The Hope Of Independence – Ten Years On

I write a lot about how I see hope. I have poems about how hope doesn’t feel positive to me – I know its effect is positive, but it’s not a nice feeling. It hurts. In movies, when hope sparks, the person usually smiles. That’s not been my experience. I write about how hope is a choice, and a practice. It’s something you do. It is getting up when everything seems bleak and still trying to change things. It is choosing to not be overwhelmed by all the despair, or at least not permanently. It is doing the work anyway. Except. I know what that other hope feels like. For a few weeks, back in 2014, I felt hope that didn’t weigh me down. Hope that didn’t feel futile. It was so unexpected, and so beautiful, and so singular.

I am from a cursed generation. Not to say we had it worse than anyone else – we all suffered in our own ways (and I’m using ‘generation’ here with the caveat that these are just useful collection labels for a widely shared experience of a time and place, not universal or destiny or remotely reliable sociology). But I think my small cohort of western very elder millennials had a particular experience with hope. We were born into the Cold War, the world of Thatcher and Reagan, the wars on the unions and the rise of hypercapitalism. But around the time we began to be aware of the world around us, we watched Eastern Bloc countries gain independence, the Berlin Wall falling, the Good Friday Agreement, the dawn of the internet and talking to people all over the world, the landslide Labour victory. Terrible things were still happening, but it felt like large global shifts of power towards something good were not only possible, but inevitable. We were too young to understand it all, but we came of age believing the world was sorting itself out, that we’d decided people mattered.

And off we went into adulthood, just in time for George Bush to take Florida, to realise what had entered Downing Street with Tony Blair, to see the towers fall and all the liberal heroes cheerleading the crushing of civil rights, to march in our millions against a war and have it make absolutely no dent. And as we grieved, we had Boomers telling us we were weak and Gen X telling us we were stupid to have ever thought it would be different.

So hope is something hard to quantify for me. I have the impulse to hope. It is there, and I hate it, because I usually find out I still have hope at the moment it dies. Just when I thought there wasn’t any hope left to lose, I’d find a store to break my own heart with. I refuse to give up on the world I saw as a teenager, though, so I approach hope as a choice. I don’t believe it will make a difference but I have to work as if it will, because the alternative is complicity.

Except for those couple of weeks in September.

I’d been campaigning for a year, not letting myself believe it could happen. I campaigned for the world I knew we could build if we just got the chance. For the people around me in the movement, made up of every ethnic group and faith and demographic and background. I saw the commitment to a country where we put people ahead of corporations, class and corruption. Where we chose community over fear and isolation. I saw the people working for it and sure, I didn’t get on with them all but we all wanted something better than this.

I knew it would be hard. I knew it wouldn’t be sunshine and roses – new countries have growing pains and the British State would do everything they could to sabotage us in case we showed the other home nations that necrocapitalism was not inevitable and there was another way to structure an economy. But through all of it, I also had faith we’d choose to make sure people were taken care of, even when things were hard.

In those last couple of weeks, it began to feel real. It began to feel in reach. The conversations changed and people began to listen. The state panicked, of course, but it still felt like it did when I was a kid – when I saw the world shifting and knew something better really was possible. Hope, it turns out, doesn’t always hurt in the moment. It can be beautiful. It can make you feel connected to the people around you, to the world. It was transcendent. I’ve never felt anything like those days and nights. Ten years later, I can still taste it. I can still conjure that light in my chest, feeling like it was spilling out of all of us like sunshine. I could hear that better world breathing. 

The years since have been so much worse than we predicted. We were called scaremongers for what turned out to be fairly anodyne assumptions about what the cost of a No vote would be. Despite their campaign, we always knew a No vote was not neutral. We have lost so much and so many in the decade since the results came in. We’ve seen other hopes rise and be crushed by the same forces.

But we’ve also seen how effective a lack of hope is as a recruiting tool for fascism. How easily our friends fell for lies which gave them an enemy to fight. How, left without the capacity to build something good, people will tear things apart. How easily cruelty seeps in where blanket cynicism has taken hold. A lack of hope, real hope, is dangerous.

So I still hope. It’s my usual kind of hope. The gritted teeth instead of the smile. It’s the hope that means we still keep fighting even when we can’t see how it could possibly work out. Even when it feels so far away. Ten years gone and I know when independence comes it won’t be that joy-filled new dawn we could have had. They won’t underestimate us again. But I hope it’ll come. I still hope. I still hope.