Writing in the Herald this week Iain Macwhirter noted that “Any trace of ethnic nationalism, and anti-English sentiment, was expunged from the [Scottish National] party in the 1970s”. Responding to this JK Rowling – of whom you may have heard – suggested this was “Quite a claim”, suspecting that plenty of English-born Scottish residents might take a slightly different view. This, obviously, made for great Twittering and, equally predictably, gave plenty of people enough characters with which to hang themselves.
Tiresomely, they are both correct. As nationalist parties go, the SNP really is a remarkably broad church. It imposes no kind of genetic test upon its members. Many of them were not born in Scotland and are, like Ms Rowling herself, adopted Scots on the grounds of inclination and residence.
For that matter, the party deserves some credit for how it has not reacted to aspects of the independence referendum. If the SNP were as nasty a party as some of its critics suggest we would have heard more chuntering about the fact that Scots-born voters actually (narrowly) endorsed independence last September. It was, in crude arithmetical terms, voters born outwith Scotland who preserved the Union. It requires little imagination to think how that awkward fact could have been used by a less scrupulous party than the SNP. It’s to the SNP’s credit that almost nothing has been said about this. This matters.
Scotland is, in many respects, a place more divided today than it was last September. Opinions have hardened on both sides of the national question and fewer and fewer people, I think, are prepared to grant their opponents either the benefit of the doubt or the presumption of good faith. This is unfortunate even if it might also be inevitable in the aftermath of such a titanic stramash. And yet even if we grant this we might, I think, remember that it could be very much worse. And that, in many other countries, it might very well have been very much worse. This matters, too. Violence, in the main, is confined to fewer than 140 characters.
In truth that’s because there’s something comically risible about Anglophobia. That doesn’t make it any less distressing to those on the receiving end of this kind of abuse but it remains important to remember that it’s the kind of thing deplored by the vast majority of Scottish voters, regardless of the party they support.
Equally, however, there’s no point in denying its existence. Anti-English bigotry is never hard to find and Twitter and Facebook make detecting it an even easier business than was the case in the past. It is simultaneously mainstream and low-level. There is plenty of it to be found even if it’s also the case that, in general or at least in my experience, the more lunatic kind of Yes voter tends to have just as great a problem with their fellow No-voting Scots as with their English neighbours. (Of course some abuse, notably of the now notorious Quisling kind is a two-fer, firing one barrel at Unionist Scots and the other at their English masters.)
But the SNP knows how toxic this stuff is. That’s one reason why, for some years now, the party has been embarrassed by the bagpipes and Braveheart bullshit. It knows this is vote-losing stuff; knows too that the nutjobs marching on the BBC in the final stages of the referendum lost Yes votes. Middle Scotland recoils from this sort of thing; reckoning it as poisonous as it is laughable. There’s no place for these McSpodes even if there are more of them than we might like.
Nevertheless, it is also the case that many nationalists struggle to understand why so many other people struggle to see the party as the moderate, civic, respectable force it (mostly) is. The SNP’s independence offer was, in many ways, a bloodless proposition. A matter of accountancy and common sense, as much as it was any kind of rallying call for national liberation. And for good reason: Scotland is not an oppressed or colonised country and claiming otherwise is a sure-fire way to make yourself look ridiculous.
I mean, Alex Salmond no longer refers to his opponents as Uncle Tams; John Swinney no longer (absurdly) promises to tell the ‘Brits’ where ‘to get off’. And for good reason. Such talk belongs to the long years when the SNP lost every election.
Despite that, the memory of such rhetoric lingers and you can always rely on relics such as Gordon Wilson to revive it with talk of an English ‘cancer’ or some such other nonsense. Most of all, however, people who are attached to the idea of Britain – the single most important motivating idea amongst No voters – find it hard to reconcile the SNP claim that to be pro-Scottish imposes no burden to be anti-British. And with good reason for, in at least one respect, the former demands a repudiation of the latter. (Unionists, quite correctly, counter that there’s nothing anti-Scottish about voting No, though this too is something disputed by a certain kind of nationalistic keyboard warrior.)
Which means I can understand why someone might take the view that this anti-Britishness – all the Westmonster daftness – is a none-too-subtle code for anti-Englishness. The irony being, naturally, that Scots become extremely agitated when south Britons conflate England and Britain even as other Scots, in this constitutional context, are happy to make a similar conflation.
Which is why, I think, it possible to accept that the SNP’s view of itself as a civic, sober, party can be largely true even as some of its opponents can also reasonably conclude that there is, no matter how much the party insists otherwise, an echo of an uglier, more traditional, nationalism within it. The SNP’s official position is admirably ecumenical; its underlying position, even worldview, unavoidably sectarian (a word I use in as neutral a fashion as possible). This remains the case even though entry to the party and to the movement is open to all, regardless of ancestry.
So it is complicated even if it’s not so complicated as to render suggestions the Nats are a bunch of McNazis anything other than contemptible. They’re not and it profits no-one to claim otherwise. This is so even though there are plenty of vile people within the wider nationalist movement (This is also true, for sure, of their opponents as Nicola Sturgeon’t timeline can confirm.)
Is there a disagreeably potent strain of Anglophobia within Scotland? Of course there is even if, happily, many English residents here have only rarely, if ever, encountered it. Is there more of it now than was the case in years past? I am not so sure about that. You can always find someone happy to blame the English for everything but that someone is not necessarily representative of anything other than their own stale prejudices.
The night is dark and full of zoomers but though they are easier to find these days they are not necessarily more numerous than they were. The SNP really is different from many other nationalist parties even if, unavoidably, it also wins support from plenty of people who might easily, in other circumstances, find a home in those other kinds of nationalist parties. As is more frequently the case than we care to admit, more than one thing can be true at the same time.
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