Cinico: Travels with a Good Professor at the Time of the Scottish Referendum

"This is not an academic work, it’s a novel. A very amusing one, actually. ‘Cinico’ is the Italian word for ‘Cynical or cynic. It’s basically a modern version of Voltaire’s Candide , which has been translated from the French as ‘ The Optimist’ or ‘ Optimism’. It pretends to be a book about an Italian journalist based in London who is sent up to cover the Scottish referendum in 2014. He makes contact with a Scottish professor of politics. Perhaps that’s what I love about it, how many novels are there written about professors of Scottish politics? I had to choose it. It moves through the journalist’s attempts to find the stories behind the referendum, nationalism, and Scottish identity, and he undergoes his own journey, like any good protagonist in a novel. But what I love is the characters he meets along the way—some classic characters like the Glasgow hard man, a real trope of Scottish identity, but also many varied ones from a variety of backgrounds—and all present insights for the reader. Through that we get exposed to all the ideas behind Scottish independence and what it means to be Scottish in 2014. The professor comes in for a good kicking, because he’s represented as very middle class, and a little bit out of touch with wider society. But at the end of the day, I think it illustrates the multifaceted nature of Scottishness and Scottish identity, and Scottish society in 2014. Because remember—and I must stress this—that 2014 was, in many ways, amazing. Think of the turnout alone. You almost never see turnouts like that, except in rare cases—or when you are a little suspicious of the situation. But in many ways this was a celebration of democracy. The vast majority of people went out to vote on what they saw as a very important question. If you told most people two or three years before the vote that, although the nationalists wouldn’t win, they’d get 45% of the vote, you’d have gotten laughed out of most rooms. I think what that goes to show is that Scotland has had a very mature, but more importantly, a very public and very open discussion of what it wanted. It also challenged some of those nationalist thinkers to come up with a much more frank consideration of the changes that independence would bring. Jackson does a good job of showing that. For Scotland, it caused a lot of reaction, like any debate that talks about rupturing a long-held civic and political union. There were families who had major disagreements. Political parties that had major disagreements. At the end of the day, that’s when the SNP made the shift from being the dominant party of Scotland, not only in the Scottish Parliament—which they’d already achieved—but in Westminster too. In the 2015 general election they blew every other party out of the water. Nobody saw that coming. That’s when Scottish nationalists also began to think, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa, we’ve got to harness this, we’ve got to do it again.’ So, even after 2014, it is worth asking, did they really lose?"