everyone, there are an awful lot of different people you just don't come across.
Oh I know. Absolutely, if you look at the polls it's pretty close. There's enough undecided people for it to go either way.
And the other thing that springs to mind is what people in Europe seem to be worried about: That it sets off a whole wave of separatisms. How do you feel about the Catalans being next and so on?
I think that's an issue for the Catalans, you know. It's interesting with Europe though. The only way that Scotland is guaranteed to stay in Europe in the long term is to vote for independence. The Tories and UKIP and everyone else are planning a referendum on leaving the EU relatively soon. Which we will have no effect on, like every other election.
This is one of Alex Salmond's most clever arguments to say: It's actually the opposite, if you want to stay in Europe you have to be pro-independence.
Yeah, and it's true. I don't agree with Alex Salmond on a lot of things, but I think it's very hard to believe that we wouldn't be able to continue our membership of the EU, considering that we would be the only European country with huge oil reserves and very, very important fishing waters for everyone else, especially the Spanish who use the Scottish fishing waters a lot. And yeah, you're quite right: That silent majority that votes in the Tories, they're the ones that are going to vote to leave the EU. Aye, the only way Scotland is guaranteed to stay in the EU is to leave the UK.
You just said you don't always agree with Alex Salmond: How will Scotland change politically if it were independent? One of the driving forces of the pro-independence campaign is that people also see Scotland as politically more progressive than England. It's interesting to imagine what Scottish Labour would look like in an independent country. I don't think you are an SNP voter, or are you?
I have voted for the SNP, mostly as a protest vote, to be honest. I have also voted green, and I will probably continue to vote green. But looking at the situation in Europe and in Germany, I'm quite excited about the Green Party actually getting more power in Scotland due to the fact that we're going for a proportional representation system. The political powers are going to have to change in Scotland. I would like to think that Labour could maybe become Labour again. I'm not sure that's possible anymore. The Libdems are never going to get voted into anything in Scotland again. Due to their coalition with the Tories. And the Tories, again, they're just not. I think the media are very keen to frame it as Yes voters supporting Salmond and the No voters supporting Darling, but it's simply not true. Myself, I'm very jaded with politicians in general, and I'm aware that, given independence, our politicians will still be corrupt. The difference is that we can kick them out when they are, and we can put in new ones, which is something that we're not getting to do just now.
I'm under no illusion, I don't believe we are going to wake up on the 19th of September with a socialist utopia on the way, but this is the first step in creating a fairer society. It's going to be a lot of hard work, you know, and I don't know how the political parties in Scotland are going to reform, but they're gonna have to.
Thanks so much for this interview, you might have kind of convinced me now.
Oh, good. I mean, every person I've ever spoken to about it, not one of them has seen this as a nationalist issue. It's not about the English, it's not about that. It's about Westminster. And Westminster is treating the rest of England as badly as it has Scotland as well, you know. Everything is so skewed towards the City of London now. Not the geographical city, but the City city. And they're not even being subtle with it anymore. It's disgusting. I sincerely hope we get independence, and I sincerely hope when we do that it fuels a much bigger change for the UK, but we'll find out on the 19th.
RM Hubbert's new B-sides and rarities collection Ampersand Extras will be out October 13 on Chemikal Underground.