The latest opinion poll in Scotland shows a slim majority, 51 per cent, now supporting independence. No need to get too excited, perhaps. We have been here before. The last time was in 1998, when the imminent resurrection of the parliament in Edinburgh brought support for independence to 56 per cent on a wave of nationalist euphoria.
Scottish nationalism has always risen and fallen in waves. Once the parliament was actually established, that earlier wave of euphoria splashed harmlessly against the rocks of Scottish unionism. But in recent months, support for the SNP has been edging up from its usual 25 per cent, thanks it seems to disillusionment with the Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition that has governed Scotland since 1999—and even with the parliament itself. Far from sorting out all of Scotland's problems, as it was meant to, the parliament does not even appear to have made the Scots feel better about themselves. Subterranean tremors from deep inside Scotland can be sensed once again.
They may not lead to a political eruption, but they are at least likely to cast a shadow over the celebrations planned for the 300th anniversary of the union of England and Scotland on 1st May next year. When the union came into effect, England celebrated briefly then forgot about it. Scotland momentarily fell silent, and then never shut up about it. It is a sign of the times that the Scottish executive seems uncertain how to play the event. Of course there will still be the Queen, the march past of the one Scottish regiment (in place of the six that used to exist), the fireworks over Edinburgh Castle. But will celebration of the union make Scots feel more British? Or will the blaze of the tartans and the skirl of the pipes reawaken emotions that lie buried in every Scottish breast, the old grudge against England and the dream of freedom?
The electoral system makes it more or less impossible for any party to win an absolute majority in the parliament. The race will be for the position of biggest party. Of the 129 seats in the parliament, Labour now holds 50, the SNP 25, the Conservatives 17 and the Liberal Democrats 17; splinter groups share the rest. The SNP needs a big swing, and the opinion polls hint that it may achieve it. Even then the Liberal Democrats would probably be left holding the balance of power. They are playing hard to get. A crucial point of disagreement with the SNP is whether in the next Scottish parliament there should be a referendum on independence.
Whatever ministers in London may think, then, the problem of Scotland in the union is not over—and it runs far deeper than the occasional flurry of English grievance over the asymmetry of devolution (the West Lothian question), Scottish over-representation in the British parliament and cabinet or Scotland's advantage in public spending.
Even within Scotland, profound political changes can be hard to detect. Edinburgh and Glasgow are both politically stable and so not typical. The biggest changes seem to be occurring in small places like Kilmarnock or Linlithgow or Elgin, towns glimpsed by their governors from the motorway or railway, where the natives and their notions remain a mystery.
We do not even know the character of the nationalism being espoused there. Is it "90-minute nationalism," a protest vote, a postmodern identity fad born out of boredom and narcissism? Or does it lie deeper, in a tenacious popular memory that ultimately goes back to the nationhood saved by the heroism of Robert Bruce at Bannockburn in 1314, not dead but sleeping these three centuries, ready to rise again?
In Scotland there are so many unknowns that it is safer to write on a subject I do know about: myself. I am now to be counted with that slender majority who have concluded that it is better for the Scots to become independent—and quite likely better for the other nations of the United Kingdom as well.
This was not a casual conversion. All my adult life I had been a member of the Conservative party. I have been a Tory candidate for election to both the British and the Scottish parliaments. I was still committed enough to believe that the party's comeuppance in 1997, when it lost all its seats in Scotland, could be the prelude to an ascent from the ashes. I thought the implosion might purge the party of all it had got wrong as Thatcher stomped with heavy boots over the conventions that had grown up inside the union. I was deluding myself. The Scots Tories, nine years on, neither uphold their old policies nor seek new ones—they prefer to have no policies at all.
Unlike most Tories, I had always been in favour of devolution. I believed that, handled properly, it might serve Tory ends—promoting self-reliance for individuals, for communities and for Scotland as a whole. It has not been so handled. If anything, the Scottish parliament reinforces the nation's dependency culture to a greater extent than the former unionist regime did. After seven years, I think I am entitled to give up on devolution.
Devolution affronts me in two particular ways. First, it has become a huge pork barrel. Scots have enjoyed high public expenditure for a half-century without improving their prosperity relative to England. Though spending per capita in Scotland runs at 30 per cent above the English level, GDP per capita runs at 5 per cent below it. The ratios change from year to year, but the long-term trend is consistent: overall growth rates in the two countries are not converging.
The main reason for this used to be that much of the public money went into propping up the bankrupt old heavy industries. It ensured Scotland's economy would remain backwards, reliant on the brawn rather than the brains of the people. But the steelworks have vanished—the site of the last, Ravenscraig in Lanarkshire, is about to be turned into a retail park—while precious little remains of the coal mines or shipyards.
Nowadays the swelling flow of subsidy goes into an inflated public sector. This accounts for nearly 50 per cent of Scottish GDP, 10 percentage points higher than the British figure. In depressed areas, the state and its agencies are often the only major employers—in East Ayrshire they provide over two thirds of jobs. Across Scotland, spending rains down on groups organised enough to lobby the government. Among them are rich pensioners, now entitled to free personal care from local authorities who previously gave it only to poor pensioners. Also among the successful supplicants are the white settlers in the Highlands, that is to say, the Lowlanders and English who have moved into the depopulated glens. Not content with displacing the culture of the indigenous Gaels, they profit from a new right of "community buy-out" to expropriate private estates with money from the government. This is supposed to be settling the scores of the Highland clearances of two centuries ago.
There is method in this madness from Labour's perspective. The more public spending goes up in an economy growing more slowly than England's, the more the British government can point to the disaster that may ensue if public spending ever came down—by secession from Britain, for example.
The gap between what the government collects in taxes from Scots and what it pays out to them in public expenditure has widened steadily since 1999: the latest figures for 2003-04 show annual spending at £45bn and annual revenue at £34bn, compared to £32bn and £27bn respectively in the year before devolution, 1997-98. (Nationalists, of course, dispute these figures, and argue that the revenues from North sea oil have to be added in.)
Much more importantly, this undoubted pre-emption of resources by the state is squeezing out the private sector and immobilising a good part of the Scottish workforce—how else could tens of thousands of Poles arrive and immediately get jobs the natives have no incentive to do? In other words, all the public spending is designed—just in a different way from before—to keep Scotland dependent, therefore voting Labour.
The second way that devolution galls me is in its political correctness—arguably the main ideology of the state in Scotland since 1999. The government consistently displays its greatest zeal when it sets about micromanaging Scots' private lives. It vaunts itself on having banned smoking in pubs. There are now plans to come down on "Buckie," the Buckfast wine guzzled by teenagers from the grimier parts of Lanarkshire as a high road to oblivion The government would have liked to ban the smacking of children but could find no practical way of snooping on those who do it. But it did ban the sectarian or national insults routinely hurled at football matches, and it fines fans caught in the act. It has banned, we hardly need add, hunting. It has even banned mink farms, though none existed in Scotland. (The mania for banning is offset in other areas of conduct by a mania for permissiveness: several Glasgow firemen were disciplined recently because they refused to hand out safety pamphlets to a gay pride march.)
Scotland is a more morally conservative country than England. This is partly a matter of the greater influence of the Protestant and the Catholic churches, but is also because working-class Scots remain attached to moral precepts long discarded by the liberal elite, above all in multicultural London. An older ethos still pervades Scotland. This is why the legislation establishing the Scottish parliament specified that it could make no law on abortion, and reserved that matter to Westminster. If such a law ever were made in Edinburgh, it would doubtless turn out more restrictive than the English one. The argument ran that a cross-border traffic of pregnant Scots lassies seeking English abortionists would be most undesirable. Yet it also seemed to me that the chance was missed to make Scotland once again not just a political community but a moral community—one prepared to try to resolve hard questions, rather than have its morality dictated from elsewhere.
From all this it should be clear that, although I am no longer a Tory, I remain a conservative in a social, economic and moral sense. What, then, is the connection to Scottish nationalism? Nationalism is generally a conservative force in the modern world. Conservative parties all over Europe are usually nationalist parties too. The exception is the Scottish Conservative party, which for the past quarter-century has been shrilly anti-nationalist. And look what happened to it. Tory unionists say they are not so much anti-Scottish as pro-British—that is, they draw the boundaries of their political community differently from the narrow Scottish nationalists. But fewer and fewer of their countrymen follow them. In a 1979 poll, in answer to the question "What nationality best describes you?", 56 per cent said Scottish and 38 per cent said British. In answer to the same question in the latest poll, from 2003, 73 per cent said Scottish and 20 per cent said British (about the same size as the Tory vote). Without doubt, Britishness is breaking down in Scotland.
Yet Scotland is exceptional in Europe in having a nationalist party of the left rather than the right. Since the 1990s, under Alex Salmond, the SNP has constantly tried to outflank Labour on the left. If Labour gives us the highest public spending inside Britain, then the SNP undertakes outside Britain to raise it higher. The SNP, somebody once quipped, promises four taps to every Scottish sink: hot, cold, oil and whisky. As a big chance for the SNP approaches, voices have arisen within it saying this sort of nonsense will not do in a party contending for power. The most successful small countries are not those with big public sectors left over from somebody else's empire, but those which never had them or got rid of them, such as Ireland or Estonia. Salmond, while not quite silencing these critics, makes clear that they will not be allowed to cloud the prospects he sees before him.
Still, in May I will vote SNP without qualms. I will do so first because my support for its principle of independence supersedes any particular policy, and second because it must surely soon see that the rest of its programme is unrealisable. Never having been in government, the SNP has no notion of the constraints likely to operate there. Fortunately, the U-turn has become a favourite expedient of modern politics.
In any event, the strategy of outbidding a rival political party on spending can cut both ways. There is probably no price the Labour party would not pay to hold on to its 50 Scottish seats at Westminster. Surely, therefore, the whole argument for independence needs to be raised to a higher plane. What is a Scottish parliament (or indeed any parliament) for? The assembly is there to give expression to the character and values of a nation, and through the political process to crystallise its aspirations from them. My objection to today's Scottish parliament is that it does not do this. It imports its values from outside Scotland. I do not believe that soaring public expenditure courtesy of the English taxpayer is good for Scotland, nor that the politically correct agenda has truly native roots.
English friends take issue with these arguments. They point to the historical strength of the political left in Scotland. They think that a lot of the political correctness in Britain speaks with a Scottish accent, originally preached from Presbyterian pulpits then fleshed out by earnest discussion around dining tables in Edinburgh New Town (Glasgow, which may be the most male chauvinist city in the world, has a different attitude). So, they say, what I have been sketching is a Scottish civil war between the public sector left and the sturdy individualists who recall the Scots doctors and engineers who ran the British empire (these, incidentally, having contributed in 1955 to the Conservatives winning a majority of votes in Scotland—the only time this has happened in a British general election).
If there is anything in that argument—and I think there may be—then my own hope must lie in the resurgence of that sturdy Scottish individualism in a nationalist idiom. I recall that the men who first brought Scotland the medical or educational advances of the modern era, far ahead of anything in England at the time, espoused that individualism but did not deny it had a social application.
The reason for the shift in my own position lies in the mismatch I perceive between the character of the British state and the aspirations of people I can see and hear every day where I live. It imposes on us here a regime of provincial subordination. That is what gave Scottish nationalism its initial impetus, but it has not been removed, or not enough, by devolution. The sole cure is to remove it, once and for all. It means the nation must become its own moral arbiter. It means independence.
I have no doubt independence would make the Scots happier. It is a shame that from their subordinate position in the union, so many feel they have to hate the English, and that this feeling is coming to be reciprocated south of the border. But I think Scottish independence could be a liberation for the English too—allowing England to get the measure of its real size, rather than gaze in a distorting mirror which distends its last imperial fantasies. Most English people have already taken the end of empire in their stride. Today they seem to be making the most of their status as a reasonably successful medium-sized nation with many assets—the English language, the armed forces, the financial sector, higher education, EU membership, a special relationship, however battered, with the US. It is hard to see how Scottish independence could damage any of these, with the possible exception of the British army, but there is no reason why the two armies should not enjoy an extremely close working relationship.
It is hardly as if we, in the British Isles, have not been through this before. A former government in London felt happy enough with the first stage in the dissolution of the United Kingdom, when Ireland became independent in 1922. More recently, Labour has shown no desire to hang on to Northern Ireland and would probably view the exit of the six counties from the union with the same feelings of relief as Lloyd George saw the 26 counties go.
Scotland would only take away another 5m people—a deficit which at the present rate of immigration to England could be made up in a few years. Perhaps the English would prefer not to exchange the Scots for Poles and Bangladeshis. But I am not sure this should be the deciding argument—especially as, despite the pain and violence of the break in 1922, the English and the Irish still have much in common 80 years later, perhaps more than when the one nation ruled the other. Yet nobody in their right mind would dream of trying to reunify them on that account. Quite the contrary: their political separation is probably the key to their ever easier relations.
In the same way, the Scots and the English will no doubt always have much in common, as a simple product of three centuries of union. But there are also things that set them apart. The treaty that brought them together in 1707 went out of its way to preserve Scottish civil society by guarantees for the institutions that underpinned it, taken at that time to be the church, the law and the education system. This trinity has been supplemented in the modern world. There is today a Scottish football league and a national team (much envied by those such as the Flemings and Catalans), newspapers and television stations, any number of other little things that may strike the visitor to Scotland as peculiar but that to the natives are part of the fabric of everyday life. This is how Scotland remains Scotland, and keeps a sense of identity. Other historic states—the Republic of Venice, the Duchy of Bavaria—have in the course of those 300 years been swallowed by bigger ones from which they will never re-emerge. But the Scots have always kept the option open of going their own way again, though until the late 20th century they never wanted to use it.
Why do more and more of them want to now? There are many reasons. The end of empire is one, because Scots had invested so much in it and got so much out of it and because, once it ended, their confinement inside Britain with a bigger and stronger neighbour suddenly seemed much more stifling. If postmodern doubts have made multicultural England less confident of its national traditions, in Scotland they have reinforced a small-country nationalism which never died away, even at the high noon of union and empire.
Asked to name one thing that has made Scotland different, and durably so, I would say its Calvinist culture. Of course religion is in decline, the culture has been diluted and Scotland is not much less hedonistic than other western nations. But just look at Gordon Brown. The only real obstacle to his becoming prime minister in succession to Tony Blair is his non-English nationality, and the gloomy Presbyterian air it casts round him: his dourness, his moralising, his always knowing better, his urge to interfere, his intolerance of dissent.
It might fairly be asked whether Scots in an independent nation of the future would really like to be condemned to eternal government by people like Brown. My answer is that this is something Scotland has to work out for itself. Just as England might adapt to a new constitutional order and become a better country for it, so might Scotland. I would not expect this to be a painless process. But I think the alternative fate for Scots of getting their politics at second hand is about the worst any peaceful democracy can suffer: its death, in fact.
| Bookmark this page with: Stumble Upon Digg Delicious Reddit Facebook |
