WITH political parties gearing up their campaigning, we learn that Labour “will build a better Britain together”, the Lib Dems are “for a fair deal” while the Tories (God help us) are “delivering for you”. And independence supporters? How about “making Scotland whole again”?
Much has been written about the complex nature of Scottish identity: the lamentable pessimism, the sentimentality, the “granite-faced grimness”, the ferocious pride and the fragile self-belief. Let’s forget all that. In reality it’s all to do with the still unresolved question of whose side you were on 300 years ago when the parcel of Scots rogues handed their country over for English gold, leaving the rest to thole it.
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Since then, from Burns onwards, Scottish identity has been above all a moral and political statement determined by where you stood in relation to this existential crisis and where you stand now. The reason we have to go back that far is because Scotland never got over it. Scotland is estranged from itself in ways not fully explained by the standard left v right class inequality thing that serves the rest of the UK. There’s an additional, complicating layer of historic self-harm endlessly in search of resolution.
Scots remain split between those who realigned their values after 1707 and those who did not. On the one hand the self-colonised by accent, class and privilege exercising power and reaping the benefits of assimilation. On the other, those who reject all that. The latter kind of Scots, says William McIlvanney, “are terrible insisters that you don’t lose touch for a second with your common humanity, that you don’t get above yourself, you refuse to be intimidated by professional status or reputation or attitude or name”.
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The seemingly innocuous but oft-heard comment in Scots communities “I was born in a council house” is shorthand for all this. Scots are uncomfortable with privilege and ostentation not because of their inner Calvinist but because they can’t make their peace with what happened many years ago. Such a compromise still means abandoning their individual integrity and their national identity. That’s the McIlvanney one, where “those who haven’t much beyond a sense of themselves aren’t inclined to have that diminished”. As a result “Scotland is in an intolerable position and we must never acclimatise to it – never!”
And so they don’t. As a result Scotland is in a doom-loop; a nation interrupted, unable to go forwards together into the future or backwards to correct the past. The poet Maurice Lindsay gets it: “Scotland is an endless/Becoming for which there was never a kind of wholeness”. In this state of ambiguous loss, we can’t make progress until both sides confront the past, recognise the need for resolution, heal the rift and become whole again. For many this will be a release not from grievance but from a kind of grief that it has taken so long and lives are still being claimed by diseases of despair. For some, the Scots beneficiaries of the Union, it means accepting that the party’s over.
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Psychologists tell us that the notion of the self refers to a person’s experience as a single, unitary, autonomous being. A nation with an enduring race memory of fracture and loss rooted in a moral crisis played out endlessly in this and previous lives has no such unitary experience, no common experience of its own history, and will only heal with a conscious and united act of self-belief that starts with unflinching scrutiny of who Scots were and who they are now.
At this stage perhaps what we need ahead of an independence referendum is a truth and reconciliation commission in the hope that at the end of the day we will all vote together for democracy. Only then will there be a looking up and looking outwards: John Maclean’s “we will be out for life, and all that life can give us”; James Maxton’s “We will start with no traditions. We will start with ideals. We will start with purpose and courage” and our men and women in parliament “will spend their whole courage, and their whole soul making a Scotland in which we can say – ‘This is our land, this is our Scotland, these are our people’.”
In short, a Scotland that is entire, unbroken, and whole. Then we can have a proper discussion.
Frances Roberts
via email
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