Things Written Randomly in Doubt Page 17

  Colley does reveal one important aspect of the British state and touches on another concerning the circularity of the “British” nations. The British state has failed spectacularly to retain its huge empire, because it never got to grips with institutionalising it. Born as a mercantile empire, Greater Britain could never transform its institutions into something more inclusive. It wanted to do business, but it didn’t want to be changed in the process. Even the Roman Empire, not remembered for its charity, extended citizenship to all its provinces in 212 ad through the Edict of Caracalla, who may have done this to increase taxation. Roman historians do not paint a pretty picture of Caracalla, and as far as I know, no one has attempted to revise it. However, Caracalla, who was of East Mediterranean (Syrian and Punic) origins and brought up in Gaul, appears to have never returned to Rome or Italy after killing his brother and securing the imperial throne for himself, and ruled the empire from the provinces. He may have seen the move as shifting the political axis away from its traditional centre.

  Britain failed to understand the logic of empire, but should have learned because it had paid a high price for ignoring the American demand for “No taxation without representation”. Even the islanders on Montserrat were prevented from visiting the “Mother Country” in a moment of crisis, while islanders nearby under French or Dutch rule are part of the metropolitan state with representatives in Paris and Amsterdam, and the rights of members of the European Union – including the right to live in Britain denied to subjects of the British crown on islands like Montserrat. The British like to think of themselves as the good imperialists. This claim is highly debatable, but they were certainly the most ungracious and have remained so, even now the empire has been reduced to a few rocks sticking out of the water. Colley tells us of “a succession of schemes, devised and discussed from the later nineteenth century to at least the 1950s, ‘to federate the Empire by a great act of political reconstruction’.” Needless to say, nothing was done, as with the reform of the second chamber (still not complete) and home rule for Ireland, Scotland and Wales (still not complete in the case of the last two). Like the American empire today and the Soviet Union up until its demise, it was undermined by a monumental inability to act and to adapt, motivated by the certainty that what had worked in the past would always work in the future. The security of power is not a good counsellor. It is stunning that people believe in the absolute stability of such states right up to the moment in which they collapse. Afterwards they shrug and say they saw it coming. As I say, ideas and their lesser companions, perceptions, are as hard as steel but more brittle.

  The other point that Colley touches on and which is quite significant in this independence debate is the triangular relationship between the nations of Britain and Ireland. Once the triangle was made up of England, Scotland and Ireland, and now that Ireland – or at least the part of it called the Republic of Ireland – has achieved not only complete independence but also a strong identity within the European Union, it has been replaced by another triangle – that of England, Scotland and Wales. What happens on 18 September will not affect Ireland, but will affect England and Wales, and affect them in different ways. If the British establishment learned from history, it would respond to a Yes vote in Scotland by granting a devolved parliament with real powers in Wales. But it won’t. A “yes” vote may help the English to rediscover their radical past and reject the narrative of the British establishment. This outcome is worthy of further examination.

  In the mid seventeenth century, an English republican army invaded Scotland and Ireland, and different Scottish armies invaded England (one to help parliament overthrow Charles I and later one to restore his son to the English throne) and Ireland to support the covenanting cause of fellow Calvinists. A small Irish Catholic army invaded Scotland to support an army of Highland irregulars mainly made up of moderate episcopalian protestants of the kind that would later be called non-jurists, in a brutal clan war with vague religious overtones. This highly successful ragtag army eventually came under the leadership of Montrose, but then as such armies do, it demobilised to take booty home and left him to his fate. Ireland and Scotland fought the last of Europe’s bloody religious wars, but England fought the first European revolution and within its ranks all the ideas of modernity were at least imagined and argued for, even if they never got too close to the centre of power – the closest being the Putney debates.

  Whatever the brutality of Cromwellian armies in Ireland and Scotland, the English changed politics forever, not only in Britain and Ireland but also across Europe. If Winstanley or Lilburne had been French, there would be central squares named after them. As it is, hardly any of their fellow countrymen have heard their names. Hobbes, Locke and Milton were giants of that century, but most English only remember that an apple was supposed to have fallen on Newton’s head. England, which was perhaps the most egalitarian of nations, became as a result of the failure of its Revolution the least egalitarian. Like all revolutions, England’s was a traumatic affair, leading to widespread economic disruption and poverty that exhausted the nation. When the Restoration occurred, the identity of the nation turned against its egalitarian past that went back at least as far as Wycliffe. In the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century English radicalism would return again. Nations change from century to century and from generation to generation. Every political argument has to be fought and won or lost again and again.

  As in Scandinavia and the Iberian Peninsula, this island of Britain is made up of closely linked nations, whose joint histories include rivalries and antagonisms as well as shared experiences and enterprises, although those two peninsulas were never as divided in their political cultures as Scotland and England are today. Perhaps in the new triangle, Scotland could become the radical force, but not in the bellicose way of the mid seventeenth century – quite the opposite, the new radicalism will have to be built on non-violence, starting by dismantling that huge arsenal of nuclear weapons the British state felt appropriate to locate twenty-five miles from Glasgow and the largest conurbation in Scotland. The English left understands Scotland’s difficulties but argues that they need Scottish support. This argument is alluring, but false. No post-war election result would have been changed by the Scottish vote, and that is why the Scottish voice is never heard. Scotland would be much more useful to the English left if it set the example of how social rights can be defended in the modern world. Scottish independence would hopefully also release the English establishment from its terrible yearning to maintain the role of a great power, even if it breaks the bank. Scotland will not get involved in future illegal wars, and England might well become more reluctant to do so. The only way that the English-Scottish border would cease to be an open one, as is the case in most of Europe and indeed in Ireland, and become subject to passport controls as the media constantly speculate, would be if England decided to leave the European Union. This is another disturbing possibility, but Scottish independence might discourage English withdrawal. Scottish independence would force England to perceive itself in a different way. This may lead to increased xenophobia, but it is just as likely or more likely that it would lead to a revival of post-war values. If England or a federated state of England and Wales would at last engage with Europe, it could still be a major player, and not the haughty, reticent and ineffectual member the British state is today. Ultimately, Scotland, England and Wales could become equal states within another union, a properly federated Europe-wide one with a more democratic structure than the current EU. Scotland, England and Wales would often have shared interests within the EU and could speak with one voice – a voice in which the interests of Scotland and Wales would finally be properly represented.

  As has already been hinted and only noticed by a few commentators down in England, the independence referendum is more about social rights than it is about nation. It is not about the Scots being better than the English. I have given an example of greatness in English history, and in the i
mmediate post-war period England was if anything to the left of Scotland, excepting some of Scotland’s most radical industrial centres. In the fifties Scotland had a Tory majority and the Labour Party was strong in large parts of southern England. If we go further back to 1922, we find that two Communist candidates were elected to Westminster, one in Motherwell and one in Battersea. The one in Battersea was an Indian, Shapurji Dorabji Saklatvala, and in both cases the Communist had been endorsed by the Labour Party. They both lost their seats in 1923, but in 1924 Saklatvala tried again without a Labour endorsement and in the wake of the fraudulent Zinoviev letter which lost Labour forty-two seats, and he won by a small majority, the only Communist candidate to do so. During the 1926 General Strike, he was arrested on the charge of sedition and jailed for two months. He kept his seat until 1929. We could go further back to the nineteenth century and the Welshman Robert Owen’s social experiments at New Lanark or back to the late eighteenth century and find considerable parallels between the two countries: both deep into the imperialist reality of slavery and plunder, both at the centre of radical ideas swirling around the Atlantic, both curious and driven sometimes by humanity, sometimes by greed, but more or less on the same political and cultural cycle.2 This brings us to perhaps the most important point in this essay: Scottish independence could be extremely important if it is successful now. If independence loses on 18 September, the question may very well return in another referendum in twenty years or so, but the moment will be lost. The left should be supporting Scottish independence not only in England, but across Europe, because Scotland now has the will and the vision to create not revolutionary but radical change. There is always a turning point, and Scotland could be it. In spite of the political tribalism, there is a consensus across all the Scottish parties, or at least their memberships, that hard-won social rights need to be defended or restored. It is unlikely that this determination will survive for twenty years within the British state. The SNP decided on a lengthy run-up to this referendum and they did this, I think, so that the flood of scare stories released by the British state and its obedient media would gradually become less effective and finally appear a little ridiculous. Scotland, alone amongst the nations, is incapable of survival, according to our weekly dose of negativity from a propaganda campaign that named itself “Project Fear”, and a more appropriate label could not have been invented by supporters of independence. Scotland now has a real chance of inventing something new, which for want of a better name we could call a polity rather than a nation, at least in the traditional nineteenth-century meaning of the term.

  Traditional nationalism required all its citizens to believe that they are the same, even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. When I worked in Florence, I had for a time a colleague who came from the town of Ururi in the south where they speak Albanian. Occasionally her husband would ring her and they would converse in their own language. “Che roba!” another colleague would say and raise his eyes to the ceiling to express the outrageousness of this situation. Albanian in Italy! Before modern nationalism, this would not have been important: who cared what the peasants or a few townspeople spoke? With the spread of elements of democracy, it started to matter what people thought, and if they were exchanging ideas in Albanian or Welsh, how would the rulers know what was going on? Many of these linguistic islands are disappearing, but border areas are still interesting places for sociolinguists to visit. Slavia, a Slovenian-speaking area that has been part of Western Europe since the time of Charlemagne, is, unlike other ones in Italy, a place where language and national identity are not connected. A language campaigner in that area told me that in the mountains when he was talking in Slovenian to the peasants, they would tell him without a trace of irony that they were Italians and not Slovenians. Of course they were Italians in the sense that they carried Italian passports and could presumably also speak Italian, but they also felt Italian. Not so when I visited a town in Slovenia close to the border with Austria. Here the local population spoke German or whatever Austrian dialect they speak in that area. It was one of the strangest places I have ever visited. The entire population appeared to get up in the morning with the express purpose of being as Austrian as it is possible to be Austrian, which means they weren’t very Austrian at all. They all wore those Austrian hats with a feather to the very last man. They were all engaged in the serious business of downing huge quantities of beer, as though this was their occupation along with being very Austrian. I have never seen so much bottom-pinching, which the waitresses suffered with contempt but also resignation. I have been to Austria proper and it is very different. A little austere perhaps, but the people dress differently from each other, as they are not employed in the business of being as Austrian as possible. There I felt as though I was in the real world, while in the Slovenian Austrian town I felt that I was at some tedious theatrical event, which gave the impression of going on forever.

  Across the border there are areas that until very recent times were Slovenian-speaking. Unfortunately the modern national state has done there what such states often do: it has eliminated the “alien” language, linguistically dividing parents from their children. It is a dismal story that has been repeated all around Europe and no doubt the world, and it is less amusing than the excessive, self-conscious Austrianism in Slovenia. The likeable thing about liberal regimes is that they allow people to be daft. Better that than everyone the same. Better to allow a little tattiness. Bad taste should have its place.

  If there’s a country that wishes to shed its stereotype, it is Scotland. There is the invention of tradition and there is the invention of invented traditions. It’s true that tartan was standardised and identified with clans on the basis of no historical evidence at all. That was an invention. But it wasn’t invented out of nothing. Behind the tat, there is something well worth saving, principally Scotland’s languages and its musical tradition. But the revival of Scottish culture does not have to be inward-looking. In fact it cannot be revived without opening itself to immigration and new ideas. Like all cultures, Scottish culture has developed through foreign influences, and to develop further – because revival is not repetition but renewal through change – Scotland should be open to a process that will take it in a direction about which none of us can be certain. But change will come, so better that it is controlled by the whole of its community, including those who have just joined it. If you breathe the air, you belong. And if you don’t breathe that air any more, then you don’t belong at least until you return. That is the essence of a polity: it is community not based on ethnicity or even language and culture; it is a community based on residency.

  I lived in Italy for several years in the seventies and eighties. I was well-acquainted with its politics at the time, while my knowledge of British politics became a little vague. Why should I have had a vote in general elections in a country I was no longer fully acquainted with, and yet not be able to vote in the election of the government that regulated my life and to which I paid my taxes? Surely in this world of increasing geographical mobility we need to move past the idea that nationality is based on who our parents were or where we were born and not who we are now. This concept of civic nationalism, as it is sometimes called, is not mine and has been around in Scotland for some time. It is its most important contribution to the debate on nationalism.

  Scotland, however, is not a monolith. It has its shares of xenophobia and intolerance, no doubt. It may be that at the moment it is on the wane, and that is why this moment is crucial. Nations change dramatically from one generation to another. The forces arrayed in England are similar, including the south of England, but the percentages are different. If Scotland is successful with its new economic plan based on openness and immigration, the pride it takes in that may protect the ethos on which success was built. Equally and perhaps particularly if success is spectacular, Scotland may change so dramatically that it becomes smug and sealed off from the world. Switzerland, the first country to implement
democracy rather than just speculate on its possibility (Britain arriving late with universal manhood suffrage – 1918 – and even later with universal suffrage – 1928), was once a country of poverty and emigration, but is now considered the antonomasia for accumulated wealth – aloof, trapped in its self-perception and distrustful of the foreigner. Success brings its own problems.

  The Better Together campaign hit on the idea of Project Fear because they think they can win without conceding anything and feel that only those who propose change have to predict the future, but the future cannot be predicted accurately by anyone. In any event there are a wide range of scenarios, not just yes and no. If either “yes” or “no” wins by a few thousand or even ten of thousands of votes, there will be a need for compromise. If the “no” wins by a large margin, Scotland will suffer terribly. Devolved government may be in danger, and what little industry is left in Scotland may go. Britain is in a greater economic crisis than it knows, and the current government is exacerbating it by using the crisis to push through a full-scale dismemberment of all the social gains of the post-war era. There are many uncertainties if the country votes “yes”, but there are at least as many if the country votes “no”.