Contemporary Scotland is fragmented: but not along the lines of Yes and No. To find evidence of real fault lines, a short journey north from Scotland’s capital reveals far deeper forces at play.

Scotland is a nation divided. This self-evident point has been loudly proclaimed by senior members of the No campaign.

The source of this animosity? Astute commentators might point to the gross inequality that scars our cities, others could look to the age old trope of embedded rivalries: Catholic/Protestant, Highland/Lowland, Edinburgh/Glasgow. Still more might contend that we’re not often called upon to have such vast national conversations, that we lack  developed platforms for such serious questions, so tend to get carried away. 

The answer, in this case, is none of the above. According to Better Together’s proclamation, the problem relates to the egging of a Westminster politician. A practice long celebrated throughout the UK, it is now deemed to presage a darker shift in these final, vital, days of campaigning.

The size of Jim Murphy’s dry-cleaning bill has become a national outrage: part of a co-ordinated attempt, we are told, to silence him. For the less reactionary, it’s perhaps unsurprising that many people, noticing a member of the shadow cabinet shouting on a street corner, decided to shout back. Instead, the fevered imaginings of the No campaign seek to identify an apparent tipping point as ‘tensions rise’. The aim is transparent: on the eve of the deadline for voter registration, the pro-union campaign is gambling on engendering fear about the act of voting itself. It wants people to stay at home and to remember the old adage: that which is divided cannot stand.

In their desire to embitter the final days of campaigning, one Better Together source went as far as to warn of ‘carnage’ on polling day. In the semi-functional democracy that is sub-national Scotland such remarks are placed well above the fold regardless of their impact. In an unprecedented move, the Scottish Police Federation responded with a statement condemning those using ‘intemperate, inflammatory and exaggerated language, lest they be seen to seek to create a self fulfilling prophecy.’

Of course, Scotland is a nation divided. For example, the diagonal highland line could yet stand as a loose marker for how the country votes: Yes can take the north and the schemes of the central belt, but is likely to struggle in more affluent south and the north east.

But there are deeper divisions below the surface. Not least the social stratification described by Neal Ascherson as the ‘St Andrews Fault’: dividing elite, engaged Scotland with the disengaged and cynical multitude. Today this can be seen in the appeals to manipulate the emotions of an apparently docile electorate, that many clearly believe are not really fit for this decision.

The referendum will not move mountains, but the old certainties and previously insurmountable fault lines could be forever altered in these coming days. Scottish democracy has received a shot in the arm thanks to this campaign. For all of the narrowing of politics in recent years into the domain of a professionalised elite, it seems that people can still grapple with a question that is universally understood to be of profound significance.

If that question is divisive, clearly the people of Scotland do not feel that this impacts on their ability to address it. For a small number, on both sides, this is a vote about identity: a matter indelibly about who they feel they are. For the vast majority, the issue of identity has been settled long ago and there is a calm and easy recognition that we live in a world of hybrid, multi-layered identities that enjoy a casual relationship with the nation state.

The debate has been non violent for just this reason. Yet the worrying tendency of those defending the union (and their own status) to cry foul, risks morphing into a truly despicable scorched earth policy. Sections of the institutions that benefit significantly from the current settlement, such as the CBI or the UK Labour Party, are increasingly cornered and dangerous: the desire of their most fervent voices is clearly to destroy the terrain on which an open debate can take place.

None of this can belie the nature of what is happening on the ground. Today I made the journey across the Forth from Edinburgh to Fife. Any traveller in Scotland today will find the impending question, ‘Should Scotland be an independent country’ all pervasive and this short trip is no exception.

There’s a massive yes sign between Haymakret station and Murrayfield. It must engender fury and joy in almost equal numbers as Edinburgh’s white collar workforce passes by each morning. But it is there, unthreatening and impossible to ignore.

The sign is far from unique. Like the bizarrely iconic Yes positioned as though it were an extension to the ski slope on the Pentland Hills, these markers of referendum loyalty are everywhere. They don’t just proclaim a position, they tell us that, at last, this debate has become broad and vast and inescapable. Many more things now seem possible than they did a few months ago and the polls seem to suggest that we could be on the cusp of an eleventh hour swing to Yes.

Yet, though it is a daily commute for thousands, this simple crossing of the firth tells us a great deal about why this country stands where it does.

Scotland’s time is very much of the present and to cross over any terrain here is to negotiate and perhaps press under the contours of past contradictions. Whatever Scotland is, or might be, it is not simple. Today’s passions provide only selective clues as to why such dramatic events are now unfolding. The truly iconic expanse of the Firth of Forth provides as good a starting point as any for a more revealing lesson in what’s going on.

On that journey across the astonishing monument to Victorian engineering that is the Forth Railway Bridge, a century’s worth of evidence for or against the union abounds beneath you. There’s the bridge itself, constructed at the height of empire in 1890 with the loss of 63 lives. There’s the scattered remnants of war time fortifications and the great tunnel running under the firth that once connected the collieries at Kinneil in West Lothian to Valleyfied in Fife, it opened half a century ago in 1964. These relics do not tell a story that necessarily leads to Yes. But, from Empire, war, to post-war settlement they recall several different Britains that are now as lost to us those 63 briggers. 

The more contemporary features are also, in their own way, profoundly British in character.

The sprawling grey mass of Grangemouth, Scotland’s only crude oil refinery, reminds us of the black gold that has enchanted (and haunted) Scottish nationalism. Only last year the plant’s future stood on a knife edge thanks to the union busting practices of Ineos boss Jim Ratcliffe, Britain’s 25th richest man.

Across the water at Rosyth sits HMS Queen Elizabeth, a vast hulk clearly visible from the bridge. This ship was built for the defence of the realm in ‘an age of uncertainty’ at a cost of 3.1 billion pounds. With her sister ship likely to be mothballed or sold this is an aircraft carrier without planes, recently described in the Daily Telegraph as ‘the perfect metaphor for Britain’s diminished global status’.

These too are the markers of division. Yet this debate is not about such totems, but rather, the nature and capacity of the people on both sides of the water. It is about the vast disparity in their incomes and the bleak depression of today’s Valleyfield that has never been addressed in the course of half a century. The political will has for generations been absent or misplaced. Though perhaps, even in these communities, some kind of motivation is stirring.

Certainly what I have found, in travelling across the country in recent weeks, is something that is very rare in Scotland: open and rational political dialogue. I have seen old men arguing about the Norwegian minimum wage over a game of dominoes and pints of heavy. I know of many researching politics and finding out for themselves what it all might mean for the first time in a generation. If both sides are sincere about wanting this campaign to be a credit to the people of Scotland they must keep that space for dialogue open and ignore the shouting, the marching and the headlines. 

Metaphors and euphemisms for the referendum abound. Many, it would seem, remain confused as to what it’s all about. The reality is relatively simple. Fundamentally this debate is an open license to discuss what a country might be like if it was not so divided. If it was not quite so trapped within the stasis of present injustice. Some people take advantage of that license, others make the best of it.

As an optimist, I am confident that both sides, even a No campaign fantasising about ‘carnage’, can still live up to the responsibility that these final momentous days place on all of us.