Finlay Whiteford
Here’s a question. What do the local authorities of Shetland, the Western Isles, West Dunbartonshire, Argyll and Bute and the Highlands have in common?
They are the only places left in Scotland where you’ll see an election poster tied to a lamppost. Elsewhere – across our high streets and housing estates, in the final week of a Holyrood campaign – there are almost no visible signs that an election is happening at all.
This change has happened in a piecemeal way over the last 25 years and without a proper national debate. Instead, this move has taken place at a council-level with election materials restricted as a result of reasons as diverse as ladder safety, litter, climate change and aesthetics.
It matters because Scotland has drifted into this position at exactly the moment when the gap between the public and the political class has never felt wider.
Political parties have tried, and largely failed, to engage voters in this Holyrood campaign – now widely described as the “loveless” election. The disillusionment has hit campaigners too. With the result seen as a foregone conclusion, the impetus to influence it drains away.
Fewer doors are knocked, there’s less about politics in the local paper, and – increasingly – many would-be voters don’t see anything more than a generic YouTube ad about an election which will shape the country for the next five years and beyond.
Posters in your front window are still permitted, but you barely see those either.
The humble lamppost sign used to be a stalwart of the campaign. In town centres a piece of card with the surname of the local candidate was a ‘look-at-me’ way to decorate the public sphere with our ideas and political allegiances.
For many of us, we’ll remember seeing these signs as children, and getting a sense that the election was something that grown-ups cared about. There was a common acceptance that it mattered what you had to say, and that there was a duty to tell others about why you voted the way you did.
Scotland is also out of step with many of its neighbours. Most democracies treat election posters as either a public good to be regulated and provided (France), a civic right to be permitted (Germany, Ireland), or a free-speech entitlement to be defended (United States). Scotland has quietly arrived at a fourth position: a nuisance to be discouraged.
Of course, council bans aren’t the only reason posters have disappeared.
The newest generation of political nerd has grown up knowing politics as a digital activity, where confrontations happen behind usernames, rather than being encountered in the street. Parties have followed the audience, directing their money towards online advertising rather than old-school ephemera.
But airing our opinions in the real world is exactly what democracy needs. Ordinary folk putting their heads above the parapet, showing that they care who gets elected, is the only real antidote to the apathy washing over our communities.
Despite what some may tell you, a reconnection with politics cannot be manufactured by a Holyrood “elite”, nor by news websites or a TV debate.
It must come from people believing that those around them will care enough to vote and shout about it, and that everyone holds the responsibility to shape this election.
It’s not as if Scotland has an aversion to climbing lampposts for political ends.
Recent flag-related incidents in Falkirk, Perth and Edinburgh have shown that with some clarity – and that councils’ capacity to police what goes on their street furniture is, in any case, not what it was.
We need to dismiss the prevailing attitude that election campaigning is embarrassing, or that political debate is impolite and shouldn’t feature in our public spaces.
That worldview influences how we relate to politics more generally; it reinforces the notion that politics happens above normal people’s heads, and is some sort of grand conspiracy against the ordinary working person.
The poster has the power to change that: a visible, everyday expression of a healthy democracy, and a reminder that politics belongs in our communities and is for all of us.
Small, perhaps. But not nothing.