Britishness is too important. Most of the time during my four-week journey through the Hebrides I have been listening to other people’s views on the independence referendum, but I was caught up sharp when a few days ago on Lewis someone asked me what I thought. So I worked out four key conclusions.
The first is obvious: This is a Scottish decision. The English do not have a role beyond interested observer. I disagree with British Prime Minister David Cameron’s injunction to love-bomb the Scots or David Bowie’s plea for them to “stay with us”. The wonderful Scottish writer John Burnside, in his book I Put a Spell on You, makes an apt comment that the hit song ‘Don’t leave me this way’ is a pathetically ignominious response to a departing lover. He was not talking about the referendum, but the same applies to all relationships. They must want to stay.
So as a chronic Scotophile, I watch and listen, but feel I have no role. Nor do I feel resentful. I do not share the view of one English friend who complained that half a million Glaswegians could end up making a decision about Britain in which he had no say. Tough. This referendum is about Scotland. If the idea of Britain is anything, it is that it is a voluntary union and it is no bad thing for that choice to be remade by a new generation.
The second conclusion is that on balance, if I was a Scot, I would probably be a “yes” voter, recognising the rather shabby record of British governments in addressing Scotland’s dramatic history over the last two centuries — rapid urbanisation, high emigration and traumatic, rapid de-industrialisation. There is a keen awareness that the English have made a practice of willed indifference to the countries and cultures they have dominated across the globe; how did I get through 15 years of studying history in three schools and two universities without ever addressing Scotland?
Mixed in with this would be a desire for a new kind of political conversation. It would be, I admit, a rather desperate response, born out of despair with Westminster rather than a confidence that Edinburgh would deliver.
However, I am not a Scot and I do not have a vote and that is why my third conclusion is that I desperately hope that Scotland rejects independence (but not so decisively that it fails to shake up the moribund political dispensation so bound up with London and the south-east). The United Kingdom would very much be a poorer place, in every sense of the word, without Scotland. In 1830, the Celtic seaboard nations made up nearly 40 per cent of the UK; that dropped throughout the 19th century due to the Irish famine and emigration. In the 20th century, the decline accelerated with Irish independence and continued Scottish emigration and English population growth so that it is now below 10 per cent. If Scotland went independent, it would be tiny. This would destroy a vital part of what makes these island nations feel like home.
The Celtic Atlantic seaboard has been powerfully creative and outward orientated, the crucial counterbalance to English caution, reserve and desire for privacy. This has rarely been acknowledged; initially because of a persistent strain of Anglo-Saxon racism, which has now morphed into a south-east metropolitan self-absorption. The historian Christopher Harvie lays this out brilliantly in his book, A Floating Commonwealth. The danger is that without a strong Celtic component, England becomes self-absorbed and insular. The ever-present temptation in Englishness is a retreat into a nostalgia about the pastoral English ideal of soporific village greens and the “old maids cycling to church in the mist” nonsense.
The Celtic nations — Ireland, Wales and Scotland — also have a strong commitment to social justice derived from different communitarian traditions, often incubated in the poverty of this coastal seaboard, that has been vital to Britain’s political culture. It is no accident that the Labour party’s history has been bound up with Wales and Scotland. These are countries with far stronger egalitarian traditions nurtured in their distinctive Christian traditions (Methodism and Presbyterianism) than England, where status and rank have always been minutely marked out. The possible loss of this fills me with gloom. Yes, supporters have no patience with such laments; they insist it is time England developed a homegrown politics of social justice and egalitarianism and stopped relying on Celtic imports. They say that an independent Scotland could stimulate English politics. I can only see it as a profound trauma, which would last at least a couple of generations and could have some very ugly manifestations.
The final conclusion is that whatever else one says about Britishness, it has been useful. It is by definition a plural identity; it is multi-ethnic and that has offered a capaciousness for mass immigration in the 20th century. Black British, Asian British, British Muslim — these identities have emerged in the last 60 years and are still being worked out.
Being British is always part of a dual identity. That does not deny that Britain has a curious hollowness to it — its traditions of empire, war and monarchy are all problematic — and successive politicians’ attempts to redefine it have been lamentable. “British values” has unfortunately often ended up sounding like an impertinent appropriation of universal human values such as fairness, tolerance and the like.
Travelling in Scotland in the summer of 2014, I only ever feel I am seen as English; everywhere else I define myself as British. British best accounts for my ancestry of Irish, Scottish, Jewish and English. That identity is important to me and it hangs in the balance and yet the experience of being impotent in a conversation which matters personally — a common experience to many nations at different times in their histories — is profoundly uncomfortable.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
