Independence: An Argument for Home Rule by Alasdair Gray; My Scotland, Our Britain: A Future Worth Sharing by Gordon Brown – review
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Version 0 of 1. When a polemic demanding independence for Scotland is given the title Independence, but the subtitle An Argument for Home Rule, brace yourself for a muddle. Momentarily, the cover of Alasdair Gray's book makes it appear that he might be arguing for both sides in the coming referendum. Home rule for Scotland – within the United Kingdom – is what Scottish Labour and Liberal parties have intermittently advocated since the late 19th century; it has already been partially achieved by devolution, and it is a constitutional process that Gordon Brown argues should continue if Scotland returns a "no" vote in September. Home rule in this sense, however, is not what Gray means; he means separation from the UK. He has a utopian vision of how (in the words of his more coherent 1992 book on the subject) "Scots should rule Scotland", disentangled entirely from England. He imagines an independent nation in the sepia image of his own childhood, set in a retro-futuristic landscape that resembles the early days of the British welfare state. It is a Scotland of state ownership, minus the anti-Scottish BBC; a Scotland free of Nato and nuclear weapons and aggression; a neutral, Fabian-socialist Scotland, like an improbably benign Switzerland, but without the banks. Gray cranks this stuff out in a pamphlet confected of cod history, doggerel poetry, whimsical tangents, the bitter settling of personal feuds and the repetition of the Scottish Socialist party's defunct "Calton Hill" manifesto for a "Scottish Commonwealth". A book that should have been a major cultural plus for the "yes" campaign does it no service at all. It is, frankly, mortifying to compare such incoherent blether with the mighty marshalling of arguments in Gordon Brown's My Scotland, Our Britain. Nevertheless, there remain some illuminating parallels between these two Scottish originals. Albeit in opposite camps, Brown and Gray agree about the central pillars of Scottish culture: the egalitarian ethos of the Presbyterian kirk, the distinctive institutions of Scottish law and the aspirational traditions of Scottish education. They also agree that recent policies of the Scottish National party government in Holyrood have actually undermined these institutions and values – through excessive centralisation, through attacks on the legal system and through the dumbing down of education. Despite his overt support for the "yes" campaign, Gray rages against justice minister Kenny MacAskill's recent attempts to remove the principle of corroboration from Scottish law (thereby rendering it more like the English), and he can't stop himself expressing fears about bureaucratic authoritarianism in the SNP. Gray may dream of independence, but he is apprehensive of the reality, perhaps aware that his polymathic Scottish traditionalism finds few echoes among contemporary nationalists. There the parallels end, however. Gordon Brown appears to suffer no such inner contradictions or uncertainties. In My Scotland, Our Britain, he summons against separatism an almost overwhelming legion of economic data, historical evidence, political rhetoric, philosophical argument and personal experience. In the interconnected world of globalisation, he derides nationalism as a 19th-century answer to a 21st-century problem. Brown trundles out the heavy economic artillery: why would the SNP want a sterling currency union while relinquishing any Scottish influence on UK economic decision-making? How can you rely on North Sea oil, when it produced 4.5m barrels a day in 1999, but only 1.4m in 2013? Loss of trading within an integrated UK-wide economy, he argues, would mean that exports from an independent Scotland to the continuing UK would be 83% lower after 30 years (and exports from the rest of the UK to Scotland 77% lower) than if Scotland were to remain a part of the UK. Brown's statistical arguments are relentless and adamantine and exhaustive: a taste, one presumes, of what it might have been like trying to disagree with him at the Treasury. Yet it is not finance that animates his book. Though few paid his talk of "British values" much attention while he was in government, this has been the central theme of his political life. Though refusing to align himself directly with the Better Together campaign, or any party line, both his absence and his presence have been enduring features of the referendum debate. At the heart of his understanding of British values there lies an unexpectedly lovely notion of fusion: that Scottish principles of solidarity, civil society and "the democratic intellect" have, through the union, entwined themselves with English values of liberty, tolerance and pragmatism. He calls Britain a covenant, rather than a contract. Before the union, he argues, there was greater division between highlands and lowlands in Scotland – or between Jacobites and covenanters – than there was between Scotland and England. The histories and myths of a unified Scottish nation were created and promoted by the likes of Walter Scott precisely to ensure that Scotland remained in the union as an independent partner, not a subordinate. A coherent Scottish identity was forged not against the union, but through it. Brown provides an interesting modern parallel to this process: the way that the legendary strength of Scottish trades unions came from their merging with British ones. Though this is a book about nationalism and the constitution, Brown views the British state as the means through which Labour politics can survive: in the desire to tackle poverty and inequality, and in the hope that a civil society can continue to thrive in a global economy. Such politics are not, in the end, so far away from Gray's nostalgic welfare statism – but Brown's vision is greater and his argument runs deeper. This is by far the most serious and important work about Scottish and British identity to have emerged as a result of the referendum debate. It should be required reading for anyone genuinely considering the arguments before 18 September, or what to do about the UK constitution thereafter. |