A BLETHERER BITES BACK
The Scots are too busy with their own nation to hate the English, argues Magnus Linklater
Edinburgh THERE is a streak of fear and more than a touch of loathing in the way Scotland is currently being written about in England. We are, it appears, a nation of racists, mean and narrow in outlook, deeply ungrateful for the new parliament we have been promised, resentful at Westminster's continuing power, greedy for more sub- sidy, wasteful and incompetent in political administration, anti-British, parochial and unpleasant. Two hair-raising articles in The Spectator, one by Katie Grant, another by Neil Drysdale, painted a picture of almost pathological Anglophobia; a Centre for Policy Studies report predicted 'a pro- longed period of self-destructive, inward- looking politics, and a level of instability unknown for more than 200 years'. Ex- patriate Scots have pitched in with a vengeance: John Lloyd in the New States- man described an Edinburgh 'awash with anti-English sentiment' and quoted one MP who drew a comparison with anti- Semitism in pre-war Germany. Again in The Spectator, Andrew Neil said he felt a stranger in his own land and railed against `the nasty underbelly of contemporary Scottish attitudes'.
It is standard practice to attack the politicians who run one's country, quite unusual to turn on the people themselves. I can only assume that I who live here have missed something, though I am probably a member of what Mr Neil calls 'the blether- ing classes', and may even be one of his bien pensants (dread phrase). I can find very little evidence to support this apoca- lyptic view of Scotland, and a great deal to challenge it. I think it is demeaning to the Scots themselves to assume that they are driven by prejudices that have so infected their political judgment and character that they are prepared to jettison 300 years of close and amicable relations with the English. I believe that most commentators viewing us from afar have misread the cur- rent level of support for the Scottish National Party as meaning that indepen- dence is a foregone conclusion. And I doubt if more than a handful of the thou- sands of English visitors pouring into Edinburgh for the Festival this week will recognise a city awash with anything other than very large amounts of alcohol and a strong dash of good humour.
But how to combat the charges? No one doubts that you can uncover incidences of Scottish hostility towards the nation that has been so long its dominant partner. I can outdo Ms Grant or Mr Lloyd any day with Anglophobic anecdotes (though the one repeated regularly about an allegedly anti-English murder in Balerno this year was nothing of the sort). We are too close for comfort: 'so close, so like, so wizened by the same east wind,' as the nationalist R.B. Cunninghame Graham put it. We dis- like English condescension. We are prone to detect slights where there are none. We are less confident than we should be. We have a lamentable habit of supporting for- eign football teams other than England's. We are rude about Jimmy Hill. We did not take to Thatcherism. We complain about Tim Clifford who runs our National Gal- leries without even pretending to moder- ate his Englishness. We suffer, as G.K. Chesterton once wrote, from 'a double dose of the poison called heredity: the sense of blood in the aristocrat, and the sense of doom in the Calvinist'.
I would, however, no more use these dif- ferences to support a charge of racism than I would suggest that 30 years of IRA atrocities have rendered the English pro- foundly anti-Irish, or that the blood-cur- dling chants at a Celtic-Rangers game suggest we are on the edge of a sectarian bloodbath. The best recent evidence came in the form of an NOP poll in the Sunday Times whose conclusions were, with one important caveat, almost exactly the oppo- site of those cited above. Across all ages and social classes and amongst men and 1 heard that.' women, 83 per cent of those polled said they felt no dislike of the English. A mas- sive 92 per cent said their attitudes were uninfluenced by an English accent. Six out of ten said they saw no reason why senior jobs in the public sector should be offered to Scots first. A majority (58 per cent) said that there should be no restrictions on who bought land in Scotland, one of the most emotive current political issues, and — wait for it — as many as 60 per cent said they would support England in the World Cup if Scotland were knocked out (the poll pre- ceded the competition by about a week).
David McCrone, professor of sociology at the University of Edinburgh, who wrote up the poll, concluded simply that 'we do not find a great deal of evidence for anti- Englishness among our respondents'. The caveat was that 43 per cent believed that anti-English sentiment might be increasing. Their reasons for this response, however, appeared to have more to do with a grow- ing awareness of Scottish issues than any profound change in social attitudes. Politi- cal life in Scotland has taken on a momen- tum of its own that has very little to do with Westminster. In the run-up to next year's elections, the principal issues are, for the moment, purely Scottish. They take up much of our time and most of our atten- tion, and they leave England, temporarily I am sure, on the sidelines of national life. In short, we have more interesting things to occupy us right now than complaining about the English.
I find this unsurprising, and by no means unhealthy. But what the increased empha- sis on Scottishness has undoubtedly done is play into the hands of the SNP. It is riding high in the polls — some 14 per cent ahead of Labour — and, at the very least, there is the mother of all political campaigns ahead if the ground is to be clawed back. The Nationalists are now — as they have long been — the main opposition party in Scot- land, and they are taking full advantage of a mid-term period which has seen the gov- ernment performing badly in Scottish terms. Local government sleaze in particu- lar, as Andrew Neil points out, is a scar on Labour's face, and the SNP has homed in on it. The real irony, however, is that far from trumpeting the benefits of indepen- dence — as one might have assumed would have been the case had the electorate been seriously anti-English — the party has been careful recently to play it down. The SNP prefers to present itself as a modem social democratic organisation, friendly to busi- ness and keen to run a tight economy, rather than as a separatist party.
That, not tribalism, is the territory on which this first election to a Scottish parlia- ment will be fought. It all makes for fasci- nating politics — a time to understand Scotland better rather than to demonise it. The novelist William Mcllvanney once said of Mrs Thatcher that 'she takes the axe of her own simplicity to the complexities of Scottish life'. I know what he meant.
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