Painless politics in Scotland
Richard West
Last week's Commons debate on devolution caused even more boredom in Scotland than it did in Westminster, where the Government's tenure of office now seems to depend on the Scottish vote. There were indeed a few snarls in the Labour Party between those who want more and those who Want less devolution. But those who want Independence or virtual independence, the Scottish Nationalist Party and the Scottish Labour Party, are no longer much interested in attempts to placate them by English politicians. Things are going their way, they believe; and they expect to get their way soon, if not at the next general election. This confidence of the separatists (a term embracing supporters of Home Rule as well as the out-and-out Nationalists) has in turn greatly depressed the two major British parties. One Scottish Tory MP, who sits for an English constituency, told me recently that the party would soon have not one single seat in Scotland. The argument over a separate Scotland has been carried on in so many TV programmes and newspaper articles that we may be excused for thinking that it has 1°eell going on for ever. In fact it is less than ten years since the separatists have been taken seriously, compared to nearly 300 Years of the Union. It is 231 years since tinnnie Prince Charlie led the last Scottish revolt, which was not really a bid for independence but a bid to impose Stuart rule Over all Britain and Ireland.
From 1745 until the late 1960s, the idea n.f. independence for Scotland was treated "Ply as comical. The separatists that one Met even ten years ago were usually middleclass cranks: a retired New Zealand whole Sale returned to take up the cause of Ills evicted crofter ancestors; a kilted and querulous schoolma'am claiming the gift of second sight; a sour Edinburgh academic no had not been given a chair at an ..?118lish university. Now that small and rttY band has become a threatening army. All changed, changed utterly; a terrible something-or-other is born. But why, and whY now after 250 years of fairly harInonious union ? This question is more imPortant and interesting than the question of What form independence would take. t, .There have, of course, been a few specific nIngs that contributed to a separatist moveem. The discovery of oil off Britain and Ireland has aroused the greed of politicians and businessmen and could lead to further sseParatist movements. If Shetland can ,clueeze £7 million out of the oil men (for a r2"Dt!lation of 20,000) why should not Ross and Cromarty or the city of 'Aberdeen grant themselves independence,
until Scotland was split into midget nations like Brunei or the Gulf States of Arabia?
But the question remains: Why has the Scottish separatist movement sprung up now ? [would suggest that an answer might be found by looking over the seas to Northern Ireland. The present hostilities there started in 1968, a year marked by turbulent crowd politics all over the world, in the United States over the Vietnam war, in Prague over liberalisation, in Paris over student grievances, and in London over the need to ape the example of Paris. The civil rights movement in Northern Ireland was in part an extension to this old-fashioned backwater of the prevailing spirit of agitation, or activism as it was called. The longterm result for the people of Northern Ireland was barbarism, but for the activists, until about 1972, there was fun revolution and much publicity in the media. It has also meant that the leading Ulster politicians, who would otherwise not have have been heard of, now command and expect attention from TV and the press comparable to that accorded to foreign heads of state.
Scottish politicians and publicists watched the events in Ulster with great excitement, not to say envy. This revival of Irish Celtic nationalism and Protestant Orange nationalism offered a heady example of how to enliven the dreary struggle in Britain between the parties of left and right. Scotland itself had long been divided between the Protestants of the eastern lowlands and the Catholics, most of them Irish by origin, who predominate on the Clyde. The battles that used to take place between Celtic and Rangers football supporters were almost as savage as those in Belfast itself. Paradoxically the events of 1968 in Northern Ireland have not revived sectarian feeling in Scotland. The old hatreds are still on the decline, thanks largely to the break-up of Glasgow's sectarian ghettoes and their dispersal to new towns and housing estates. Although the SNP gets more support from the Protestants and even includes some anti-Papist bigots, many Catholics of Irish descent seem willing to join in a new Scottish nationalism.
Scottish separatist politics, unlike the struggle in Northern Ireland, are painless and fun. Some personal friends of vaguely Scottish extraction whom I have known for years in Manchester and London, have found second youth in the excitement of present-day Edinburgh. It would be unfair to call them 'fun devolutionaries' because the atmosphere of Scotland these days is really exhilarating, especially coming from sad, jaded London. With emigration from England to Australia and even South Africa now running at double last year's rate, it is hardly surprising that many Scottish and Welsh people should look for a simpler way of escaping the rule of our Westminster government. Separatism is emigration without the bother of travelling. I really believe that the main inspiration of Scottish and Welsh, perhaps even Northern Irish nationalism, is simply disgust with the society created over the last twenty years by politicians in Westminster. It comes from a vague and probably false hope that independent Scotland, Wales and Ulster will somehow be less like the United Kingdom and more like South Africa and Australia.
Then why, the letters to newspapers ask, can the English themselves not have their own nationalist movement ? I would suggest that they already do, although it finds expression in ways that most of us find unsavoury. Anti-Irish and anti-coloured feelings are stronger in England than in other parts of the island, largely because England has so far received all the IRA bomb outrages and most of the two million coloured immigrants. This has happened during a period when the English were already depressed by the loss of world reputation, by the decline in the economy, inflation, lack of incentive to work, crime, envy and general purposelessness. Even the racist rhetoric of the National Front is couched in terms of a sour and bombastic patriotism. The National Front's racist propaganda, like that of the National Socialists in the Weimar Republic, may well be a means of expressing frustration and anger that come from loss of national pride.
This is not to say that the SNP are racists or fascists, although they have been called that by many Scottish socialists. Certainly they have attracted many right-wing nuts of the kind that in England would join the National Front. Perhaps if the coloured community in Scotland was bigger, the SNP would attempt to exploit white anxiety. But the SNP are not very strong on matters of ideology such as an immigration policy.
There are reasons to think that a Scotland with devolution, home rule or independence will not differ markedly from Scotland now. Already there are reports that the SNP are muscling in on the Labour Party's lucrative manner of local government. 'If you're a newsagent or a tobacconist', I was informed, 'you have to get a bus-stop site from the council. Already there's several SNP councillors who are taking the envelope full of banknotes and hearing the woman say, "That's your wee pieceIndependent Scotland will probably still have ill-managed, strike-bound, outdated shipyards and factories; the same rotting and filthy skyscraper council blocks; the same new towns smashed and terrorised by the young. Independence for Scotland, Wales and Ulster might leave us with four unhappy and ill-governed pseudo-states instead of the one unhappy and ill-governed United Kingdom.
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