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Homes vandalised, accused of stealing jobs and an atmosphere of discriminatory 'intimidation': The savage racism turning Scotland into a no-go zone for the English - Alison and Ken Porter are selling their bungalow on the outskirts of Stirling
- They moved from Yorkshire but are going to return after being 'driven out'
- In few years their home was vandalised twice and accused of stealing jobs
- Under a fortnight until independence referendum and polls have narrowed
- Labour MP Jim Murphy pelted with eggs on Kirkcaldy High Street last week
With a heavy heart and an air of resignation, Alison Porter has spent the week packing her worldly goods into brown cardboard boxes.
The 60-year-old grandmother and her husband, Ken, are selling-up and leaving the three-bedroom bungalow in a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Stirling where they moved from Yorkshire just over a decade ago.
They came hoping eventually to spend a long, happy retirement here, but are now giving up good jobs, and leaving behind friends and a home they love to return to the north of England.
Due to leave by the end of the month, Alison and Ken will be sad to leave their tidy home behind, but feel they have little choice. They claim, after all, to have been driven out.
The Porters made headlines in Scotland this week after claiming they can no longer cope with the level of hostility that blights the daily life of someone with an English accent living north of the border.
In the past few years, they say locals have twice vandalised their home. Strangers occasionally accuse them of ‘stealing’ jobs. On several occasions, during the recent debate over Scottish independence, Alison has been called an ‘English bitch’ and worse. The atmosphere of discriminatory ‘intimidation’ is growing more pervasive as we approach this month’s finely balanced referendum, which is just 12 days away.
‘I thought this place was my home,’ Alison told reporters this week, ‘but now I don’t feel it any more.’ When I caught up with her a couple of days ago, she was still brimming with indignation.
The independence debate is becoming more and more about anti-Englishness,’ she said. ‘It’s got to the point where I feel afraid to talk because I have a Yorkshire accent. In any other context, you’d call it racism.’
Twice in recent years, Alison says she has had Union Jack bunting torn from her home — once during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and again for the Royal Wedding.
Today, despite being a principled supporter of the Union who will vote against independence, she is afraid to place a ‘No’ poster on the property or in her car, for fear of sparking further attacks.
‘It’s getting like Northern Ireland, with all the hatred and sectarianism. It doesn’t matter who wins on September 18, it’s only going to get worse. And I’m not the only one who feels intimidated. There are plenty like me.’
Indeed. For with under a fortnight to go until voters answer the question ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ and polls showing the race has narrowed to as few as six percentage points, the debate is dominating everything in Scotland, with many families riven by the arguments. It’s not surprising the campaign is turning increasingly ugly.
You see it in the ‘No’ placards being routinely defaced across the country, and read about it in newspaper reports of campaign activists having their phone lines cut and property vandalised.
I caught a whiff of this anti-English sentiment first hand, on Wednesday, when an Aberdonian taxi driver taking me to a rendezvous with canvassing ‘No’ campaigners remarked icily: ‘Will you kindly tell them to go back south of the border?’ But at least he was comparatively civil. Which can’t be said of the increasingly ugly attacks on politicians who have campaigned against Alex Salmond’s SNP.
Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander was, for example, called a ‘f****** liar’ on a national radio phone-in the other day.
And Labour MP Jim Murphy was pelted with eggs on Kirkcaldy High Street last week, moments after a shaven-headed man had squared up to his supporters shouting: ‘I will f****** knock you out!’
The most striking aspect of the high-profile attack on Murphy, for which a 45-year-old man has been charged with assault, was perhaps not the egg-throwing itself, but the events that led up to it.
For weeks, the Labour MP, who is on a tour of Scotland in which he speaks in town centres from atop Irn Bru crates, had been followed by mobs of ‘Yes’ campaigners seeking to intimidate onlookers for their supposedly Anglophile views.
A gang in Motherwell shouted ‘terrorist’ and pushed piles of leaflets off a nearby ‘No’ campaign stall when Murphy spoke, saying: ‘This is what happens when you side with English Tories.’
In Dundee, a man with a loud-hailer called the (very Scottish) Murphy a ‘traitor’, adding: ‘Go back to London, go back to your nest of paedophiles.’ In Leith, a wine bottle was lobbed in his direction, with a cry of ‘freedom!’
Much of it was captured on film now circulating on YouTube. And on at least three occasions, Murphy says, ‘Yes’ activists went so far as to challenge him to a fight.
‘A guy in Glasgow said, “Let’s have a square go!”, which is Glaswegian vernacular for, “Let’s get it on!’’ ’ Murphy tells me.
‘In Aberdeen, a young man didn’t like my answer to his question, and said the Aberdonian version of, “Let’s have a fight.” And in Kilmarnock, a skinhead came up to me and said: “Let’s have a street brawl now!”
‘You try to laugh it off. But there’s an ugly corner of Scotland in which a kind of aggressive, intolerant nationalism lives.’
Along with almost any public figure who attempts to argue the Unionist cause, Murphy has, in recent weeks, been derided as a ‘Quisling’. This ugly term is derived from the name Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian politician who collaborated with German occupying forces during World War II.
In the argot of Scottish nationalism, it is being used with abandon, despite its vile connotations equating the English with **** imperialists and suggesting that Scots in favour of the Union are akin to supporters of the Holocaust.
‘Yes’ activists don’t just chant the word ‘Quisling’ either. Lewis Macdonald, a Labour MSP for north-east Scotland, has twice had his office attacked by vandals who daubed the letter ‘Q’ on his doors and windows in paint. And he’s got the photos to prove it.
‘It’s part of an co-ordinated attempt to convince people that a “Yes” vote is a vote for Scotland and a “No” vote is a vote for England,’ he says.
‘On the doorstep now, we often get called “traitors” and told to go back to England. The “Yes” campaign has created an atmosphere that’s nationalistic, anti-English, anti-democratic, and fails to respect the fact that people like me can oppose independence and still be patriots.’
Last month, MacDonald’s colleague Dame Anne Begg, the 59-year-old Labour MP for Aberdeen, put a ‘No’ placard outside her home — only for someone to creep onto her front lawn that night and tear it down.
‘Anne has to use a wheelchair, and this has made her feel unsafe,’ says a friend. ‘She has spent a lifetime in politics and has never seen anything so nasty.’
So indiscriminate and widespread is the vandalism of ‘No’ placards that if you drive along the A93 from Aberdeen to Balmoral, the 50-mile journey undertaken by the Queen during the past month, you will see at least 20 defaced ones lying in fields.
It’s a depressingly familiar sight for Alex Burnett, a businessman who will stand for the Conservatives in the West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine constituency at next year’s General Election.
Earlier this summer, he spent a day putting up 150 ‘No’ placards in the region. Within a day, 120 had been destroyed.
‘Someone had just gone around with a knife, cutting them to pieces,’ he says. ‘I reported it to the police, because it’s important they have statistics about this kind of thing, and they said that, funnily enough, no “Yes” posters were being defaced.’
Adding to the air of intimidation is the fact that ‘Yes’ campaigners now attend almost every public ‘No’ event, video-taping attendees and waving placards.
‘It’s deliberate intimidation, particularly the filming,’ says a ‘No’ campaign source. ‘It’s the kind of thing animal-rights nutters have done for years.’
There are, it must be said, examples of ugly behaviour on both sides. The other day, for example a 26-year-old man was prosecuted for joking on Twitter that he might ‘assassinate’ Alex Salmond.
And on Saturday, a group of ‘Yes’ campaigners were attacked while leafleting outside Heart of Midlothian’s Tynecastle stadium.
Many on the pro-independence side also argue that English politicians have routinely patronised the Scots by claiming that financial Armageddon awaits the nation if it is granted control over its own affairs. That, they say, is itself a form of racism.
But while nationalists may not have a monopoly on ugly behaviour or jingoistic language, they’ve certainly made it their trademark. Why else would the Collins English Dictionary have recently declared ‘cybernat’ one of its ‘words of the year’?
The term refers to the vast informal collective of ‘Yes’ campaigners who use online forums to smear, defame and criticise opponents. And it’s wearily familiar to prominent opponents of independence.
They include author J.K. Rowling (described as a ‘bitch’ and a ‘traitor’ on Twitter), Edinburgh-born Olympic cycling hero Sir Chris Hoy (a ‘t**t’, a ‘creep’ and a ‘bigot’) and Sir Paul McCartney, who was this week dubbed a ‘big-headed English p***k’ and worse for backing the ‘No’ campaign.
The term ‘cybernat’ was coined in 2008 by the Labour peer George Foulkes, after he found himself being subjected to vile online abuse for opposing independence.
Foulkes believes there has ‘always been a fringe’ of anti-English extremists in the nationalist movement — including the Scottish National Liberation Army, an Eighties terror group. In the run-up to polling day, he’s seen them take their abuse to the streets.
‘They threaten people who have English accents. “Why don’t you go home?” or “What are you doing up here?” Often it’s said to people who have lived in Scotland for years. I was talking recently to a guy who has been up here 16 years and he’s still getting it.’
Many ‘No’ campaigners accuse Alex Salmond of quietly stoking these tensions. Both Foulkes and Jill Stephenson, an emeritus professor of history at Edinburgh University, believe the SNP leader and his colleagues often speak in anti-English ‘code’.
‘Any time you hear senior members of the SNP complain about “Westminster”, or “the Tories”, or “London”, what they are really talking about is the English. And supporters know it,’ says Stephenson.
Of course, in any racially loaded debate, careless language can have ugly consequences. Earlier this year, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown intervened in a row in his Fife constituency after English-born teenager Sasha Bell-Newman was told to ‘f*** off back to your own country’ during a classroom discussion about nationalism.
In June, Clare Lally, the mother of a disabled child who had spoken out against independence, was subjected to a smear campaign in which one of Alex Salmond’s advisers, Campbell Gunn, briefed newspapers that she was not an ordinary voter, but instead the daughter of a Labour politician with connections to the party’s London elite.
In fact, she was no such thing, and Gunn apologised. But not before Lally had been visited at home by abusive ‘Yes’ activists.
‘It got so bad that we had to take her out of her house and put her somewhere else for a few days,’ recalls former Chancellor Alistair Darling, who is running the ‘No’ campaign. ‘They were at the door. That sort of behaviour is totally unacceptable. That’s not the sort of Scotland most people want to live in. Yet [Mr Gunn] the special adviser Alex Salmond has is still in his job.’
The upshot has been to create an atmosphere where many ‘No’ supporters, particularly in working-class areas, feel scared to express their sympathies for fear of being branded anti-Scottish.
Wider political scores are also in play. In blue-collar neighbourhoods, SNP canvassers have sought to convince floating voters that a ‘Yes’ vote offers a chance of revenge against the ‘English’ Conservatives, who presided over the decline of manufacturing during Margaret Thatcher’s time in power.
They also point out that a vote for independence may force the resignation of the Old Etonian Tory Prime Minister, David Cameron.
Alan Clarke, a veteran Labour activist who was canvassing in Aberdeen this week, tells me that he’s been repeatedly called a ‘traitor’ and an ‘English-loving b******’ on the doorstep.
‘It’s not nice, is it? They want to create an atmosphere where people feel it’s unpatriotic to vote against independence.
‘You speak to people and when they tell you they are going to vote “No” their voice often goes right down. It’s as if they are too scared to be heard taking our side.’
For all this, it must be stressed that the ‘No’ campaign retains a poll lead of between six and ten per cent. Betting markets put their chances of success at roughly 75 per cent.
Yet, as ill-feeling grows, the gap is narrowing. And there are growing fears that the poll a week on Thursday could spark similar unrest to that witnessed in Canada in 1995 during Quebec’s independence referendum.
That election also saw a wide ‘No’ poll lead narrow drastically in the run up to polling day, resulting in riots in the Canadian state after voters eventually rejected independence by a margin of just 1.2 per cent.
This week, it emerged that Scottish police will guard some polling stations to maintain law and order. And the Right Reverend John Chalmers, head of the Church of Scotland, publicly called for an end to ‘name-calling and rancour’ in the coming weeks.
But the nervousness lays bare a sad fact: as the experience of Alison Porter and so many opponents of independence shows, this divided nation now increasingly feels like an unwelcome place to be English.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z3CuKqmPyI Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
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Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin
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