Scotland’s young, feisty yes generation has nowhere to go
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/21/what-now-scotland-young-yes-generation
For several nights last week, George Square in Glasgow became a mosh pit of political passion and, on the final night, despair. As they waited for the referendum result, young working-class Scots grabbed each other around the head and danced. Their chants were improvised: “No freedom, no party” – an ironic take on No justice, no peace – and the more prosaic: “Let’s go fucking mental.” The persistent fog that had clung to the river Clyde was augmented by a haze of skunk.
These were kids drawn from an age group that across Scotland had voted by 71% to 29% to leave Britain, and from a working-class city whose majority had defied its Labour heritage to vote likewise. Their bid failed, but my time in that mosh pit – incongruous in being middle-aged, sober and without face paint – became a nightly seminar in the modern politics of identity.
Scottish politics has been about class, community, land and nation. But the working-class youth of Clydeside found themselves cut adrift from these traditional markers. This is a generation born when the death of communism was already a finished fact; when Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History was already in its paperback edition. To them, neoliberalism was not a spectacular historical eruption but simply the world around them. As it destroyed the remains of the industrial society their fathers knew, rendering the stone churches and granite docksides as meaningless and depopulated as medieval ruins, they did what they were told to do: get an education and a low-paid job.
And then, in 2008, neoliberalism broke down. We are five years into what came next: a broken economic model; an educated and technologically empowered young generation whose future has been cancelled; and a political elite that is aloof, clueless and whose roots in common society have withered. The result is discontent – and the Scottish referendum was just the latest iteration. But what is it doing to identity?
