Bile, anger and the growing divisiveness of a nation’s politics

YOU know, this used to be a hell of a good country,’ Jack Nicholson pondered in Easy Rider. ‘I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.’ These words crept into my mind last week and no matter what I did to shut them out, they found a way back in.

Labour MSP Anas Sarwar revealed that he had been sent a threatening image on social media. The grisly picture showed a set of gallows in the smirr-soaked grounds of a Victorian jail, a noose dangling from the gibbet in bleak anticipation. The intention was, he said, ‘to symbolise what happens to me and others after independence’. He reported the matter to the police and officers are investigating.

What makes the incident especially gloomy is that, according to the MSP, one of those responsible for disseminating the message was an SNP candidate.

There is a great deal of chatter about the ‘divisive’ nature of the 2014 independence referendum, and to those unfortunate enough to find themselves on the winning side it was. What began as a renewal of democratic engagement ended in dismal scenes of Nationalist mobs baying at BBC journalists and Labour’s Jim Murphy forced to suspend his pro-UK speeches amid intimidation.

The language crop-dusted into public debate – Alex Salmond called the Unionist parties ‘a parcel of rogues’ – has borne fruit in a national discourse that is sour, fractious and unremittingly angry.

Decency

When Nationalists object to these facts being pointed out, they counter that the referendum was in fact ‘transformative’. It was, but not in the way they think. The months leading up to September 18, 2014, the result and the fallout was a fulcrum for levering out one Scotland and cranking in another in its place.

The old Scotland was governed by decency and a sense of togetherness captured in the couthy Lallans saw: ‘We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns’.

The new Scotland is perhaps more politically active, though not necessarily more politically aware. But we are now a colder people, quicker to loathing and distant from those who do not see the world as we do. How many Nationalists cut off once-fast friends over constitutional disputes? How many Unionists dread certain social occasions in the knowledge a particular relative or chum will get a little well-primed and want to rerun past disagreements?

Worst of all, the egalitarianism embodied in ‘Jock Tamson’s bairns’ is being replaced by an ugly Scottish superiority.

Nationalism proceeds from the conviction that Scotland is a great nation held back by the Union and its people’s lack of confidence in themselves.

Nats have never grasped that Scots are not self-loathing. That is the essence of Tamsonism: We are as good as everyone else. Nationalists tried to claim this principle for their movement but it is the antithesis of what they believe.

While egalitarianism is out, the new cultural mode of Scottish life is jingoism as national self-help. We tell ourselves Scotland is a land above, untainted by the base prejudices of England on everything from immigration to welfare to nuclear weapons. Of late, this ethical chauvinism has sought to redefine the present and to revise the past, bowdlerising history to remove unpleasant truths about Scottish villainy. Last week, one commentator railed against critics of Nicola Sturgeon’s presidential-style visit to the US, insisting she was strengthening Scotland’s diplomatic ties around the world.

He said: ‘Across the world Scotland’s progressive values are recognised for the genuine attributes they are. We are a nation, too, that carries less of the colonial baggage so associated with a British imperialism of the past.’

This dawn raid on the historical record was audacious. The Scots were not merely lusty participants in the British Empire, they helped to direct it. Glasgow wasn’t ‘built on tobacco’ but on slavery. The more excitable Nationalists are convinced we are living under the Westminster lash but when it came to profiting from the sale and purchase of human beings, Scotland held the whip hand.

Nationalism requires such airbrushing, for it is a creed of victimhood. And it inspires victimhood in others. For it is not only Scotland’s Nationalists who have changed, her Unionists have too. The Barbour set – Scottish, British and three G&Ts in – are still there but they no longer define Scottish Unionism.

Their Unionism was that of the cheerful pessimist – the Nats will probably win, but no sense getting worked up about it. Now the Unionist voice in Scotland spends much of its time complaining about the impositions of Nationalism. These impositions are often real – the SNP does seek to silence dissent, it has co-opted institutions which ought to know better – but they cannot be the basis for a positive Unionist programme.

Arrogance

Mirroring the Nats’ response to imagined oppression, some Unionists echo their rhetorical rampages. Ask men over 50 – ask women over 50 – their thoughts on Nicola Sturgeon and the replies would be unprintable. There is a segment of Scotland that despises the First Minister. She may be cocky, wrong-headed and hellbent on separation rather than fixing education or the health service, but does she deserve contempt, even hatred?

The Nationalists are ingénues convinced of their own sophistication. They thought they could poke the bear of identity politics and, once stirred, it would dance only to their tune.

In their arrogance, they did not consider that the atavistic impulses they were appealing to were just as prevalent in others, that rallying half the country around one flag would draw the other half around another. Asked by a pollster last month, four in ten Scots defined themselves as hardcore Unionists, placing themselves at the very top of a scale of one to ten.

Gallows. Revisionism. Political fundamentalism. Scotland used to be a hell of a good country, but something has gone wrong with it.