I haven’t been following UK politics much lately. I
think the British public has already decided that Labour will win the next
General Election and that Keir Starmer will be the next Prime Minister. This
may even be a good thing.
I am a Conservative, but I’m also a democrat. The
Conservative Government has done a rotten job since 2019. Boris Johnson was a disappointment.
We are worse off now than we were when he became Prime Minister. If this is not
the time to give the other party a chance, when is it?
From a Scottish point of view, it will be helpful to
have a Labour Government. Labour has the best chance of taking a significant number
of seats from the SNP. So, I am reasonably relaxed about it.
I didn’t much like the way Rishi Sunak became Prime
Minister, but he has quietly been doing quite a good job. He will leave the
country in a better place than when he began. The economy is improving and there
is not even a hint of scandal or chaos under his leadership. This contrasts
favourably with Boris Johnson.
I am pleased that Britain is a country in which
someone like Rishi Sunak, Humza Yousaf and Sadiq Khan can reach the highest
levels of politics. It is quite unusual in the world and to our credit. It is
unimaginable that this could occur in most European countries. But this should
not preclude people from saying things that they believe to be true even if the
truth is controversial.
One of the biggest problems we have today is that we
have arrived at a situation where people tell us that we have free speech, only
then to tell us that we only have free speech when we agree with them. This
prevents us arriving at truth.
Take the issue of a film describing the biological basis
of what it is to be a woman being prevented from being shown at Edinburgh
University. Take the example of Joanna Cherry being prevented from speaking
about her reasonable fears that she a lesbian might be expected to sleep with a
transwoman with a penis because s/he too thinks s/he is a lesbian. It is not transphobic
to fear what s/he might do with that penis during lesbian sex and any lesbian
ought to be allowed to disagree that this transwoman really is a lesbian.
Take also David Starkey saying:
You have a Prime
Minister, I think a man of immense talent, of extraordinary skill, but really
not fully grounded in our culture.
This statement is controversial. Reasonable people can
disagree and say it is not true. But Starkey is also an immensely talented historian,
and he ought to be allowed to express opinions, which he considers to be true
without being called the worst word in the English language “racist”.
Rishi Sunak is highly educated. There is every reason
to suppose that he knows our culture as well as anyone else and better than
many. He will most likely have studied British history at school, he will have
read the best of English literature and will understand our political traditions
better than most voters. But the same could be said of a Japanese lecturer or a
German lecturer who has studied British history and literature.
In the UK we have since 1945 developed the idea that
being British or indeed being Scottish or Welsh has nothing whatsoever to do
with where your parents came from or your ethnicity. It may not even have
anything to do with citizenship.
A Polish citizen arrives in Scotland and lives here
for a while. He may then be described as Scottish, particularly if he agrees with
Scottish independence. He may deny that he is British (Scottish not British),
even though it is the British Government that gives him leave to remain.
Someone else arrives on a small boat, or at an airport
and starts living in London. Almost immediately we must say that he is British
or if he wishes English. Failure to do so leaves us open to accusations of
racism.
But the consequence of this is that anyone in the
world just by reaching our shores and living here for a while becomes automatically
British, or Scottish or English or whatever other identity he chooses. It turns
out that the whole world is British.
We may or may not agree with this. If we don’t we are
liable to be called racist. But no one else plays by these rules and we don’t
either about ourselves. If a Scot moves to England, he does not become a new English
person. If an English person moves to Scotland, he does not become Scottish,
his accent precludes it as does his birth.
If Joe Biden’s ancestor moves to the United States in
the 1840s, he is still Irish, not because he lives in Ireland but because of
his ancestry. Yet we maintain that identity has nothing to do with ancestry
while all the time we have a hereditary monarchy whose justification is based
on genealogy.
The truth is that if my parents moved to Poland in the
1960s and I grew up in Poland, spoke fluent Poland and knew everything about
Polish history and literature, there is zero chance that I could become Prime
Minister of Poland, First Minister of Silesia or even be considered Polish by
most Poles whether or not I was a Polish citizen. Polish citizens from Vietnam
are called Vietnamese by nearly all Poles and also by themselves.
When Poland was partitioned Poles became citizens of Prussia,
Austria and Russia. But they did not believe themselves to be Prussians, Austrians
and Russians. They kept their identity, their language and their religion despite
there being no Poland for them to be citizens of. So how can identity be merely
a matter of where you live? If that had been the case, there would have been no
Poland in 1918.
So too in most of Eastern Europe there are minorities
who maintain their identity. There are Belarussian citizens who are Poles.
There are Hungarian citizens who are Slovaks and there are Romanian citizens
who are Germans. They base their identity on their language, heritage and ethnicity.
All around the world there are people who claim an
identity, and ethnicity based on something other than their citizenship. Native
Americans are different from other Americans because they descend from the
people who lived in pre–Columbian America. Aboriginal Australians have that
identity based on their descent from people who lived in Australia prior to
Captain Cook.
But in Britain it is racist to make a distinction
between someone whose family arrived yesterday and someone whose family has
been in Britain since Stone Henge was built. But this is absurd and also
untrue.
It is good that we consider Rishi Sunak English and
British and Humza Yousaf Scottish (if he does not want to be British). But prior
to 1945 there was a homogenous people in Britain who descended from Celts and
Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans and this mongrel mixture was as
much a people as Poles, or Slovaks or Native Americans, or Aboriginals.
Since 1945 large numbers of people have arrived in
Britain from overseas. The nature of what it is to be British has changed. But
let us at least retain our ability to speak the truth.
Charles III is king because despite various breaks he
can trace his ancestry back to at least William the Conqueror and perhaps to
the Saxon kings before that. Almost everyone whose family lived in the UK prior
to 1945 will at least in part be descended from the Beaker people who lived
here in the Bronze Age.
Most Scots descend from the Picts and then the Scoti
who arrived in the dark ages from Ireland. But it is neither rude nor racist to
point out that Humza Yousaf does not descend from these people. It doesn’t make
him less Scottish. We are all mongrels with ancestors from almost everywhere.
But there is a distinction between Native Americans
and those who came on the Mayflower and later. There is a distinction between
the Māori people who arrived in New Zealand around 1300 and those who arrived
sometime after 1800. They are all New Zealanders. But a Māori might point out
to someone with the name Mackenzie that you are not fully grounded in our
culture without it being considered rude, untrue or racist.
