Jack MacRoary's Guide to the Independence Referendum:
Episode Seven
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: None.
Description: The darkest days in the MacRoary family's history.
_____________________________________________________________________
Now I’m going to have to take a deep breath before I tell you about this day. Which was Friday 19th September 2014. We went from the best day of our lives to the very worst day all in one day. Which is hard to take. And even now it’s hard to take. Even with hindsight or reflection or perspective or whatever it is Mr Marker says I have as well as my talent. Some things are too big for me to take. And when something is too hard for even my mum to take and my dad to take, I know it’s a serious situation.
I’ll go back a bit. After we’d all met The First Minister we were on a high. Uncle Tam was spitting feathers that he’d missed him because he never voted till later in the day. ‘Early bird catches the worm,’ dad said when Uncle Tam came round to our house to watch the count.
And even though it was a school-night, mum and dad said I could stay up with them to watch the results. Because this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. As the leaflets told us, that very day we held Scotland’s future in our hands.
‘There will be no sleep in the MacRoary house tonight,’ dad said.
‘No sleep till Independence,’ Uncle Tam said. He’d brought round a bottle of whisky for celebrations and he’d opened it when the polls shut at 10pm sharp. And it was now 11pm and he was getting annoyed with the ‘pundits’ on TV and was probably drinking more than was sensible. Or responsible. Or whatever the label tells you. I don’t like whisky. I mean, I’ve never tasted it, but the smell is bowfing enough to put me off. But that doesn’t mean I’m not a true Scot. Being a true Scot isn’t about loving whisky, it’s about wanting to be independent. And being independent means you can choose to drink whisky or to be the bigger man and make a profit exporting it to other countries so they can drink it.
So we were all there, in party mode, we’d had haggis and neeps for our tea and we had caramel wafers and tea cakes to keep us going through the night, and we were just waiting for the great day to turn into the day we became free.
But it never happened. You know that now. What I’m doing is telling you, retrospectively, what did happen, at least in the MacRoary household. That’s social history, Mr Marker says. Or it will be once I’ve written it down.
I have to admit that I was finding it pretty hard to stay awake, because those political people are all pretty boring and it was hours before the first votes were counted. But when they were – we got a big slap in the pus.
It was about half past one in the morning and the wifie at Clackmannanshire stood up and said that they’d voted No by two thousand and six hundred votes.
And Uncle Tam was shouting at the TV and mum was saying, ‘It’s only the first place, Tam, don’t worry, it’s in the bag.’
‘Mr Salmond told me we’re going to win,’ I said. I called him Mr Salmond because I thought it was a bit cheeky for me to call him Alex, even though I’d met him. I mean, you wouldn’t call the President of the United States Barak would you? You have to have respect for the position even if not for the man, Mum says.
‘We’re gonna take a beatin’,’ Uncle Tam said, ‘you mark my words. It’s been a total stitch up since that Gordon Judas Brown got in on the act.’
‘Trust your fellow Scots,’ mum said, trying to keep the peace as usual.
Dad said nothing. But you couldn’t really draw any conclusions from that. He doesn’t usually say much.
What he did say, about four in the morning, I know because I was drifting off to sleep and Uncle Tam was shouting at some stupid UKIP man in the basement of the TV centre who was talking rubbish – no surprise there – was, ‘It’s like watching the longest car-crash in history.’
And I didn’t really know what he was talking about because I was half asleep. But I looked at his face and if I had to describe it for my English teacher, I would say he looked ‘haunted’. And I’ve never seen my dad look like that. It was horrible.
It was no, No, NO, one after the other and even when Dundee voted Yes it didn’t make things look any better. My mum was trying to do the most difficult sums in the world to prove that we still had a chance, but even I could tell that we didn’t. And because this could be history one day, I should tell you what everyone did, so that we can all remember our shame. It’s tough, but you can’t hide from the truth. Orkney, Shetland, the Western Isles, Inverclyde, Renfrewshire, Midlothian, East Lothian, Stirling, Falkirk, Angus, Dumfries & Galloway, East Renfrewshire, Aberdeen, East Dunbartonshire, South Lanarkshire, Perth & Kinross, West Lothian, Scottish Borders, North Ayrshire, South Ayrshire and East Ayrshire, all voted No. And even when Glasgow voted yes, it only got my mum doing more sums and my dad saying ‘a car crash’ and Uncle Tam saying ‘I’m black affronted that they are the only one’s wi’ the sense…’
And somehow we just kept on going through the night. But it wasn’t a party any more. It was just horrible. ‘Like staring into the abyss,’ Uncle Tam said. And when I looked at my dad’s face, I knew what he meant. It was the most horrible night of my life. Ever. Which was hard to take, following what had been the happiest day of our family’s life.
And we kept expecting that Aberdeenshire would be declared. At least we thought we could salvage some pride by living in a place that voted Yes. The result was due at 3am but it never happened till nearly six o’clock - it was ‘the final straw’, as Uncle Tam said because the result was shocking. Sixty percent of the people voted No. We couldn’t believe it. Everyone we’d talked to said they were voting Yes. Everyone we knew was voting Yes (apart from Ms Mammakaski, of course) and mum started doing all kinds of other sums and dad told her to stop because the car crash had happened and Uncle Tam said it was ‘the final straw’.
‘How am I ever going out to the shops again?’ Mum said.
I didn’t know what she meant, and I knew she would have to go out to the shops. You have to eat, even if you lose. But I knew this was too important to remind Mum that she always says you have to be a good loser.
‘Why mum?’ I asked.
‘I just feel betrayed,’ she said. ‘I’ll never know whether the person standing next to me has voted No. It’s destroyed my trust in my community.’
And I expected her to cry. But she didn’t. She just went really white.
And then the final blow fell. The result from Fife came in just after six o’clock in the morning, you couldn’t wiggle the sums any more. It was a FACT. Scotland had rejected Independence.
John said, ‘I knew voting was a waste of time,’ and mum said, ‘Don’t you ever say that, John MacRoary. We might lose but it’s our right to vote.’
‘We were bloody cheated,’ my dad said. And that’s the last thing he said. He didn’t even drink any more whisky. He just got up and went out to feed the beasts.
That left my mum and Uncle Tam and me and John.
‘Go out with your dad,’ Mum said to John.
‘I’m sorry, mum,’ John said. ‘I did vote Yes. And I never wasted it.’
She didn’t even answer him.
‘Should I go to school, mum?’ I asked.
She shook her head at me.
‘It’s not over yet, boy,’ Uncle Tam said. ‘And there’s no school today.’
‘There is, Uncle Tam,’ I said. ‘I know, I’ve got maths homework due.’
‘School’s for Nawbags only this day,’ Uncle Tam said. And he was right, you know. He was right that we were beaten and he was right that the only kids who turned up at school were the ones who’d had a good night’s sleep. That was the ones whose parents had voted No and were smug enough to know they’d win. But not all the No voters’ kids went to school. I know quite a few people in my school who would have voted Yes, and they didn’t go to school as a protest. But how they’d sit in the house with their parents having voted No, I don’t know. It was bad enough watching all the No people having their parties on TV.
And if my parents had voted No, I would have felt so ashamed I might have emigrated if I could. But of course I couldn’t. So I was just lucky that my family all stood up for what was right and believed in Hope over Fear and Social Justice, even though we didn’t win.
You might think that was all bad enough, but there was plenty worse to come. In case you don’t remember.
I kept waiting for my mum to cry. She didn’t. Later she told me she was too empty to cry. She said she had never felt so empty in her life. And I felt sorry for her. I felt sorry for Scotland and the people who voted No of course, because they didn’t realise they were being cheated. And I felt sorry for my dad and Uncle Tam and even for me and John but the person I felt most sorry for at that moment was my mum. And I have to confess that even though my mum didn’t cry, I did. I mean, I went to the toilet and no one knew about it. But I did cry. I cried for my mum.
And when I came back into the living room I could almost feel the silence hit me.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked. I wasn’t being stupid, I knew we’d lost the Independence Referendum, and that wasn’t what I meant.’
‘It’s no’ happened yet,’ Uncle Tam said, ‘but it’s gonnae.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘He’ll have to go,’ Uncle Tam said. And he was right again.
But all that day my mum couldn’t leave the sitting room.
First we waited for the press conference which was supposed to be at 10 in the morning but it didn’t happen. The pundits just all kept talking and talking and we just kept sitting and sitting. To be honest, I would rather have been at school, but I couldn’t leave my mum.
Dad and John came in for their dinners and there was nothing for them. So I went and made sandwiches for everyone. No one had much of an appetite anyway and no one said anything, apart from ‘thank you’ for their dinner.
And I kept wondering what could possibly happen next. I mean. Somehow we had to get on with life. But how do you get on with life when all your hopes and dreams have been smashed to a million pieces? That was what I didn’t know.
And I wondered how Alex Salmond was feeling. Because I could see how my mum was feeling, and my dad and Uncle Tam, and they were all really gutted. And I just thought it must be a hundred times worse for Alex Salmond because it was his political life as well and he’d told people like me that we would win. And he’d given us hope. And Hope hadn’t won the day. But I didn’t know what he could do. He couldn’t make things better for us now and we didn’t blame him for what happened because he couldn’t make everyone vote the right way now could he. And I felt that we had all let him down. And my mum felt that too. I know because she said it.
When Alex Salmond came on the Television from Bute House to tell us what the plan was for the future that we no longer had, she said straight up, ‘We’ve let him down.’
‘No we haven’t mum, you couldn’t have done any more,’ I said, ‘you did all that Facebook campaigning and we did Farmers for Yes and…’
‘Aye, we’ve nothing to be ashamed of,’ Uncle Tam said, because he was still there and even my dad and John had not gone back to work after their dinner because they were waiting to hear what happened next. My dad said his ‘heart had gone out of his work’ that day. So we just sat there. Waiting.
And my mum just said again, ‘We’ve let him down.’ And then we all sat stunned as he started to speak. And I’m going to quote this so don’t think I’m making it up or plagiarising it. Some things are important enough to report really properly and accurately. For history. And this is one of them. Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond, our First Minister and the man who wanted us to be a free and Independent country, said this:
“It has been the privilege of my life to serve Scotland as First Minister. But as I said often during the referendum campaign this is not about me or the SNP. It is much more important than that.
“The position is this. We lost the referendum vote but can still carry the political initiative. More importantly Scotland can still emerge as the real winner.
“I am immensely proud of the campaign which Yes Scotland fought and of the 1.6 million voters who rallied to that cause by backing an independent Scotland.
“I am also proud of the 85 per cent turnout in the referendum and the remarkable response of all of the people of Scotland who participated in this great constitutional debate and the manner in which they conducted themselves.
“We now have the opportunity to hold Westminster’s feet to the fire on the “vow” that they have made to devolve further meaningful power to Scotland. This places Scotland in a very strong position.
“I spoke to the Prime Minister today and, although he reiterated his intention to proceed as he has outlined, he would not commit to a second reading vote by 27th March on a Scotland Bill. That was a clear promise laid out by Gordon Brown during the campaign. The Prime Minister says such a vote would be meaningless. I suspect he cannot guarantee the support of his party.
“But today the point is this. The real guardians of progress are not the politicians at Westminster, or even at Holyrood, but the energised activism of tens of thousands of people who I predict will refuse meekly to go back into the political shadows.
“For me right now, therefore, there is a decision as to who is best placed to lead this process forward politically.
“I believe that in this new exciting situation, redolent with possibility, Party, Parliament and country would benefit from new leadership.
“Therefore I have told the National Secretary of the SNP that I will not accept nomination to be a candidate for leader at the Annual Conference in Perth on 13th-15th November.
“After the membership ballot I will stand down as First Minister to allow the new leader to be elected by due Parliamentary process.
“Until then I will continue to serve as First Minister. After that I will continue to offer to serve as Member of the Scottish Parliament for Aberdeenshire East.”0
And then I was as gutted as the rest of my family. That’s when it really hit home. At first I thought, how can he desert us in our hour of need? I couldn’t believe how he could think that something positive could come from this. I even wondered for a moment if he was just like all the other politicians. Was it just a game for him?
Then I thought about Peter in the Bible, denying Jesus, and even though I don’t believe in Jesus or God, I knew that what Peter did was really about the worst thing you can do – even worse than not standing up for Brian when people are mean to him, or the nameless woman (I don’t want to say her name but you know who she is) who bullied my mum. And I remembered that it all comes down to trust. I trusted him. I asked him if we were going to win. And he said yes, he thought we were. It wasn’t a promise. It was what he believed. And he made me believe it to. But it wasn’t his fault it didn’t happen. And I realised how totally gutted he must be and how brave he must be to make that speech in front of all the cameras and everyone, when he must be even more upset than my mum and my dad and my uncle Tam and John and me and everyone who voted Yes, which was still 45 per cent of the population by the way, and he must feel he had let us down WHICH HE DIDN’T, and maybe that was why he was going. It was something he felt he had to do. And I respected him for that then, and I respect him for that now. I know that Alex Salmond didn’t let the MacRoarys down any more than the MacRoarys let Alex Salmond down. And Alex Salmond didn’t let Scotland down. But Scotland let Alex Salmond down. We let ourselves down. We killed our own hope.
And I think I grew up a bit that day. I certainly understood a lot of things. But I couldn’t say anything. Not even to make my mum feel better. And that’s the worst feeling in the world, wanting to make someone else feel better and knowing there’s nothing you can do about it.
So after the speech there was really nothing that any of us could say. We really were speechless. All of us. Which is a total first for the MacRoary household. My mum just got up, switched off the television and we all sat and looked at the black screen for what felt like forever. And I thought to myself that even though we were all stuck in our own personal pain, we were still there as a family. Together. But we were not better together. We were lost together. Hopeless together. Gutted together. It was a terrible feeling.
Looking back I think our house was a bit like a real zombie place that day. And I don’t mean to make you laugh by that. And I know that zombies aren’t real. But I can’t think of a better way to describe it. We had had our hearts ripped out and our hopes ripped up and we all felt like we were dead but we had to keep living. But no one knew how to start. And the only way to start was to go to bed. And hope that the next day might be easier. But it wasn’t. You’ve heard people say it has to get worse before it gets better, well that’s true. But you’ll have to wait for next week to find out how.
Swearwords: None.
Description: The darkest days in the MacRoary family's history.
_____________________________________________________________________
Now I’m going to have to take a deep breath before I tell you about this day. Which was Friday 19th September 2014. We went from the best day of our lives to the very worst day all in one day. Which is hard to take. And even now it’s hard to take. Even with hindsight or reflection or perspective or whatever it is Mr Marker says I have as well as my talent. Some things are too big for me to take. And when something is too hard for even my mum to take and my dad to take, I know it’s a serious situation.
I’ll go back a bit. After we’d all met The First Minister we were on a high. Uncle Tam was spitting feathers that he’d missed him because he never voted till later in the day. ‘Early bird catches the worm,’ dad said when Uncle Tam came round to our house to watch the count.
And even though it was a school-night, mum and dad said I could stay up with them to watch the results. Because this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. As the leaflets told us, that very day we held Scotland’s future in our hands.
‘There will be no sleep in the MacRoary house tonight,’ dad said.
‘No sleep till Independence,’ Uncle Tam said. He’d brought round a bottle of whisky for celebrations and he’d opened it when the polls shut at 10pm sharp. And it was now 11pm and he was getting annoyed with the ‘pundits’ on TV and was probably drinking more than was sensible. Or responsible. Or whatever the label tells you. I don’t like whisky. I mean, I’ve never tasted it, but the smell is bowfing enough to put me off. But that doesn’t mean I’m not a true Scot. Being a true Scot isn’t about loving whisky, it’s about wanting to be independent. And being independent means you can choose to drink whisky or to be the bigger man and make a profit exporting it to other countries so they can drink it.
So we were all there, in party mode, we’d had haggis and neeps for our tea and we had caramel wafers and tea cakes to keep us going through the night, and we were just waiting for the great day to turn into the day we became free.
But it never happened. You know that now. What I’m doing is telling you, retrospectively, what did happen, at least in the MacRoary household. That’s social history, Mr Marker says. Or it will be once I’ve written it down.
I have to admit that I was finding it pretty hard to stay awake, because those political people are all pretty boring and it was hours before the first votes were counted. But when they were – we got a big slap in the pus.
It was about half past one in the morning and the wifie at Clackmannanshire stood up and said that they’d voted No by two thousand and six hundred votes.
And Uncle Tam was shouting at the TV and mum was saying, ‘It’s only the first place, Tam, don’t worry, it’s in the bag.’
‘Mr Salmond told me we’re going to win,’ I said. I called him Mr Salmond because I thought it was a bit cheeky for me to call him Alex, even though I’d met him. I mean, you wouldn’t call the President of the United States Barak would you? You have to have respect for the position even if not for the man, Mum says.
‘We’re gonna take a beatin’,’ Uncle Tam said, ‘you mark my words. It’s been a total stitch up since that Gordon Judas Brown got in on the act.’
‘Trust your fellow Scots,’ mum said, trying to keep the peace as usual.
Dad said nothing. But you couldn’t really draw any conclusions from that. He doesn’t usually say much.
What he did say, about four in the morning, I know because I was drifting off to sleep and Uncle Tam was shouting at some stupid UKIP man in the basement of the TV centre who was talking rubbish – no surprise there – was, ‘It’s like watching the longest car-crash in history.’
And I didn’t really know what he was talking about because I was half asleep. But I looked at his face and if I had to describe it for my English teacher, I would say he looked ‘haunted’. And I’ve never seen my dad look like that. It was horrible.
It was no, No, NO, one after the other and even when Dundee voted Yes it didn’t make things look any better. My mum was trying to do the most difficult sums in the world to prove that we still had a chance, but even I could tell that we didn’t. And because this could be history one day, I should tell you what everyone did, so that we can all remember our shame. It’s tough, but you can’t hide from the truth. Orkney, Shetland, the Western Isles, Inverclyde, Renfrewshire, Midlothian, East Lothian, Stirling, Falkirk, Angus, Dumfries & Galloway, East Renfrewshire, Aberdeen, East Dunbartonshire, South Lanarkshire, Perth & Kinross, West Lothian, Scottish Borders, North Ayrshire, South Ayrshire and East Ayrshire, all voted No. And even when Glasgow voted yes, it only got my mum doing more sums and my dad saying ‘a car crash’ and Uncle Tam saying ‘I’m black affronted that they are the only one’s wi’ the sense…’
And somehow we just kept on going through the night. But it wasn’t a party any more. It was just horrible. ‘Like staring into the abyss,’ Uncle Tam said. And when I looked at my dad’s face, I knew what he meant. It was the most horrible night of my life. Ever. Which was hard to take, following what had been the happiest day of our family’s life.
And we kept expecting that Aberdeenshire would be declared. At least we thought we could salvage some pride by living in a place that voted Yes. The result was due at 3am but it never happened till nearly six o’clock - it was ‘the final straw’, as Uncle Tam said because the result was shocking. Sixty percent of the people voted No. We couldn’t believe it. Everyone we’d talked to said they were voting Yes. Everyone we knew was voting Yes (apart from Ms Mammakaski, of course) and mum started doing all kinds of other sums and dad told her to stop because the car crash had happened and Uncle Tam said it was ‘the final straw’.
‘How am I ever going out to the shops again?’ Mum said.
I didn’t know what she meant, and I knew she would have to go out to the shops. You have to eat, even if you lose. But I knew this was too important to remind Mum that she always says you have to be a good loser.
‘Why mum?’ I asked.
‘I just feel betrayed,’ she said. ‘I’ll never know whether the person standing next to me has voted No. It’s destroyed my trust in my community.’
And I expected her to cry. But she didn’t. She just went really white.
And then the final blow fell. The result from Fife came in just after six o’clock in the morning, you couldn’t wiggle the sums any more. It was a FACT. Scotland had rejected Independence.
John said, ‘I knew voting was a waste of time,’ and mum said, ‘Don’t you ever say that, John MacRoary. We might lose but it’s our right to vote.’
‘We were bloody cheated,’ my dad said. And that’s the last thing he said. He didn’t even drink any more whisky. He just got up and went out to feed the beasts.
That left my mum and Uncle Tam and me and John.
‘Go out with your dad,’ Mum said to John.
‘I’m sorry, mum,’ John said. ‘I did vote Yes. And I never wasted it.’
She didn’t even answer him.
‘Should I go to school, mum?’ I asked.
She shook her head at me.
‘It’s not over yet, boy,’ Uncle Tam said. ‘And there’s no school today.’
‘There is, Uncle Tam,’ I said. ‘I know, I’ve got maths homework due.’
‘School’s for Nawbags only this day,’ Uncle Tam said. And he was right, you know. He was right that we were beaten and he was right that the only kids who turned up at school were the ones who’d had a good night’s sleep. That was the ones whose parents had voted No and were smug enough to know they’d win. But not all the No voters’ kids went to school. I know quite a few people in my school who would have voted Yes, and they didn’t go to school as a protest. But how they’d sit in the house with their parents having voted No, I don’t know. It was bad enough watching all the No people having their parties on TV.
And if my parents had voted No, I would have felt so ashamed I might have emigrated if I could. But of course I couldn’t. So I was just lucky that my family all stood up for what was right and believed in Hope over Fear and Social Justice, even though we didn’t win.
You might think that was all bad enough, but there was plenty worse to come. In case you don’t remember.
I kept waiting for my mum to cry. She didn’t. Later she told me she was too empty to cry. She said she had never felt so empty in her life. And I felt sorry for her. I felt sorry for Scotland and the people who voted No of course, because they didn’t realise they were being cheated. And I felt sorry for my dad and Uncle Tam and even for me and John but the person I felt most sorry for at that moment was my mum. And I have to confess that even though my mum didn’t cry, I did. I mean, I went to the toilet and no one knew about it. But I did cry. I cried for my mum.
And when I came back into the living room I could almost feel the silence hit me.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked. I wasn’t being stupid, I knew we’d lost the Independence Referendum, and that wasn’t what I meant.’
‘It’s no’ happened yet,’ Uncle Tam said, ‘but it’s gonnae.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘He’ll have to go,’ Uncle Tam said. And he was right again.
But all that day my mum couldn’t leave the sitting room.
First we waited for the press conference which was supposed to be at 10 in the morning but it didn’t happen. The pundits just all kept talking and talking and we just kept sitting and sitting. To be honest, I would rather have been at school, but I couldn’t leave my mum.
Dad and John came in for their dinners and there was nothing for them. So I went and made sandwiches for everyone. No one had much of an appetite anyway and no one said anything, apart from ‘thank you’ for their dinner.
And I kept wondering what could possibly happen next. I mean. Somehow we had to get on with life. But how do you get on with life when all your hopes and dreams have been smashed to a million pieces? That was what I didn’t know.
And I wondered how Alex Salmond was feeling. Because I could see how my mum was feeling, and my dad and Uncle Tam, and they were all really gutted. And I just thought it must be a hundred times worse for Alex Salmond because it was his political life as well and he’d told people like me that we would win. And he’d given us hope. And Hope hadn’t won the day. But I didn’t know what he could do. He couldn’t make things better for us now and we didn’t blame him for what happened because he couldn’t make everyone vote the right way now could he. And I felt that we had all let him down. And my mum felt that too. I know because she said it.
When Alex Salmond came on the Television from Bute House to tell us what the plan was for the future that we no longer had, she said straight up, ‘We’ve let him down.’
‘No we haven’t mum, you couldn’t have done any more,’ I said, ‘you did all that Facebook campaigning and we did Farmers for Yes and…’
‘Aye, we’ve nothing to be ashamed of,’ Uncle Tam said, because he was still there and even my dad and John had not gone back to work after their dinner because they were waiting to hear what happened next. My dad said his ‘heart had gone out of his work’ that day. So we just sat there. Waiting.
And my mum just said again, ‘We’ve let him down.’ And then we all sat stunned as he started to speak. And I’m going to quote this so don’t think I’m making it up or plagiarising it. Some things are important enough to report really properly and accurately. For history. And this is one of them. Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond, our First Minister and the man who wanted us to be a free and Independent country, said this:
“It has been the privilege of my life to serve Scotland as First Minister. But as I said often during the referendum campaign this is not about me or the SNP. It is much more important than that.
“The position is this. We lost the referendum vote but can still carry the political initiative. More importantly Scotland can still emerge as the real winner.
“I am immensely proud of the campaign which Yes Scotland fought and of the 1.6 million voters who rallied to that cause by backing an independent Scotland.
“I am also proud of the 85 per cent turnout in the referendum and the remarkable response of all of the people of Scotland who participated in this great constitutional debate and the manner in which they conducted themselves.
“We now have the opportunity to hold Westminster’s feet to the fire on the “vow” that they have made to devolve further meaningful power to Scotland. This places Scotland in a very strong position.
“I spoke to the Prime Minister today and, although he reiterated his intention to proceed as he has outlined, he would not commit to a second reading vote by 27th March on a Scotland Bill. That was a clear promise laid out by Gordon Brown during the campaign. The Prime Minister says such a vote would be meaningless. I suspect he cannot guarantee the support of his party.
“But today the point is this. The real guardians of progress are not the politicians at Westminster, or even at Holyrood, but the energised activism of tens of thousands of people who I predict will refuse meekly to go back into the political shadows.
“For me right now, therefore, there is a decision as to who is best placed to lead this process forward politically.
“I believe that in this new exciting situation, redolent with possibility, Party, Parliament and country would benefit from new leadership.
“Therefore I have told the National Secretary of the SNP that I will not accept nomination to be a candidate for leader at the Annual Conference in Perth on 13th-15th November.
“After the membership ballot I will stand down as First Minister to allow the new leader to be elected by due Parliamentary process.
“Until then I will continue to serve as First Minister. After that I will continue to offer to serve as Member of the Scottish Parliament for Aberdeenshire East.”0
And then I was as gutted as the rest of my family. That’s when it really hit home. At first I thought, how can he desert us in our hour of need? I couldn’t believe how he could think that something positive could come from this. I even wondered for a moment if he was just like all the other politicians. Was it just a game for him?
Then I thought about Peter in the Bible, denying Jesus, and even though I don’t believe in Jesus or God, I knew that what Peter did was really about the worst thing you can do – even worse than not standing up for Brian when people are mean to him, or the nameless woman (I don’t want to say her name but you know who she is) who bullied my mum. And I remembered that it all comes down to trust. I trusted him. I asked him if we were going to win. And he said yes, he thought we were. It wasn’t a promise. It was what he believed. And he made me believe it to. But it wasn’t his fault it didn’t happen. And I realised how totally gutted he must be and how brave he must be to make that speech in front of all the cameras and everyone, when he must be even more upset than my mum and my dad and my uncle Tam and John and me and everyone who voted Yes, which was still 45 per cent of the population by the way, and he must feel he had let us down WHICH HE DIDN’T, and maybe that was why he was going. It was something he felt he had to do. And I respected him for that then, and I respect him for that now. I know that Alex Salmond didn’t let the MacRoarys down any more than the MacRoarys let Alex Salmond down. And Alex Salmond didn’t let Scotland down. But Scotland let Alex Salmond down. We let ourselves down. We killed our own hope.
And I think I grew up a bit that day. I certainly understood a lot of things. But I couldn’t say anything. Not even to make my mum feel better. And that’s the worst feeling in the world, wanting to make someone else feel better and knowing there’s nothing you can do about it.
So after the speech there was really nothing that any of us could say. We really were speechless. All of us. Which is a total first for the MacRoary household. My mum just got up, switched off the television and we all sat and looked at the black screen for what felt like forever. And I thought to myself that even though we were all stuck in our own personal pain, we were still there as a family. Together. But we were not better together. We were lost together. Hopeless together. Gutted together. It was a terrible feeling.
Looking back I think our house was a bit like a real zombie place that day. And I don’t mean to make you laugh by that. And I know that zombies aren’t real. But I can’t think of a better way to describe it. We had had our hearts ripped out and our hopes ripped up and we all felt like we were dead but we had to keep living. But no one knew how to start. And the only way to start was to go to bed. And hope that the next day might be easier. But it wasn’t. You’ve heard people say it has to get worse before it gets better, well that’s true. But you’ll have to wait for next week to find out how.
About the Author
Jack MacRoary, also known locally as the Bard of DrumTumshie, comes from the small farming community of Tattybogle, which he has singlehandedly put ‘on the map’ through his fame. After bursting onto the literary cultural scene in August 2012 when he appeared at the inaugural Edinburgh eBook Festival, Jack now attends DrumTumshie Academy. His current ebooks are Tales from Tattybogle (available from Amazon here and Kobo here) and More Tales from Tattybogle (available from Amazon here and Kobo here). He is also the first McStorytellers McSerial writer.
Jack lives on a farm with his dad, mum, older brother John and a range of animals and pets, including Dug (the cat), Bisum (the dog) and Micro (the pig). His ebooks give an insight into rural life, as well as providing an insightful commentary on Scots culture.
Follow Jack on Facebook here.
Jack lives on a farm with his dad, mum, older brother John and a range of animals and pets, including Dug (the cat), Bisum (the dog) and Micro (the pig). His ebooks give an insight into rural life, as well as providing an insightful commentary on Scots culture.
Follow Jack on Facebook here.