You'll Take the High Road and I'll Take the Low Road

This Thursday, Scotland will have its long-awaited referendum on whether to become an independent country. A week or so ago, one single poll gave a tiny majority to those in favour – which has turned the Scottish question from a matter of purely local interest to the leading issue in British politics. For the moment.

The No Campaign, aka Better Together, has rightly taken a lot of stick for its abysmal campaign. Not only has it given nobody in Scotland a better reason to stay in the UK than the fear of something worse – missing the point entirely that the Yes Campaign’s principal appeal lies with the hope of something better.

Better Together’s hopelessness was funny until that poll last weekend startled the powers behind the campaign out of their complacency. The week just gone has seen, on the one hand the pitiful spectacle of the three main party leaders crawling up to Scotland to tell them how important the Scots are to Britain – after having treated the whole affair up to that point as having all the interest to them of a parish council by election. Too little, too late boys, although it was fun to see David Cameron talk about the “effing Tories”.

On the other hand, it has seen naked economic threats as various businesses based in Scotland (Standard Life) or doing a lot of business there  (BP) have “come out against independence”. As other people have pointed out, BP has no trouble doing business in countries like Russia and Zimbabwe, so quite what they’re afraid of happening in Scotland is unclear.

It’s depressing, isn’t it? The primary line of argument anyone was able to think of to keep the UK going started off as “think of all the things that could go wrong with your economy” and developed into “we will fuck your economy up if you don’t do what suits us”.

Scotland’s case is not really helped when some nutjob SNP types start calling for BP to be nationalised though. Nice one! That will bring the foreign investment flooding in!

If I was the sort of person who was able to develop a rational argument and see it through to a strong conclusion, I’d like to think I could have gone on to write something like this piece by Fintan O’Toole in the Guardian. Unfortunately, I am not that focused. So I’ll link to it instead and let you read it and be astonished at my perspicacity in having brought it to your attention...

For many people in Scotland, this may well be a matter of ethnic nationalism. Some of them may really hate “the English” and regard the 1707 Act of Union as colonisation.

For far more (I hope, at any rate), this is being seen as an opportunity to take back a stake in politics from a distant, uninterested Westminster. You don’t have to think Alex Salmond is any better than any of the other leaders to believe that decisions that affect you, your family and your friends should be made nearer to those people rather than further away.

That, I think, is what the British malaise about politics stems from – decisions that affect us are made far, far away from us. Geographically if you live in Scotland, but in all sorts of other respects as well.

It’s sharpened to an edge capable of cutting through only by the “national” fault line in the case of Scotland. As O’Toole says:

The Scottish independence referendum poses a very good question but suggests an inadequate answer. The question is: where does power lie? This is not a marginal problem to pose in a 21st century democracy. It cuts to the heart of a deep crisis in the relationship between people and politics. But the answer implied on the ballot paper is a geographical one: power lies in either London or Edinburgh. Most Scots – and most of the rest of us – know that while this choice is far from meaningless, it also rather misses the point.

Most people are still so bewitched by the 19^th century idea of the nation state that they can only imagine a group of people wanting to govern themselves, in their own interests, if they form a “national” group. Whether they acknowledge the legitimacy of that wish depends entirely on how they feel about that group (see, oh, I don’t know...the entire history of the 20^th century, for example).

One of the few things I remember from my political theory degree was a quote by a chap called Benedict Anderson, who called nationalities “imagined communities”.

That in turn made me think about all the people bleating last week about how their British identity was going to be harmed by the Scots becoming independent.

If they want to imagine another community, surely that’s up to them? And if it pains you so much, well, why not just carry on imagining that they’re still in your imaginary community? Are you still imaging the Irish in it too? Why don't we add some others? The Norwegians, perhaps. They're very tidy. 

That’s the psycho-cultural bit taken care of. If the Scots don’t feel like part of the same imagined community as us...well, that’s that really isn’t it? You can’t force them to imagine themselves as part of the same community as you.

SUBHEADING - It breaks up the text

But suppose they do still see themselves as British. Why does that HAVE TO entail being governed from Westminster under a single unitary state entity? It only does when you start assuming in mystical qualities about “proper” communities and their “natural” territories and (dare I say it) “god-given” rights.

The best reasons for Britain being governed by a single government are military reasons. This is an island, and a whole island is easy to defend. If someone else is in charge of part of the island, then you don’t have the natural advantages of being an island.

Britain being invaded is unimaginable. England being invaded with the connivance of a hostile Scotland is beyond unimaginable. We’re living in the 21^st century, FFS.

If anyone can tell me point out anything else that is ideally organised on the precise level of “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” (plus its various overseas territories) then I’d be astonished.

Hence, large areas of policy are governed at the European level – precisely because markets bigger than the UK are more profitable, a trading bloc bigger than the UK has more international clout, standards in goods and services that are heavily traded need to be common across areas bigger than the UK etc etc.

But things should only be managed in bigger blocs, further away from the people affected, when that is efficient.

That old EU chestnut “subsidiarity” should be the norm and it should start at home. Power should be exercised as close to the people as possible, and it should ONLY be moved upwards to more distant, larger institutions when smaller bodies are clearly unable to do a good job.

I don’t think that nation states have a special privileged position above supranational bodies and subnational bodies. They are not the fount from while all authority flows upwards and downwards.

The idea that Britain will lose its seat at the top table internationally without Scotland is equally ridiculous. First and foremost, I believe that governments and states are there to promote the welfare of the people who live in their jurisdictions – and so international clout is only a means to that end, nothing more. National prestige for its own sake is meaningless.

Secondly, are we still sitting at the top table? Or are we on a little card table extension the USA has shoved onto the end to save our embarrassment when we turned up uninvited?

The other Alex S

Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out that only defeat can really bring a country to terms with itself –

never having recognised itself as having been defeated, Britain has no sense of its real place in the world. If losing Scotland forces a reassessment of Britain’s idiot pretensions and forces it to look at itself, so much the better.

So, for all these reasons, I don’t think that Scotland being “another country” is a big deal at all. The trains will still go there, 300,000 Scots will still live in London, money will continue to flow north and south, and we’ll all feel the same about each other as we do now (ie general lack of interest) - but they will be running their affairs and we will be running ours.

How does that undermine anybody’s identity?

Whatever happens on Thursday – this whole process has opened up the kind of thinking and reflection you don’t often see in this country. If for no other reason, it will have done Britain some good because of that.