Peter Jones: Take my word, it’s a separate issue

Ewan Crawford’s argument in The Scotsman last week (7 February) against the use of the word “separatism” and its variants to describe the SNP’s goal of independence was eloquent. But it was also flawed and an argument that should be dismissed.

The target here is the BBC. “The party is upset,” he said, “that BBC journalists, committed as they must be to ‘due impartiality’, have on occasion used ‘separation’, one of the most politically-loaded terms in Scottish politics, as if it is a neutral word.”

And as Joan McAlpine wrote in the same issue: “Independence is a neutral term and that’s the one that should be used.”

I don’t dispute that the word “separate” has negative characteristics and when used in opinion poll surveys, damps down the support for political independence. That’s why the SNP’s goal is to expunge “separation” from the airwaves and for “independence” to be the only word used.

The SNP not only wants to set the terms of the debate, but also the language in which it is framed. This, however, is an unacceptable assault on the media’s freedom to use whatever words journalists and editors think accurately portray what a political party is trying to do. Some, it is true, use words in a politically biased sense. But that’s media freedom for you.

Ewan’s argument had two big holes in it. First, he began with an amusing analogy, asking why it was that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had not noted that the separation celebrations last year for the creation of the state of South Sudan fell in the same month that the US celebrates Separation Day.

Surely, he suggested, we all know of America’s Separation Day celebration on 4 July? And of course of the famous Hollywood movie Separation Day when a US president leads US fighter jets to defeat evil alien spaceships attempting to exterminate all humans.

It’s a fun point, but completely fraudulent. Unless I have got my history wrong, the country of pre-2011 Sudan has been racked by half a century of vicious civil war in which millions have been killed and millions more made refugees.

Americans, pre-1776, were in bloody revolt against British imperialism kicked off by the fact that, living in a British colony, they were taxed by Britain but denied representation in the imperial British parliament. And in the movie, all of humankind was threatened with extinction.

Now, I might have missed something, but I don’t think the UK is being torn apart by civil war. I don’t think millions of Scots are being killed or turned into refugees. The very existence of the SNP says that there is no political oppression. Yes, Scots are taxed, but they also have political representation in the British parliament. Some of them have even got to be prime minister. At least one is always in the Cabinet. And I do not think that evil English spaceships are circling Scotland blowing up our cities.

There is no philosophical, moral, or political equivalence between South Sudan, the USA, movie death-dealing aliens, and Scotland. To suggest that there is insulting to all Scots, and implies that Nationalists, even intelligent mild-mannered ones such as Ewan, harbour a paranoia that Scotland is under occupation, oppressed, and threatened. It is a very odd kind of oppressive occupation that permits Scots to elect anybody they like to the very seat of occupying power.

Secondly, the neutrality of the word “independence”, asserted by Joan, is doubtful. Ewan managed to sell the pass on that when he wrote: “While most people presumably would like the means to be independent, with the ability to choose to join with others, very few of us fancy the idea of living a separate life.”

Independence, in other words, is a desirable condition, implying that with national political independence comes personal or family independence. Actually, unless you are a Soviet collectivist, it is very hard to think of conditions in which the idea of independent living would not be desirable. And as such, the word is also politically-loaded, but with positive characteristics as opposed to the negative characteristics associated with separation.

The apparent political positivity of independence is further enhanced by the fact that nobody yet knows what sort of independence the SNP will offer. Political independence is not an agreed, defined condition, but a spectrum which ranges all the way from the devolution settlement we have now to statehood in isolated North Korean terms.

Until the SNP publish a definition of what it means by independence, people are quite entitled to assume it corresponds to their own idea of it. Some might see an independent Scotland which has to submit annual Scottish budgets to the Bank of England for approval, as John Swinney, finance secretary, has said he is willing to do, at independence, but other self-described nationalists may call that craven subservience.

Whatever the eventual detail of the SNP’s version of independence, it will have four central characteristics. There will be no Scottish MPs at Westminster and no Scottish taxes paid to a British Treasury. There will be (after negotiation) a Scottish seat at the EU top table, and at the UN.

To many Scots the loss of participation in British institutions looms a lot larger than does entry to international bodies. It looks like separation, and indeed it is political separation. Taking part in such things as the British army, navy, and air force will no longer be possible and the continuance of the security offered by say, the Bank of England acting as lender of last resort to Scottish banks, is at best questionable.

These people, to quote Ewan again, might think that “recognising the benefits of sharing sovereignty while protecting important national interests” is what the UK is all about, and that losing that shared sovereignty might render Scotland a lot less able to protect national interests.

The Scottish Fishermen’s Federation said precisely that two weeks ago. The Scottish National Farmers Union, according to a poll of members, take the opposite view. Both “independence” and “separation” are perfectly legitimate though politically-loaded descriptions of what opposing political camps, and differing sections of the Scottish public, believe to be the consequences of the, shall we say, sovereignty debate. Banning one, but not the other, would be undemocratic. The BBC should carry on using both.