On Nationalism Alex Salmond yesterday alienated hundreds of thousands of No and undecided voters by describing the Yes campaign as ‘Team Scotland’. When I first heard this, I was furious. Now I’m almost glad he did so, and not only for the chance it gave Better Together to issue a rare piece of good campaign material, inviting Lynsey Sharp, a No-voting medallist from Team Scotland at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, to ask what team she belonged to now. More than that, I appreciate the energy he’s given to the No campaign by motivating a huge number of people who had remained silent to speak up. Playing to the Yes-voting base like that is not sensible in a close campaign, and even some of that base was quick to distance itself from those comments (thank you, Hazel, for being so reasonable in that respect). Salmond’s comments yesterday were of greater significance as they represented the slipping of Salmond’s and Scottish nationalism’s mask, the one that presents a friendly, civic façade. Scottish Nationalism, we’re told, is based on a shared political identity north of the border, rather than questions of ethnic identity, the latter being pretty widely agreed upon as a bad thing, which has in the past provided the political basis for stomach-turning atrocity. It’s unsurprising that the SNP and the Yes Campaign would need and want to distance itself from a political ideology described by Albert Einstein as ‘an infantile disease’ and ‘the measles of mankind’; by Charles de Gaulle as ‘when hate for people other than your own comes first’; by George Orwell as ‘power hunger tempered by self-deception’; by Noam Chomsky as ‘[having] a way of oppressing others’; and by the comedian Dylan Moran as ‘[not getting] people anywhere except near a pile of dead bodies’. The list could go on and on. The basis for the claim of a shared political identity is questionable enough. From consistently conservative regions of the Scottish borders, to the Orkneys and Shetlands, which recently threatened to exercise their own right to self-determination to remain in the UK or pursue their own independence (taking their large geographic share of oil with them) in the event of a Yes vote, there is no political belief that truly unites everyone north of Gretna. Nicola Sturgeon’s curt dismissal of this latter proposal on the basis that the Orkneys and Shetlands are ‘not a nation’ should lead the right-thinking voter to examine the narrative of nationalism based on the expression of shared, distinct political identity still more closely. Then there’s the oft-raised question: doesn’t a worker in Glasgow share an identity in a more accurate sense with a worker in Liverpool, or Newcastle, or Leeds, or even London, than he does with a farmer in the Borders, a lawyer in Edinburgh, or a crofter in the Highlands or Islands? What is it about living north of a notional border on this island that means we should share a political identity? And even if we do on the whole share a distinct political identity from the rest of the UK, which social attitude studies show we do barely if at all, why is independence needed to express this? Doesn’t the devolution of substantial powers, with more to come under the Scotland Act 2012, and still more promised following a No vote, allow us to express that distinct political identity if we so wish? The Yes campaign’s repeated assertions of the pressing need to legislate in areas over which it already has exclusive competence (such as childcare and the NHS) ring rather hollow as arguments in favour of taking the radical step of declaring complete independence. I oppose Scottish nationalism for the same reason I oppose UKIP’s recent independence-from-Europe campaign: the small-mindedness of it. The world is getting smaller, and looking for independence – from Europe or from the UK – is swimming directly against the tide of progress. This is a view my Yes-voting friends have, unsurprisingly, been quick to seek to rubbish. But let’s play Yes Scotland and UKIP bingo. Which of these anonymised statements comes from the Yes Scotland website and which from UKIP’s? ‘[] believes in [] becoming a democratic, self-governing country once again.’ ‘At its most basic, X is the ability to take our own decisions, in the same way as other countries do.’ ‘The big difference will be that []’s future will be in our own hands. Instead of only deciding some issues here in [], [] will allow us to take decisions on all the major issues.’ ‘A vote for [] is a vote to [...] recover power over our national life.’ ‘We believe that [] is good enough to be an independent nation, trading and building harmonious relations with the rest of the world.’ ‘[] could [...] play our part in creating a more peaceful and stable world’ ‘…we believe there is so much to be proud about [] and the contribution it has made to the world’ * These are the same attacks directed at a different enemy, and I disapprove of them for the same reason. They both represent a desire to turn our backs on unions created to foster peace and prosperity through integration and co-operation. They both rest on the parochial assumption that these goals and others are better served by acting only in narrowly-defined local interests rather than recognising that the very real benefits that come with solidarity and the pooling of resources (and, yes, the pooling of sovereignty). UKIP fails to recognise the benefits to the UK of having a voice in the world’s largest economy and consumer market; the Yes campaign fails to recognise the benefits to Scots of having a voice in a G8 country with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council (and so on). In either case, the whole speaks louder than the sum of its parts. It is not just me who has identified the Yes campaign’s policies as running contrary to the values of the European Union. Earlier this week, Joseph HH Weiler, one of the most learned EU scholars on the planet, described ‘a polity such as an independent Scotland predicated on a regressive and outmoded nationalist ethos which apparently cannot stomach the discipline of a multinational nation’. Weiler sees nothing setting apart the allegedly-progressive nationalism of Yes Scotland and the ‘bad nationalism’ of the past. And this brings me back to Salmond’s comments yesterday. With his references to ‘Team Scotland’, he sought to set Scots apart not on the basis of their politics but on the basis of an ethnic identity that most, thankfully, consider wholly removed from that politics. He appropriated an identity so many people wear with patriotic pride in their culture and history in support of a political cause that less than half of those people who consider themselves Scots believe in. Do these arguments mean there is never any room for independence movements or the splitting of states? Of course not: history is littered with necessary and positive examples. The difference is that these movements are usually rooted in political repression or oppression, often perpetrated on the basis of contrasting ethnic identities of oppressors and oppressed. But Scotland is not denied freedom to express a national identity, as the people of Ireland were when it was part of the UK. Scots are fairly represented in the national legislature of the UK and often occupy leading positions in government. Scots express their will directly, through their own parliament and local governments. And Scots were not the victims of colonialism, but its architects and beneficiaries. As Weiler put it, ‘Scotland is not Chechnya’. And it’s not Ireland or Australia or South Sudan or India either. Salmond’s rhetoric is polarising and will appeal only to those whose identity is Scottish and Scottish alone. It denies the value of what the Canadian politician Michael Igantieff described as: ‘multi-ethnic, multinational, multi-confessional experiments in democratic freedom’ and seeks to destroy the ‘shared identities that people like [Ignatieff] carry in their souls’. But it is the true foundation of nationalism, and it is a terribly frightening thing. Alex Salmond’s mask is slipping, and his ugly, populist, ethnic nationalism is peeking through. Let’s learn from this rare PR gaffe from a very effective politician, and run from the reality it reveals. A Yes vote is a nationalist vote and a nationalist vote is small-minded and dangerous, no matter what the SNP or the Yes campaign tell you. *UKIP, Yes, Yes, UKIP, UKIP, Yes, UKIP.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 15:08:48 +0000
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