Scots identifying as 'Scottish, not British' should concern Unionists

Scotland is becoming less British.

According to the most recent census, conducted in 2022, 65.5% of the population of Scotland identify as only Scottish, up from 62.4% in the previous census, carried out in 2011. However, the percentage of people in Scotland who identify as only British, not Scottish, has also increased up to 13.9% from 8.4% in 2011.

Strikingly, there has been a dramatic decline in the percentage of people in Scotland who identify as both Scottish and British, down by 10.1% from 18.3% in 2011 to just 8.2% in 2022.

These figures appear to suggest that Scots are increasingly regarding British and Scottish as incompatible identities which ought to be of great concern to opponents of independence.

It was always a fundamental tenet of traditional Scottish Unionism that Scottishness and Britishness were two sides of the same coin and that being Scottish automatically meant being simultaneously British.

Yet the percentage of the population of Scotland who now identify as both Scottish and British is now down to a paltry 8.2%. I've not seen any age breakdown of the statistics but it seems safe to guess that the 8.2% who identify as both Scottish and British will contain a disproportionate number of older people. Britishness is increasingly seen as an unattractive and unappealing identity for people in Scotland.

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There are a number of reasons for this development, and it's not all due to the 'divisions' in Scottish society created by the independence referendum, as the Scottish Conservatives love to claim.

A major factor is Brexit and the colonisation of Britishness by a nakedly aggressive and reactionary English nationalism. Both the Labour and Conservative parties wrap themselves in British flags even as they unashamedly make pitches to English nationalism and the hard Brexit which has come to be symbolic of it.

The National: Fewer and fewer people in Scotland are identifying as both Scottish and British, the census has None of this is appealing to the average Scot and merely acts to reinforce the equivalence of English with British in Scottish minds. There are other factors contributing to the decline of Britishness in Scotland not the least of which is the loss of credibility suffered by the few remaining British institutions, the royal family, the BBC, and the Westminster parliament.

The monarchy has been beset by controversy and scandal in recent years and in Scotland a recent poll found that a majority is now in favour of an elected head of state. The poll, carried out by Survation on behalf of anti-monarchy campaign group Our Republic found that just 34% of Scots supported the continuation of a hereditary monarchy while 45% said they would prefer an elected head of state.

The monarchy is no longer the unifying factor that it is claimed to be, instead it has become another point of difference between Scotland and the rest of the UK, where support for the monarchy remains significantly higher than it is in Scotland. The continuing sycophantic pro-monarchy propaganda pumped out by the BBC only serves to alienate many in Scotland, driving them even further away from espousing a British identity alongside their Scottish one.

If being British means a nauseating worship of the ill tempered and pampered Charles and his deeply problematic family, then most Scots would rather not have any truck with it.

The census did bring welcome news for the Gaelic language, recording a significant increase in the number of people who report having some skills in the Gaelic language. The census found that 2.5% of people aged three and over had some skills in Gaelic in 2022, an increase of about 50% on the figures for 2011 and 2001.

The increase is due to the upsurge in learning Gaelic which has swept Scotland in recent years. The popular language learning app Duolingo reported an astounding 1.8 million downloads of its Scottish Gaelic course, and while most of these downloads will not translate into active learning of the language, far less new fluent speakers, the figure is certainly testament to the widespread interest in the language, a very far cry from when I was the only school pupil in all of Lanarkshire to sit a Gaelic learner's O grade in 1978. I got an A.

Another major factor driving the increase in speakers is the growth in Gaelic medium education. There are now four Gaelic medium primary schools and a Gaelic medium secondary in Glasgow. All over Scotland there is evidence that Gaelic medium education is increasingly popular.

There are increasing numbers of Gaelic speakers outwith the traditional heartlands of the language and for the first time in centuries there are young people growing up with native speaker competence in Gaelic across swathes of Lowland Scotland, reversing a trend which culminated with the death of the last known speaker of Lowland Gaelic, Margaret McMurray, who lived in Maybole in South Ayrshire and died in 1760.

However, Gaelic still faces significant challenges, the percentage of speakers continues to decline in traditionally Gaelic speaking communities meaning that although the number of Gaelic speakers in Scotland is increasing the number of those who use it habitually in Gaelic speaking communities is still dropping.

This could lead to the eventual extinction of Gaelic as a community language if this trend is not reversed. Much more needs to be done, but the increase in the number of Gaelic speakers now offers a glimmer of hope for the language which once defined the very nation of Scotland.