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Part I
International sport
States, nations and identity
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1 Sport, identity and constitutional crisis
Sporting politics?
Raymond Boyle
Introduction
The relationship between sport, the media and politics during times of constitutional crisis is the focus of this chapter. These issues are examined through a case study of Scotland in the run up to and since the 2014 independence referendum. In so doing, this chapter documents the historical relationship between sport and political and national cultures in the stateless nation of Scotland. The chapter then investigates the position and impact of sports culture in the political and cultural debate in the run up to the 2014 Referendum. This was to be a political decision that would decide if Scotland were to become a separate state or remain within the UK.
As part of the case study, the chapter focuses on the role that key sporting figures, such as Andy Murray, played in the media discourses that surrounded the vote in 2014 and beyond. It is particularly interested in the role social media played in the ongoing relationship between representations of sport and aspects of expressions of political and national identity. Throughout this chapter the findings suggest that caution is required in assuming that expressions of national identity through sport are unproblematically translated into the political arena.
The initial part of the chapter briefly highlights the interplay between sport, politics and identity before examining in more detail the context for the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. The latter sections of the chapter reflect on the role and position that sport in Scotland and its attendant culture play in the broader political process and the role of the media in this process.
Sport, politics and identity
David Papineau (2017), in his book examining the relationship between philosophy and sport, noted that: “Those few philosophers who have written about the value of sport tend to stand somewhere between Chomsky and Shankly. They don’t dismiss sport as meaningless, but at the same time they distinguish it from real life. In their view, sport is worthwhile precisely because it gives us a break from more serious pursuits. I think that the philosophers have it wrong too. Sport is just as serious as the rest of life. Shankly may have been a tad overenthusiastic, but he had the right idea. Sport reaches deep into human nature, and can be as important as anything else” (Papineau, 2017, p. 272).
What is not in doubt is that sport as a cultural form is deeply connected to the society that produces and reproduces the institutional frameworks that sustain and underpin sporting culture. In contemporary society and with regard to elite sport, the media are a key element of this process, both as financial underwriters of sport and as mediators of the range of representations that sports culture offers.
To this end it is unsurprising that sports culture can become implicated in wider cultural and political identities. At times, such as in the origins and history of an organisation such as the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in Ireland, these links and expressions of identity are overt and explicit (Cronin, Duncan and Rouse, 2014). Sporting organisations such as the GAA become part of a wider cultural and political mobilisation of collective identity which helps to legitimise certain political and cultural narratives around the nation, its origins and its practice.
The Scottish case also allows us to reflect on how globalisation (both in sports and politics) interconnects with often deeply embedded regional and national identities and practices. It is not the case of one identity dominating over another, of an either/or type scenario. Rather it is the complex interplay between differing layers and levels of identity as long-standing football supporters follow a global game that is still framed within often local sensitivities. While lamented by some, the Scottish game is less global than, say, the English Premier League (in terms of players, European success, international media coverage and reputation). That doesn’t mean that globalisation doesn’t impact on the football industry in Scotland, but rather that it does so in particular ways that reflect a specifically rooted geographical, cultural and political context.
Indeed, given the long-standing and embedded importance of symbols in sporting culture and the growth since the late nineteenth century of international sporting competition, it does not take a massive leap of the imagination to position sport as a cultural form that lends itself to collective expressions of identity. Initially bound within a particular time and physical space, as the media develop an interest in this lucrative commercial form of entertainment, the mediation of sport moves from newspapers, to live radio, television and the internet to become an increasingly boundless, instant and potentially global experience.
Politics: Scotland a stateless nation
If we acknowledge that aspects of sports culture are rooted in the wider political and cultural context within which such cultural forms are produced, we also need to be clear what we mean by the term politics in this context. At times politics can be clearly linked to the mainstream political culture of the time. Examples include politicians and political elites associating themselves with high profile sporting successes as rather crude attempts to make political capital from them. However, we need to understand that politics is also about how power is organised in society, and this reaches out from beyond mainstream political culture into areas such as class, gender and the politics of ethnicity and identity.
For example, for many years Scotland has had a sporting identity rather than a political one. As a stateless nation its national football and rugby teams became symbolic carriers of Scottish national identity, particularly on an international sporting stage (that recognised Scotland as a nation) at a time when the country’s political identity was subsumed within the UK Westminster State.
From the supporters of the Scottish national football team, the self-styled “Tartan Army”, to the culture and identity that surrounded the Old Firm rivalry between Celtic and Rangers, Scottish sport gave rise to mediated expressions of the country’s often complex self-image and range of individual and collective identities at a time when these often were unable to find expression in a political form.
Scotland has had major political referendums before 2014. For a generation of Scottish politicians, the 1979 referendum on whether to establish a Scottish Assembly shaped the subsequent political landscape in Scotland for the next two decades. In a very different analogue media age, the 1979 referendum saw 51.6 per cent support the proposal for Scottish Home Rule, but on a turnout of 64 per cent, this represented only 32.9 per cent of the electorate and thus failed to reach the requisite 40 per cent of the electorate required to trigger a new Assembly. For some, the abject failure of the Scottish national team at the World Cup Finals in Argentina the previous year played a role in this result that appeared to reflect a collective crisis of confidence among the Scottish population. While impossible to prove, the very fact that Scotland’s terrible showing at the World Cup – with defeat to Peru, followed by a draw with Iran, before hopes were raised and then dashed by a gallant 3–2 victory over Holland – could be linked to the failed 1979 referendum is indicative of the linkage between high profile sporting success (or failure) and notions of a collective feelgood factor that may be translated into the political arena.
The political landscape continued to be dominated by debates around greater political autonomy for Scotland and this was heightened by the repeated election of UK Conservative governments despite Scotland returning few, if any, Conservative MPs to Westminster. By 1997, the “settled will” of the Scottish people to have a parliament sit again in Edinburgh was recognised by the New Labour government which ended 18 years of Conservative rule in the UK.
A referendum – based this time on securing a simple majority as opposed to what many felt was the rigged target of 1979 – initiated by New Labour in 1997, asked whether the Scottish electorate wanted a Scottish parliament established and saw an overwhelming vote of 75 per cent in favour, with 25 per cent against on a 61 per cent turnout. A form of proportional representation would elect the 129 MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament), thus ensuring a greater spread of political parties in the parliament and ensuring that single party government would be difficult to achieve given this electoral system. A series of coalition Labour/Liberal Democrat Scottish Executives ensued following the first Scottish parliamentary elections for almost 300 years in 1999.
Rather than settle any debate about an independent Scotland, the Scottish parliament saw the breakup of the Labour hegemony of Scottish politics that had existed since the 1950s, and became a platform for a re-invigorated Scottish National Party (SNP) led for most of this time by the dominant figure in Scottish politics during this period, Alex Salmond. By the 2007 Scottish elections, and despite the electoral system, the SNP under Salmond became a minority Scottish government (the term government having now replaced the rather anodyne term Executive in the lexicon of Scottish, and eventually UK, politics).
By the election of 2011, the SNP, with its growing experience of government, went to the polls promising that if elected they would hold a referendum on Scottish Independence within the lifetime of the Scottish Parliament. In 2011, they secured a majority of seats in the Scottish Parliament (the first time any party had achieved this since 1999) and set about negotiating with the UK Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government the terms of an independence referendum. The Edinburgh agreement of October 2012 saw First Minister Salmond and Prime Minister Cameron agree the terms of such a vote and 18 September 2014 became the date of the referendum. What is important to understand here is that the issue of Scottish independence runs deep within Scottish political and civic culture and that, to all intents and purposes, from 2012 the issue of the referendum dominated the political landscape of Scottish politics. In effect, what you had in Scotland was a long campaign that was of varying degrees of intensity, but never absent from the political and media discourse. Meanwhile, across the rest of the UK, the issue of Scottish independence was largely absent from political discourse, as not for the first time Scotland and the Scottish Question faded from the London-based political and media agenda where political elites simply failed to register the impact any Yes to independence vote would have in dismantling the seemingly impregnable UK state.
Scotland 2014: the independence referendum
The referendum campaign of 2014 was the most extraordinary political episode in the modern history of Scotland. Never before had the nation engaged in such a long and intensive dialogue about its present and future. Animated discussions took place within families, among friends and colleagues at work, in pubs, coffee bars, restaurants, in the streets, schools universities and churches. Most often they were friendly but some ended in disharmony and disagreement between relatives and close acquaintances. Indeed, it was not at all unusual to find families’ split down the middle on how they would vote as the day of reckoning approached.
(Devine, 2016, p. 232)
As the distinguished Scottish historian Tom Devine notes above, the Scottish independence referendum of 2014 was an event unprecedented in not just modern Scottish political history, but also that of the UK state. The referendum of 18 September 2014 saw 97 per cent of the Scottish based adult population registered to vote. The actual voter turnout would be 84.15 per cent, the highest in Scottish political history. The result would see 55 per cent vote to remain in the UK and 45 per cent vote for the creation of an independent Scotland.
The referendum question finally agreed was “Should Scotland be an independent country?” This was not an uncontroversial formulation given the various permutations that could have been put forward. In addition, 16-year olds would get to vote in the referendum and the final Yes/No decision would be based on a simple majority. The two main campaign teams launched in May and June 2012 were the independence campaign Yes Scotland, driven initially by the SNP/Scottish Green Party and the Scottish Socialist Party (but always a broad coalition of interests) and led by Blair Jenkins, a former BBC Head of News and Current Affairs and STV Director of Broadcasting, while the campaign to remain in the UK and urging a No vote was called Better Together, backed by the Scottish Conservatives/Scottish Labour and the Scottish Liberal Democrats. It was chaired by former Labour chancellor Alistair Darling and the campaign director was Blair McDougall, a former Labour special advisor.
One challenge was the long nature of the campaign given that, by the end of 2012, the referendum had already become the focus of political debate in Scotland despite there being over 20 months until polling day. The polls tended to suggest that independence would be rejected by about 60 per cent to 40 per cent, that the core of the Yes vote was around 35 per cent and that this would need to shift significantly.
From the outset, the Yes Scotland campaign built on the strong political campaigning machine that had been successfully developed by the SNP in winning both the 2007 and 2011 Scottish elections. The focus was on social media and mobilising local activists to make the case for independence. It is important to note that support for independence was of course not solely the preserve of the SNP. Both the Scottish Greens and Scottish Socialist parties supported the campaign, mobilising their local networks accordingly as well as support from a range of nationalist leaning, but non-affiliated groups such as National Collective, a coalition of artists and cultural activists, which in fact had been active since late 2011 but gained significant prominence during the campaign. Other important grassroots and community-based groups/networks that played a role in the Yes campaign included The Radical Independence campaign, the Common Weal and Women for Independence. All were part of a broad coalition of civic, cultural and political groups within the Yes campaign who all used social media as a key organising tool and communication platform.
The Scottish Independence Referendum (Franchise) Act 2013 was passed in June 2013 by the Scottish parliament, and the campaign moved up a significant level with the publication by the SNP government of its 670-page white paper Scotland’s Future, which they published in November of that year (SNP, 2013). Up until this point, the polls had shown little movement despite the plethora of well attended public events being run by various public, private and political organisations about the referendum. What was not in doubt was that this was an issue that people were keen to have more information about. However, what was also clear was that a large percentage of the electorate had already made their mind up with regard to how they were going to vote, while a constituency of around 15–20 per cent were undecided.
My personal experience of the long campaign and attending numerous public events was that the engagement and debate, while always passionate, was by and large not ill-tempered or intemperate. However, as we moved into the year of the referendum, the sense that I had was that there was increasingly less listening going on in the public discussion and there was a hardening of opinion and, in some cases (from events I attended), a coarsening of the debate. In ...
