Statue-smashing critics of Britain’s history risk driving Scotland out of the Union
‘We are here for each other in sickness and in health,” said Boris Johnson during his visit to Orkney. It was a well-chosen line, invoking more than just the massive resources that the United Kingdom was able to mobilise when Covid struck. The PM knows that the joining together of two peoples, like a marriage, must be more than a contractual relationship.
A similar point was made by that ur-unionist James VI and I when he addressed the House of Commons as England’s new king. “Hath not God first united these kingdoms, both in language and religion and similitude of manners?” he asked sceptical MPs in his Scottish accent. “Hath He not made us all in one island, compassed by one sea?”
The Union would not have lasted had it been only an amplified economic alliance. It rests on shared habits. Throughout the British Isles, we dress the same way, sing the same songs, watch the same TV shows, shop at the same chains, speak in the same half-sarcastic tone. Yes, we have our regional differences, but they are less pronounced than in many countries whose unity is not in question.
Because of our linguistic and cultural cohesion, debates over independence tend to be about party politics. Scottish nationalists cannot appeal to ethnic separateness in the way that, say, South Sudanese nationalists or Kosovan nationalists could. So they present independence as a way of avoiding Conservative governments (not a wholly unreasonable argument, given that the Tories have won majorities in Scotland only twice since the Great Reform Act – in 1900 and in 1955).
Unionists make their case in largely transactional terms, arguing that the UK has an integrated economy, that an independent Scotland would have to establish a new currency, that a smaller country would be much more vulnerable to oil shocks, and so on. These arguments may be true, but they don’t determine referendums. In the end, identity almost always trumps economics.
Suppose, by way of illustration, that the Irish Republic were suddenly to become vastly poorer or vastly wealthier than the UK. How many votes would it swing in a Northern Ireland poll? Maybe a few thousand at the margin; but most people would vote on the basis of whether they felt Irish or British. Feelings are necessarily hard to quantify, but they are no less real for that.
Which brings us to the current spike in support for a breakaway Scotland. Conventional wisdom has it that it owes something to Brexit and something to Covid. But my hunch is that it owes rather more to the statue-smashing we have just witnessed – or, rather, to the intellectual trend that gave rise to the statue-smashing.
The Brexit referendum was in fact followed by an opinion poll swing to unionism. That surprised most commentators, who had assumed that, if Scotland voted differently to the UK as a whole, there would be a surge in secessionism. It didn’t happen, partly because it became clear that Scotland could not rejoin the EU without cutting itself off economically from the rest of the UK, and partly because Brexit revived a sense of British particularism. Nicola Sturgeon was forced to drop her promise of an early independence poll, and her MPs at Westminster worked hard to overturn Brexit, fearing that it would put Scottish statehood out of reach.
The coronavirus may have contributed mildly to the current mood. Epidemics make people turn inwards, which is why Sturgeon can get away with suggesting that she might quarantine English visitors. There is a vague but widespread feeling north of the border that the Scottish authorities handled the epidemic better than their English counterparts – whereas, in reality, both pursued similar policies.
It now looks, though, as if the high death rates in England may have partly been an accounting error: Public Health England was, incredibly, counting everyone who died having had the virus as a Covid fatality, even if they recovered and then died of something else. Despite carrying out more tests per capita than almost any country in the world, the UK has lower infection rates than much of Europe. Meanwhile, Oxford leads the pack in the race for a vaccine and a Southampton-based biotech company may have found the closest thing to, if not a cure, at least a way of mitigating the disease’s worst effects. We may all soon be glad to live in the same jurisdiction as these companies.
But even if businesses and researchers based in England lead the world out of the crisis, even if the UK economy surges, that will not determine the future of the Union. Nationality is determined by the heart, not the head; by poems, not ledgers.
And it is here that we find the true danger to the Union. Britishness, never popular on the Left, is nowadays systematically associated with racism, colonialism and xenophobia. In an age that treats victimhood as the supreme virtue, there is no longer merit in being the greatest country in the world. A perverted version of our history is propagated by public bodies and academic institutions. Slavery, for example, is portrayed as a peculiarly British vice when, in fact, it was Britain that extirpated an institution that had been widespread on every continent for thousands of years.
Scots (and, indeed, Irish people) were disproportionately involved in Britain’s global expansion: there is a reason that no one calls it “the English Empire”. Our imperial venture was, inevitably, morally mixed. It had heroic and shameful moments, just as any national story does. Britain exploited its subject lands, but also worked to end slavery, build schools and leave behind a functioning legal system. Some territories were acquired violently and held through repression; others were brought to independence without a shot being fired in anger.
As long as our cultural and intellectual elites see Britishness as a synonym for bigotry and bullying, though, the peoples of the home nations will grope back towards older patriotisms. Yet, paradoxically, there are few states of which the Left should be prouder. Where else, down the centuries, would you rather have been poor or female or from a religious minority? Seriously, where? Russia? Persia? Abyssinia? Which countries did more to elevate the living standards of ordinary people?
The United Kingdom has extraordinary achievements to its name. It developed and exported the sublime idea that laws should not be passed, nor taxes raised, except by elected representatives. It elevated the individual above the collective and the rules above the rulers. It exhausted itself in two world wars and the Cold War – not because it had been attacked, but because it felt honour-bound to defend the freedom of others. It did these things as one country, drawing on the strengths of all its constituent parts.
The Union, in short, has contributed mightily to the happiness of the human race. Let not man – nor woman – put it asunder.
Britishness, never popular on the Left, is nowadays systematically associated with racism, colonialism