Wave of nationalism grips Unionists

THE entertaining Scottish Labour leadership contender, Tom Harris, thinks we need some more cultural icons to enliven our political debate. To garner publicity for his bid to take over from Iain Gray, the Glasgow South MP has called on Billy Connolly to head up the No campaign in the forthcoming independence referendum. The Big Yin, he says, is a “100 per cent Scottish hero” but no doubt it is the brilliant comedian’s less than enthusiastic past remarks about the SNP that Harris finds particularly attractive. Connolly has made it clear he is not exactly a huge fan of nationalism.

In this regard Harris is following Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Jim Murphy and many others who have spoken out against those dreadful narrow (or worse) nationalists. But really for intellectual consistency, it is the memory of an even bigger cultural figure – John Lennon – that these politicians should be invoking. In fact, how about: “Imagine there’s no countries, It isn’t hard to do,” as an inspiring slogan for the No camp? That would at least appear to be an honest message from those who say they find nationalism so horrifying.

Except, of course, they don’t find it horrifying at all. Instead, as the academic Michael Billig has demonstrated, politicians in the UK, the US and many other established western states, have just found a different term. “Our nationalism,” Billig wrote, “is not presented as nationalism, which is dangerously irrational, surplus and alien. A new identity, a different label, is found for it. Our nationalism appears as “patriotism” – a beneficial, necessary force.” In this way, the existence of established nation states is depicted as natural and obvious, while the label nationalist can be reserved for weird others.

It is nationalism therefore, rather than Samuel Johnson’s patriotism, which seems to be the last refuge of the scoundrel. In his best-selling book, The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama said this of the American people: “We value patriotism and the obligations of citizenship, a sense of duty and sacrifice on behalf of our nation.” It is difficult to imagine the president substituting the word nationalism for patriotism in that sentence.

Closer to home, in a speech during his energetic period as Secretary of State for Scotland, Jim Murphy made an explicit point emphasising this idea of the good patriot and bad nationalist, when he said: “In the 1990s we made a ... mistake in Scotland. We allowed the SNP to monopolise the Saltire. We allowed our national symbol – St Andrew’s Cross – to be co-opted as an image of nationalism. Patriotism and nationalism are not the same thing. All nationalists are patriots. But not all patriots are nationalist.”

The former Labour adviser, John McTernan, seemed to make a similar point in The Scotsman yesterday when he called for the Saltire to be “depoliticised”. In reality almost all national flags, including of course the Union flag, are political – because they are expressions of a political entity – the nation state. If the British flag is not an image of nationalism, then what is it?

Instead of invoking a spurious and nonsensical distinction between patriotism and nationalism it would be refreshing for those Scottish politicians who oppose Scottish independence to set out their true position. That position is that they have a strong Scottish identity but are ultimately British nationalists in that they support the existence of the current British state. There is nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed about that point of view.

For supporters of Scottish independence the issue at stake is that a Scottish state, rather than a British one, should be taking the principal decisions about this country. And just as there will be those with a Scottish identity who are British nationalists, I have no doubt that there are those who feel a sense of Britishness and who ultimately believe that Scotland would be better off as an independent country.

The late eminent philosopher, Ernest Gellner, wrote: “Nationalism is primarily a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.” Seen in this way the proper argument between supporters and opponents of independence boils down to a political choice rather than any deep philosophical difference over nationalism. In short those in the Unionist parties believe the national unit of Scotland should not be congruent with the political unit – the nation state. Instead it is only Britain that deserves such status.

The important point in all of this is that if we can remove the name-calling over whether nationalism is inherently good or bad and recognise that we are all nationalists (except those who genuinely don’t believe in countries) then we can clear the ground for a useful, enlightened debate over Scotland’s future.

Yesterday in response to the news that the jobless total had fallen in Scotland but risen across the UK as a whole, the Scottish Secretary, Michael Moore, highlighted what he said was the creation by the Westminster government of the most competitive business tax system in the developed world. In particular he highlighted cuts in corporation tax.

This is interesting because the Scottish Government re-stated its case again this week for responsibility for taxation to be transferred from London to Edinburgh. The think-tank Reform Scotland also produced a paper which advocated greater fiscal autonomy both for improving growth and for tackling poverty.

In his remarks Mr Moore can clearly be identified as a British nationalist. He believes Britain should be in competition with other nation states and that the British government should have the right to set the tax rates it believes are appropriate for the UK in order to stimulate economic activity and boost jobs. The Secretary of State’s former leader Sir Menzies Campbell once said that in a sense liberalism and nationalism were the antithesis of each other.

In fact the only difference between the views of Liberal Democrats, as articulated by Mr Moore, and the Scottish nationalism of the SNP, is that the LibDems believe it should be Britain rather than Scotland that should have the right to exercise economic and other powers. The arguments over Scotland’s constitutional future will be hard-fought. There are indeed profound differences between the SNP and its opponents but a belief in the principle of nationalism and a world of nation states is not one of them, so let’s not pretend that it is.