Dr Theatre

There's a slightly campy thing that actors say to each other if one of them is ill and has to go on: 'Dr Theatre will sort you out'. It's half a joke but half a way of talking about the strange thing that really quite serious debility can sometimes fall away when you step on stage. You feel sick, blocked up, headachey, fluey, but you step on stage and you feel powerful, clear-headed, energised. It tends to be explained as the rush of adrenalin, which is a pain killer and also by raising your body temperature and increasing your heart rate, clearing your head and giving your the feeling of energy. But can it be just that?

I'm very moved to read extracts from Kika Markham's forthcoming autobiography about he final years of her life with Corin Redgrave. In 2005, at a public meeting to protest against the Dale Farm evictions, he suffered a massive heart attack. He was saved by the swift action of a traveller who gave administered CPR but he had been without oxygen for several seconds and the trauma changed him. Markham relates mood changes, psychotic episodes, and - almost worst of all - he had forgotten their life together.

Eight months later, on 12 February 2006, he came to Royal Holloway for an event celebrating the work of Harold Pinter, organised by Michael Kustow (who also, sadly, died three weeks ago). Kustow had put together an extraordinary cast for a series of readings: Ken Cranham, Jane Lapotaire, Harry Burton, Roger Lloyd Pack, and Corin. Oh and Vanessa Redgrave turned up. It's certainly the starriest event I've ever seen at Royal Holloway, the sort of event only someone with the chutzpah of Michael Kustow could put together.

My only concern was Corin. He was frail, but not just frail: he was vacant, somehow. His eyes seemed not to be taking in what was around him. He looked without sight; he seemed infantile, to be frank. His movements were slow, imprecise. He seemed breathless. While the other actors stood in the improvised green room talking animatedly about recent work, he sat absently in the corner. Was he smiling? Or was it a grimace of pain? How, I wondered, was he going to perform anything? Would we even get him onto the stage?

We did, with some difficulty, get him up the three steps to the stage and he sat on the end of the line of chairs at the back of the stage, where the actors waited before they would step forward to perform their extracts. Corin wasn't due to do anything until very late in the sequence. Everyone was storming it; Harry Burton, wiry, sweetly menacing as McCann in The Birthday Party; Roger Lloyd Pack blankly troubling, Ken Cranham delivering Deeley's 'Odd Man Out' speech from Old Times with enormous relish: ‘it was Robert Newton who brought us together and it is only Robert Newton who can tear us apart’ he roared with an explosion of laughter. Jane Lapotaire gave one of Ruth's seductive speeches from The Homecoming with a tease of eroticism. And then it was Corin's turn. He was due to deliver a couple of Harold's poems. There was a pause. I think the actor next to him had to indicate to Corin that he was due on. Corin looked up. He looked round. He stood up, unsteadily.

it was honestly like the end of The Usual Suspects. We see Kevin Spacey's character limping awkwardly down the road, his crooked hands; the camera watches his twisted legs, his stumbling feet. And slowly his legs straighten, the steps stop dragging become purposeful. The hands untwist. Suddenly there's poise and decisiveness in his movements.

That's how it was with Corin Redgrave. He stood and I swear it was like the milkiness of his eyes cleared, suddenly he seemed totally in the room, he stepped forward with poise and command. His eyes swept across the audience; he appraised us. And he began to speak. I felt the hairs on my arms give a start. The quavering mumble backstage was now a deep crackle of authority. And he spoke the poems with conviction and a sense of confrontation reminiscent of Harold himself. He was funny; he was intense; he seemed twenty years younger. He twinkled. He seemed weighty and he seemed light. Can that just be adrenalin? Perhaps it can. But a man whose brain, damaged by oxygen starvation, seemed for a few minutes to heal itself in front of us.

The audience erupted in applause which he acknowledged with a half smile. He turned and returned to his seat and as he sat down he became vacant, baffled, distant, his eyes faded, his left arm hang limp by the arm of his chair. It was as though an actor had exited the stage, leaving only a man.

Tomorrow

In the 1870s, Gustave Flaubert compiled a series of entries for a purported Dictionary of Received Ideas. It was a guide to the platitudinous idiocies with which middle-class French people responded to their daily lives under the Second Empire. Here's a selection from the I's.

ICE CREAM: It is dangerous to eat it.

IDEALS: Perfectly useless.

IDIOTS: those who think differently from you.

ILIAD: Always followed by the Odyssey.

ILLUSIONS: Pretend to have had a great many, and complain that you have lost them all.

IMAGINATION: Always 'lively'. Be on your guard against it. When you lack it, attack it in others. To write a novel, all you need is imagination.

IMMORALITY: Properly enunciated, this word confers prestige on the user.

IMPIETY: Thunder against it.

INFINITESIMAL: Nobody knows what it means, but it has something to do with homeopathy.

INNOVATION: Always dangerous.

INSTRUMENT: If it has been used to commit a crime, it is always 'blunt', unless it happens to be sharp.

ITALIANS: All musical. All treacherous.

Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet with the Dictionary of Received Ideas. Penguin Classics.  Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, pp. 311-312.

It's a brilliant mixture of hearsay, commonplace, pretentiousness, self-importance, hypocrisy, and cliché. It's very funny but underneath it there's a deep sense of anger and despair. It's reminiscent of Schopenhauer's The Art of Being Right (1831), which purports to be a guide to rhetorical tricks to win the argument without actually being right, but expresses despair that these horrible unreasoning manoeuvres actually work. Flaubert's Dictionary articulates a kind of disgust at the way people so often seem proud to substitute proper ideas with mere Things To Say. We hear this all around us nowadays and I've never felt it more explicitly than in the last week of the Scottish independence referendum.

Not from the Yes side. In fact, not from the Scottish No side. But from the English. Not everyone, obviously, but, I've followed from afar the debates in Scotland on extraordinary websites like Bella Caledonia and National Collective and Wings over Scotland for a couple of years and I've been dazzled - I mean it, dazzled - by the wit, imagination, the rigour, seriousness and good humour with which the debate has been conducted. But then, two weeks ago, when suddenly Scottish independence was thrust into the centre of English political attention, it's been shocking how very intelligent people have been parroting platitudes about the debate, completely unaware that Scotland has been discussing this for years with all the encrusted complexity and subtlety that you would expect. It's been an unedifying, uninformed spattering of received ideas: why hasn't England got a vote? people have seriously asked; of course it's all about hating the English; the Yes campaign have just bullied the opposition; it's all about ethnic nationalism (Thunder against it); the Scots are just obsessed with Braveheart; it's just a short-termist anti-Tory vote; their sums don't add up; they're addicted to oil/subsidy/welfare; an independent Scotland would consign England to eternal Tory rule. All of these issues have been properly debated north of the border, but no one south of it seemed to care; far preferable to utter these bons mots, half-witticism, half-analysis, wholly useless.

This matters because of what is about to happen. Scotland has voted no. It was pretty decisive and this should be respected. (But let's remember, 45% of Scotland voted Yes in the face of virtually the whole of the media, the whole of the political establishment, a coordinated campaign by some big figures in the finance and business sectors, and a negative and scaremongering No campaign.)

This morning, David Cameron walked out into Downing Street and explained that he was going to honour the pledges about further devolution made late in the campaign. And we all - not just the Scots - have a responsibility to hold him to that. Already we've had that prick Farage on the radio disputing that the Scots deserve any more powers and there are numerous Tory MPs harrumphing about the Scots being 'rewarded' for 'losing' the vote.

But there's a catch. This is what Cameron said.

I have long believed that a crucial part missing from this national discussion is England. We have heard the voice of Scotland - and now the millions of voices of England must also be heard. The question of English votes for English laws – the so-called West Lothian question – requires a decisive answer.

So, just as Scotland will vote separately in the Scottish Parliament on their issues of tax, spending and welfare, so too England, as well as Wales and Northern Ireland, should be able to vote on these issues and all this must take place in tandem with, and at the same pace as, the settlement for Scotland.

I hope that is going to take place on a cross-party basis. I have asked William Hague to draw up these plans. We will set up a Cabinet Committee right away and proposals will also be ready to the same timetable. I hope the Labour Party and other parties will contribute.

This is very clever. He's going to offer devolution as Scotland would expect, but he's making it conditional on a kind of devolution to England too. It can't be separated; English devolution 'must take place in tandem with, and at the same pace as, the settlement for Scotland'. Scottish MPs won't be able to vote on English issues, which means that if they give tax-raising powers to Holyrood, implicitly Scottish MPs won't be able to vote on an English budget.

This is a serious matter for Labour, because, although, as I've said before, removing the Scottish MPs would not necessarily mean Labour couldn't get to power, removing the Scottish MPs from the vote would make them much more vulnerable to voting rebellions in power. But of course, if Labour try to resist these plans, Cameron can say to Scotland that he'd like to introduce devolution but Labour is blocking it. Given that Labour has emerged rather bruised from this campaign, it needs to build bridges with its Scottish electorate, so will be reluctant to put obstacles in the way.

This is why Cameron has so enthusiastically agreed this massively accelerated timetable. He got Miliband and Clegg in lockstep in the last weeks of the referendum campaign - that vow, signed by all three party leaders - and he wants the deal to be done before the election. He doesn't want the three main parties going into the election with three different settlements for Scotland which would expose their divisions. He wants to seal the deal to benefit the Tories and it's going to be very difficult for Labour or the Lib Dems to get in the way. (Note that the negotiation of Scottish devolution is being handled by Lord Smith of Kelvin - a crossbench peer - but the English devolution is to be overseen by lifelong Tory William Hague. So they can be separated, but only to let Hague ensure that the settlement works to the Tory benefit.) All my leftist friends who wished for a No on the basis that it would lead to eternal Tory rule: well what do you know? We got it anyway.

To resist this, several things would need to happen. I suppose Labour could do a backstairs deal with the Lib Dems and disaffected Tories to isolate Cameron and bump things beyond the election - but that's business as usual; that's the kind of stupid game playing that our current corrupt, fly-blown system produces. To respond genuinely, imaginatively to the situation it's in, Labour will need to look beyond immediate party politics and re-connect with its grassroots, but not just its grassroots; it needs to find a way of connecting to the disaffected working class that are drifting to UKIP or not voting at all, to the humane middle class who do not put money above people. This will never be done through branding or soundbites or warm words; it means rethinking the whole approach of the party to become a people's Labour Party, the kind of thing it hasn't really been since the mid-1980s.

Because the West Lothian question is a serious question. We shouldn't be vote-rigging parliament just to keep 'our' party in power. But there are many constitutional arrangements that we need to consider; we need to debate the nature of our polity, examine imaginatively the examples of other countries, and models not even tried; we need to look hard at our system and ask what is essential, what is traditional, and what we could just sweep away; to get excited about what our country could be; to take responsibility as citizens, creative people, democrats, prepared to believe, really believe, that anything is possible. In other words, we'd have to drop the received ideas and become a lot more Scottish. 

But we only have a few months to do it, where Scotland had two years (or maybe 35 years). There's not much evidence that we're prepared to make the effort; we rejected voting reform; we rejected regional assemblies; most of us don't even vote except at General Elections; we actually elected Boris Johnson, because apparently he's a bit of a character. 

There's little sadder than that feeling of possibility closing down, or the imagination narrowing to a dot. But that's just today.

Tomorrow - as democrats, citizens, progressives - we need to hold on, keep the possibility alive, force open the edges of our imaginations, work hard, dream harder, because if we don't take responsibility for our country, we deserve everything we get. If we can't imagine what being a fully active citizen would mean, we've already lost.

Bloomsday

'I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.'

James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922

Kant, Complexity, and not as much as there should be on Little Revolution

There's a tradition in aesthetics that stretches back at least to Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), or even further back to David Hume's  'Of the Standard of Taste' (1757) which says that basically we should agree in our judgments of what is good or bad and that when people disagree it is because one person isn't judging properly. Hume has a pragmatic series of qualities that characterise the 'ideal judge', some of which are matters of character and some of experience. Kant's more sophisticated argument suggests that aesthetic judgment involves using some of our fundamental mental capacities in a distinctive way that suspends our particular experiences of the world; in a sense, when we make aesthetic judgments we are more in contact with our humanity than in ordinary judgments and perceptions. Obviously there are problems with these approaches: this state of rarefied high-minded perfection is probably impossible to achieve under Hume's definition and in Kant's it's not clear that we should respond aesthetically to art: after all, art is partly about beauty, but sometimes it's about political ideas, or ugliness, or conceptual thought - to respond only to the formal elegance of Accidental Death of an Anarchist or Guernica or One and Three Chairs would be to respond not to art but a slender aspect of that art. 

That said, I am in unfashionable sympathy with this approach. The tradition of de gustibus not disputandum est, that you can't argue over matters of taste, seems to me disproved every day: we often disagree about our artistic judgments and we often argue, try to persuade each one other of the rightness of our perspective. I can think of conversations where I've managed to see an artwork from someone else's point of view which has enabled me to 'get it'. If it were true that aesthetic judgments were wholly subjective, we would no more argue over them than we'd argue over whether I had a headache. Art, in other words, is not Marmite. If I'm honest, when I find myself wildly disagreeing with someone about an artwork, I do think that often they are wrongly using a non-aesthetic judgment - prejudice, attitude, posturing, crude political disapproval, crude political approval, sheer peevishness and perversity - where they should be using an aesthetic one (and also, being reasonably self-critical, I try to wonder if I am). It's true that art is not purely aesthetic; political and moral categories are wholly relevant to art. But they do not, in my view, replace aesthetic judgement; I'm not convinced by the Terry Eagleton argument in Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) that, to put it crudely, scratch an aesthetic judgments and you'll find a political one underneath. They seem to be in my experience clear and distinct ideas. I can think of countless occasions where a political judgment is used to trump an artistic one; in fact, I have an academic friend who I think uses political judgments as a kind of prophylactic against the difficulty of becoming absorbed in the messy endlessness of aesthetic experience - rather than let himself go into the hall of mirrors of a truly complex play or film or novel or poem, he reaches, more often than not, for a political judgement and, with an almost audible sigh of relief, he can safely set it aside and not have to deal with the artiness of it.

Indeed, one of the things that irritates me most in responses to theatre is the foreclosing of a play around meaning. I've been wondering why. After all, what does it mean? isn't a stupid question. It's an entirely pertinent question to ask of some of the finest plays I've ever seen: if you watch Far Away by Caryl Churchill and you don't ask what it means, I kind of wonder what play you're seeing. But it seems to me another way of taking a short-cut to avoid the aesthetic. It's the aesthetic that almost always complicates, often productively, the meanings of a piece of theatre and by jumping to a meaning without paying thorough, fine-grained attention to how those meanings have been enriched and multiplied and complicated by the aesthetic, even to the point of obliteration (e.g. Dada, Citizen Kane, Attempts on Her Life), we're doing it wrong.

What the aesthetic does is often make things more ambiguous, uncertain, and difficult. Very occasionally the aesthetic simply muddies what should be clear water. I'm not inclined to stay with the feelgood arrangement of Robin Thicke's 'Blurred Lines' for instance. You need to pick your meanings. But most of the time, I want to stay with the ambiguities that art gives us. Twenty years ago, I went with a friend to see Churchill's The Skriker. By any definition, this was a complicated piece. Afterwards, my friend kept saying 'what do you think it was about?' and I kept trying not to answer. I didn't want to be swept up in the stampede towards meaning. I like not knowing; rather, I like the special kind of not knowing that theatre (that art) makes possible.

These meandering thoughts are prompted by the premiere of Alecky Blythe's Little Revolution at the Almeida. Blythe is known for her verbatim work, but in particular her form of verbatim where the actors are recreating, down to every last hesitation, grammatical fuck-up, personal tic, semantic confusion, the words of an interviewee whose recorded words are being played to them through an earphone. For this play, Blythe is returning to Hackney, the site and subject of her breakthrough show, Come Out, Eli (2003); the occasion for this visit was the wave of rioting that broke out across Britain in the summer of 2011. As the riots spread through East London, Blythe went out with her MP3 recorder and tried to interview residents and rioters, criminals and community leaders. From this she has assembled a kind of narrative about the riots but also about the making of a verbatim show about the riots.

Like almost any good bit of theatre, it has divided the critics. And this isn't just a newspapers-versus-the-bloggers thing. It's got lots of people really worked up. Some of the newspapers loved it; some hated it. Some bloggers loved it; some hated it. People I like and respect admired it and some people I don't like and don't respect admired it too. So it's all very confusing.

But there seems to be a broad pattern here. So, Susannah Clapp in the Observer says,

You don't see the riots. Nor is there a concerted attempt to account for what caused them [...] You – at any rate I – realise for the first time just how stylised "realistic" stage dialogue is, how effectively a confident delivery can disguise incoherence, how a rich vocabulary can triumph over broken syntax

So she accepts that the show isn't trying to represent the riots as such but she's learned something about the nature of theatrical representation and she gives the show four stars. On the other hand, Aleks Sierz in The Arts Desk, tells us

Little Revolution tells us nothing we didn’t know about the 2011 riots; it comes late after the event; it says more about the difficulties of recording people in stressful situations than about the events themselves; it seems to have no politics

He wants a show about the riots themselves and he pans it. Megan Vaughan, who is a marvellous blogger (and, incidentally, a bit of a Kantian), tells us 'Tonight’s show was Little Revolution by Alecky Blythe, and it was about the riots in London in 2011' [my emphasis] and, on this basis, finds it wanting: 

that realism [...] never appears. There’s no threat here. There’s no fear or tension. We hear from comedy do-gooders and opinionated bystanders, but never the kids. People throwing tea parties, never throwing bricks. It’s not real (we’re in a theatre in Islington ffs), it’s not realism, it’s not even naturalism because the source material sounds like soap in the actors’ mouths. It’s just realness. Tedious, massaged realness. Rehearsed, yet also somehow a bit stunted, awkward. 

In other words, the aesthetic means are a distraction from the realism that would punch through all that, take us beyond the middle class theatre makers, the Islington theatre, the rehearsed actors, and directly show us the riots, the bricks, the kids.

I'm simplifying these comments and there's more subtlety in what each person is saying, but I wonder if Little Revolution is a show where, if you think it's about the riots, you won't like it; and if you think it's about how theatre can represent the riots, you'll love it.

And I loved it. I'm not in love with it - I did think there were some longueurs - but it's pretty loveable, as long as you stay with the ambiguities. I wanted to talk about what happens when you stay with the ambiguity of Little Revolution.

Alecky Blythe plays herself throughout the show. Let's think about that for a moment. Alecky Blythe plays herself. But it's not like David Hare performing his monologue Via Dolorosa; it's not there to add authenticity, testimony, personal conviction. Somehow it's the opposite; it shows the inadequacy of the method, lays bare the awful presumption, the haphazard encounters, the class bias that leads her to focus on a community tea party sponsored by M&S and, apparently, to see it as a major positive rather than an ineffectual distraction. She seems driven to create an everyman hero out of Siva, the owner of a destroyed corner shop, in a way that seems a an individualistic cliché about redemption and the common man. But the thing is, she can have her M&S cake and eat it, because the theatricality allows her to be double; as I said, Alecky Blythe plays herself. There are two Alecky Blythes on that stage; one who conducted these interviews, the other who is pitilessly observing her own failures. It's ferociously honest and, in that sense, realistic: in part because it gives us a sense of what it is like being caught up in a confusing and sprawling ongoing mess like a riot but also because it gives us access of a fairly direct kind to the decisions being made to make the show - in a way that you didn't with, say, Gillian Slovo's The Riots (2012) - but at the same time the theatrical framing of it draws intense attention to and encourages us to laugh critically with and at those choices. 

It reminds me of Nick Broomfield's documentary style; like Louis Theroux for grown-ups, Broomfield, in extraordinary work like Chicken Ranch (1983), Driving Me Crazy (1988), The Leader, His Driver and the Driver's Wife (1991), Aileen Wuornos (1992), Heidi Fleiss (1995), increasingly intervened in his documentaries, sometimes playing the idiot, sometimes challenging his subjects, in a way that refused to treat the camera and the documentary maker as anything other than a material reality present in the room, affecting the documented reality the way observing the path of an electron changes the path of an electron. But while Broomfield regularly throws his interviewees off the game, Blythe herself is the one wrong-footed and the piece has an undertow of pathos, comic pathos to be sure, but pathos all the same. In fact she's surrounded by journalists and documentary-makers, some of whom are condemn themselves out of other people's mouths, but some of whom are clearly much more professional and experienced than Blythe. Much of the humour of the piece, and it is very funny, derives from Blythe's Monsieur-Hulot-like ineptness, always several steps behind the action.

Because, I don't know what you think, but the Recorded Delivery technique, where actors reproduce exactly the intonations of the original speaker, has very contradictory effects on me. On the one hand I have that startled intense response of hearing how people actually speak placed on a stage, which jolts you into realising how artificial realistic speech usually is (which is Susannah Clapp's point, above), and does immerse you somehow in a particular, ungeneralised situation; but it also, to be very frank, makes me laugh at how idiotic people often sound when you hear genuine ordinary speech reproduced on stage. I'd love to say that I think Blythe's techniques confers an enormous dignity to the people she represents, but I can't wholeheartedly say it does. Taken as a whole, the overall gesture of the performance suggests a care and attention, a respectful desire for fidelity, but at individual moments, everyone (including, of course, Blythe herself) often we might find ourselves laughing at the characters. We are doubled too: we're in the show and we're outside it, internal and external to the show.

And class is at work; of course it is. Not as an unreflective assertion of the authenticity of the marginalised and socially excluded and disaffected, but in the uncomprehending three miles between Almeida Street and Clarence Road. Alecky Blythe both puts herself forward to be ridiculed and also marks the space of the middle-class theatregoer in the show; Almeida has been, without doubt, the theatre with the most well-heeled audience in London. Imagine that theatre trying naively to represent reality; when we experience Alecky Blythe's limitations, we're also experiencing our own. To sit there wanting to see the reality of the riots and being frustrated that we can't is, weirdly, to replicate exactly what Alecky Blythe is doing right through the show. Alecky Blythe's performance/behaviour - because which is it? - sometimes seems intentionally playing dumb (maybe to get people's trust), sometimes she seems inarticulate out of genuine fear, and sometimes she's stumbles, as would surely most of us, against the limits of her understanding and imagination, and she shares that with us. In Joe Hill-Gibbins's production (and Ian NcNeil's design), the Almeida itself has been broken up, remade; a kind of dérive overlays a different topography on a theatre I've probably sat in 50 times, always in the same configuration; we entered the theatre through a new entrance, the famous balcony, back wall and columns have been decent red, obscured, the theatre looks damaged or incomplete; it is difficult to know who was audience and who was cast; it's actually hard to tell what is the theatre and what is the set. And, on that, we sense an uneasy division in the cast between the actors (Equity minimum, at least) and the 'community chorus' of 30+ volunteers (presumably not paid). Personally, I don't think that's a disastrous political problem; no one's forced to be in the community chorus and it may well be genuinely a valuable, invigorating experience being involved in a production like this - but it sure does add to the sense of division in the theatre, the sense of our middle-class omniscience as a theatre audience, demanding to be shown the reality of the underclass, is disrupted, broken, inadequate.

I think it's wonderful, not because it lets us know the true story of The Riots, but because it invites us to reflect on what that could possibly mean, and I love it because it stays with all the ambiguities to which this question gives rise. It's a very funny, deeply uncomfortable bit of theatre.

UPDATE: Read Matt Trueman's piece. He says it all so well.

England, Yes

Next week, Scotland goes to the polls to decide whether it wants to be an independent country or remain part of the United Kingdom. It is clear that, whatever the result, we are already two separate countries: over the last eighteen months, Scotland has been animated by debates over this referendum; people everywhere have been discussing finer points of constitutional law, the ethics of border controls, the value of an independent nuclear deterrent, membership of the EU and NATO, Devo Max, dual citizenship and currency substitution. In England, these debates are silent, or confined to think tanks and universities. For the English it is as though nothing is happening.

Until this weekend, when one poll showed, for the first time, that the Yes campaign had crept into the lead. With less than two weeks to go, the pro-Union political class have creaked into action. Cue more fear-mongering, more negativity. We're 'sleepwalking to tragedy', declared Boris Johnson. Everywhere the pro-Union Press (which, in England, means 'The Press') announce that we have only ten days to 'save the Union'. In fact, they had eighteen months to save the Union but they did nothing about it.

Why? Arrogance, for one thing. Most people believed No would win easily. Of course they did. You don't put Alistair Darling at the front of a campaign that actually needs to win something. Labour has always considered the SNP an upstart and it seems has refused to engage with the ideas. Part of me thinks it was so confident that they would lose, they just contemptuously thought it was an opportunity to clip the SNP's wings. But also ideology: when people use fear and misinformation as the main strategies in a campaign, they are trying to hide something. And what they have been hiding from us is the idea of change. 

Change is infectious. It really is. Look what just happened. Panicked by the polling and the sudden discovery that, against the odds, Project Fear is not working, the British political class has announced a set of devolved powers to Scotland's Parliament to be handed over in the event of a No vote. There's also a timetable, agreed across the three major pro-Union parties. That was yesterday; this morning, on the Today Programme, I heard for the first time people seriously discussing whether we should extend this kind of federal system across England too. Suddenly, the problem of Britain's Londoncentricity becomes something to discuss. What kind of country do we want? How do we arrest the decline of our common citizenship? Suddenly the country seems not something we're stuck with, but something we can change. Change is infectious.

And this is why I am excited about the prospect of a Yes on 18 September. It's Scotland's decision, of course. But I'm not talking to Scotland; they're well ahead of us on these debates. I'm talking to England. Some on the left have worried that an independent Scotland, with its 50 years of solidly voting for left-wing parties, would consign a rump England to eternal Tory rule. But, as I've argued before, there's not much evidence that Scottish votes often sway General Election results. (Indeed, that is surely one of the strongest arguments that a Scottish voter would have for voting yes. If Scottish votes were constantly foisting left-wing governments on Britain, I'm sure there'd be a lot less wind in the Yes Campaign's sails)

I've heard some poor arguments from England. One is that since Scottish independence would change the nature of the United Kingdom, everyone should have a vote. Try googling the phrase 'national self determination' people. Second, this really annoying phrase, that we would 'lose Scotland'. As far as I know, Alex Salmond does not intend to unhook Scotland and let it float away. It will still be there. Probably a lot more settled and happy, less angry about its relationship with Britain, flourishing and comfortable. Scotland is great and it could be even greater and we, its closest neighbours, will still 'have' it - to visit, to cherish, to work in, to read the books that come out from it, to continue to allow it to enrich our culture as it always has.

Let's also say that to expect Scottish voters to vote No purely to save English left-wingers from Tory rule is to suggest that they should put our political happiness before theirs, which seems a perverse thing to expect. Imagine Scotland were independent already; would we expect Scotland to voluntarily absorb itself into Britain just to help the British left? No. So we can't expect them not to want to go the other way. If we keep voting Tory, that's our fault and we shouldn't gerrymander the vote by demanding Scotland stay.

As it happens, I think this is why the economic argument against independence is irrelevant. Various economic experts have claimed that Scotland would be seriously damaged by becoming independent. Now, first, economics is not a precise science. If it were, we wouldn't be only now struggling our way out of a catastrophic worldwide recession. Truthfully, nobody knows anything (and there have been plenty of economists arguing for the benefits of independence too). But even if Scotland were to be a bit worse off as an independent country, that's their choice. The effects of such a change are simply unpredictable and no honest economist would deny this. If Scotland were independent already, it would be absurd to urge them to absorb themselves into Britain for economic reasons. By the same argument, Britain should absorb itself into China.

If Scotland votes yes, it will be the biggest shock to the identity of this country for almost a century. In the short term, I will be anxious, anxious that the immediate response will be massive hostility and intransigence on the part of the established political order - and indeed from the little Englanders who seem to be driving right-wing policy right now. It might push the country further towards UKIP and the kind of bullet-headed refusal to accept that change is good, that change is always an opportunity, that we can use change, its dynamic, its energy and power, and we can become better people. In the short term, I fear the British left will be in retreat.

But in the medium and long term, imagine it. A successful social democratic state, right next door. While we scrabble around finding a place to keep Trident, they'll have nuclear disarmament. While our prescription charges go up, theirs have been cancelled. While university fees go sky high, next door they're free. It will be a standing refutation of the ideological myth of the Right that There Is No Alternative. It will be an inspiration, a rallying cry, something to point to whenever we are told by the so-called realists that neoliberal market capitalism freed from government intervention is the only game in town. Because there will be another game in town just over the border. An independent Scotland will be an amazing thing for the British left. If we let the future be what it could be, it will be a chance to rethink the nature of Britain, the relationship between the capital and the regions, the nature of community, local government, devolution. What if the West Country had its own tax-raising powers? A parliament for every region? What if we had genuine, local, street-level representation that was responsive, vigorous, imaginative and funded? What if we, the majority, the non-rich decided we wanted to rebuild the NHS, invest in education, let the arts flourish nationally and not just in a few metropolitan centres? And we decided we wanted to pay for it? And force the rich to pay their fair share? Scottish independence, makes Britain independent too.

And if that doesn't work, fuck it, we can just go live there.