Will JK Rowling’s Expelliarmus disarm Scottish independence?

Scotland didn’t qualify for the World Cup, so while the English have been feverishly debating whether or not young trequartista Raheem Sterling ought to start this weekend’s match against Italy, north of the border the talk has been strictly politics. On Monday, US president Barack Obama warned Scots against voting “Yes” to independence in September’s referendum, and yesterday it was the turn of J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, to make the case for caution. She also made a hefty £1 million ($1.68 million) donation to the Better Together campaign.

In a 1,600-word essay, Rowling expressed her concern regarding the economic risks of independence, as well as the irreversible nature of a “Yes” vote. 

The vitriolic reaction to her thoughtful and measured contribution is symptomatic of the polarized debate that now dominates all public discourse in Scotland. One Edinburgh charity, The Dignity Project, posted a widely condemned tweet: “What a #bitch after we gave her shelter in our city when she was a single mum.”

Rowling’s sincere and detailed intervention has stung those in favor of independence far more than Obama’s unsurprising backing for the status quo. Along with the late designer Alexander McQueen and the tennis player Andy Murray, Rowling is Scotland’s most prominent cultural export of recent years. 

Rowling’s personal story of writing her way out of poverty and clinical depression to global renown has taken on major cultural significance, offering a persistent challenge to the resurgent notion in U.K. politics of poverty as a moral condition. In Edinburgh, locals can point out the cafes where she is said to have written Harry Potter while trying to keep her young child asleep. Rowling has always resisted allowing herself to be positioned straightforwardly as the kind of exceptional “pulled-up-by-the-bootstraps” individual invariably used to justify cutting government support for the poor. She consistently draws attention the immense difficulties faced by vulnerable people in the U.K. 

Indeed, Rowling would have been the ideal figurehead for the “Yes” campaign, which seeks to project a future in which Scotland operates with confidence on the global stage while at last untethered to the neoliberal consensus at Westminster and empowered to put in place radical reforms to tackle the inequality and deprivation that afflicts so much of the country.

Instead, she has expressed a doubt about the kinds of futures that might lie ahead for an independent Scotland. She worries that the “Yes” campaign’s inclusionary “civic nationalism” may yield to a more exclusionary mode of identity politics; that the economic grounds for the Scottish National Party’s optimism might not be as solid a foundation as they are said to be; that too much of the impetus behind the campaign for independence comes from a cussed desire to defy an unpopular Prime Minister whose tenure is necessarily limited.

Rowling’s doubts about the case for independence are certainly not without substance. Rather than ignoring them as merely an inconvenience, those in Scotland who are convinced that the way to a better and more just society lies through independence must take Rowling’s suspicions seriously, think them through, and develop a workable political vision in which it is absolutely clear exactly what it is that independence alone can make possible in Scotland. 

The old-fashioned question of sovereignty has been largely absent from the debate, partly because Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond fudged the issue by putting together a platform in which the Queen will retain her position regardless of the outcome of the referendum, and perhaps because we are now supposed to be beyond sovereignty as part of a fully globalized world in which meaningful networks of power extend far beyond national boundaries. But if Scots are serious about undertaking a profound cultural and political transformation, and hope to do so by means of independence from the rest of the U.K., then the question of sovereignty and what it could enable in Scotland must be explored in far greater depth. For now, the kind of pragmatic thinking shown by the same woman whose imagination furnished us with an entire world of witches and wizards to explore looks likely to prove persuasive.