Two of my overly time-consuming interests are cricket and politics. Correctly fearing the worst from the impending cricketing affray between England and India at Lord’s, I directed my holiday travels further afield, and to potentially by far the biggest change to the British Constitution in my lifetime: the Scottish referendum on September 18.
No, I didn’t go to Edinburgh; after all, this was my summer holiday. I certainly considered Barcelona, though, to compare Scotland’s independence referendum with Catalonia’s definitely-not-an-independence-referendum on November 9.
Catalonia’s problem is intriguing. It’s one of Spain’s 19 ‘autonomous communities’ – a region that today is among its most economically dynamic, a major tourist attraction, and, it argues, a disproportionate tax contributor. It would, it reckons, be better off on its own.
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The Spanish Parliament, though, has decreed that Catalonia’s autonomy isn’t that autonomous, and that its agreed ‘nation’ status is just “a cultural term with no legal weight”. In April it ruled the Catalan parliament was powerless even to hold a self-determination referendum.
David Cameron must have been nonplussed. He’s as personally powerful as any Prime Minister in Europe, yet felt bound to accept that the Scottish people had elected a parliament with a mandate to hold a referendum. As for denying Scotland’s nationhood, I doubt if it even crossed his mind.
What’s happening on November 9, then, is a public consultation that is a referendum in all but name and that asks two questions: “Do you want Catalonia to be a State?” and “If so, do you want Catalonia to be an independent State?” – both with a big capital ‘S’.
Recent polls show ‘Yes/Yes’ clearly ahead with approaching 50 per cent and ‘No’ with just over 30 per cent. Meanwhile, although the Scottish ‘Better Together’ campaign has its problems, at least one of them isn’t the Spanish Justice Minister, who, telescope jammed to a Nelsonian blind eye, insists “The vote will not take place”. We shall see.
I decided, though, that Barcelona during the school hols wasn’t quite my thing, and so settled for the only place in the world to have rejected a clear independence option at the ballot box twice – Quebec.
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Indeed, it’s one of Quebec’s claims to fame: the snowy owl, Celine Dion, poutine – its greasy spoon answer to Scotland’s deep-fried Mars bars – chips smothered in gravy and cheese curds – and not being independent.
There’s long been a strong Scottish presence here, but, even if there weren’t, there would still be a genuine interest in September’s referendum, and an understandable tendency to view it through a Québécois prism.
As with Scotland, there is a strong historic strand to the independence case: that Quebecers are descendants of a conquered people, and, like colonists throughout much of the world, should be granted their overdue national sovereignty.
The cultural, linguistic, and religious distinctiveness strands are even stronger, with 80 per cent of the province being French-speaking and largely Catholic, while over 90 per cent of eight of the other provinces are English-speaking and predominantly Protestant.
Economically, too, Quebec is indisputably disadvantaged – in this respect in the opposite position to Catalonia – and this is where the Quebecers’ warnings to Scottish voters come in. Be very afraid, they say, based on their perception of Quebec’s post-referendum experience. Don’t blow it, you can’t lose a referendum without losing something else.
It’s almost the reverse of what seems to be coming out of Scotland itself, where the prevailing view seems more one of win or lose, either way we win.
Nearly two-thirds of Scottish voters believe in at least ‘devo max’: that the Scottish parliament should make all or the great majority of decisions affecting Scotland, and have their own tax funding to do so. And English party leaders are competing to offer the biggest basket of goodies in exchange for a ‘No’ vote. Quebecers would advise: check the details and conditions, the small print, time scales, get-out clauses – and still prepare for the worst. They’ve been there, close enough to smell independence, yet today they’re as far away as ever.
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In this April’s provincial general election, the Parti Québécois (PQ), the equivalent of the SNP, who had spearheaded the independence campaign through two referendums, received its smallest-ever vote share.
In the first 1980 referendum, the mood, among Quebecers at least, was one of sweet reasonableness. The lengthy question sought a new negotiated “agreement with the rest of Canada, based on the equality of nations … enabling Quebec to acquire sovereignty while maintaining with Canada an economic association including a common currency …” Sound at all familiar?
That referendum was lost by 60 per cent to 40 per cent and the additional powers and more favourable treatment the campaigners thought they’d been promised never quite materialised.
But 1995 was very different. With a fortnight to go, the ‘Yes’ side was edging ahead and set off a panic.
Constitutional reforms were promised, President Clinton was brought in, but the turning point was a massive Montreal ‘Unity Rally’ at which 100,000 out-of-state Canadians ‘love-bombed’ Quebecers while Prime Minister Jean Chrétien rehearsed the values of ‘Canada: the best country in the world’.
It’s the kind of stunt Cameron would love – his only problem being that, while Chrétien emphasised Canada’s commitment to multiculturalism, its military peace-keeping record, and its flourishing public health system, Scots are likely to be less bowled over by Cameron’s personal war with multiculturalism, his country’s war with Iraq, and privatisation.
However, even with the love-bombing, the No campaign edged home by barely 1 per cent or 46,000 votes out of nearly 4.7 million. This time, surely the sheer closeness would force concessions, but no. Quebecers’ living standards have been falling for the past 30 years and it is close to becoming Canada’s poorest province.
The separatists’ reasoning is that the ‘something else’ lost – particularly when the 1995 referendum was lost – was precisely the threat to hold and win a referendum. The threat of breaking away was “the biggest bargaining chip the provincial government ever had”, and, as they see it, that’s very same position the Scottish Government is in today.
* Chris Game, Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham