On May 3, the voters of Scotland are headed to the polls to vote for the third Scottish Parliament since that body was created in 1999. There is apparently a pretty strong chance of a Scottish Nationalist Party victory there. The SNP’s manifesto calls– in reasonably argued terms– for Scotland’s independence from the Union it has maintained with England for exactly 300 years now.
The newly emerged “Scottish question” is impacting London politics in some very significant ways. Only one of these is the newly emerging possibility that the Holyrood (Scottish) Parliament might move towards secession. Another is the fact that the Labour Party’s annointed successor to Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, who has loyally stood in line for years to wait for his turn as party and national leader, is now seen by many English people as far “too Scottish”.
Until very recently being seen as Scottish would have been viewed by most English people either as a plus or as something fairly netural. But now, suddenly, a surge in anti-Scottishness among many English people suddenly has Brown’s chances of winning the intra-party succession vote thrown into a serious degree of doubt.
Plus, Scotland has always been a strong Labor stronghold. So an SNP victory would signal a broad repudiation among many traditionally pro-Labour Scots of the Labour Party as Tony Blair has (re-)fashioned it… And then, an SNP-led secession from the Union would give the Tory Party a much stronger chance to recapture Westminster at the next election. (Indeed, it might hasten that election considerably.)
So the “Scottish Question” is big. The respected Scottish commentator Iain MacWhirter has argued for some months now that it may be time for a ‘Velvet Divorce’, similar to the one that in 1993 allowed the Czech Republic and Slovakia each to go very peaceably along its respective way.
The SNP’s manifesto is worth reading in some detail. Here what it says on p.7:
- Scotland can be more successful. Looking around at home and at our near neighbours abroad, more and more Scots believe this too. Independence is the natural state for nations like our own.
Scotland has the people, the talent and potential to become one of the big success stories of the 21st century. We can match the success of independent Norway – according to the UN the best place in the world to live. We can do as well as independent Ireland, now the fourth most prosperous nation on the planet.
With independence Scotland will be free to flourish and grow. We can give our nation a competitive edge.
… Together we can build a more prosperous nation, a Scotland that is a force for good, a voice for peace in our world.
Free to bring Scottish troops home from Iraq.
Free to remove nuclear weapons from Scotland’s shores.
Free to invest our oil wealth in a fund for future generations…
Note that reference to “our oil wealth”… With the vast majority of the North Sea oil that is currently controlled by London lying in what– under any divorce– would be Scotland’s economic exploitation zone, that line in the manifesto is presumably sending shivers down the spine of economic planners in London. (Note, too, those to “bring[ing] Scottish troops home from Iraq” and “remov[ing] nuclear weapons from Scotland’s shores.” Those ideas also seem to be very popular in Scotland these days.)
There are other reasons for many English people to worry about Scottish secession, too. One is that, without a concept of a shared “Britishness” to rely on, the question as to what it is that actually constitutes “Englishness” seems fairly hard to fathom.
I write this as someone who grow up in southern England, with Scottish, English, and Welsh forebears all proudly acknowledged as such within the family. And a high proportion of my “English” friends have similarly mixed ancestries.
But here’s another thing on this vexed question of English identity. I also grew up Anglican– which, in terms of religious affiliation was in the England of the 1950s and 1960s a sort of an unthinking default option. Back then, if you were a Catholic, or a Jew, or a non-conformist (i.e., a member of a non-Anglican Protestant denomination), then you knew who you were and what you were supposed to believe.
If you were Anglican, you never even really questioned who you were; and you certainly were never required to believe anything in particular.
In this regard, the idea of “Englishness” feels to me like a sort of ethnic-affiliation ‘default option.’ It’s what you are if you’re British but you’re are also not Scottish or Welsh or Irish.
I note that George Orwell, back in the day, had a similar problem figuring out what it was that constituted ‘Englishness’ for him. In one of his writings, it really came down to knowing how to make a proper, English-style pot of tea. And yes, that was an important task we had to master to get our Brownie Girl Guide badges back in the England of the 1950s…
MacWhiter has done some great writing many aspects of the Scottishness question. In this recent article, he wrote, fairly mildly:
- Most Scots seem to favour, not separation, but extending the powers of the Scottish parliament. They want a parliament that looks and behaves less like a Labour local council and more like national champion.
Inexplicably, Labour have decided to reject any significant alteration or enhancement of Holyrood’s powers…
And here, he wrote about the anti-Scottishism expressed by many English writers:
- When commentators talk of the Scottish “raj”, “whingeing Jocks”, etc, they can indulge in identity politics without fear of being accused of supporting the BNP [the fascistic British National Party]. During last summer’s footie wars, The Observer ran the front-page headline: “Brown under fresh pressure over Scottish roots”. If Brown had been black the story would never have been printed.
This ethnic hostility is rife on the internet. It is an opportunity for English people to get it off their chests, to rant at the non-English, and to celebrate their own values. For one problem about criticising multiculturalism, and calling for a return to British values, is deciding what those values are. George Orwell’s warm beer, cricket and spinsters on bicycles usually figure on the inventory of Britishness. But these are essentially English, rather than Scottish, values. It is not easy to have a Scottish “cricket test”.
Now, I’m not for a second denying that Scots aren’t guilty of this kind of communal hostility themselves. There is far too much anti-English feeling in Scotland which is excused as banter, but is – in its own way – racist. That’s not the point.
This identity crisis may be one factor behind the withdrawal of English support for the union, and it is having a blow-back in Scotland. It may be that English nationalism is becoming a more important dynamic of constitutional change than Scottish nationalism. That like the Czech Republic before the velvet divorce from Slovakia, the momentum for dissolution is coming from the senior partner in the union…
So anyway, the May 3 Scottish election: Definitely one to watch.
- Update Friday morning, Lille time:
I cross-posted this over at The Nation’s blog. There, I had also inserted the following paragraph:
- How ironic would that be– if, while government ministers in Washington and London argue about what final shape Iraq’s governance structure should take, one significant fallout from Blair’s decision to join W’s war-venture in Iraq should turn out to be the dissolution of Britain’s own 300-year-old Act of Union?
Another election to watch-EGYPT-Gamal marries!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6571712,00.html
“George Orwell’s warm beer, cricket and spinsters on bicycles usually figure on the inventory of Britishness. But these are essentially English, rather than Scottish, values”.
I think that’s the thing. The English are so much in the majority in this union that they’ve (we’ve – I’m English, mostly) got into the habit of not having to think about the difference between “English” and “British”. As you say, the ‘default option’. Usual thing – the minority “has to” adapt to the majority, the majority doesn’t have to pay any attention to the minority. Except, if the minority just won’t accept that …
But this is such an inbred situation, and been going on for so long, there are Scots all over England and vice versa. As I said, I’m “mostly” English, but I lived for a few years in Sutherland – way north in the Scots highlands, heavily dependant on tourism. You don’t have to lean on the bar of a local pub with your ears open for very long before you can hear it pointed out just how _many_ (English) tourists think they’re still in England. And having heard that, you can’t avoid avoid recognising that it’s an accurate point – people came to visit me. They enthused, in loud voices, about how they’d never seen this part of “England” before. And when I pointed out that it’s Britain, but not England, then it’s all “why do you have to be so pedantic, who cares ?”. I don’t think that’s atypical. It’s just too close to see, for those who haven’t noticed.
And so the Scots are ahead of the English in this respect; they’ve had to think about it, where the English by and large just don’t want to. The “withdrawal of English support” that you quote, I think is a reaction to the way that the situation poses a need to – people here just don’t _want_ to think about it, it’s a sort of irritated flapping of the hands, “oh, just go away and don’t bother me”. If Scotland does move to separate further, the Scots will know why, and the English won’t. Personally, I think it will be a disaster for the English if it happens. Scots nationalism does have a rancid anti-English streak, but it also has some experience in tempering that, and actually dealing with the world as it is now. English nationalism has never had to be realistic.
Let’s pretend that some of us are Shias and the others are Sunnis.
Then which should the Scottish be: Sunnis or Shias?
Probably the ones with the oil…
But actually, from a social-psychology point of view, I found it really notable to see how fast and how far these anti-Scottish feelings seemed to have spread among people in England… This, remember, in a period of established social peace at home and considerable general material wellbeing. So imagine how much faster sectarian sensibilities and/or hate-propaganda against a perceived ‘other’ can spread when you have radical deterioration of a community’s everyday living conditions…
Another explanation might be that, despite the broad social peace and material wellbeing there is considerable anger at Blair and what he has turned Labour into, and this anger is being turned against Blair (in Scotland) and against Blair’s longtime sidekick Brown (in England.)
If Blair’s ghastly, long-sustained kowtowing to Washington results in the effective breakup of the Labour Party and entrenches Toryism in England for many years to come, that will be yet another strong count against him. Though mind you, after his position on Iraq, no further count is required.
I don’t believe it will happen (much of the SNP vote is surely an anti-Blair/New Labour protest vote that probably wouldn’t vote for secession in a referendum. That said, it is a good point that for the first time a lot of the momentum for separation is coming from the English side.
It is also true, I think, that there is much less holding the two countries together than there has been since the Union. The original union was essentially a top-down action based upon the monarchy, and the monarchy now has less real constitutional significance than probably at any time since the Restoration. There is now an alternative bigger stage for Scottish elites to strut upon, in Brussels, and the EU also provides some of the security reassurance that Scotland used to get from the Union, so two more key glues for the Union are much weakened.
My gut feeling is it won’t happen. But that’s partly based upon experience and it may be that the situation has changed enough for that to mislead.
If it does happen, I can see two main effects. First, combined with the Blair backlash, it will almost certainly lead to very substantial Tory majorities in England for some time. Second, it might finally force England (as it will be) to do what Britain ought to have done a long time ago, and retrench militarily, abandoning (hopefully) the murderous interventionism that has been the result of our political classes having substantial armed forces to play with. Perhaps at last our armed forces will actually be used only for the defence of the realm.
What is vital, though, is that any separation does not coincide with substantial UK economic instability. While it’s easy to say “it can’t happen here”, I wouldn’t like to risk even the slightest chance of the kinds of violent ethnic/nationalist confrontation that have caused so much misery around the world in the last hundred years or so coming anywhere near my family.
Maybe you should take a trip down to Somerset and find out what people there think of the Welsh. You’d be amazed.
This kind of stuff is all around us all the time and if you are in the union movement, for example, you work on the problem on a continuous basis.
With respect, I have a credibilty problem when people suddenly discover a new widening gap between Hillies and Billies, Square-Heads and Pointed Heads (yup, Brecht wrote a play about it) or Fatty-Puffs and Thinifers.
This is one area where the long view is always the more reliable view. Boswell might be more illuminating than The Sun or The Times, for example, and Tam Dalziel or Mick McGahey would know more about it than the Tartan Tories (SNP), who love to hyperventilate their own propaganda, in any case.
This is a scenario for a Tory Scotland and a Tory England. It’s not about division. Its more akin to “Unionism” of the North British political kind. Lots of sentiment, bourgeois bottom line. Together, or separate, still the same capitalist market. Divide and rule, unite and rule, same difference.
“This kind of stuff is all around us all the time … With respect, I have a credibilty problem when people suddenly discover a new widening gap …”
Yes. It’s not new. It _does_ seem to be receiving a certain push in the media, at the moment, though. As I say, I think it’s reactive, on the English side, a response to suddenly noticing that the SNP are actually real and can’t be shrugged off any more. But that comes about because of the Edinburgh Assembly, which came to seem finally necessary (my opinion) following the ridiculous Major years, when the governing party had no elected representatives north of the border. Which came about because … no, it’s not new. Plus, of course, the SNP seem to be offering good criticism of the Blair government, on the war(s), cash-for-honours, etc, so there’s perhaps a focus behind the current rubbishing of the Unruly Scots.
But to suggest that it’d be the English that precipitate it – I can’t see it. This discussion arises from the possibility of the SNP acheiving a majority in Edinburgh, and that’d be how, and who.
There’s always been the silly muttering about Them Over There. Stories about border towns that never repealed their laws about the conditions under which the citizens can shoot Them with their bows and arrows (I live in Lancaster, I’ve heard it told many times of both Carlisle and Chester). I’ve even met people who think it amusing to invoke Agincourt, for goodness’ sake. But it doesn’t mean anyone’s going to grab their longbow and go on a rampage. It’s all been overtaken and left to rot, it’s been left to become the province of “good old days” cosy myth-making and low-grade xenophobic reaction. Which seems to be on the rise in other ways too. If the English did get left to have to think about how to find a working nationalism without involving Scotland … I don’t know what would come of it. I don’t even know where there’s much thinking on the subject, apart from among the people to whom it shouldn’t be left.
“Much less holding the two countries together than there has been since the Union” ? In some ways. But more in other ways ? The rest of the world is a _lot_ nearer than it was in 1707, Europe is a context we both have to find a way of fitting into somehow. There would have to be vast, huge, other changes both sides the border, and wider afield, before anybody needs to start fretting about the Black Watch besieging Newcastle, or armed militias rustling sheep in Liddesdale …
I don’t want to get too critical of Helena, whom I admire and revere, but I do think somebody should stick in a big caveat here. Let me give an example. I live in South Africa. We have a citizen reporter web site here called Reporter.co.za. today there is a story on it about tribalism, playing with the idea that the big political divisions and personal confrontations are really only manifestations of Zulu-Xhosa rivalry. It is nonsense but o.k. here at home because we know how to hold these things in proportion, which is not to say that tribalism could not be a problem. We make sue that it is not by constant vigilance.
It’s at:
http://www.reporter.co.za/article.aspx?ID=RP21A442839
But if an overseas reporter was to parachute in the easiest way to dramatise SA politics would be in tribal terms. All of a sudden every half-awake couch potato in the USA becomes an expert on South Africa, just as they are suddenly “experts” on Iraq, with their Sunni and Shia old baloney.
There’s a really hilarious book by Tom Sharpe called “The Throwback” about a kid who reverts to his ancestral roots (like mine) among the “Border Rievers”.
“The Throwback” – *laughter*. These incomers. They come waltzing in with their fancy foreign ideas about how things are …
There is room for worry, though. If things were to move to the point where a nationalist Scots government was setting about ridding itself of nuclear weapons, there are those who would interpret this as a “setback” for the US. Is it possible that there are people in murky “agencies” somewhere who might feel that it would be their duty to avert this possibility ? Is that paranoid of me ?
it’s fascinating – both the rise of the SNP and the rise of cultural nationalism on both sides of hadrian’s wall (and, yes, i know ‘scotland’ doesn’t start till berwick-upon-tweed).
but what’s most interesting, i think, in helena’s article, is how clearly it shows the relationship between these nationalist twitches and the british left.
scotland’s role as one of the centers of grassroots militance (from miners’ unions to – unless i misremember – the poll tax revolt) has been pretty clear. but in the past few decades, the distance between that tradition and the electoral party that’s claimed to represent it has become wide enough to amount to blatant contradiction. i mean, left as some backbenchers are, the labour party under blair is a by-the-books neoliberal enterprise.
it’s hard to think of a more transparent example of the classic dynamic:
grassroots left activism gets channeled into an electoral strategy and sold out, and a nationalist project jumps in to reassure the disenchanted.
a similar story (though without the separatist side to the nationalism) could be told about the 1920s-30s in germany, the 1970s-80s in the u.s., and plenty of other places and times. but precisely because the stakes are in many ways so low in the scottish case, it’s particularly clear.
“hard to think of a more transparent example of the classic dynamic”
Hold your horses! Tory does not mean fascist!
Also, this is a scenario and not a fait accompli. So far, it is no more than a flash in the pan for the SNP, one of many in their history, none of which have materialised into anything more.
There is nothing like Scottish fascism. The SNP is made up of genteel characters who fancy having a nice private self-congratulatory scene based on nostalgia for the Scottish Renaissance – a rather nice sort of club with plenty of golf, curling, salmon, grouse and deer-stalking.
The Scottish labour tradition is not going to be a pushover for anyone. The scenarion could as well be played out in reverse, with a revival of George Galloway-style working class politics throughout Great Britain.
With respect to Dominic, whom I admire and like a lot (tho at a distance; but after all, isn’t being liked far, far better than being ‘revered’?) I should say that in Britain/England I most certainly don’t feel like an “outside reporter parachut[ing] in”… Maybe nearly a “native informant”? I’m not sure…
(And yes, “native informants” can also, very often stir things up in a malignant way. I wasn’t intending to do that, though.)
Anyway, it was a combination of longstanding, low-level interest in this whole question of “Englishkeit”, reading a very sensible piece about recent Englishkeit developments in the London Review of Books, and hearing my brother-in-law Martin– an extremely reasonable and wise person for whom I have huge respect and affection– talking over dinner about the reasons for which a reasonable English person could indeed start to harbor resentment of the Scots… that led me to post here about it.
Plus, as a development that has certainly been strongly affected– if not almost entirely spurred– by Blair’s criminal idiocy re Washington and Iraq, then it seems of great political as well as humanistic/social import…
(Dominic, does Dorset count? I was there. Also Middlesex and Monmouthshire…)
At a broader level I deeply respect the attempts that Communists and others– in addition to Quakers– make to try to find an overarching morality/worldview that is radically committed not only to human equality but also to countering all attempts at inter-human sectarianism and hatemongering wherever it occurs. (Does Communist discourse/argumentation on class war honestly do this, though, I ask? Maybe that is a different discussion…)
Love you too, Helena, of course I do.
Dorset doesn’t count. The point about Somerset is that it is adjacent to Wales, separated from it by the Bristol Channel. I was astonished by the hostile feelings of some Somerset people towards the Welsh. Monmouthshire counts. There the Welsh are probably still burning down English people’s holiday homes, for all I know.
Gloucestershire too – remember the story in Laurie Lee’s “Cider With Rosie” about the night the locals murdered the loud-mouthed colonial visitor after drinking with him in the pub?
As for the reasons for resenting the Scots, they have been there since the Act of Union and even before. What about the Stuarts or even Mary Queen of Scots?
A Scot, Lord Reith, laid it down when he said “there is no such impressive sight as a Scotsman on the make”. Pushy. Brash. Arriviste. Chancers. Reith admired them, others don’t. The literature and the history is full of them. Blair , Brown and George Galloway are true to type. Keir Hardie, Ramsay Macdonald, Harold Macmillan and more. This business did not start today and can’t be fixed by re-arranging the constitutional furniture.
This is not the thread to defend communism, I agree. Suffice it to say that the point about class struggle is not to perpetuate it, but to end it. Because of their single-mindedness on this score (or obsession, if you insist), the communists have always been good at overcoming xenophobia. Ex-Proddie commies can talk to ex-Catholic ones. Greek commies can talk to Turkish ones. Similarly, in British politics overall, the more powerful bond between Scotland and England (and Wales)is the socialist one, and not the artificial construct called “Unionism”, which is actually laced with deadly sectarianism.
Helena is not a parachutist. Let this be understood, and I would never say so. All I would say is: handle this matter with care, because people, especially US people these days, can get the national/race/religious analysis bit between their teeth so fast, and their political culture is so much more shallow (isn’t it?) that they actually make foreign policy decisions in the rush of false confidence that follows. I don’t think they’ll go to war with Bonnie Scotland in a hurry. But then again: What if the Scots get serious about kicking out the Tridents from Faslane (as they should)?
The problem with “Englishness” is that it has been subsumed into pride in empire for the past two centuries. England was submerged into an empire whose intellectual bases were largely Scottish and dragooned into obedience by a standing army largely recruited in Ireland and Scotland from the first victims of the empire. The last heroes of England were General Ludd and Captain Swing whose followers rallied again around the Peoples Charter. Thereafter England disappeared into domestic service, police work abroad, emigration (voluntary or otherwise) and the slums. It was difficult to define the English nation because there was no such thing: on the one hand an Imperial ruling class which regarded its own narrow interests as paramount and any protests from below as sabotaging “progress.” And, on the other hand the people, rent into classes and castes of a complexity unlike anything the world has ever seen, a nation exiled and wandering hopelessly, lost in its own land until occasionally galvanised by war when danger awoke the rulers of Empire to the fact that the only people who could save them were the labourers, clerks and tradesmen whose accents they despised and whose customs made them laugh…
WHILE I enjoyed Helena Cobban`s blog (Great Britain Headed for Velvet Divorce) she makes a couple of points which are wide of the mark. Firstly, strictly speaking Scotland has not been “a Labour stronghold since the birth of the Labour party” as the Conservatives won a majority of the popular vote in the 1950s, although their support has been gently nose-diving since then, culminating in the 1997 election when they failed to win a single seat in Scotland. She is correct in that Labour have been the main beneficiaries of this decline and saw their representation grow with every victory for the Conservatives from 1979 onwards.
Much more importantly, the attacks on Gordon Brown’s ethnicity can be seen in the context of the bitter in fighting between Blair and Brown and the desperate attempts by the Blairites to discredit the Chancellor in any way possible. As Brown continues to survive the various attacks on his character, and no Blairite minister can be persuaded to stand against Brown, the last thing that can be flung at him – and its difficult for him to deny – is his Scottishness. If this was the issue, it might be worth investigating. But it is not.
Apart from being “not Tony”, a crime in itself to the increasingly unhinged Blairistas, the real heart of the dispute between the two is much more serious. It relates to the slaughter in Iraq and possible further military misadventure in Iran. This chimes with the Blairites` suspicion that Brown is not sufficiently pro-market, a baseless assertion given that the Chancellor has been unerringly friendly to big business in his long years fulminating at the Treasury.
Labour’s pro-war faction, keen to prolong a human and military disaster now popular only with British arms dealers and undertakers, view Brown’s political antennae with concern. Crudely, Prime Minister Brown will calculate that the electoral benefit to Labour at the next UK election will be sufficient to make it worth withdrawal from Iraq and blocking any move on Iran. Brown has been rightly criticised for fluffing his chance to stop UK endorsement of the war in 2003. Had he supported the then Foreign Secretary, the late Robin Cook, he could have averted British involvement and left Blair with nowhere to go but the backbenches. Explanations as to why he failed to do this are now academic. He is now on the hunt for a respectable exit strategy. He knows that a face-saving timed withdrawal would draw a line under Blair’s tragic folly, bring back disenchanted Labour supporters and nullify his progressive opponents most potent weapon. It would also allow him time, energy and money to concentrate on pump-priming the British economy in time for a UK election in 2009.
The war is hugely problematic for Labour in the Scottish elections on May 3rd. Scotland’s broad-based independence movement (the SNP, Greens and both socialist parties now support independence) has grown out of civic nationalism with roots in education, the churches and the peace movement. It is characterised by anti-militarism, non-violence and demands for “social goods” such as public education, health and transport. It is resolutely not ethnic nationalism for head-bangers. But the War Party is unconcerned at how things will play in Scotland. In March, Blair pushed through legislation for a new generation of Trident nuclear missiles with the support of the Conservatives. Trident is an emotive issue in Scotland: imposed from England, it is a symbol of Scottish political impotence, delusions of empire and collusion with Republican America. To have it pushed through with the help of the Conservatives, whom Scots still view with contempt, only increases the pain. And Trident comes at staggering cost: 100 billion GBP could buy you a lot of social goods.
On top of this, while the Scottish economy is doing well, the gap between rich and poor has increased under Labour, and many Scottish communities are simply abandoned to poverty. There is a creeping feeling that the standards of Scotland’s state education system, once a source of great pride, are in sharp decline.
The Labour leadership have sought to deal with the SNP advance by personal attacks on its leader, Alex Salmond, and by trying to spread fear at the economic costs of independence. Many of the attacks have backfired. If the election turns into a straight fight between Salmond and the massed ranks of Labour, Scots are more likely to back the charismatic underdog who seems to have his heart in the right place. While most dissent and opposition has been nullified in mainstream UK politics, in Scotland, the progressive anti-war forces are lining up against Tony Blair and his lucrative union with the arms dealers and the neo-cons.
Patrick Small is Contributing Editor of Product Magazine
http://www.productmagazine.co.uk
Helena, I thought you would find this of interest
(and other observers of Scottish nationalist trends…from Toronto’s The Daily Star:
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/208350