Better together
Better said TIM MAGUIRE
It took the Better Together campaign quite a while to respond to my request for someone to interview, but to their credit, they managed to come up with someone. Meet Duncan Hothersall, a supporter and sometime activist for Better Together, who describes himself as “a loudmouth on Twitter who enjoys a good argument and sometimes even a bad one.”
Born of a mum from
Portobello and a dad from Lancashire, he was raised in Stoke, and as his Twitter profile @dhothersall attests, he’s a rationalist atheist and a gay husband, pro-choice and anti- ignorance, a member of the Co-operative Party and the Scottish Labour Party, as well as a supporter of LGBT rights and a member of the Equality Network. I
www.humanism-scotland.org.uk
put it to him that it was a bit of a surprise seeing someone with these credentials in the Better Together camp – surely he’d be better off in a more tolerant, secular, independent Scotland? “Not at all”, he replied. “I’m not a flag waving Unionist, and my politics isn’t associated with geography but my gut feeling is that we will get the best outcome for the largest number of people by co-operating and working together. I got involved with the campaign because in 2011 I was involved in Labour Hame (www.
labourhame.com). I know that unionism isn’t a labour value but the humanist stance that we are about the things that unite rather than divide us resonates with me. This isn’t the time to create a new nation state. All that does is create another island of self-interest, which creates more competition whereas I
prefer co-operation. You get more done when you work together, it’s a no brainer.” He laughs. “If I say that on Twitter, people say ‘well why don’t we have a world government then?’ And I go, ‘OK, what’s wrong with that?’” I suggested to Duncan that the Scottish Parliament has been much more supportive to the cause of secular humanism than the one at Westminster, and given that the failure of the most
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