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| Yes to Scottish independence. No to nationalism | Yes to Scottish independence. No to nationalism |
| (about 3 hours later) | |
| Understandably, some supporters of Scottish independence want nothing to do with the sound of bagpipes. Or not for now. I learned this after some very limited bagpipe noise during a Newsnight debate about independence caused offence, with a Twitter user saying the use of a piper was "insulting". | Understandably, some supporters of Scottish independence want nothing to do with the sound of bagpipes. Or not for now. I learned this after some very limited bagpipe noise during a Newsnight debate about independence caused offence, with a Twitter user saying the use of a piper was "insulting". |
| The tweeter could hardly elaborate, but you guessed this was an objection to any perceived reduction of the Scottish independence movement by patronising southerners to an expression of retrograde nationalism. With luck, at any rate, this will mean that ba ****es will never again be flourished by Alastair Campbell, the spin doctor turned professional entertainer, as proof positive of the Scottish loyalties that coexist with his "Better Together" inclinations. More importantly, London-based media may also want to keep pipe and porridge-based sensitivities in mind during the countdown to the referendum, soon after the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn. | The tweeter could hardly elaborate, but you guessed this was an objection to any perceived reduction of the Scottish independence movement by patronising southerners to an expression of retrograde nationalism. With luck, at any rate, this will mean that ba ****es will never again be flourished by Alastair Campbell, the spin doctor turned professional entertainer, as proof positive of the Scottish loyalties that coexist with his "Better Together" inclinations. More importantly, London-based media may also want to keep pipe and porridge-based sensitivities in mind during the countdown to the referendum, soon after the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn. |
| How, if it must be done at all, can broadcasters convey authentic Celtic atmosphere without recourse to cheap, nationalistic imagery? Mercifully for London-based programme makers – taking deployment by Alex Salmond as their guide – a wide number of cultural references remain acceptable. Tartan, for instance, for all its treasured place in the royal family's dressing-up box, appears to be as innocuously iconic to nationalists, in the approach to the referendum, as are tributes to William Wallace and celebrations of Bannockburn, in which around 11,000 English soldiers died. | How, if it must be done at all, can broadcasters convey authentic Celtic atmosphere without recourse to cheap, nationalistic imagery? Mercifully for London-based programme makers – taking deployment by Alex Salmond as their guide – a wide number of cultural references remain acceptable. Tartan, for instance, for all its treasured place in the royal family's dressing-up box, appears to be as innocuously iconic to nationalists, in the approach to the referendum, as are tributes to William Wallace and celebrations of Bannockburn, in which around 11,000 English soldiers died. |
| It is not long since Salmond attended the premiere of Pixar's Brave (with its acclaimed bagpipe soundtrack) in tartan trews. An SNP spokesman said they "got a big thumbs-up". The national flag is another promising accessory. "A few saltires," as Salmond said after waving one around at Wimbledon, so as to own the Murray victory, "doesn't really harm at all." Also acceptable for foregrounding in Scottish independence debates, at least to judge by their place in the Homecoming Scotland 2014 programme , enabled by a £3m government grant, are allusions to: Highland games, whisky, clan gatherings, Gaelic, Rabbie Burns, the Forth Road Bridge's 50th birthday and Bannockburn Live, an event Salmond has described as Homecoming's "epicentre". | It is not long since Salmond attended the premiere of Pixar's Brave (with its acclaimed bagpipe soundtrack) in tartan trews. An SNP spokesman said they "got a big thumbs-up". The national flag is another promising accessory. "A few saltires," as Salmond said after waving one around at Wimbledon, so as to own the Murray victory, "doesn't really harm at all." Also acceptable for foregrounding in Scottish independence debates, at least to judge by their place in the Homecoming Scotland 2014 programme , enabled by a £3m government grant, are allusions to: Highland games, whisky, clan gatherings, Gaelic, Rabbie Burns, the Forth Road Bridge's 50th birthday and Bannockburn Live, an event Salmond has described as Homecoming's "epicentre". |
| Let other 2014 commemorations of war dwell on reconciliation or shrink from triumphalism: next summer, visitors to Bannockburn's Live will enjoy a feast of martial entertainments, including, says Visit Scotland, "a spectacular re-enactment of this iconic battle close to the original site". Three "brutally realistic" massacres a day are promised. | Let other 2014 commemorations of war dwell on reconciliation or shrink from triumphalism: next summer, visitors to Bannockburn's Live will enjoy a feast of martial entertainments, including, says Visit Scotland, "a spectacular re-enactment of this iconic battle close to the original site". Three "brutally realistic" massacres a day are promised. |
| "It's no surprise that 2014 is the year the SNP has chosen for the independence referendum," the Scottish poet Professor Kathleen Jamie wrote in the New Statesman after visiting the site. She is one of 10 Scottish poets invited to contribute inscriptions for a monument at Bannockburn, "exploring the significance of the Bannockburn battlefield to people today". "In some fantasy," Jamie said, "they perhaps imagine the 'independence' debate is akin to that gory feudal battle, which happened somewhere between a bog and a housing scheme, under the A91". | "It's no surprise that 2014 is the year the SNP has chosen for the independence referendum," the Scottish poet Professor Kathleen Jamie wrote in the New Statesman after visiting the site. She is one of 10 Scottish poets invited to contribute inscriptions for a monument at Bannockburn, "exploring the significance of the Bannockburn battlefield to people today". "In some fantasy," Jamie said, "they perhaps imagine the 'independence' debate is akin to that gory feudal battle, which happened somewhere between a bog and a housing scheme, under the A91". |
| Except it is, surely, fairly surprising that the SNP should have, by its choice of date, actually encouraged those naturally sympathetic to Scottish self-determination, among whom I'd include myself, to understand a yes vote as primarily a statement of bellicose, English-phobic nationalism. It's as if the coming referendum on the EU had been carefully scheduled for the anniversary of Waterloo, in 2015, to be preceded by a whole year's celebration of beer and wellingtons, roast beef and Shakespeare, with 10 poems by English poets to help voters "explore the significance of the Waterloo victory to people today". Did Salmond not have enough confidence, without these victory enactments, in his ability to finesse the 700 years after Bannockburn, during which, historians have noted, many Scots became keen participants in British empire building? | Except it is, surely, fairly surprising that the SNP should have, by its choice of date, actually encouraged those naturally sympathetic to Scottish self-determination, among whom I'd include myself, to understand a yes vote as primarily a statement of bellicose, English-phobic nationalism. It's as if the coming referendum on the EU had been carefully scheduled for the anniversary of Waterloo, in 2015, to be preceded by a whole year's celebration of beer and wellingtons, roast beef and Shakespeare, with 10 poems by English poets to help voters "explore the significance of the Waterloo victory to people today". Did Salmond not have enough confidence, without these victory enactments, in his ability to finesse the 700 years after Bannockburn, during which, historians have noted, many Scots became keen participants in British empire building? |
| Salmond needs no sympathisers from the land he has likened to 16th-century Spain, stealing "Inca gold" (or oil), but if we have been slow to declare support, it could be because extreme, flag-waving chauvinism has been strongly discouraged in British schools for generations, with the postwar decline of nationalism only intensified by multicultural nerves. True, as we were reminded last week, members of the EDL have miraculously survived all such conditioning; equally, these extremists now risk being righteously snubbed in Mens' Socks. | Salmond needs no sympathisers from the land he has likened to 16th-century Spain, stealing "Inca gold" (or oil), but if we have been slow to declare support, it could be because extreme, flag-waving chauvinism has been strongly discouraged in British schools for generations, with the postwar decline of nationalism only intensified by multicultural nerves. True, as we were reminded last week, members of the EDL have miraculously survived all such conditioning; equally, these extremists now risk being righteously snubbed in Mens' Socks. |
| Michael Gove has proposed a more Salmondesque approach to history teaching, which would put English glories at the heart of the curriculum. The outraged response merely confirms the prevailing discomfort around uninhibited nationalism that gave us the Danny Boyle Olympic ceremony – and Salmond's debt to the Cameron administration, for generous contributions to his "Lord Snooties" narrative. | Michael Gove has proposed a more Salmondesque approach to history teaching, which would put English glories at the heart of the curriculum. The outraged response merely confirms the prevailing discomfort around uninhibited nationalism that gave us the Danny Boyle Olympic ceremony – and Salmond's debt to the Cameron administration, for generous contributions to his "Lord Snooties" narrative. |
| If the clue to SNP behaviour might seem to be in the name, Salmond's deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, has been refreshingly clear about her reluctance to "go on", like some of her party's allies, about 1,000 years of character-building history, and her preference for looking ahead, to "the Scotland we want to be". "For me,", she said last year, "the fact of nationhood or Scottish identity is not the motive force for independence." Rather, she wants the claim to independence to rest on principles of "democracy and social justice". Scotland has a democratic right to independence, without which it cannot achieve a level social justice that is impossible, she maintains, within a devolved Scotland. "The Westminster system of government has had its chance and failed." | If the clue to SNP behaviour might seem to be in the name, Salmond's deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, has been refreshingly clear about her reluctance to "go on", like some of her party's allies, about 1,000 years of character-building history, and her preference for looking ahead, to "the Scotland we want to be". "For me,", she said last year, "the fact of nationhood or Scottish identity is not the motive force for independence." Rather, she wants the claim to independence to rest on principles of "democracy and social justice". Scotland has a democratic right to independence, without which it cannot achieve a level social justice that is impossible, she maintains, within a devolved Scotland. "The Westminster system of government has had its chance and failed." |
| It is an argument, in that case, which might easily, without bagpipes or warriors, appeal to residents of any impoverished and resentful region of the United Kingdom, if only they had the means and a similar certainty that, left to themselves, a more equal society would result. Is the Scottish character so much more just and fair-minded than the English/British version as to guarantee the kind of nation Sturgeon wants to build? As encouraging as it is to think so, if only to feed fantasies of some day crossing the border, the generalisation recalls, in its reductive way, a passage in Orwell's Notes on Nationalism written in 1945. He mocks, among other things, "the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad'." | It is an argument, in that case, which might easily, without bagpipes or warriors, appeal to residents of any impoverished and resentful region of the United Kingdom, if only they had the means and a similar certainty that, left to themselves, a more equal society would result. Is the Scottish character so much more just and fair-minded than the English/British version as to guarantee the kind of nation Sturgeon wants to build? As encouraging as it is to think so, if only to feed fantasies of some day crossing the border, the generalisation recalls, in its reductive way, a passage in Orwell's Notes on Nationalism written in 1945. He mocks, among other things, "the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad'." |
| Can a Scottish person be bad? Nicola Sturgeon concedes that they have, indeed, been known to vote Conservative and that an elite even participated in the 1707 stitch-up. Can a person from England be good? Possibly, but a substantial strand in the independence argument rests on a belief that this will never be said of British politicians, unlike the Scottish leaders to come, with their total unsimilarity to Gordon Brown. "The UK's ability to re-reinvent itself is spent," says Sturgeon, with a confidence we can only pray is misplaced. | Can a Scottish person be bad? Nicola Sturgeon concedes that they have, indeed, been known to vote Conservative and that an elite even participated in the 1707 stitch-up. Can a person from England be good? Possibly, but a substantial strand in the independence argument rests on a belief that this will never be said of British politicians, unlike the Scottish leaders to come, with their total unsimilarity to Gordon Brown. "The UK's ability to re-reinvent itself is spent," says Sturgeon, with a confidence we can only pray is misplaced. |
| While the Bannockburn case for nationhood advertises ancient Scottish superiority over the English, the new Scotland argument asserts it for the future. It's an odd kind of idealism. /> | |
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