SNP Anglophobia isn’t just petty, it’s sinister

It’s tempting to laugh at the Nationalists’ grievance mon ge ring, but it is poisoning political debate

‘Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.” This was the battle cry of Miss Jean Brodie, tragically fulfilled at the end of the novel. But for years Scottish nationalists have attempted to take a leaf out of her book – by taking numerous leaves out of the history books.

You could imagine few things more innocuous than a children’s commemorative book about the Platinum Jubilee. Yet a recent FOI request revealed that Scottish Government officials lodged numerous complaints about the book, which SNP ministers ordered to be withdrawn from circulation in Scottish schools. Officials pushed for passages about Brexit and the 2014 independence referendum to be removed, and dismissed mentions of England’s 1966 World Cup victory as Anglocentric. They even objected to a section on smart thermostats, claiming it might be “triggering for anyone experiencing poverty”. Instead, they demanded new stories be inserted on everything from the Jacobite rebellions and the deportation of Commonwealth immigrants to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Not all their recommendations were ridiculous; referring to the Queen as “Elizabeth I” rather than “Elizabeth II” in a Scottish edition makes sense. Yet others defy belief, and raise serious questions about the impartiality of Scotland’s Civil Service. I mean no disrespect to Benazir Bhutto’s memory, but there is something grimly amusing about insisting that a book of children’s cartoons include the murder of a Pakistani leader (not classic bedtime reading, perhaps).

It’s tempting to laugh – in fact, it would take a heart of stone not to – but it would be a mistake to ignore the sinister repercussions of all this. Nationalists have long tried to poison debates about Scottish identity by hijacking the very concept of Scottishness to mean unconditional support for independence. And complaints about the Jubilee book are surely hypocritical given the proliferation of often blatant propaganda in Scottish schools.

Earlier this year, North Lanarkshire Council issued a “study aid” containing numerous pro-independence slogans and a factsheet on Nicola Sturgeon. The Scottish educator Neil Mclennan recently complained that nationalism had “infected” education, rendering aspects of it “parochial”. In one example, he said that the curriculum guidance offered only examples of

English slave ports such as Liverpool and Bristol. He’d even petititoned the Scottish Government to add Glasgow to the list, given its own prominent role in the slave trade, to no avail.

Of course, nationalist movements always seek to revise the past for their own veneration – he who controls the past controls the future – and Scotland’s is no different. Theirs, among other things, seeks to separate Scots from any culpability in the British imperial project and recast them as another victim of colonialism (now invariably blamed on “England”). A complex past is too often distilled into a series of grievances – Culloden, the Highland Clearances – and long ago “glories” such as Bannockburn, which have taken on a mystical significance in some sections of the Nationalist community. Yet Braveheart was a Hollywood blockbuster, not a documentary.

According to this partial reading of history, the Act of Union merely served to smother Scotland’s culture and economy. Ian Blackford, one of the propagandists-in-chief, claimed in a Commons debate that the Act of Union unfairly cut off Scotland from its continental links. Yet far from clipping Scotland’s wings, the Union gave it access to prized trading routes and prosperity.

Scots were keen participants and enthusiastic beneficiaries of the Empire, and ended up running large swathes of it, after Scots engineers had built much of its infrastructure; roads, bridges and railways, from Canada to the Indian sub-continent. Nor was imperialism the sole preserve of Anglo-britain; in fact, it was the loss of money and morale from a failed Scottish imperial venture – the ill-fated Darien scheme – that paved the way for the impoverished Scots to seek the merger with England in the first place.

The Union helped stabilise political life, creating the conditions for the extraordinary creative surge of the Scottish Enlightenment. Scotland, boasting more universities than England at the time, was certainly no backwater, but it could also be a hotbed of tyranny and superstition. The decade before the Act of Union saw, on Scottish soil, the last mass executions for “witchcraft” in Western Europe, and the last execution for blasphemy in the UK, when in 1697, Thomas Aikenhead, an 20-year-old student, was condemned to death after being overheard “mocking” the Old Testament outside a tavern in Edinburgh. Despite his contrition, the Kirk refused to pardon him.

As it turns out, Scottish Nationalists are as adept at glossing over their present failures as they are at rewriting history, whether it’s their appalling record on education, health, Scottish life expectancy – now the lowest in Western Europe – or the international scandal of drug overdose deaths.

All countries need their founding myths – they are essential for unity and social cohesion. Yet, though antienglish grievance will boost the separatist movement in the short term, no healthy nation can base their sense of self on victimhood alone.