This Thursday, Scotland will have its long-awaited
referendum on whether to become an independent country. A week or so ago, one
single poll gave a tiny majority to those in favour – which has turned the
Scottish question from a matter of purely local interest to the leading issue
in British politics. For the moment.
The No Campaign, aka
Better
Together, has rightly taken a lot of stick for its abysmal campaign. Not
only has it given nobody in Scotland a better reason to stay in the UK than
the fear of
something worse – missing the point entirely that the Yes Campaign’s
principal appeal lies with the hope of something better.
Better Together’s hopelessness was funny until that poll
last weekend startled the powers behind the campaign out of their complacency.
The week just gone has seen, on the one hand the pitiful spectacle of the three
main party leaders crawling up to Scotland to tell them how important the Scots
are to Britain – after having treated the whole affair up to that point as
having all the interest to them of a parish council by election. Too little,
too late boys, although it was fun to see David Cameron talk about the “
effing
Tories”.
On the other hand, it has seen naked economic threats as
various businesses based in Scotland (Standard Life) or doing a lot of business
there (BP) have “come out against
independence”. As other people have pointed out, BP has no trouble doing
business in countries like Russia and Zimbabwe, so quite what they’re afraid of
happening in Scotland is unclear.
It’s depressing, isn’t it? The primary line of argument anyone
was able to think of to keep the UK going started off as “think of all the
things that could go wrong with your economy” and developed into “we will fuck
your economy up if you don’t do what suits us”.
Scotland’s case is not really helped when some nutjob SNP
types start calling for
BP to
be nationalised though. Nice one! That will bring the foreign investment
flooding in!
If I was the sort of person who was able to develop a
rational argument and see it through to a strong conclusion, I’d like to think
I could have gone on to write something like this piece by
Fintan
O’Toole in the Guardian. Unfortunately, I am not that focused. So I’ll link
to it instead and let you read it and be astonished at my perspicacity in
having brought it to your attention...
For many people in Scotland, this may well be a matter of
ethnic nationalism. Some of them may really hate “the English” and regard the
1707 Act of Union as colonisation.
For far more (I hope, at any rate), this is being seen as an
opportunity to take back a stake in politics from a distant, uninterested
Westminster. You don’t have to think Alex Salmond is any better than any of the
other leaders to believe that decisions that affect you, your family and your
friends should be made nearer to those people rather than further away.
That, I think, is what the
British
malaise about politics stems from – decisions that affect us are made far,
far away from us. Geographically if you live in Scotland, but in all sorts of
other respects as well.
It’s sharpened to an edge capable of cutting through only by the “national”
fault line in the case of Scotland. As O’Toole says:
The Scottish independence referendum poses a very good
question but suggests an inadequate answer. The question is: where does power
lie? This is not a marginal problem to pose in a 21st century democracy. It
cuts to the heart of a deep crisis in the relationship between people and
politics. But the answer implied on the ballot paper is a geographical one:
power lies in either London or Edinburgh. Most Scots – and most of the rest of
us – know that while this choice is far from meaningless, it also rather misses
the point.
Most people are still so bewitched by the 19th
century idea of the nation state that they can only imagine a group of people
wanting to govern themselves, in their own interests, if they form a “national”
group. Whether they acknowledge the legitimacy of that wish depends entirely on
how they feel about that group (see, oh, I don’t know...the entire history of
the 20th century, for example).
One of the few things I remember from my political theory
degree was a quote by a chap called Benedict Anderson, who called nationalities
“
imagined
communities”.
That in turn made me think about all the people bleating
last week about how their British identity was going to be harmed by the Scots
becoming independent.
If they want to imagine another community, surely that’s up to
them? And if it pains you so much, well, why not just carry on imagining that
they’re still in your imaginary
community? Are you still imaging the Irish in it too? Why don't we add some others? The Norwegians, perhaps. They're very tidy.
That’s the psycho-cultural bit taken care of. If the Scots
don’t feel like part of the same imagined community as us...well, that’s that
really isn’t it? You can’t force them to imagine themselves as part of the same
community as you.
SUBHEADING - It breaks up the text
But suppose they do still see themselves as British. Why
does that HAVE TO entail being
governed from Westminster under a single unitary state entity? It only does
when you start assuming in mystical qualities about “proper” communities and their
“natural” territories and (dare I say it) “god-given” rights.
The best reasons for Britain being governed by a single
government are military reasons. This is an island, and a whole island is easy
to defend. If someone else is in charge of part of the island, then you don’t
have the natural advantages of being an island.
Britain being invaded is unimaginable. England being invaded
with the connivance of a hostile Scotland is beyond unimaginable. We’re living
in the 21st century, FFS.
If anyone can tell me point out anything else that is ideally
organised on the precise level of “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland” (plus its various overseas territories) then I’d be
astonished.
Hence, large areas of policy are governed at the European
level – precisely because markets bigger than the UK are more profitable, a
trading bloc bigger than the UK has more international clout, standards in
goods and services that are heavily traded need to be common across areas
bigger than the UK etc etc.
But things should only be managed in bigger blocs, further
away from the people affected, when that is efficient.
That old EU chestnut “subsidiarity” should be the norm and
it should start at home. Power should be exercised as close to the people as
possible, and it should ONLY be moved upwards to more distant, larger
institutions when smaller bodies are clearly unable to do a good job.
I don’t think that nation states have a special privileged
position above supranational bodies and subnational bodies. They are not the
fount from while all authority flows upwards and downwards.
The idea that Britain will lose its seat at the top table
internationally without Scotland is equally ridiculous. First and foremost, I
believe that governments and states are there to promote the welfare of the
people who live in their jurisdictions – and so international clout is only a
means to
that end, nothing more.
National
prestige for its own sake is meaningless.
Secondly, are we still sitting at the top table? Or are we
on a little card table extension the USA has shoved onto the end to save our
embarrassment when we turned up uninvited?
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| The other Alex S |
Alexander
Solzhenitsyn pointed out that only defeat can really bring a country to terms
with itself –
never having recognised itself as having been defeated, Britain
has no sense of its real place in the world. If losing Scotland forces a
reassessment of Britain’s idiot pretensions and forces it to look at itself, so
much the better.
So, for all these reasons, I don’t think that Scotland being
“another country” is a big deal at all. The trains will still go there, 300,000
Scots will still live in London, money will continue to flow north and south,
and we’ll all feel the same about each other as we do now (ie general lack of
interest) - but they will be running their affairs and we will be running ours.
How does that
undermine anybody’s identity?
Whatever happens on Thursday – this whole process has opened
up the kind of thinking and reflection you don’t often see in this country. If
for no other reason, it will have done Britain some good because of that.
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