Scottish Nationalism and America

Scotland's independence is a decision for the Scottish people. Something to be decided through a peaceful referendum, if the desire is for one, once a generation. If Scotland decide to go their own way then I certainly wish them well enough.

However, amiable separation is not what many of this movement want, at all. No, we live in a time of identity politics and fashionable victimhood and they will not be happy unless they can frame their independence as "freedom"; as righteously throwing off the yoke of their colonial oppressor.

Scotland, though the smaller member of a union that has at times (though certainly not in all ways) struggled to have its voice heard next to a London-based English establishment, is no colony of England. A basic reading of history will tell you about the Darien Scheme, Scotland's failed attempt to establish a slave colony which bankrupted the country and led to the Act of Union. Scotland were fully complicit in the British Empire: at one point, a third of Caribbean slave plantations were run by Scots, Scots responsible for the British East India Company and kicking off the Chinese Opium wars, Canadian Scot who established Canada's Indian Residential schools, to choose just a few examples.

One of the points I'm going to keep coming back to in this blog is that of collective responsibility for the crimes of your ancestors. Modern Scottish people may quite rightly point out that their own forefathers were impoverished, exploited, they never went anywhere or colonised anyone. They are absolutely correct. However, this does not seem to apply to the English working class who, despite their own poverty and exploitation during Empire days are constantly lumped in with the ruling class to the point where English is synonymous with evil imperialist.

Scotland has no such international image. Theirs is romantic, brave, underdog, Braveheart, tough kilted highlanders. Non-British people do not even question the idea that the Scots are a colonised people, that England is their oppressor. Whichever far fetched story is told about what the English did to them will automatically be believed. And this (with the exception of one Australian film maker) is largely thanks to America and Canada.

You'll find a lot of Scots rolling their eyes in embarrassment at all of those Americans (and Canadians) who think they're Scottish, with their ridiculous, romanticised, theme park mystical Celtic rubbish, but for all of that, their attitude has been essential to the Nationalist cause and I think they know full well that they have capitalised on it. The world believes the oppressed, colonised Scotland fantasy because North Americans believe in it, do not question it, do not read a single academic history book that might correct them. And they do this because they want to escape from the racial politics of their own country, where they are the whites, the privileged, the descendants of the slave owners. If they can look across the Atlantic into a mythic past and find a romantic victim tribe for themselves to belong to, well, then that's much easier than confronting their own difficult politics. And what is a noble, oppressed tribe without an oppressive "other" to set themselves up against? That would be those evil English, who are also romanticised into a posh, effete, upperclass boogeyman. The English poor and working class do not exist in the American imagination, except for the odd chimney sweep and prostitute in the background of Victorian hollywood movies, and so are erased, as ever.

Modern Scotland's problems with economic inequality are not the fault of monolithic "England" but are primarily rooted in class and deindustrialisation. There's nothing going on in Glasgow that you don't see in Sunderland or the struggling parts of England that receive less funding than Scotland. Immigration is another area where Scotnats love to act morally superior, but this is something Scotland has experienced to a far smaller degree than England, and despite that, social attitude surveys don't show a whole lot of difference in opinion between the two.

We are in a post-truth world, as we keep being told, and I suppose that this is what it means. The historical experiences and current situation of most English people doesn't really matter and you can yell facts at people until they're blue in the face. Identity and image is what matters, and much of the world is deeply emotionally invested in the idea that Scotland is the brave underdog and the English, all of us, poor, northern, homeless, failed by education, targeted by rape gangs, are evil Imperialist scum. If we complain, we have no sense of humour, we have a chip on our shoulder, while our northern neighbour, in many ways not so different to us at all, gets fawned over and loved, the less pleasant parts of their own history swept under the carpet.

And they still somehow get away with playing the underdog.

This myth does the rich histories both of our complex countries a serious disservice.