Nationalist leaders have always enjoyed feigning victimhood
What is the deadliest threat to the Union? The Northern Ireland Protocol? The economic crisis? Nicola Sturgeon? Brexit? Demographic change?
While some of these things might play a part, a bigger factor is the way the United Kingdom’s history is being traduced. As the British brand is tarnished – as we “decolonise” museums, remove British writers from the school syllabus, vandalise statues and import American race rows – the peoples of our constituent nations understandably grope back towards older patriotisms.
Unionism rests, to some degree, on the appeal of being part of the world’s strongest country. Or, rather, it used to. These days, strength is seen as “problematic”. Never mind that the UK used its strength to stamp out the slave trade, spread the rule of law, defeat the Nazis and contain the Soviets. Our cultural elites slot everything into an imagined pyramid of privilege. To be at or close to the top of that pyramid is, in their eyes, almost unforgivable.
Hence the SNP’s shameless attempt to present separatism as a kind of anti-imperialism. “Of all the countries that have become independent from the UK,” says their recent promotional video, flashing through various African, Asian and Caribbean excolonies, “not one of them has tried to come back”.
Hence, too, the party’s newfound friendship with Sinn Féin, which tries to portray Northern Ireland as a colony. For most of the 20th century, an alliance between the Nats and the Shinners would have been unthinkable. Scots of Irish Catholic origin tended to be Labour and Unionist, perhaps calculating that they would be better off in a religiously pluralistic UK than in a Presbyterian Scotland. But by the 2014 referendum, most Scots who identified as Irish voted to leave, extending the logic of their opposition to the Crown and its symbols.
As a tactic, claiming to be oppressed makes sense. Bertrand Russell astutely observed in a 1937 essay that people tend wrongly to confuse victimhood with virtue. Our own age puts an even higher value than Russell’s on being supposedly downtrodden. By tapping into this sense, Irish and Scottish nationalists capture the mood of the times. Yet they also perpetrate a falsehood. There is a reason that no one ever called it the English Empire.
During the 18th century, perhaps 30,000 English people settled in the Atlantic colonies, as against 75,000 Scots and 250,000 Irish. Many were pushed into emigration by poverty, of course, but numerous others – including among the Scots and Irish – were younger sons of the gentry or of professional families, seeking their fortune as planters.
“Throughout the Empire,” writes the historian Kevin Kenny, “Irish Catholics served as soldiers and administrators, or worked as policemen, doctors, engineers, lawyers, journalists, or businessmen.” In 1830, when Ireland accounted for around 30 per cent of the UK’s population, it supplied (according to a study by Peter Karsten) 42 per cent of the soldiers in the British Army.
Ireland also provided around half the East India Company’s recruits prior to the 1857 Mutiny. When, following that bloody business, the Crown assumed more or less direct control of India, Irishmen were no less prominent in the new administration. Universities in Cork, Galway and Belfast offered courses in Indian languages, history and geography, as did Trinity College Dublin. It wasn’t long before some English officials were grumbling that the Indian Civil Service was run by and for Irishmen.
Reginald Dyer, the officer responsible for machine-gunning unarmed protesters in Amritsar in 1919, is vaguely remembered as an unfeeling English toff. In fact he was born in Punjab to an Irish father and educated in Co Cork. The LieutenantGovernor who backed him, cracking down on the protests that followed the atrocity, was Michael O’Dwyer, a Catholic from Co Tipperary.
O’Dwyer had little sympathy for Home Rule, but many of his countrymen saw greater Irish autonomy as compatible with participation in a global imperium. Before the horrors of 1916, most Irish nationalists backed John Redmond in wanting home rule within the Empire.
There were, to be sure, Irish republicans in the colonies, but they were the minority. As Patrick O’Farrell put it in his history of Irish settlement in Australia, most “accepted, indeed took pride in, belonging to Australia and the empire, readily incorporating God Save the King into their annual St Patrick’s Day festivities”.
None of this should be remotely surprising. Between 1801 and 1921, the years when the Empire expanded and became institutionalised, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom with representation at Westminster. None of the contemporary theorists of imperialism, including Lenin and Bukharin, saw it as a colony.
Of course, many Irish Catholics suffered from both legal and unofficial discrimination. It might not have been colonial oppression; but it was still oppression. And, as the psychologists Daniel Wegner and Kurt Gray have shown, we tend to categorise people as either oppressors or oppressed, agents or patients, doers or done-to. We struggle to see that all nations, like all people, are in both categories.
This duality applies to all nations – England as well as my ancestral countries of Ireland and Scotland. Scots, indeed, were the greatest empire-builders of all, governing colonies, managing estates and mission schools, planting tea, founding banks, dealing in jute, rubber and opium.
Most of all, Scots served as soldiers. In the 1750s, the new Highland regiments drove the French from Canada. During the American Revolution, plaid-draped troops were so fierce that Thomas Jefferson had to be made to take a specific attack on Scotland out of the Declaration of Independence. The image of the kilted Highlander became the icon of empire.
The SNP notion that Scotland was somehow annexed by England is beyond idiotic. Contemporaries often saw it the other way around. When James VI rode south to claim his second throne in 1603, many Englishmen moaned that they were being invaded by swarms of lairds, come in search of new titles and sinecures.
There were similar objections to the Act of Union in 1707, blamed for making England responsible for Scotland’s debts. Indeed, the notion of a union between the two kingdoms was first put forward in 1520 by a Lowlands theologian, the unfortunately named John Major, as a way to ensure that Scotland would not be dominated by her larger neighbour.
Of course, facts these days give precedence to feelings – and no feeling is stronger than the indignation of imagined victimhood. Hence the bizarre sight of the boldest, most inventive and influential nations on Earth reimagining themselves as someone else’s vassal.
I’m no great fan of the British Empire. Like that ingenious Unionist, Adam Smith, I would rather we had stuck to trade, maintaining only a few commercial outposts and coaling stations. Colonies are both costly to run and deleterious to liberty.
Still, I am struck by the peculiar lack of perspective applied to Britain’s imperial moment. All past empires fall short by modern standards. But there were few places, down the ages, where it was better to be poor, or female, or from a religious minority; few places where ordinary people were freer or wealthier.
Perhaps for that very reason, we hold Britain to a uniquely high standard. Cecil Rhodes may have wanted black men to have the vote, founded the newspaper of what is now the ANC and set up a race-blind Oxford scholarship, but he is condemned for exploiting the Matabele.
No such condemnation is made of, say, the Matabele king, Lobengula, who, on realising how well Rhodes was doing out of the deal, had the prime minister who had advised him to sign it, along with every member of his household down to the children, put to death in public.
We apply a similar moral relativism to the groups designated as oppressed today – which is partly why politicians and whole peoples crave victim status, knowing that it serves as a magic talisman against criticism.
Nevertheless, I keep coming back to the question of context. We think of personal autonomy, jury trials, equality before the law, limited government, habeas corpus, uncensored expression and freedom of religion as universal values, but they were largely promulgated in the English language. Imagine that the Second World War or the Cold War had ended differently. There’d be nothing universal about them then. Even today, the list of countries prepared actively to defend them is depressingly short; but we know it will always include the United Kingdom.
It was as a conjoined people that we dared our mightiest deeds, defeating tyranny and letting the world breathe more freely. It is in remembering our achievements that we recall the creed that holds us together. This story shall the good man teach his son.