Editor’s Note: Brian Cox is an Emmy Award-winning actor known for his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and in Hollywood movies including Manhunter, Braveheart and The Bourne Identity. He is a patron of the Scottish Youth Theatre, and rector of Dundee University. He supports the Yes Scotland campaign, but is not permitted to vote in the referendum as he lives in the U.S. The views in this commentary are solely his.
Story highlights
Voters in Scotland to decide on country's independence on September 18
Actor Brian Cox supports the "Yes Scotland" campaign
Cox: A "yes" vote will see "the old feudal ideologies dismantled"
Independent Scotland "will embrace new forms of political thinking," says Cox
As we approach the referendum, what is being proven time and time again is that the people of Scotland are showing a political will that has been sadly lacking in these islands for the last generation or so.
Whatever the vote and whatever the outcome on September 18, the victory will be the revival of social democracy.
Hopefully – from my point of view, and that of the Scottish people – the vote will be a resounding “Yes.”
A “Yes” which reinforces the will of the Scottish people to supersede the political apathy of the last twenty years or so.
In the debate between “Yes” and “No,” there clearly has arisen confusion between Nationalism and Independence. Nationalist sentiment can obfuscate the point of Independence.
This vote is not about nationalism, it is about social democracy, and for myself and the people of Scotland, social democracy is at the root of our desire for Independence.
An independent state of Scotland will reinforce its own laws, embrace new forms of political thinking, new creeds, new political parties, and new positions of argument.
Independence will allow a new system to be put in place, and in Scotland’s case, and for the people of Scotland, a system of social equality where the yoke of the old feudal ideologies are finally dismantled.
The political systems of New Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrats have atrophied in the UK; atrophied to such an extent that the dividing line between these ideologies have become increasingly blurred by each party’s pragmatic desire for political power. A power to be got seemingly at any cost. And particularly in the Labour Party’s case, to be got at the expense of political ideology.
Sadly – and as a member of the Labour Party it pains me greatly to write this – over the last fifteen years or so I have witnessed the Labour Party’s fundamental socialist thought being consistently compromised on a needs must basis, an “ends justifies the means” ideology; floundering in a swamp of sound bite sentiment.
Labour’s failure to understand and anticipate Scotland’s desire for a state of independence could at root lie in its reconstitution of the party as New Labour in the 1990s. The need for this reconstitution came about as a desire for the party to purge itself of its top heavy industrial union dependency and militant tendency.
It tried to create itself anew as New Labour, but perhaps in the process threw the baby out with the bath water.
And yet, it might have succeeded in this metamorphosis had it not been for the all-wheening hubris of its leader, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, who insisted in involving these islands in an illegal war which created a painful fissure in the body politic of the party.
That fissure has never been healed. Faith was lost and has yet to be restored.
And at this vital time when the big battalions of political thinking of Westminster are mustering their final offensive against Scottish Independence, the very act of this coercion creates in the Scottish character a defiance and an understanding of their true spirit; a spirit which despite overbearing adversity remains fiercely independent in its constitution.
The environmental campaigner George Monbiot has written that “to vote ‘No’ in this referendum is to choose to live under a political system that sustains one of the rich world’s highest levels of inequality and deprivation. A system that treats the natural world, civic life, equality, public health, and effective public services as dispensable luxuries, and the freedom of the rich to exploit the poor as non-negotiable.”
Throughout the Independence campaign, I have been shocked and shaken by the disconnect of my colleagues and their failure to understand the state of play throughout the whole of this nation, exemplified by the needs of the Scottish people.
I have been appalled at the condescension and patronizing attitudes of those who I would have thought would have known better, and who could have offered far deeper and more profound arguments against the idea of Independence.
And not once during this entire campaign has there been a successful attempt by the naysayers to match and compete with the profound belief of those in the “Yes” camp: Their arguments have always deteriorated into tactics of fear, and the disparagement of faith.
But you know, when you go into the polling booth and you place your mark on the ballot paper, that very act, in its purest form, is an act of faith, “Yes” or “No.”
The only guarantee you’ve got is the guarantee of your own spirit, for good or for bad. And on September 18, my hope and the hope for my people is to choose “Yes,” for good.
WATCH: Brian Cox and Rory Stewart debate independence
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