SCOTLAND THE SELF-DELUDED

Andrew Neil explains why he has become a

stranger in his homeland, and suggests a remedy

THOSE OF US who are proud to be Scot- tish and British have become strangers in our own land. There was no conflict about being both in the Scotland in which I grew up and was educated in the Fifties and Six- ties. The mood is very different today: the past two decades have seen the rise of an increasingly separatist Scottish identity and a concomitant decline in British identity north of the border. It is a dangerous brew which threatens the very existence of the United Kingdom.

My generation (and many before it) was brought up to revel in its dual identity. We had no doubt where our loyalties lay on the football or rugby pitch, espe- cially when the enemy was England, and took great satis- faction from Scotland's all- too-infrequent victories. But those of us who followed cricket cheered when England scored one of its even rarer victories over the West Indies or Australia and in general we liked to see Brits win, what- ever their home nation- ality. These days, if England played Iraq, you could count on a substantial and voluble minority of Scots to be back- ing Iraq.

At school I learned to take pride in my distinctive heritage and history. I could reel off the long list of Scottish folk heroes, pioneers, entrepreneurs, philoso- phers and inventors. For a small, cold, mostly barren country on the periphery of north-west Europe we seemed to have made a disproportionate contribution to the intellectual and economic progress of mankind. No doubt that helps to explain why, at the age of ten, I was a Scottish Nationalist, as were most of my classmates. But we soon grew out of such childish notions.

As we learned more, it was quickly apparent that Scotland had flourished most when it had voluntarily joined forces with England (we took great pride from the fact that Scotland, unlike Ireland or Wales, had never been permanently conquered by the English) at the start of the 18th century. The Union gave Scotland a far bigger can- vas on which to map out its prosperity and allowed Scots to exploit their talents on the international stage.

By the end of the 19th century, Scotland was probably the richest country in the world; Glasgow was the unrivalled second city of the empire and Scots had played countless crucial roles in the building of the British nation-state and its global empire — without ever having to lose the culture, history, education and religion that made us different from the English. Those born to be Scottish and British had been truly dealt a privileged, winning hand by fate.

Not in today's Scotland, where being a `true' Scot involves disparaging the very notion of Britishness.. Britain is increasingly depicted as an irrelevance, a historic inter- lude from the age of imperialism, a con- spiracy to keep Scotland in supposedly colonial shackles, an impediment to the creation of a separate Scottish identity. You cannot feel more Scottish, we are told, unless you feel less British.

The Scottish media is drenched in such drivel. The blethering classes who domi- nate its columns and letters pages never miss a chance to put Britain down, to play up every imagined English slight to our Scottish sensitivities; to predict a more mature and civil society and politics for Scotland if only there was more self-gov- ernment (which means glossing over the cesspit of waste, incompetence and corrup- tion that is Scottish local government); to boast of a superior Scottish nationalism in a manner which they are the first to con- demn whenever the English, Germans or Americans parade their own narrow nationalism.

Behind all this lurks a pervasive and growing anti-Englishness. The bien pensants of Scottish nationalism deny this but it is there for all to see, the nasty underbelly of contemporary Scottish attitudes. The Scottish tabloids — even those edited by Englishmen — think it is good for sales to have regular swipes at the English. The foul-mouthed, anti-English rant of an Edinburgh heroin crackhead in Trainspotting has been made into Scotland's Gettysburg Address by fash- ionable bletherers.

Children with English accents are bullied in the play- ground (one teenager was recently murdered for the `crime' of being English). A so- called comedian at this year's Edinburgh Festival begins his act by announcing that his jokes are not for the English snobs in the posh seats at the front. Even the Scot- tish bourgeoisie begins every rugby interna- tional at Murrayfield with a morose, anti-English dirge, 'Flower of Scotland', which some would like to make our nation- al anthem.

The English have every right to be mysti- fied by this outpouring of denigration and hatred. After all, last year they elected, by a landslide, a government dominated by Scots. If anybody should feel discriminated against and excluded from power and influ- ence in today's Britain, it is the English. Nor has the near-monopoly of Scots in the top jobs (PM, Chancellor, Foreign Secre- tary, Defence, now Social Security) under- mined New Labour's continuing popularity south of the border.

Last year's general election also at last gave Scotland the government it wanted after 18 years of Tory rule. So the result should have been good for the Union on both sides of the border. But there is no pleasing Scotland in its current curmud- geonly mood, as the Blair government is currently finding out to its cost.

Allan Massie, one of the few sane Scot- tish commentators still given space to write, has attributed the decline in British identity among Scots to the end of empire and the absence of external threat to these islands. Scotland was content to be sub- sumed into a greater whole as long as there was an empire to build, exploit and defend, and foreign foes who threatened our liber- ties to see off. Now there is no empire and no foreseeable prospect of being invaded, there is less point to Britain, and the Scots are returning to a pre-Union nationalism which they think can be preserved within the warm and welcoming embrace of the European Union, just like Ireland.

There is something in this: there may be a certain historic inevitability about the decline of British and the renaissance of Scottish identity. But it need not be termi- nal for the Union. There is a more immedi- ate reason, however, why it might be: throughout the Tory years, Labour unwit- tingly encouraged Scotland's nascent fissi- parous tendencies. A party that thought all it had to do to keep Scotland happy was deliver devolution is instead reaping the whirlwind it sowed in the Eighties.

While England reluctantly swallowed the Thatcherite market medicine for four con- secutive general elections, Scotland remained steeped in a sullen collectivism. Scottish Labour politicians told the Scots that they were being cheated out of their democratic rights, that England was foist- ing an alien and permanent Tory govern- ment on Scotland; the wilder fringes of Scottish Labour even joined with the Nationalists in urging non-payment of the poll tax, thereby creating a culture of non- payment of council taxes which exists to this day.

By disaggregating the Union for its own partisan purposes, Labour played into the hands of the Nationalists. It encouraged the idea that Scotland was a distinct politi- cal entity from the rest of the UK whose interests were being ignored by London (despite the over-representation in West- minster and the over-spending north of the Border). The horde of Scottish Labour worthies who feared they might be denied office forever in London began talking in more nationalist tones; they warmed to the prospect of a ministerial car in Edinburgh.

There was much wild talk of Scotland's democratic deficit. It came at a time when there was already something of a Scottish cultural renaissance underway. Politics and culture combined to produce a separatist genie which even a Labour government dominated by Scots cannot shove back in the bottle.

Those of us who feared that devolution would not assuage nationalist sentiment but turn out to be the slippery slope to sep- aratism have a good chance of being proved right. That is scant consolation if the consequence is that your country gets dismembered. Nor does it take into account the fact that the election of yet another Tory government last year, while Scotland stayed stubbornly Labour, would equally have put the Union in jeopardy.

Those who want to save the Union need to do two things: first, accept that devolu- tion is a done deal but build on what Labour has delivered to create a new Unionism; and second, restate in clear and certain terms the case for the United King- dom and a British sense of identity.

Labour's gimcrack plan for a parliament in Edinburgh is likely to encourage sepa- ratism rather than dish it. It allows for a substantial devolution of power in home affairs but all the money will continue to come from a block grant from London. It would be hard to imagine an arrangement more tailor-made for exploitation by the Nationalists than this. Every time there is a shortfall in spending they will blame miser- ly London. Tension between Edinburgh and Westminster will become an everyday occurrence, making what was supposed to be a permanent constitutional settlement unstable.

The only way to resolve this is to go much further than Labour proposes: the Scottish parliament should be responsible for raising all the money it plans to spend. Then the Scots can indulge in their sup- posed love of high taxes and big-spending politicians (or more likely flood the A74 south to England when Edinburgh overtax- es them). And only when there is some clear correlation and connection between what politicians promise to spend and what they have to raise in taxes will Scottish poli- tics grow up.

For too long Scotland has enjoyed Thatcherite levels of taxation and socialist levels of spending. Home Rule worth the If you can't stand the heat get into the kitchen.' name would make the Edinburgh parlia- ment self-financing for all the areas under its responsibility. It would also mark the beginning of a new Unionism, one that recognised the new, enhanced Scottish identity but based on the belief that there was still enough residual support for the concept of Britain to make it worth contin- uing with the United Kingdom.

That support would grow if more politi- cians and opinion-formers put the case for Britain. Too many are too quick to deni- grate the very idea: even Lord Rothermere dismissed Britain in the Daily Telegraph this week as a 'third-rate power'. His words are music to those who would split us asunder. He should know better.

Britain remains a power to be reckoned with. We are the fifth largest economy in the world, with fine and feared armed forces and a global influence that comes from membership of the European Union, the UN security council, Nato, the Com- monwealth — and our special relationship with America. The United States, of course, is in a league of its own. But Britain remains in the top half of the world pre- mier division.

We have also become something of a success story: in many ways Britain is better equipped to face the demands of the Infor- mation Age than any of our European competitors. Germany and France are a decade behind us in the privatisation and deregulation essential to compete in the global economy. We would do well to dwell more on our successes for it would rein- force our British identity: people don't desert what the rest of the world admires, and it was a pervading sense of British fail- ure which gave separatism its first boost in the Seventies.

That peculiar mix of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish, augmented by immi- grants from all over the world, still makes Britain special: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and without the United Kingdom we would all be diminished. We would certainly all count for a lot less in the world. That is well understood by Euro- pean federalists in Brussels: a Europe of 100 regions and small nations would be far easier to control than a Gaullist Europe of strong nation-states.

So there is still all to play for: I do not subscribe to the view that the dissolution of the United Kingdom is inevitable, though many in Scotland — and a growing number of English nationalists as well — would like us to think so. But the old Unionism of the unitary state is gone. A new Unionism will have to be forged within a much more devolved, even federalist United Kingdom. That can only be achieved if the case for Britain is restated clearly and convincingly. Do both these things and the Union can be saved — and I might once again feel at home in the land of my birth.

The author is editor-in-chief of the European and the Scotsman.