Some of Scotland’s elite love the place so much they even choose to live here
ONE of the most amusing tics of Scottish nationalists is their unshakeable conviction they are in the vanguard of a daring antiestablishment movement. If you count bravely standing up to the powers that be and telling them they’re doing an absolutely smashing job, I suppose they are. The same party that came to power declaiming the failures of the Lanarkshire Labour nomenklatura and has been running the show uninterrupted for 12 years cannot come to terms with the terrible, exhilarating truth: they are the establishment now.
The ruling-class-in-denial is well represented in the ranks of the nation’s writers, artists and other celebrated ‘creatives’, some of whom love Scotland so much they even live here. They have issued A Declaration for Independence, 2019, the ‘2019’ presumably included lest anyone confuse the constitutional musings of Elaine C Smith with those of Thomas Jefferson.
The manifesto, signed by 50 of the most glittering names in Scottish public life, proclaims that ‘Scotland should take its place as an independent country on the world stage’. The alternative would be ‘to accept that Scotland’s fate would remain in the hands of others and that the Scottish people would relinquish their right to decide their own destiny’.
Declaration
As a rule of thumb, when flag enthusiasts start talking about destiny, it’s time to stockpile canned goods. Other imperatives include an independent judiciary and freedom of speech (both of which the UK already has) and local government reorganisation, unilateral nuclear disarmament and the right to join trade blocs (all of which the UK can already do).
With a flourish, they ‘affirm the values of care, kindness, neighbourliness and generosity of spirit’, values which are always best expressed by breaking up a centuries-old partnership and erecting a border between the erstwhile partners.
The very existence of the declaration is baffling. These instruments are usually drawn up by rebels against the reigning order, putting them on notice that their rule will soon be cast off.
Scrolling through the signatories, I counted a half-dozen, maybe as many as a dozen, who could pick up the phone and get face-time with the First Minister.
The intellectual establishment’s revolutionary self-image is matched only by its insistence on speaking for the people. The same dynamic was seen in the 2014 referendum, when the cultural cognoscenti were consulted for their insights from the literary coalface.
Alan Warner, best known for his 1995 novel Morvern Callar, warned of the ‘sinister and depressing implications’ of a No vote, namely a ‘profound and strange schism between the voters of Scotland and its literature’ and ‘the death knell for the whole Scottish literature “project”’.
Scots voting to remain in the UK would represent ‘a crushing denial of an identity that writers have been meticulously accumulating, trying to maintain and refine’. After all, ‘has there ever been another European country where a “progressive” – and to use two pompous words – “intelligentsia”, has united in a liberation movement, yet the majority has finally voted against the aspirations of this movement?’
It’s not hard to see why artists rely on grants and endowments, advances and prize money. Could you imagine these people in a job interview?
But it was Chicago-based Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh who captured what rubbed up the Scottish elite the wrong way about Westminster: it was too elitist. A breakaway was stirring because ‘the Conservatives have long given up even pretending to represent anybody other than society’s elites’, while the only promise of Labour was that it might ‘perhaps wring some begrudged concessions from those elites’.
The voters were now aware of ‘the public school elites’ and other establishment types who actually ran the country and would benefit from ‘freedom from the corrupt, imperialist and elitist setup’.
The superstition that Scotland is above the everyday human and social vices that bedevil the rest of the country is just a happy-clappy articulation of the national superiority complex from which these people suffer.
Scottish nationalism is not a grassroots initiative the people managed to force onto the political agenda. It is an elitist project that finally learned how to do populist politics. Its adherents enjoy unrivalled dominance of government, the third sector, academia and the arts.
What is missing from Scottish national populism, is the people themselves. They have little input to a campaign that is ultimately about those in positions of political, institutional and cultural power wearing them down until they support separation. The only contribution the masses are allowed to make is the tax revenue that eventually subsidises those who presume to speak for them.
Priorities
A populism of the people would not produce the document at issue, a selfindulgent meander through the political pedantries of a class apart, those with more ideals than insights and more influence than their mercurial analysis of priorities merits. That is why their manifesto does not declare a right to better healthcare or a quality education.
It is why they do not clamour for job creation and why their statement insists that ‘economic growth should not be pursued at the expense of the wellbeing of the people or their habitat or that of other people or nations’.
These are pedestrian matters for those whose minds feed on the spiritual junk food of national greatness and whose hearts thump for higher things than mere schools and hospitals. Nationalism always puts the nation first and those who live in it have to wait their turn. Nationalists the world over do the same.
What knocks the spirit is that this bland and derivative politics is what stirs those minds that are meant to be our most adventurous, our most innovative – that Scotland’s creatives are so unoriginal.