Readers, help me out here. I used the word ‘separatist’ on Twitter today to describe the Scots who intend to vote for independence in the referendum in September.
It’s the word I usually use to describe them – alongside ‘unionist’ for those who intend to vote against independence and for the union. One side wants to stay in the union and one side wants to separate from the rest of the union so they seem to me to be the best short had descriptive words for everyone’s end goal.
Today, however, a few people got really very cross. I was told that calling people separatists is a bit like calling them racists. I was told that it is an “inaccurate” word. That it is “unnecessarily emotive”, “highly charged”, and “pejorative.”
I don’t get it. How can it be any of these things? Voting for independence is voting to leave the union. Nothing wrong with that (as long as you do it for emotional not economic reasons) but it does make separation a perfectly good word to use. So I pushed back on it.
What’s wrong with it, I asked. Finally one of my followers told me it was too hard to explain on Twitter.
Hmmm. A few months ago I wondered here why the SNP were making all this quite so complicated. Right now, Scotland is effectively a member of five unions: a union of the crown; a defence union (Nato); a monetary/currency union; the European Union; and a fiscal union.
If you listen to what the SNP say you will see that in the main they say want to keep the first four and only to turn the dial on the fifth (fiscal independence, as Mark Carney has made as clear as possible, is not possible without monetary independence). But that isn’t really going to be possible post a yes vote (which I why I am pleased to see that a plan B to sterling is now being worked on).
So here’s why I think that Scotland’s separatists don’t like being called separatists: the word makes it clear that voting yes doesn’t mean voting for a tad more fiscal devolution (as I imagine the SNP might like the undecided to think), it means breaking – or at least heavily negotiating to stay in – most of the other unions. It means separation. Separating can be good and it can be bad, but it is what it is.
PS Regular readers will know that I am generally a unionist (hard not to be when you are born in Ireland, part educated in England and married to a Scot) but with occasional sympathies towards the romance of the separatists. But you can read my interview with the firmly separatist Angus Tulloch here.
PPS One person told me on Twitter this morning that they preferred to be called a ‘civic nationalist’. This seems to me to be the political equivalent of the now famous phrase ‘conscious uncoupling’ – a euphemism used to make what is actually happening seem rather less dramatic than it really is.