Britain’s splitting headache
NINE days ago, Scottish drawing rooms echoed with the glorious,
phlegm-sodden sounds of Robert Burns poems, recited loudly and at
length.
Burns Night takes place every year on January 25, the presumed
birthday of the adored Scottish poet. A haggis supper is optional,
but recitation of Burns’ most famous poem, the feisty Address to
a Haggis, is not.
In it, he hails the “great chieftain of the pudding race”, which
is sneered at by the anglicised upper class but keeps the Scot
strong: “The trembling earth resounds his tread.”
Burns died in 1796, but his patriotic poem has more resonance
than ever. Despite last year celebrating 300 years of its union
with England, Scotland, along with parts of Wales and Northern
Ireland, is restless.
The Scottish National Party, whose goal is Scottish
independence, has won government for the first time ever, and there
is talk of a referendum on the subject. Wales, which occupies a
place in the English heart similar to that of Tasmania in
Australia, also has its own independence movement. And despite a
recent power-sharing agreement, the voices of nationalism in
Northern Ireland are stronger than ever. Which leaves a very lonely
England looking vulnerable as the last vestiges of its old empire
are threatened.
“The European Union means people are becoming aware of the fact
that Europe consists in large part of very small countries,” says
Alasdair Allan, a Scottish National Party MP in the Scottish
Parliament.
“Scotland is an ancient country, with the institutions of an
independent one. People are beginning to ask, ‘Why are we not a
properly independent country?”‘
Since 1999, Scotland has had its own parliament, with dominion
over education, health care, police and justice but, crucially, no
revenue-raising or foreign policy powers.
Traditionally, Labour has enjoyed strong support north of
Hadrian’s Wall, but its supremacy was overturned last year when the
SNP won minority government (with 47 seats out of 129, compared
with 46 for Labour) in the Scottish elections. The shock was felt
in Westminster, where the Labour Prime Minister is a proud (and
famously dour) Scot.
The SNP win sent a strong message to England that the union of
the two countries, which has existed since the Act of Union was
signed in 1707, may not be the strongest of marriages. Since then,
there has been talk of divorce.
The change in government was partly a reaction against what many
Scots saw as the arrogance of the London-centric British Labour
Party. According to stereotype, Scots are brave-hearted warriors,
but the decision of Tony Blair’s government to take Britain to war
was enormously unpopular in Scotland.
As the Scottish First Minister, the head of Scottish government,
Alex Salmond put it: “(Blair) managed to illustrate why it’s
probably a good idea to decide whether your troops should go off to
war because if you don’t, some other idiot will.”
The Iraq war coincided with a resurgence in the sense of
Scottish identity, Allan says, and it’s not all kilts and
whisky-soaked Highland flings.
According to Professor David McCrone, co-director of the
Institute of Governance at the University of Edinburgh, Scottish
national pride has evolved.
“Britishness has withered away,” he says. “It’s not like we have
some sort of rabid ethnic ‘we-hate-England’ nationalism, but people
take pride in being open to immigrants in Scotland. In England,
they worry about keeping them out, whereas we seek to attract
immigrants.
“About 2% of the population is non-white. They are mostly
Pakistani immigrants. According to our research, they call
themselves Pakistani Scots or Muslim Scots. You find Sikhs wearing
kilts and all sorts of things.”
Thirty years ago, 65% of people in Scotland called themselves
“Scottish”. By 2005, this figure had leapt to 76%. In England, 41%
of people declare themselves “very proud of being British” but only
23% of Scots feel the same way.
“Virtually nobody would describe themselves as more British than
Scottish now,” Allan believes. “One of the factors is the
disappearance of one of the main bulwarks of Britain, which is
empire.
“When it entered the union in 1707, Scotland became part of an
empire with merchants and colonial governors, missionaries and
soldiers and all of that. That doesn’t exist any more.”
As is often the case with marriages that have soured, there are
also fights about money. In the past few months, there has been
feisty public debate about the fact that public spending is higher
per capita in Scotland than in the rest of Britain.
In the minds of some English, the miserly Scots are living large
off the munificence of England’s wealthy south-east. Some call
their northern neighbours “subsidy junkies”.
The National Health Service is also administered slightly
differently in Scotland, meaning that Scots get free prescriptions
and free personal nursing care for the elderly. The English get
neither, a fact that creates some resentment.
But both major British parties are keen to preserve the union.
On a recent trip to Scotland, the leader of the British
Conservative Opposition, David Cameron, lashed out against the ugly
stain of separatism seeping through the Union flag.
“The future of the union was looking more fragile more
threatened than at any time in recent history,” he
warned.
The British Labour Party cites more practical, chiefly economic
reasons for its opposition to Scottish separatism. But Scotland has
rich oil reserves in the North Sea, which the SNP says would ensure
its fiscal independence. If it has its way, there will be a
referendum on the independence question in 2010.
“It will be up to the people to decide,” Allan says.
But it’s not just the northern natives who are restive
England also faces insubordination from their western neighbours,
the Welsh. Normally the butt of jokes involving sheep and baritone
singers, the small but culturally distinct region is pushing
back.
In last year’s elections for the Welsh Assembly, Plaid Cymru,
the Party of Wales, won a record number of seats. It moved from
opposition to forming a coalition government with the Labour
Party.
Its stated aim is to “promote the constitutional advancement of
Wales with a view to attaining full national status for Wales
within the European Union”.
“The big parties are all very London-based and London-centric
and people are starting to see they don’t deliver to the people of
all corners of the UK,” says Meinir Jones, a spokeswoman for Plaid
Cymru. “That’s why the nationalists are now in power in Scotland
and Wales.”
During the 1960s, a group called the Free Wales Army waged a
bombing campaign to promote the cause of independence, but since
then the road to greater autonomy has been peaceful.
“We’re quite mellow and easygoing,” says Jones of her
countrymen. “People call us the land of the song. We like singing
and rugby. Our identity is based on culture more than politics,
very different to the Irish people.”
Ireland’s recent political history is famously bloody, but since
last May, the Nationalists and Unionists have shared power in
peace.
Ian Paisley, Ireland’s Democratic Unionist First Minister, and
his deputy, former IRA chief-of-staff Martin McGuinness, appear so
jolly in public appearances that one Ulster unionist dubbed them
the “chuckle brothers”.
But the nationalist cause, which has been alive in some form or
another since the time of Cromwell, is not about to fade out.
Last year, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said guardedly that the
Northern Ireland devolution experiment was “a work in
progress”.
“I’m minded of when someone was asked what they thought about
the French Revolution. They said it was too soon to tell.”
Posted
on
Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 12:04 am under