David Hayes: The Matter of Scotland
David Hayes is Deputy Editor of openDemocracy. He writes each month for Inside Story.
THE theme is familiar in many classic films with a Scottish setting. A questing outsider, usually English or American, enters a remote, rural, “highland” community where he finds himself seduced by the locals’ charm, intrigued by their difference, frustrated by their elusiveness and deflected by their guile. Some form of catharsis ensues, invariably signalled by a pivotal cèilidh (party) around halfway through. In the process, and as the tale hurtles towards resolution, both visitor and host are changed.
The focus of the search may be pillaged alcohol (Whisky Galore), oil-exploration rights (Local Hero), a missing girl (The Wicker Man) or an island marriage (I Know Where I’m Going!). The first two observe the hallowed formula by having respectively an English and American protagonist, the last two underline a singularity by making this figure respectively a “lowland” Scot and (as well as being English) a woman.
But the precise ingredient that raises these films to classic status is that they do more than portray, with joyous wit and insight, a collision of worlds: they also reflect on and subvert the very lenses (Anglicist romanticism, Celticist stereotype, and what Malcolm Chapman in a pathbreaking study, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture, calls “symbolic appropriation”) through which this collision has historically been framed.
It is too early to say how far London’s political entry into Scotland, heralded with some fanfare in early January 2012 – its mission, thwarting at all costs the country’s “separation” from the rest of the United Kingdom – will unfold according to this time-honoured narrative arc; even more, what kind of outcome its encounter with the locals will achieve.
What can be said at this point of the constitutional tussle – which will culminate in a referendum on Scotland’s independence, probably in autumn 2014 – is that each side is intensely rehearsing its part; that those pesky Scots are both acutely aware of and unfazed by the high-stakes play they are involved in; and that the major speech by prime minister David Cameron in Edinburgh on 16 February, the highlight of the opening phase, suggests that the outsider is beginning, creatively, to explore the possibilities of its own more limited repertoire....
ALEX Salmond is fond of quoting the maxim of the great Irish home-ruler Charles Stewart Parnell: “No man may fix the boundary to the march of a nation.” Again uncharacteristic in its raising of a visionary standard, it is also an appropriate reminder that behind the sometimes all-consuming frenzy of the daily headlines – David Cameron makes a speech in Edinburgh! An opinion poll shows support for independence down by 2 per cent! – lies a history that continues to inform and, albeit in often less than straightforward ways, to shape the present.
Indeed, the appeal to history, the effort to bend it in a direction that serves the cause – of Scottish independence, British union, or whatever half-way house suits the moment or party – is an expected feature of all sides in the debate. On one side: ancient kingdoms (Pictland, Alba), martial heroes (Robert the Bruce, William Wallace), medieval battles (Stirling Bridge, Bannockburn), documents (the Lübeck letter, the Declaration of Arbroath), principles (the community of the realm, the sovereignty of the people), institutions (education, law), values (egalitarianism, smallness). On the other: ancient bonds (family, military), intellectual heroes (David Hume, Adam Smith), modern battles (Waterloo, two world wars), documents (the Treaty of Union), principles (freedom, globalisation), institutions (the monarchy, the BBC), values (pluralism, greatness)....
WHEN was Scotland? The sheer depth of the change seems to compel this variant of the question famously posed of his Welsh homeland by that unclassifiable historian, Gwyn A. Williams. It is implicit in much of the new Scotland’s rich historiography, including Tom Nairn’s pioneering The Break-Up of Britain, Michael Lynch’s Scotland: A New History, Tom Devine, Michael Fry and John Mackenzie’s books on Scotland and empire, Michael Keating’s The Independence of Scotland, Tom Gallagher’s sceptical The Illusion of Freedom: Scotland under Nationalism (and his major works on religious sectarianism in Glasgow and Edinburgh), Murray Pittock’s The Road to Independence? Scotland since the Sixties, Christopher Harvie’s Scotland and Nationalism (and his extraordinary inland-sea study The Atlantic Coast), and Neal Ascherson’s reverberative Stone Voices.
A canvas of centuries seems often to focus on the post-1945 decades, when the shared experience of war in Britain was then solidifed by state-led development, full employment and what Anthony Crosland called “welfare citizenship,” as both high-point of and turning-point in the British-unionist dimension inside Scotland (the “moment of Britain,” in Christopher Harvie’s words). The Conservative Party’s oft-cited 50.1 per cent of the vote in Scotland in the election of 1955 – a record achievement for any party – is another measure of “the world we have lost.” At the time the SNP was still miniscule, though the huge support for a “Scottish covenant” in 1947–50 calling for “a Parliament with adequate legislative authority in Scottish affairs” and the popular reaction to the “Stone of Destiny” escapade, expressed underlying national sentiments that as yet lacked political confidence....