Surprise Surprise.....

[AyeSeeTee]

Who didn't see this coming lol

[Confidemus]

http://wingsoverscotland.com/once-in-a-blue-your-dreams-come-true/

Last week I was working in the tattoo studio and got chatting to a client on whom my colleague was completing a large, Japanese-style sleeve on his upper arm and chest. He was sitting upright in his chair, stripped to the waist, his new ink glowing.

We got talking about the referendum. Unusually, this guy was a No voter. I say ‘unusually’ because the vast majority of our clients in the studio are vocally keen Yes types. Perhaps there’s something in the inked person’s character – a bohemian or experimental quality that naturally favours thoughts of change or progression.

This guy was a very nice, friendly, middle-aged small business owner from North Lanarkshire. As a Yes voter, I try not to get too preachy on the subject in the studio simply because it wouldn’t be professional – I wouldn’t want to get into any kind of heated debate with someone I have to tattoo for hours on end.

Still, I lightly prodded him on some of the independence issues. I was curious to hear his perspective as I rarely encounter it in someone face to face.

“Bad for business”, he mumbled in an offhand way. “I just don’t like the sound of it”

This wasn’t enough information for me. I probed a bit: “Don’t you think it would be good to actually have a democratic government of our own?”

“Yeah… I just think it’ll be bad.”

I left it at that. The guy, although perfectly pleasant, clearly didn’t want to examine any issues, or at least not with me. He had an air of stubborn refusal to even entertain the possibility of changing his mind. When his tattoo was complete, his arm was dressed and he put his shirt back on. It was a Rangers football top.

Now, obviously it would be hugely unfair to generalise about the connection between Rangers fans and unionism based on this one person, but it did set me thinking about how a sense of belonging and belief prevents us from thinking about change.

Regardless of the rational, evidence-based arguments in favour of an independent Scotland, there’s a mentality among many of our population that doesn’t heed the potential for a new economic prosperity or social justice agenda, purely because of an entrenched, unexamined set of opinions based around a sense of ‘belonging’.

Whether it be monarchist, unionist, imperialistic, racial, class-based, sectarian or some collection of all these traditional structures and their historical complexities, there are people who identify with them. They ‘belong’ and that’s that. There is no need to examine the possibility of change – because they ‘belong’, they ‘believe’ and the argument is at an end before it’s even started.

Beliefs are strange things. A belief is armoured. For whatever reason, a belief is like a locked file on a shelf. It sits in our brain waiting to be accessed at a time when the pertaining subject matter comes into conversation. When that happens, the file comes off the shelf, the dust is blown away, and a whole set of opinions can be accessed and broadcast without complication.

As such, beliefs become hard-wired and established, more tenacious than a simple idea. The stronger the belief, the bigger the file. The older the belief, the more important the file. Belief, dogma, belonging and tradition all lock arms and conspire to prevent the brain from thinking. “Things should stay just as they are because that’s what I believe – I don’t need to talk about it. I don’t want to.”

Even when the belief is detrimental to the wellbeing of the individual or group, it often persists. Immense harm can come from belief. Religious or sectarian conflicts persist because people cannot change their belief. Class privilege, racism, sexism, and more all endure because people’s beliefs resist being updated for the modern age.

Taking a bad belief apart is painful. People are reluctant to even try. We all recognise this behaviour. We even have a caricature for it – putting one’s fingers in one’s ears and shouting “la la la la”.

Rather than being united, people are isolated by their belief. It may exclude them in certain ways so that they consciously seek other individuals or groups of people who share the same copy of that belief. Before you know it, ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ are born.

The United Kingdom is propped up on belief. With the monarchy at its core, we have an enormous range of creaking structures that survive on belief despite their continuing decline, irrelevance or redundancy, sustained on pageantry, imagery, tradition and rhetoric of the kind that the UK has always tended to do rather well. We have bearskin hats, gilded carriages, cheap plastic flags, tiaras, corgis, Black Rod, commemorative tea towels, the House of Commons mace, cricket, Big Ben and Royal Ascot.

But these structures are not what they once were. The UK’s capitalistic Empire is gone, shrunk down to London’s fevered financial market, which now turns on its host and cannibalises traditional public resources like the Royal Mail and soon the NHS.

Our Westminster representatives, perhaps sensing the crumbling of UK belief, appear to be turning desperately to ever more regressive and outdated rhetoric in an attempt to resurrect the ghost of Olde Britain. Increasingly racist attitudes seep into political and media discourse, even on the “internationalist” left. An obsession with immigration and anti-European sentiment cements the Bullingdon Bulldog spirit and keeps all the boys in the front row.

But it feels like Scotland’s collective beliefs are changing. We’ve had a head start: we’ve been forced to re-examine them for some time. The economic and social devastation of the 80s forced us to accept that the social contract which once promised the North a fair share of the UK’s collective wealth had been broken. The further victimisations of the poll tax and the bedroom tax affirmed this conclusion.

Scotland now observes a rogue neighbour hell-bent on alienating European trade, squandering oil wealth for short-term gain and salivating at the prospect of selling perhaps its most loved institution and proudest achievement, national healthcare, to feed the insatiable hunger of Canary Wharf.

I’m happy to see how little the Yes campaign has attempted to rely on engendering militaristic or historic nationalism based on the Scotland of centuries ago. Rather, their message shows the future lies in social justice, technological advances, gender equality, environmentalism and fiscal stability, all of which can be enshrined in our first written constitution. Our new King-in-waiting will remain head of state apparently – I’m sure he’ll be quite happy fishing at Balmoral.

As an artist, I’m wary of belief. I have no God and I hate bagpipes. I encourage change for its own sake in my work because it demands it. However, voting for change on the 18th will not be a reckless decision for me and I can’t help but think that if the tattooed man in North Lanarkshire were to pluck up the courage to question his own beliefs for even a moment, he would do the same.

[Casual Bystander]

Old Firm united as both Celtic and Rangers supporters back a Yes vote for referendum, poll reveals.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/old-firm-united-both-celtic-3598872

[HaikuHibee]

Aye, just the bigots. I hope Rangers fans do think. Good advert for yes.

[Casual Bystander]

http://www.britishtogether.co.uk

[Maga style]

Hmmmmm