Making a case for creating a nation to be proud of

One of the most honest dissections of Labour’s disastrous Scottish election campaign appeared on the Better Nation blog in May. Its author was Jamie Glackin, one of the party’s unsuccessful candidates and a member of its Scottish Executive Committee. “Make no mistake,” he warned. “Unless we seize this opportunity to become the party of the People of Scotland with the vision and the ambition that entails, then we are heading very quickly to irrelevance.” Scotland’s Labour politicians and commentators would have done well to remember these words before they piled into the “British v English” riots debate.

First Minister Alex Salmond said the riots could not be described as UK wide. He reflected what thousands of Scots were saying around office photocopiers, in mother and toddler groups and Facebook sites with names such as “Not rioting in Scotland, too proud of my country” or “UK riots? Last I looked it was only England.”

When the Labour MP Jim Sheridan – fast becoming Michael Martin’s heir as most embarrassing Scot at Westminster – asked David Cameron to condemn Salmond (as opposed to the looters and murderers of Birmingham and London) it wasn’t just the Prime Minister who was confused. The folks back home must have wondered what the lumbering member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North was on. If the people of Scotland were up in arms, it was not at Salmond for doing his job right.

Contrast the coverage of “UK Riots” with stories about violence associated with Old Firm games. The latter is always reported as a Scottish problem: quite correctly, though it makes the majority of us cringe. But while Scotland is politically part of the UK, to describe sectarian crime as a “UK problem” would be absurd.

It wasn’t just backbenchers like Sheridan who got it wrong. Labour’s Iain Gray metaphorically linked arms with the Tories David Mundell and the Liberal Democrats Willie Rennie to denounce the First Minister for supporting the Scottish tourist industry at the height of its season. Have they learned nothing from May? One expects the has-been Liberal Democrats and the never-have-been Scottish Tories to be out of touch. But Labour, just a few years ago, could reasonably claim to be in tune with the Scottish psyche. Those days are past now.

During the election campaign, a watershed opinion poll compared the personalities of Salmond and Gray. The SNP leader was furthest ahead when it came to the statement “he stands up for Scotland”. This is exactly what he did last week. Unionist opponents claimed he was gloating over England’s misfortune. But let’s listen to what he actually said.

The concocted “row” began last Wednesday morning when Good Morning Scotland ran a discussion with Les Gray of the Scottish Police Federation and Stewart Waiton, an English sociologist based in Dundee on why our country was riot free. Dr Waiton suggested Scottish society was a little more conservative and its young people a little less alienated from their communities. Gray said firm policing in Scotland would prevent trouble.

Salmond turned down the chance to score a political point when asked if the coalition’s economic policies were to blame for the disturbances. There was, he said, no excuse for wanton criminality and Scotland had an obligation to send help if we could. Far from suggesting no possibility of riots in Scotland, he said there was little room for complacency and the police were prepared for any trouble.

Commentary since last week has sought to wilfully misrepresent this interview, but Salmond did not say Scotland was violence-free. The SNP stands for two things, achieving independence and making Scotland better now. That means tackling sectarianism and football disorder now – even when rivals say you are over reacting. It means addressing alcohol abuse now – even when the unionist parties vote against minimum pricing. It means giving record funding to the Violence Reduction Unit instead of following Labour’s madcap policy of jailing every teenager caught carrying a knife.

These are all Scottish problems. It’s not racist to assert that, just as it isn’t racist to say the large scale urban rioting we witnessed last week was an English problem. That is not to say we do not share some of the same urban deprivation as London and Manchester. All western societies experience these problems to a degree, but they are expressed differently in different political cultures.

Before devolution, politicians outside the SNP had no difficulty acknowledging Scottish distinctiveness. They referred to our “more collectivist society” Remember Margaret Thatcher’s Sermon on the Mound? It was considered anathema to Scottish values by people of all political persuasions – even patrician Scottish Tories. You would regularly speak to English friends who would praise the “alternative approach” up here. Many even moved north to be part of it.

To some extent this is myth-making, but it can be useful myth-making. As any psychologist will tell you, self-perception is self-perpetuating. If Scots “don’t riot because the English do,” (to borrow the name of one facebook group) chances are the streets will remain calm. Perhaps not the most noble motivator, but it works. In the 1970s the Tartan Army went to Wembley and made a total nuisance of themselves. But when really nasty football hooliganism became known as “the English disease” across Europe in the 1980s, Scottish supporters re-cast themselves as “the friendly fans”. They began self-policing. As a result, they now enjoy an international reputation for good behaviour. If Scotland as a nation thinks it is fairer and more socially cohesive, chances are we will become just that. The alternative is talking ourselves down, as Gray, Sheridan, Rennie and Mundell prefer. But we already know what the Scottish people think of that approach.

l Joan McAlpine is an SNP MSP for the south of Scotland