The Spectator's Notes | 11 October 2018

Although, in David Goodhart’s famous distinction, I see myself as one of the ‘Somewheres’ rather than the ‘Anywheres’, I do not believe in nationalism (as opposed to patriotism). Nationalism always involves falsified history and sees identity as a zero-sum game. Nation states should be respected, not deified, and are usually the better for not being ethnically ‘pure’. But the Anywheres’ attacks on nationalism are interestingly selective. They hate Viktor Orban’s Hungarian version, for instance, but love Leo Varadkar’s Irish one. The avowedly internationalist EU uses Irish nationalism as its biggest moral justification for blocking Brexit.

And thus does Scottish nationalism, being seen as left-wing, escape criticism for its coercive righteousness. The Revd David Robertson, the minister of St Peter’s Free Church in Dundee, produces a well written blog called TheWeeFlea.com. In it, he relates how he was recently bicycling through his parish when he noticed a poster which said, ‘Dear BIGOTS, you can’t spread your religious hate here. End of sermon. Yours, Scotland’. Similar posters also warn ‘transphobes’ and ‘homophobes’. The declared purpose is to stamp out hate: ‘You may not have faith in respect and love,’ one says to the ‘BIGOTS’, ‘but we do.’ ‘Yours, Scotland’ means the Scottish government and Police Scotland (it is an extra weapon of petty nationalism when the polity has only one police force, since it then comes under monopolistic political control). As a minister who might have some ‘disagreement’, as he puts it, with ‘homosexuality, the trans philosophy or Islam’, Mr Robertson feels that the poster is an unwarranted attack on him and his faith, so he has reported the Scottish government and the police to themselves for their hate crime. ‘Yours, Scotland’! There is a great deal wrong with our Westminster government, but can you imagine it having the arrogance to sign its moral edicts, ‘Yours, Britain’?