In February 2020 when we were all beginning to worry about Covid the Scottish Government passed a law extending the franchise in Scottish Parliament and local elections so that everyone with leave to remain in the UK can vote plus some prisoners.
On the one hand I can see the justice of allowing
someone who has been living and working in Scotland for years having the chance
to vote despite not being a British citizen. In pre-SNP Scotland I would have
supported this completely. But Scotland is not a normal democracy. Every
election we have is fundamentally not about education, healthcare and the other
issues that the Scottish Government controls. We might try to turn the
conversation to those matters, and we might succeed up to a point, but we know
that most voters will decide to vote on whether they want Scottish independence
or not. I do not believe that this is a matter for foreigners.
I have lived and worked abroad. I would not dream of
campaigning for someone else’s country to break up. It would be grotesquely
rude of me to do so. It would be to break all the rules of hospitality. Imagine
going to live in the United States, gaining the right to live and work there
from the United States and then campaigning for one of the states to become
independent. This would be considered completely unacceptable behaviour.
In every single EU member state, it would be
considered simply an abuse to use the principle of free movement of people to
attack the member state from within. Germans, Poles and Italians would react
with fury if people from other countries moved en masse and then started
agitating for secession. Imagine if Germans moved to parts of Poland in order
to gain a majority for reunification with Germany. Poland would deport them. Imagine
if enough Italians moved to Corsica and then demanded Corsica be returned to
Italy. How would the French react?
Constitutional matters are for citizens not
foreigners. It is for this reason that whenever I come across a foreigner
campaigning for Scottish independence, I ask them which part of their own
country they want to become independent. It is grossly hypocritical for a
French person to campaign for Britain to be broken up if he would be horrified
by the prospect of France breaking up. If it would be wrong for me to move to
Brittany and campaign for Brittany to leave France it is equally wrong for an
EU citizen to move here and campaign for Scotland to leave the UK.
But despite it being wrong to move to Britain accept
British hospitality and then campaign for Britain’s breakup it must be admitted
that many EU citizens and other foreigners are attracted to the SNP and its
continual agitation to destroy the UK. Why are they attracted?
Some people for historical reasons hate Britain. They
blame us because we had an empire and their ancestral home was part of it. They
dislike us because of our historical foreign policies and the fact that we have
been in wars with people they sympathise with. Others blame us for famines, for
1000 years of occupation and oppression. It’s odd that no one in Britain
complains that we were conquered by Angles and Saxons. Others still resent that
Britain voted to leave the EU. The SNP’s support for the EU and the prospect
that Scottish independence might lead to Scotland joining the EU is attractive
to some EU citizens.
These people should be careful what they wish for.
Anyone who has leave to remain in the UK has the legal
right to live in the UK. But Scottish independence would destroy the UK as a
nation state. We don’t know exactly what the resulting states would be, and we certainly
don’t know who would have the right to live in them. That would be up to the
Government’s of these future states. At the very least foreign nationals would
have to reapply for leave to remain in either Scotland or the former UK. It is
likely that foreign nationals would be given the right to remain in Scotland,
but they would have no right to live and work in the former UK. They would not
be former British citizens and there is no guarantee that leave to remain in
Scotland would grant someone the right to live and work in England.
The most important issue however is that foreign
nationals above all others should be careful with playing with nationalism. It
is likely to burn you much more than fire. The British identity is open to
every immigrant. Most British people think it is wrong to deny this identity to
people who live here. But this attitude is quite unusual in Europe. Most Polish
people for instance think that to be a Pole you need to speak Polish and have
Polish ancestry. If I moved to Poland, I could never become a Pole.
But there is an element of this in the Scottish
identity and also to an extent in the other identities in the UK. An English
person with an English accent who has lived in Scotland for forty years will
still be considered English by most Scots. If he wore a kilt many Scots would
ask if he was entitled to do so. Entitlement comes from ancestry.
Scottish nationalists pretend to welcoming and
inclusive to foreigners because they want your votes. So long as you support
the SNP that welcome is liable to continue, but as soon as you disagree you
will cease to be Scottish. This is the mistake so called “English Scots” fall
into. You can go native if you like, Scottish nationalists will even say that
you are as Scottish as they are as long as you support the SNP. But disagree
with them just once and you will be straight back to being English.
Scottish nationalism is made up of some genuinely
open-minded inclusive Scots who want independence for progressive reasons. But
you only need to spend a small amount of time on social media and to see
pictures of the Scottish nationalist marches to realise that Scottish
nationalism appeals to ancestry. Why else are they dressing up as if they were
refighting the 1745 rebellion?
Scottish nationalists have tried to appropriate
Scotland’s flag and all of the symbols of Scotland and they have largely
succeeded. But this sort of nationalism only applies to people who are from
Scotland. It won’t ever apply to people from elsewhere. What have saltires and
thistles and lions rampant and tales of 1314 to do with you if you are from
Poland? You don’t even know who the Scottish heroes are nor can you understand
your neighbour if he speaks Scots.
But this is the danger for foreigners in an
independent Scotland. It would fundamentally define Scottishness by ancestry because
anyone who has Scottish ancestry would get a passport and be fully Scottish.
Anyone else might be allowed to remain, but there is no guarantee that a Polish
accent would be quite so welcomed if times got tough. If you don’t look like a
Jacobite or speak like a Jacobite be very careful voting for Scottish
nationalists. You might find yourself watching TV in Gaelic or Scots and you
might find that the ability to speak one or the other was a requirement for
certain jobs and even a requirement for citizenship. If you think that could
never happen here, it might be worth remembering that the ability to speak the
national language is already a condition for gaining a passport in most EU
countries including Britain. What would Scotland’s national language be? Do you
really think it would be English? They hate the English. They might well end up
hating you.
