Euan McColm: Pollok rapper who says Yes to grown-up debate

More than three years after the 2014 referendum, members of the Scottish Independence Convention met in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall with the intention of reinvigorating a movement that’s suffered its share of knocks.

Welcoming delegates who packed the rows of that grand theatre, the co-convener of the SIC – Rab C Nesbitt star Elaine C Smith – was eager to share her wisdom. It’s been three years since Smith and her fellow travellers endured the bitter taste of defeat; surely three years is time enough to come up with something new, something inspiring.

We won’t win over No voters, Smith told her audience, by calling them quislings and traitors.

Well, blow me. Three years of reflection and this was the level of banality the Yes movement’s brightest and best had reached.

The pro-independence campaign produced a number of loud and confident voices. Unfortunately most of them have been loudly and confidently repeating the same tired old lines about a Scotland held back by the Union.

Those, such as Smith and her SIC co-convener Pat Kane, who have high profiles and, thus, influential roles in the Yes movement, continue to display a lack of understanding of why a majority of Scots rejected the nationalists’ offer in 2014. And the irritation of being called quislings isn’t the half of it.

The nationalist movement, speckled as it is with “free” thinkers whose thoughts must always accommodate the “truth” that independence is always the solution, is all but intellectually moribund. But, from among the ranks of “creatives” – those minor novelists, bloggers, vloggers and “performers” – who formed such a substantial part of the Yes campaign three years ago a truly interesting new voice has emerged.

The rapper Loki – real name Darren McGarvey because he was born in Pollok and not in a Spider-Man comic – has enjoyed an increasingly high profile over the past three years. McGarvey, a recovering alcoholic and survivor of childhood abuse, was – at first, anyway – a darling of the Yes movement.

Authentically working class, with the diction and the furrowed brow to prove it, McGarvey was a gift to the nationalist cause. Here was an articulate, passionate young man whose experiences – and compelling retelling of them – gave weight to the idea that, if independence was about anything, it was about social justice.

McGarvey’s status as darling of the independence cause was to be short-lived. Soon, he began to question the motives of some of those he had once stood beside. Had he been a less interesting character, McGarvey might have found his level as a critical friend of the independence movement.

Last Monday, McGarvey appeared on Radio 4’s Start The Week and announced himself as one of the United Kingdom’s most provocative social commentators. If 2014’s indyref produced a new public intellectual, he is a rapper from Pollok. Who’d have thought?

In a dazzlingly articulate and powerful contribution to the programme, McGarvey spoke about the corrosive impact of stress on those living in poverty and about taking personal responsibility for one’s decisions.