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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

The Scottish nationalists seek to end the United Kingdom after 300 years of a successful union. Their drive for an independent Scotland is now nearer to success than it has ever been. Success would mean a diminished Britain and a perilously insecure Scotland. The nationalists have represented the three centuries of union with England as a malign and damaging association for Scotland. The European Union is held out as an alternative and a safeguard for Scotland's future. But the siren call of secession would lure Scotland into a state of radical instability, disrupting ties of work, commerce and kinship and impoverishing the economy. All this with no guarantee of growth in an EU now struggling with a downturn in most of its states and the increasing disaffection of many of its members. In this incisive and controversial book, journalist John Lloyd cuts through the rhetoric to show that the economic plans of the Scottish National Party are deeply unrealistic; the loss of a subsidy of as much as £10 billion a year from the Treasury would mean large-scale cuts, much deeper than those effected by Westminster; the broadly equal provision of health, social services, education and pensions across the UK would cease, leaving Scotland with the need to recreate many of these systems on its own; and the claim that Scotland would join the most successful of the world's small states - as Denmark, New Zealand and Norway - is no more than an aspiration with little prospect of success. The alternative to independence is clear: a strong devolution settlement and a joint reform of the British union to modernise the UK's age-old structures, reduce the centralisation of power and boost the ability of all Britain's nations and regions to support and unleash their creative and productive potential. Scotland has remained a nation in union with three other nations - England, Northern Ireland and Wales. It will continue as one, more securely in a familiar companionship.

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Leseprobe

Cover

Dedication

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Breaking Britain

Notes

1 The Other Union

Notes

2 The English Speak

Notes

3 The Cash Nexus

Notes

4 The Crumbling Pillars

Notes

5 To Be Yersel’

Notes

Conclusion: The Re-imagining of the Union

Notes

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Dedication

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Breaking Britain

Begin Reading

Conclusion: The Re-Imagining of the Union

End User License Agreement

Pages

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Dedication

For Ilaria Poggiolini

SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT

THE GREAT MISTAKE OF SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE

JOHN LLOYD

polity

The right of John Lloyd to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2020 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4268-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Lloyd, John, 1946- author.Title: Should auld acquaintance be forgot : the great mistake of Scottish independence / John Lloyd.Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An incisive critique of the quest for Scottish independence”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2019038609 (print) | LCCN 2019038610 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509542666 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509542673 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509542680 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Self-determination, National--Scotland--History--21st century. | Nationalism--Scotland. | Scotland--History--Autonomy and independence movements. | Scotland--Politics and government--21st century.Classification: LCC DA828 .L55 2020 (print) | LCC DA828 (ebook) | DDC 320.1/509411--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038609LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038610

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has benefited from advice and insights from many, some of whom have been consulted often, a few of whom don’t want public thanks. Those who haven’t said they don’t include: Wendy Alexander, Ali Ansari, Brian Ashcroft, Arthur Aughey, Alex Bell, Miguel Beltran de Felipe, Paul Bew, Nigel Biggar, Lucy Hunter Blackburn, Keir Bloomer, Vernon Bogdanor, Nick Butler, Jim Campbell, Alan Cochrane, Maeve Connoly, Colin Copus, Gordon Craig, Alistair Darling, Chris Deerin, John Denham, Mure Dickie, Gerry Fisher, Jim Gallagher, Steven Gethins, Anthony Giddens, Brian Girvin, Rosemary Goring, Elga Graves, David Greig, Kevin Hague, Michael Ignatieff, Ian Jack, Alvin Jackson, Mark Jones, John Kay, Michael Keating, Christine Keay, Alex Kemp, Michael Kenny, George Kerevan, Colin Kidd, Calum MacDonald, John McClaren, Iain McClean, Greg McClymont, Gavin McCrone, Jim McColl, John Nicholson, Lindsay Paterson, Ray Perman, Jim Philips, Murray Pittock, David Purdie, Malcolm Rifkind, Graeme Roy, Christopher Rush, Michael Russell, Astrid Silins, Paul Silk, Jim Sillars, Lucas Stevenson, Adam Tomkins, Jim Tomlinson, David Torrance, David Ure, David Webster, Andrew Wilson, Janice Winter, Martin Wolf.

John Thompson and his colleagues at Polity Press – including Susan Beer, Julia Davis, Emma Longstaff and Evie Deavall – have been most helpful, efficient and attentive. My agent, Toby Mundy, was as always deeply and forensically engaged in the development of the book. My English–Jewish actor son, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, played Macduff in the Globe Theatre’s Macbeth in the summer and autumn of 2016, speaking in a strong Scots accent partly borrowed from me, but strengthened. It made me think about the pity of sundering a British state that had come to be largely accepting of human mixing – an element in my deciding to write this book.

INTRODUCTION: BREAKING BRITAIN

The independence of Scotland would bring Great Britain to an end. That was the name given to the voluntary Union between Scotland and England in 1707 and, since it would finish Great Britain, it would destroy the United Kingdom as well, since the latter designation – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – became the official title after the Union of Great Britain with Ireland in 1800. Without Scotland, Great Britain no longer exists: and without Great Britain, the United Kingdom no longer exists. The title survived the independence of the Republic of Ireland to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which has lasted for a century. In destroying that, the Scottish nationalists are playing for very high stakes indeed, whose outcome affects every part of the UK – though so far, only those living in Scotland have had a voice, and the understanding has been that the thinnest majority would be enough to declare independence.

This book argues the unionist case, believing, as most Scots showed they also did in the referendum on independence in 2014, that continued, and renewed Union will be better both for Scots and their fellow British citizens. But it must be better defended than it has been in the past. Some Scots politicians have done so: Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister, in books, articles and speeches; Alistair Darling, in his leadership of the 2014 campaign against independence; Ruth Davidson, a popular, uplifting and moderate Conservative voice (she resigned from the leadership in August 2019).

But strong English voices are usually lacking. In the Scots referendum in particular, the position of the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, and of the other party leaders, was less one strongly protective of the rights of the citizens of the UK, and more a series of often sentimental pleas that Scotland remain in the Union. In the conclusion, I give the example of the sharp debates in Canada at the end of the 1990s over the secession of Quebec – debates won by the federalist politicians, who strongly argued for the rights of the federal state and pressed hard for recognition that the departure of a major province was a matter not only for its people, but for all the citizens of a Canada that would be diminished by secession. I believe it offers a model of vigorous support which should commend itself to unionists of every one of the four nations of the UK.

In some quarters, there is no defence. In August 2019, the shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, indicated at an event in the Edinburgh Festival, that a Labour government would not try to block a second referendum on independence, saying ‘We would let the Scottish people decide. That’s democracy’ – thus confirming the nationalists’ view that the British as a whole had no interests, or rights, in the issue.

In the election of 12 December 2019, the Conservative Party led by Boris Johnson won a large majority of 80 in the House of Commons. The Scottish National Party were also winners, gaining 13 seats with 45 per cent of the vote, taking back several of the seats they had lost to Labour and the Conservatives in 2017. The Labour Party, with a far left manifesto, a fudged position on Brexit and a leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who had become unpopular, suffered most, losing 60 seats and 2.6m votes on 2017, most in constituencies in the Midlands and the North of England it had, in many cases, held for decades.

It meant that the new Prime Minister had large freedom of action, and no need for the support of the Northern Irish Democratic Unionists, a support whose cost and disagreements had added to the many woes of Theresa May, his predecessor. A scenario much discussed before the election, when a Tory victory seemed uncertain, in which Labour, Liberals and the SNP would combine to form a majority in the House, with a second referendum in Scotland the price of SNP support, simply disappeared. Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, did, however, repeat her demand for a new referendum, and said it was inevitable that it would be conceded.

As she knew, it was far from inevitable – and, with polls showing that Scots were still doubtful about the adventure of independence in highly uncertain times, she is likely to have been glad of that. She also knew that with a trial in Edinburgh in March for her predecessor as leader, Alex Salmond, charged with several charges of sexual assault, coupled with growing scepticism about the SNP’s record in providing efficient public services, 2020 was likely to be a tougher year than she had experienced in a six-year leadership marked by a succession of victories.

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the nationalists have come closer to the realization of their aim than at any other time. The moral and political case for Scots secession, the creation of an independent Scots state, has always relied on seeing England, or Englishness, or the English, as malign influences on the Scots; catching them in a political straitjacket which denies them the possibility of being fully themselves; possible only if the Scots nation secured a sovereign government. A nation should be governed by its own people, they believe: and the other British have not become, in over three centuries, their own people.

Early nationalists, like Hugh MacDiarmid, the Anglophobe poet who stands at the head of Scots twentieth-century cultural nationalism, believed that being Scots was to recognize, or find, an essence, which he sometimes described in racial terms, that was wholly opposed to that of the English, whom he hated.

Scottish nationalist leaders don’t now promote a racial essence. Their nationalism is presented as civic: it has little to do with the anti-foreigner, anti-immigrant rhetoric that is often part of the various European nationalisms. It ‘is built, not on ethnic homogeneity, but on a shared political identity’.1 Scotland, with a naturally declining birth rate, needs immigrant labour and, unlike other states which are also ageing (most of those in Europe), its nationalist government actively seeks it. The suspicion that nationalism cannot be civic runs deep, especially among those who see the European Union as an alternative to it: but a civic, liberal nationalism is quite possible, if at times beset with un-civic temptations (see the Conclusion of this book).

It depends, however, on the essentialist argument of ‘being ourselves’ in government, since only ourselves can govern in the interests of the Scots people. In this, it must thus prove that the three-century-old Union of nations that is the United Kingdom has been, and certainly now is, illegitimate in the eyes of the people: unable to be successfully multinational, and at the same time successfully democratic. England dominates, and thus governs, Scotland against its wishes. Getting out is paramount for national political health.

There is something seductive about this, even if you aren’t a nationalist. Many Scots, not previously inclined to nationalism, have turned during the past four decades towards the Scottish National Party, since 2007 the government in the Scots parliament and the country’s most popular political party. Here’s what a nationalist could argue: indeed, what nationalists are arguing.

As this is written, Westminster politics are turbulent and at times unseemly. Both the major parties, Conservative and Labour, committed themselves to delivering Brexit, citing the mandate given by a referendum in 2016, which brought in a 52-per-cent vote in favour of ending Britain’s 45-year-old EU membership. Faced with this vote, a parliament largely composed of pro-EU members failed to find a majority for a plan acceptable to the EU and the UK parliament which would do so. The three-year inability to agree has made the UK an object of scorn and pity round the world.

Brexit, however delivered, would take Scotland out of the EU with the rest of Britain, though nearly two-thirds of Scots voted for remain. The nationalists argue that it would make Scots poorer, more isolated and would encourage the growth of chauvinism – an argument, scaled up to the rest of the UK, echoed by many millions. Scots, nationalists believe, would be cut off from those with whom they had forged close links, and from an EU which has brought Europeans together, helped the former communist states to make transitions to democracy and kept the peace in Europe for nearly seventy-five years.

Some of the richest states in the world, a nationalist would point out, are small: New Zealand (4.8m), Norway (5.26m), Finland (5.5m), Denmark (5.75m): Scotland is in the middle of that pack, at 5.44m. They are able to get consensus on both social and economic issues, and to introduce needed reforms, more easily. Government depends on trust: and in small states, where the politicians are better known by and less distant from their electors, trust is easier to develop and keep.

Scots, most nationalists (and many non-nationalists) think, are a more moral people than the English, and are naturally social democratic in their politics. They need to break with the rest of the UK, where England tends to conservatism, in order to have a politics to which people can relate.

Scotland was a European nation state – one of the oldest. When the Union with England was agreed in 1707, its separate parliament was abolished, say nationalists, through a mixture of English bribery and opportunism, the English seizing the advantage when Scotland was weak. The lack of an independent political centre has weakened its culture and rendered it helpless when the elephant in the Union – England – goes on the rampage, as under Margaret Thatcher, UK Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990.

Besides, a nationalist might say, Scots are close to agreeing to leave the United Kingdom: the referendum in 2014 showed that 45 per cent of those living in Scotland voted for independence. Since the decision to leave the EU, the polls have at times shown a majority for independence as the consequences of Brexit become clearer, and as Boris Johnson, who attracted a popularity, or unpopularity rating in Scotland of -37 in June 2019,2 became Prime Minister (he entered 10 Downing Street on 24 July). Nearly all nationalists are certain that independence will come (and many Scots who wish to remain in the Union fear they’re right). The nationalist vision is that this is the way Scotland’s energy and talents will be released and Scots can make their own mark on the world. Voting for independence will bring Scots together.

The counter argument, the unionist argument, which informs this book, begins with an observation that has formed part of Scots life for most of the three centuries in which it became British as well as Scots. That is, that Scotland has remained distinctively Scottish, even where it was most, and most uncontroversially, unionist. Many – the larger part – of the events, movements and innovations that both Scots and non-Scots see as expressive of the nation appeared and were developed after the turn of the eighteenth century.

The Scots Enlightenment, that spurt of intellectual and practical exploration of the changing nature of the economy, society and morality, and the mapping of their future, took off in the mid eighteenth century, centred on Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Its American historian, Arthur Herman, subtitled his book on the enlightenment as ‘The Scots’ invention of the modern world’, and wrote that ‘the union with England and Wales in 1707 also created ‘the conditions under which Scotland could emerge, not just as a modern nation but as the model for all nations which must pass through the fire of modernity, past, present and future.’3 The two writers who still shine most brightly in the Scots, and international, firmaments – Robert Burns (1759–1796) and Walter Scott (1771–1832) – were enfolded in it, at times conflictually but never rebelliously: Burns was a British civil servant (customs officer) for part of his working life, while Scott in his writings and public life strove, with success, to integrate the stream of anti-regime Jacobinism into the dominant politics of increasingly settled unionist life.

The nineteenth century saw Scotland’s emergence as one of the greatest manufacturing centres of the world, especially in engineering – spurred by technological breakthroughs, of which the most momentous for the future of industry and capitalism was the instrument maker James Watt’s developments of the Devonshire preacher Thomas Newcomen’s steam-driven pump into a steam engine that could drive machinery, from mills to locomotives. Britain’s vast empire was the space within which Scots could and did become rulers, administrators, military leaders and scholars of other lands until deep into the twentieth century. Their contribution was both cruelly oppressive, as the eager supplying of opium to China’s millions of addicts by the Scots William Jardine and James Matheson in the 1820s; and piously adventurous, as the carrying of Christianity to Africa by the missionary David Livingstone, son of Blantyre mill workers.

Assumption of the imperial right to create and develop as well as to command and suppress, were combined, as in the person of the 8th Earl of Elgin (1811–1863) (his father had purchased and repatriated the Elgin marbles, statuary from the Greek Acropolis, which remain in the British Museum), who virtually formed Canada as an autonomous state within the Empire. Later, having become High Commissioner in China, he achieved victory in the 2nd Opium War (1856–1860), ordered the destruction of the summer palace of Beijing as retaliation for the execution of twenty European and Indian captives; and then forced the Chinese authorities to cede Hong Kong to Britain in perpetuity. He had, however, Christian scruples about his part in winning a war waged for the right to sell opium to addicts, writing to his wife that ‘I was never so ashamed of myself in my life.’

So deeply was Scotland invested in heavy industrial production and imperial governance that the decline of both hit it very hard in the twentieth century. Yet that century also saw the development of two movements of the left which, for much of the century, cemented the union for the working and lower middle classes, that is the majority: the spread of active trade unionism through the United Kingdom, most unions organized on an all-British basis; and the creation of a welfare state by a Labour government after the war, one whose main institutions in health, education and social care – roughly equal throughout the UK – remain.

Until the 1970s, unionism was, in Colin Kidd’s words, ‘banal … a union so well established as to need no defence or justification’.4 Indeed, after Scott, the Union and its effects had little presence in literature, either in Scotland or England (Ireland was a quite different matter: for the writers who had not left – as had George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett – Ireland’s imperial subordination was the subject). To be sure, the Union, and English domination of it, was a matter for debate, criticism, and often biting wit in Scots conversations in a way it rarely was in England. But it was a fact of life, a background structure to quotidian reality.

The reason lay in the nature of the Union settlement itself, however chaotically and self-interestedly (on both sides) achieved. It lay ‘precisely (in) the fact that Britishness sat lightly on top of the constituent national identities’.5 The almost incredible lightness of being able to be Scots while also being British was and remains an extraordinary, if partly accidental, achievement. It is this which acts as the backstop to the unionist position and which, up to the present, has helped persuade Scots to remain within it.

The success of the nationalists poses, still, large questions. The economic issue tends to stand tallest in this: a view widely shared by economists is that the promises made by the SNP of a golden future come independence are largely spurious. The difficulties of launching a new nation state with a currency (the pound) of a state it has left and over which it has no control, and its application to join a European Union whose rules insist on its adoption of a currency (the Euro) the SNP leaders do not wish to join, are large.

The Scottish National Party government describes itself as ‘social democratic’, and emphasizes the benefits Scots enjoy, not available to the rest of the UK, such as free university education and free home care for the elderly. Yet these are available because of a large subsidy from the UK Treasury under a system known as the ‘Barnett Formula’ (after its creator, the former Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Joel Barnett): in whatever ways that may be rationalized and accounted for, on independence something between £8bn and £10bn will disappear from Scotland’s capacity for public-sector expenditure. At the same time, the best forecasts of the country’s finances after secession, including the SNP’s own, point to the need for sharply reduced public spending for some years. Further, according to analysis of the British Social Attitudes survey of 2010, ‘it seems that Scotland is not so different after all. Scotland is somewhat more social democratic than England. However, for the most part the difference is one of degree rather than of kind and is no larger now than it was a decade ago. Moreover, Scotland appears to have experienced something of a drift away from a social democratic outlook during the course of the past decade, in tandem with public opinion in England.’6

A confident statement of long-term, deeply embedded difference between the English and the Scots in character, habits, and outlook is rarely possible, though the nationalists attempt to encourage it. SNP rhetoric on attitudes to immigration, for example, stress the openness of Scotland and the grudging, even hostile attitudes said to be those of the English. Yet England is far more multinational and diverse than Scotland: and Professor John Curtice, the pollster of reference at Strathclyde University, says that in aggregate, there is little difference between the way in which the two populations view immigrants. He also warns that these views can and do change quite rapidly and substantially, depending on circumstances.

Scotland’s population – 5,062,000 in 2001, and 5,295,000 in 2011 (the census years) – remains overwhelmingly white: it is changing slowly, though change will tend to accelerate. On the census figures, Scots and other white British accounted for 95.47 per cent of the population in 2001, declining to 91.15 per cent in 2011. Other whites brought the 2001 total to 97.99, the 2011 total to 96.02 per cent. England had a population of 49,138, 831 in 2001, rising to 53,012,456 in 2011. White British made up 88.3 per cent in 2001, 80.8 per cent in 2011. All whites were 91 per cent in 2001, 84.4 in 2011. England, too, has a large white majority: but it is both smaller than Scotland’s and changing more rapidly than Scotland: some cities have, or are about to have, a minority white British population.

In Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city – at 577,869 in 2001, 593,245 in 2011 – white Scots and other British made up 90.77 per cent in 2001, with all whites at 94.55 per cent; and 82.66 per cent in 2011, while all whites came out at 88.42 per cent. The Asian population – including Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Chinese – grew from 4.44 per cent of the population in 2001 to 8.05 per cent in 2011.

In Bradford, slightly smaller than Glasgow at 522,452 in 2011, white British accounted for 76.06 per cent of the city’s people in 2001; 63.86 in 2011. The Asian communities came out at 19.09 per cent in 2001; 26.83 in 2011. Birmingham, England’s second city, had a similar percentage of ethnically Asian citizens in 2011 – 26.6 per cent: the white British, 53.1 per cent in 2011 and will be a minority by 2021, as they already were in London in 2011.

Politicians from ethnic minorities are much more visible in the Westminster parliament than in the Scots one, as they were in the Cabinet in 2019. Boris Johnson’s three most senior colleagues were children of ethnic minorities who came to the UK: Sajid Javid, Chancellor, son of Pakistani immigrants; Priti Patel, Home Secretary, daughter of Gujurati Indians who moved to the UK from Uganda; and Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, whose Jewish father came to the UK from Czechoslovakia in 1938, aged six. Ashok Sharma, the International Development Secretary, was born in India and moved to the UK with his family when five: James Cleverly, the Conservative Party Chairman, was born to a Sierra Leone mother and a British father. In the Scottish cabinet, Humza Yousaf, the Justice Secretary, is the son of a Nigerian mother and a Pakistani father, who came to the UK in the 1960s.

Rapid change is evident in what had been, and still often is seen as the two countries’ traditional strengths and weaknesses. Glasgow had been the ‘murder capital of Europe’ – with a knife being the weapon of choice, and with a reputation stretching back centuries for violent crime. A Violence Reduction Unit was created in 2005, and, taking some of its cues from the US, the murder rate in both Glasgow and Scotland has been more than halved. London, suffering an epidemic of knife crime from 2017, now tries to copy Glasgow’s success.

By contrast, improvements in education in London have, in the past few years, made the city into an ‘education superpower’ – even as London has by far the highest level of immigrant families in the UK, many of whom have limited English language skills. Reasons given include higher standards in the semi-independent academies and free schools; the Teach First programme, which puts top graduates into tough schools; ambitious immigrant parents, many of whose children now surpass white working-class boys and even in some cases everyone else; and rapid intervention to tackle underperformance. Scotland, which had long prided itself on its good, egalitarian schools, has a system now (in the 2000s) mired in mediocrity. The rest of England lags behind most other countries in Europe in the core subjects of mathematics, science and reading but is still graded better than Scotland.7

The fact is that both nations can learn from each other: and have, through centuries. The fact also is, that strengths and weaknesses, though culturally affected, are not fate.

One difference which appears incontestable, because it has been so clearly shown, is the two countries’ attitudes to the European Union in the 2016 referendum. England voted for Brexit by 53.5 per cent, while Scotland’s Brexit vote was only 38 per cent (Wales was close to England’s level, at 52.5 per cent for Brexit: Northern Ireland between them, with a minority Brexit vote of 44.2 per cent). Why? Adam Ramsay, the editor of Open Democracy UK, gives a battery of reasons, many of them self-serving for Scots: Scotland is better educated than England (more university graduates); the English political power centres on the concept of the ‘Queen in parliament’, while the Scots believe power lies with the people; with a different legal system, a history of emigration, Scotland is accustomed to political rule from outside of the country.8

It’s hard to say if these, and other differences, explain the large difference in the vote between the two nations: indeed, some of them seem unlikely to explain anything. The Scots, like the English, have been governed by the convention of the ‘Queen in parliament’ for over three centuries, without, until recently, major complaint. The Brexit ‘revolution’ has been presented by Brexiteers as a people’s rising: and the subsequent debate over Brexit, by both Remainer and Brexiteer sides, is cast all but exclusively in terms of ‘what the people really want’. This can become a little ridiculous, as the Remainers’ call for a second referendum, described as a ‘People’s Vote’, raises the question of what they believe the first exercise to be. But it is a further demonstration that, deeply divided as the two groups are, they agree that they draw their mandate from the people. Finally, Scots education is no longer the world-leading, or even England-leading, system which it, until recently, was: the universities remain high in national and world ratings: the schools do not.

The SNP line on the EU changed radically. In the 1970s, the party leader, William Wolfe, saw continued membership of the EU as ‘a political dark age of remote control and undemocratic government’, a position strongly endorsed by the rising star, Alex Salmond. But the modernizers, by then including Salmond, saw the rising Euroscepticism among English politicians, and secured a shift to ‘Scotland in Europe’ in the 1980s. They understood that if Scotland was to leave one Union, it had better find another to join in order to reassure prospective voters.

This has seemed to be the settled will of around two-thirds of the Scots people, to judge from the outcome of the 2016 referendum on the EU. Yet the lack of any credible Leave figure in Scotland, which Ramsay, in his Open Democracy article, sees as a positive feature, an indication of the solid support of Scots, but instead demonstrates rather the lack of debate and clash of ideas. Where the main political parties – the ruling SNP, the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens, and with those the Scots-based news media, the business and trade union confederations – all called for a ‘remain’ vote, the fact that over a third of Scots voted Brexit, including about a third of the SNP supporters, is a more surprising result than it has usually been presented.

The larger question is the state of the EU itself. It is a very large question for Scotland, since its nationalist government is bent on leaving one Union – of the UK – for another, reassuring people that the European Union is the better bet and the safer haven. But the EU is not safe, in large part because its currency is not: one of the reasons why the British Labour government decided not to join the Euro, and the SNP decided to retain sterling.

Three centuries of Union have created a Union which has, until the last few decades, worked largely uncontroversially, as most unified democratic states do: as one which allocates, through the common tax system, larger subsidies and aid to the poorer, harder-hit, more rapidly ageing and more scantily populated (as the Highlands and Islands of Scotland) parts of the country than to the richer ones. Grumbles about the ‘Robin Hood’ side of national economic management – using the taxes of richer areas to assist the poor – are everywhere in democratic states. In Italy, a major political party, the Lega Nord, was founded in 1991 and drew considerable support for its policy of separation from the south of Italy, which it held to be an area of shiftless people living off northern taxes. Its direct descendant, the Lega, became in 2019 the dominant part of the governing coalition.

But, more often, a state’s efforts to, in some measure, equalize the inevitably differing economies of its constituent parts have been passively supported, even by the wealthier regions. The Union has accomplished what the creators of the European Union wished to create, but which now looks unlikely to be realized, at least not for the present political generations: a state able to treat all those on its territory as equal citizens.

The fact that Britain is such a state and that Britishness has a real meaning makes the decision to secede from the Union by a marginal vote in a referendum doubly absurd. Every citizen in Britain will be affected by secession because it will fundamentally change the make-up of the state. The Scots nationalists’ position, that the vote belongs to everyone resident in Scotland at the time of a referendum, means that a recent immigrant with little or no knowledge of the stakes involved is privileged over Scots living elsewhere in the UK, and over all other British. The immigrant, if s/he intends to become a permanent resident, should have a vote: but so should first-generation Scots living in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, while British citizens as a whole should be included – with a voice rather than a vote (since it is right that Scots should decide the future of their nation). There is a proposal for a way of dealing with this later in this book, designed to meet the objection made by the former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption in one of his 2019 Reith lectures, that a democratic polity ‘cannot operate on the basis that a bare majority takes one hundred per cent of the spoils’.9

The very large advantage the nationalists have had in Scotland, once they crossed over the credibility bar at some point in the 1980s, is that they were able both to redefine, and take a grip on Scottish patriotism. Scots patriotism has been, for most of the Union period, a widely accepted, widely adopted but mainly cultural matter: in song, dance, humour; in literature; in sport; in the various forms of Protestantism; and in military prowess. Official patriotism was expressed in loyalty to the British king or queen and country, and in pride in empire.

The twentieth century progressively thinned this out. Culture had been expressed in localities, woven round differing dialects and forms of labour, where most concerns were bounded within rural or urban communities: these are less compelling and, especially for the young, much more globally connected. Political allegiance, when it was occasionally required to be made overt or celebrated, was for most a reflexive gesture of British loyalty.

This was not absent in the generation born soon after the war but it was dying. The ceremonies observed in my birthplace, the fishing village of Anstruther on the East Fife coast, as parading through the streets on old year’s night; gathering on the harbour to see the fleet leave; the fishermen’s ball; the kirks unaccustomedly full for harvest festivals (this was a fishing and farming area) and a local assumption, not welcome among the children, that all adults could take a hand (and sometimes it was a hand) in disciplining your behaviour: most of these have gone, now, or leave faint traces. Local was most important; but many families got and sent airmail letters to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States: sometimes relatives came back to look about and say: that wasn’t there before! My grandfather’s two younger sisters came back to Fife as women in late middle age, on a visit as much dutiful as sentimental: born in the later Victorian time, when our part of Scotland was relatively poor, they emigrated and successfully integrated into a booming America, in accent, habits and expectation American.

Michael Fry writes a threnody to the age gone in his fine, ultimately elegiac A New Race of Men,10 contrasting Scotland’s ‘coherent culture’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Scots felt themselves ‘a new race of men’ with a more diverse, but more divided twentieth century, ‘ill-equipped to resist influences that were provincializing it, as Scots seized the great opportunities open to them (elsewhere) … and as all sorts of British authorities and social forces tightened their grip on Scotland. The culture, in the broadest sense, suffered the most from this. Not only did it become too weak to defend itself, but the Scots people grew increasingly unsure if it was worth defending.’

This is in part true: the centralizing of government and the strengthening of the state during and after the Second World War was hard on localism, though welcomed by those who voted for, and in large measure received, a level of healthcare and modest financial security, which were not available to them from the state, even when they had been called, indeed compelled, to defend that state. And Scots had seized opportunities open to them elsewhere in large numbers from medieval times: perhaps most of all in the nineteenth century, when empire was their oyster and North America provided a welcome warmer than for most other Europeans.

It is the Scots nationalists’ proudest achievement, that they have provided a vocabulary and a mission for an aggressive assertion of a re-established Scottishness, which must rest on the framework of an independent state in order to preserve itself for the future. But it is by some way the opposite of the old British patriotism, which promoted a common identity and pride. Scots patriotism now has relied heavily not on a commonality, a comradeship, with the English, but on a distrust, a dislike, most strongly expressed by some of Scotland’s most prominent writers, furthered by the nationalist leadership through a relentless depiction of British political and governing class as chronically out of touch, London-centred and determined to impoverish Scotland with policies of austerity.

The argument here is that the huge dislocations which secession will bring, most of all to Scotland, are not worth the effort because independence will be, at the very least in the short and medium term, materially impoverishing; the politics necessarily configured round a shrunken economy and constrained to be ‘neo-liberal’, unless embarking on a difficult, contested, perhaps impossible process of widespread nationalization in the pursuit of a more socialist state, while the culture remains roughly the same. I argue that even before devolution, indeed through much of the twentieth century (and of course before), Scotland managed to retain a distinctive culture which, though less locally bounded, was and is still vibrant enough to produce people following the arts, the sciences and entertainment, who enrich the society and the locality in which they were born and, frequently, beyond, as the country has done for centuries. The former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown (2007–2010) argued that ‘we should make clear and explicit that the benefits we receive from the Union reflect a fundamental moral purpose – that no matter where you reside and what your background is, every citizen enjoys the dignity of not just equal civil and political rights, but the same social and economic rights too’.11

This is written to refute the view that secession is necessary for this to be preserved and furthered: and to argue that continued, if necessarily reformed, Union will best preserve the freedoms it was designed to enshrine.

Notes

Michael Keating,

Small Nations in a Big World: What Scotland Can

Learn

(Viewpoints), Luath Press Ltd, Kindle edition

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/scottish-independence-most-scots-would-back-independence-under-pm-boris-johnson-1-4952657

Arthur Herman,

The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World

, pub. Fourth Estate, 2002, p. viii

Gerrard Carruthers and Colin Kidd,

Literature and Union

, Oxford University Press, 2018, p. 27

Alice Brown, David McCrone and Lindsay Paterson,

Politics and Society in Scotland

, Macmillan Press, 1996, p. 205

https://standpointmag.co.uk/features-may-14-independence-nothing-for-scots-nigel-biggar-referendum/

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/we-are-failing-to-make-the-grade-in-education-q3vg8gjv6

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/eight-reasons-scotland-is-more-remain-and-what-will-happen-if-its-dragged-out/

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2019/Reith_2019_Sumption_lecture_2.pdf

10.

Michael Fry,

A New Race of Men

, Birlinn, 2013, p. 395

11.

Gordon Brown,

My Scotland, Our Britain

, Simon and Schuster, 2014, p. 239

1THE OTHER UNION

The competing possibilities and constraints of globalization and nationalism are central to the way in which the twenty-first-century world is framed and experienced. In this still youthful century, what had seemed to be a bountiful gift from the previous one – a world, and above all a Europe, committed, willy-nilly, to ever-closer and ever more fruitful engagement, in trade, in immigration, in culture, in education across national borders – has been submitted, in times grimmer than foreseen, to ever-closer inspection by those who benefit little from these engagements, and often find them wanting.

The new nationalists of Europe have taken up the cause of the many who now feel, for different reasons, that their country has let them down by letting too much of the rest of the world in. Their parties claim they can protect their people from much of this. From mass immigration in the first instance; from trade so free it destroys national industries; from the rule, more or less opaque to most, of supra-national institutions, among which the European Union is presented as the darkest, looming shadow.

The nationalists of Scotland, though, are of a different stripe. The many European movements which would claim nationalism as their political home – the French Rassemblement National (previously Front National), the German Alternativ für Deutschland, the Italian Lega, the Swedish Democrats, the Spanish Vox, the two Dutch far-right groups, the Forum for Democracy and the Freedom Party – are not the Scottish National Party’s allies. All have a different goal from the SNP: they wish to win a dominant position in their nation’s politics which will allow them to radically shift policies on the economy, on Europe and above all on immigration. Their common aim is to protect: protect the economy from the malign effects of globalization, protect the state from the interventions of the EU and protect the people from the flows of immigrants, especially those coming from Middle Eastern and African states, and also from the poorer EU states, such as the Central European, former communist countries. Muslims are seen as particularly dangerous, represented as hostile to the religious and ethical values of Europe and providing incubation cells for terrorism.

By contrast, the SNP places itself as social democratic, civic, welcoming of immigration, enthusiastically pro-EU and with no plans for trade barriers, quotas or tariffs. The nationalists with whom it has the closest ties are the Catalans, who, like the Scots are part of a larger state, but also see themselves as an ancient nation, wishing to get out of the one which enfolds them, Spain. Relations are cordial rather than close: the Catalans are further to the left than the Scots nationalists: their militancy and willingness to confront the Spanish state is witness to the fact that Spain will not allow secession to be the subject of a campaign, let alone succeed. The Scots Nats, for all their rhetorical exuberance, are allowed to be within the law in their efforts to leave the British state and strive to remain legal.

The SNP argues, in effect, that Scotland must leave the UK to be much the same as it was within it: its politics moderate, its economy firmly market-based. With these as its guiding lights, it argues that Scotland must leave the port in which it has been berthed for over three centuries – the United Kingdom – and become, as nationalists would see it, a vessel free to seek a welcome in another Union, which it believes will serve it better from now on. It is presented as an easy move, with the reassurance of the same currency and the same monarch as now, with continued membership of Nato. For everything to stay the same or, where not the same, get better, everything must change.

But change will be wrenching. If unpicking the UK from the EU after less than half a century of membership will be hard, unpicking Scotland from a more than 300-year-plus Union will be just as contested, and much harder. The prospect, for all their public confidence, must be, in reflective moments, terrifying for the party leaders. Even if they believe their vastly overconfident economic forecasts, they cannot know if Scotland, alone, can provide for its citizens the standard of living available when it is part of the sixth or seventh largest economy in the world. The prospect is also clearly fearful for many of the Scots whom nationalists seek to convince to take the voyage; a large reason why, so far, they have refused to be loosed from the British state, even as they continue to return the SNP as the largest party in the Scottish parliament, with a significant representation in Westminster.

The post-war, liberal era in the wealthy Western states was increasingly closely aligned with globalization, and Francis Fukuyama will forever be aligned with the declaration that ‘we may be witnessing … the end of history as such, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final forms of government … the struggle is now over’.1 The thesis was controversial as soon as it appeared, and grew more so, to the point that Fukuyama himself recanted. History had not closed its book, and liberal democracy did not become a politics of choice of most for the dictators in the world: insofar as it spread, in the 1980s and 1990s, the new century saw it shrink again. So confident was Russian president Vladimir Putin that the claim of a liberal democratic future was now truly discarded that he told The Financial Times in June 2019 that liberalism was dead.2 But a common view did spread – Russia is, in fact, part of it – that at least economic globalization was now dominant, and could not be defied except at increasing national cost. Economic nationalism was stupidity.

The general consensus on this illuminates the singular position of the Scots (and the Catalan) nationalists. Where the national populists of Europe strive to turn their countries into less open societies, nationalist Scotland enters into the current whirlpool of European nationalisms as a movement which sees the people it wishes both to represent and liberate as confident globalists, well able to fend for themselves in the world’s market place, requiring to be protected from no peoples other than the English. It accepts the main tenets of the economics of globalization even as its century-long quest is to create a new international border between itself and the rest of the UK, precisely the opposite of what the globalizers think appropriate.

This conviction that nationalism is no longer a long-term option in today’s world, and that borders are now unnecessary and irrational, has powerful arguments behind it, and powerful proponents, including US President Bill Clinton (1993–2001) and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair (1997–2007), both of whose convictions were sharpened by arguing with those on the left of their own parties. Among the most influential of the arguments deployed was that made in a 1997 essay ‘Power Shift’ by Jessica T. Matthews, a former head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,3 one of the world’s most prestigious NGOs and one of the best endowed (by a nineteenth-century Scots industrialist, who combined ruthless management in his business life with huge charitable giving towards the end of it).