‘National’: it does exactly what it says on the tin, whatever Sturgeon says
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about what Nicola Sturgeon said to Elif Shafak about wanting to take the word “National” out of The Scottish National Party. This was back at the beginning of the Book Festival this year, that’s always a good place for a discussion about something important – and at a time when, because the rest of the UK often doesn’t have a great deal of political news to report, Festival discussions can become, quite often and rather wonderfully, the subject of widescale news.
She would quite like to remove that word, Nicola Sturgeon said, because it could give the wrong impression about what her party is all about – nationalism, the unpleasant connotations of the British National Party, that sort of thing – but that there it was, bang in the centre of her political persuasion, as it were, and nothing much she could do about it now.
Well, as I say, it’s wonderful the way the Book Festival focuses the mind and it’s got me mulling over that idea, that the word is there, and that Nicola Sturgeon would quite like to remove it at this point in her party’s history and . . . Really? You can just do that? And so, good for Elif Shafak, I am also thinking. For getting the issue of nationalism and politics and individual political will out into the air in the first place, to bring all these issues to the surface. Because, as one of our public intellectuals who herself was born in a country deeply troubled by the strife and dangers of nationalist thinking, and who writes about this in her fiction and non fiction alike, she is excellent – in her charming and beautifully articulate way – at coming out with the most important subjects for debate, and really pressing her line of enquiry while all the time making it seem as though such relevant and timely interrogation is the most relaxed and fun conversation one could be having. Being the very opposite of a politician , in other words.
So there they were, the intellectual and the politician, having this discussion at part of a Festival dedicated to the arts and culture and to expanding our horizons generally. And I really am thinking by now: what happened there? That Nicola Sturgeon has just said that though it would be quite convenient if it wasn’t there, still, not a great deal can be done about that awkward word “National” in her job description anyway. Because, I am asking myself, at this point, has language and nomenclature become so very irrelevant? That one can be so takeit or leave-it, as it were? Surely quite a lot of quite important stuff in this world is tied up with our description of it; that for most of us, even though the politicians would like to have us believe otherwise, words do matter, actually.
And, moreover, in this matter of the Scottish National Party and its name, isn’t it also the case that, though no-one is saying much about it, quite a lot has already been done about that same word in question, even so?
I mean, for starters, the whole Scottish National Party banner has become, relatively quickly, and seamlessly, turned into the more acceptable sounding SNP. Because what is ever – what could ever be? – controversial about an acronym? The whole point of acronyms is that they reduce words – often quite complicated words, or words with unpleasant or challenging sounding associations – into a collection of neutral-sounding letters that roll off the tongue and disappear into the air almost before you’ve said them. I know this because I work at a university and universities, alas, having been turned fully into business institutions, are just jam-packed with acronyms. It’s become an effective and bossy way of turning educators and lovely abstract and applied thinkers into bureaucrats . . . or that’s the intention, at least. For it’s always a good moment when the Doctor of Philosophy resists the trippety-trip of an HRC style appellation – vocabulary fashioned and fitted by the Higher Research Council – rolling off his or her tongue and states instead the full set of words with their dreadful anti-intellectual associations: “Quality Assurance”, with its slap-bang sound of the second-hand car dealership about it, for example, to describe the various shenanigans now associated with delivering a course of study; imagine saying that out loud instead of the nattily styled “QA” that makes the concept of having to justify what you do for a living sound so low maintenance and benign when in fact it’s anything but. So in this case we have the easy sound of SNP all wrapped up in its jolly yellow cloak and cheery call of Yes! Yes! Yes! And who’s to think, unless someone like Elif Shafak is around, that there might be something unpleasant lurking there within it? It’s only the letters SNP after all.
Yet the word National is there in the acronym, and it’s a big word, denoting associations with a particular place, an alignment with that place, first and foremost, and a privileging of that place over other places. Scottish National Party means that it is a party that puts Scotland first. That it’s not just The Scottish Party, which would also have ideas of Scotland first at its centre, but that ideas of nationalism are also inherent in its very make-up. It was there when the party was set up, in 1934, as a result of a merger between the National Party of Scotland – think about that – and The Scottish Party, and it was there when Alex Salmond started campaigning for a referendum that took full-throated expression in 2014 and had maintained a separatist agenda all through his leadership from 1990 onwards.
So it’s one thing for Nicola Sturgeon to say to Elik Shafak at the Book Festival that, oh, well, she could happily take that word out of her Party’s name now . . . But doesn’t that sound a bit, well, political? A bit like, say, taking that phrase Weapons of Mass destruction (or WMDS as the politicians quickly changed them to) out of the debate when it turned out there hadn’t been any? Or using a jolly-sounding made-up word like Brexit – that sounded a bit like a hearty Second World War snack and something we might all enjoy in a Vera-lynn-all-in-it-together kind of way – to cover up a really nasty idea that was all about putting Britain first and to hell with ideas about a larger Europe and being part of a more open-minded project?
National means nationalism. That’s what words do. Name things. As we tell our children when we are teaching them to read: nouns are naming words and adjectives are describing words. National is an adjective. Nicola Sturgeon may now want to take it off the label of the tin. But it describes what’s inside.