Scottish nationalists don't have a monopoly on Scottishness
|
Version 0 of 1. Asking questions of your government is a basic feature of democracy. It is also deeply Scottish. Robert Burns himself wondered "If I'm design'd yon lordling's slave/By Nature's law design'd/Why was an independent wish/E'er planted in my mind?" We should always ask questions of our leaders. This must especially be the case when they put a fundamentally important issue to us in a referendum. In Scotland increasingly those who question their government's plan to dissolve the 300-year-old political, economic and social union between Scotland and the rest of the UK are under attack. They stand accused as being unpatriotic, anti-Scottish, and above all, of being negative. Business figures complain of a culture of fear, threats and boycotts from nationalists. A new study, published this week, suggests that support for independence is now at a historic low of 23%. Scots do not react well to being told to shut up and to stop asking questions. The irony is that the nationalist campaign is deeply negative. Their campaign exists to break the solidarity and unity that exists across the United Kingdom. The very heart of their proposition is inherently negative: that the people of our island are too different from each other to share political institutions. To their credit, the modern SNP have shed ethnic nationalism. But today, encumbered with an outdated logic, they find they must fall back on old arguments in order to make the case for separation in a post-nationalist world. The constant message from the anti-UK campaign is that English values are different from Scottish values. This is not, my opposite number says, a matter of "right versus left, it is a matter of right versus wrong." The implication is that someone born Dumfries has the right values but someone in Carlisle lacks them. Arguments about UK government policies are not policy debates but rather wedges to separate Scots from their UK family. Otherwise the nationalists would have developed an alternative welfare policy: they haven't, instead they have only in the last fortnight started work on a project, not to set policy, but to define "Scottish values" within the welfare state. Similarly, there is no substantial policy debate to be had between Scotland and the UK on the NHS. Whatever happens in the NHS in England, it doesn't affect a devolved Scottish NHS. So why do the nationalists raise it in this campaign other than to talk up a divide between Scots and English? The narrative of division and difference has no logic but it is the only strategy they have. They need to divide Scots from Geordies, Scousers, Brummies, Mancunians and Liverpudlians. They must make familiar family members into abnormal strangers. Devolution is, in the words of John Smith, the settled will of the Scottish people. For the negative nationalists it is a "half measure" or "a messy fudge". Throughout the history of devolution they have stood outside the debate with nothing positive to contribute. As political parties and civil society came together for the Scottish constitutional convention the nationalists refused to take part because it sought a better Scotland in the UK. When Labour proposed an extension of devolution in 2007 and the current UK government implemented it, the nationalists opposed it. When, this week, the IPPR put forward an important contribution to the devolution debate it was dismissed by the nationalists in preference to demands for full separation. They talk about devolution as if it were a bribe to the Scottish people to stay in the union rather than a positive project about improving the governance of Scotland. If it is a bribe, it is strange one. In a recent opinion poll options for further tax raising powers or fiscal autonomy were far less popular than the current devolution arrangements. Today they claim the banner of my party, Labour, but it is a flag of convenience. Scotland needs independence, we are told, because we have a Conservative-led government. But throughout all of the last Labour government, the longest period of Labour government in our history, the nationalists demanded independence. They claim Donald Dewar for their own, but of course Alex Salmond stood against him demanding independence. They claim the social legacy of Clement Attlee. When the '45 Labour government were establishing the NHS and welfare state the nationalists were demanding independence. Perhaps though, the most negative thing about the nationalists is their worldview. Some frame this debate as a battle between Britishness and Scottishness. It isn't. It is a contest between two different visions of Scottishness. Scotland's bard dreamt of a time when "Man to Man, the world o'er, Shall brothers be." This is the Scottishness embraced by most Scots: positive, outward-looking, confident on any size of stage. Invested with a compassion that does not stop at our own borders. It is the confident Scottishness that has allowed Scots to impact more on the world than any nation of our size, and many much larger. Positive Scottishness contrasts with the inward looking negative narrative of grievance and division. The SNP, on ceremonial occasions, wear a white rose in reference to a work by nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid. "The rose of all the world is not for me", he wrote, "I want for my part only the little white rose of Scotland." How closed-minded. How parochial. How un-Scottish. How negative. |