Penny Mordaunt’s appearance at the Fringe in Edinburgh
has proved controversial for her statement that the SNP’s approach to independence
fails because it is based on bile and hatred. But who does the SNP hate? The
answer would seem obvious. England. The English. But both the SNP and its
supporters deny this vehemently.
There are two main hatreds in Scotland. Anglophobia and
Sectarianism. The experience of both depends on where you live, the nature of your
accent and how you behave.
I have never witnessed Sectarianism. In Aberdeenshire
it simply does not exist. No one asks you which school you went to, because we
nearly all went to the same school. No one knows who is Catholic and who is Protestant
and no one cares either.
This does not mean that Aberdeenshire is more virtuous
than parts of the Central Belt, it means simply that there was no large
migration from Ireland to Aberdeenshire. If there had been there would no doubt
be two Aberdeen football teams, lots of Catholic schools and also lots of
prejudice.
Anti English sentiment is universal in Scotland though
frequently mild. Our nearest neighbour is often described by the Scottish media
as the “Auld Enemy”. Battles between Scotland and England are celebrated and
remembered in a way that is peculiar in European terms. Few Europeans know
about nor care about battles in the fourteenth century. No one describes their
neighbour as an enemy, not even Poland, which suffered more than anyone between
1939 and 1945.
This sort of Anglophobia has existed in Scotland for
centuries, but it hasn’t usually prevented friendly relations individually
between Scots and English people. Lots of Scots live in England. Lots of English
people live in Scotland. They marry. They have friends. Where is the hatred?
But the same can be said about sectarianism. Lots of
Protestants marry Catholics. Lots of Celtic fans have friends who support
Rangers. Many people living in the Central Belt don’t give a damn where someone
else went to school. Much of the song singing and taunts are a ritual about
asserting an identity and membership of a group. So likewise, where’s the
hatred?
But to deny the existence of sectarianism is also
false. Some people do experience it both physically and in terms of verbal
hatred. What starts out as a ritual singing and taunting can easily turn into
something worse.
So, to with Anglophobia. It is rarely if ever as bad
as sectarianism, but banter about football matches and Bannockburn can
sometimes turn nasty. A little English child is mocked by everyone at school
because of his accent. An adult is told to mind his own business for expressing
a political opinion on Question Time. An English tourist gets an unfriendly
welcome and comments in a pub. These things happen. Someone is shunned by neighbours for his posh
accent. To deny them is like denying sectarianism.
Anglophobia is not racism. I don’t believe it is sensible
to call prejudice against someone of the same race racism. Neither sectarianism
nor Anglophobia are commonly as bad as the experiences suffered routinely by
ethnic minorities. It is harder to be a Muslim in Scotland than either an
English person or someone from across the sectarian divide. We are not visibly
different and that makes the biggest difference of all.
But even if it is wrong to exaggerate Anglophobia, it
is still the foundation of Scottish nationalism. It doesn’t mean that every SNP
supporter hates English people. They don’t. But without the basic Anglophobia
that has existed in Scotland for centuries and which goes on about an Auld
Enemy and battles fought in the Middle Ages there would be no motivation to put
an international border between England and Scotland.
No one wants to put an international border between Castille
and Aragon, Saxony and Bavaria and number other former enemies, because if they
ever hated each other, they got over it centuries ago. We didn’t. That’s the
only difference.
Scottish nationalists claim that they hate Westminster
rather than England. Although it is odd to hate a building and a district of
London, it is not accidental that they choose Westminster to hate.
While Scots have in a relatively mild way hated
England since 1707, it only became a political issue from the 1980s onward.
Labour and the Lib Dems argued that it was unfair that Scotland voted Labour
but got a Tory Government. That’s why we needed devolution.
In most nation states it is a non-issue if a part votes
differently to the whole. It is a feature of democracy. We are citizens of the
same state, fellow countrymen. It matters not one little bit if California votes
Democrat but gets a Republican President.
But it does matter if the part that votes Tory is the
Auld Enemy. It does matter if these are the people we have been fighting since
1314. In that case they are not our fellow countrymen. They are foreigners and
worse than foreigners they are enemies. They outnumber us. They are oppressing
us by giving us Tories.
It is this relatively mild Anglophobia that is the
foundation of the SNP argument. This reached its peak when certain Scottish
nationalists blamed English people living in Scotland for their failure to win
the referendum in 2014. It is to treat fellow citizens in a way that is unique
in Europe. It is to say they are illegitimate because of their accent and where
they were born. No one else does this, because it is a form of bigotry. What
does it matter where a fellow voter in a democracy is born?
There are two strands to the SNP. The main strand that
goes back to its foundation is the denial that our fellow citizens are fellow
citizens. This is pure prejudice because we all have the same passport and
citizenship. It is a form of hatred. The other strand is from sectarianism and
is based on the desire to the destroy the United Kingdom not so much because of
what it has done to Scotland but for what it has done to Ireland.
Scots of Irish descent don’t so much hate England and
the English they hate the Brits including if they are logical the Scots for the
Plantation of Ulster, Oliver Cromwell, the Irish Famine, the partition of Ireland
and the failure of the IRA to obtain a united Ireland by force of arms.
If SNP supporters in general feel victims, its sectarian
supporters feel that they are the victims of the British for everything that
happened to Ireland since the Norman Conquest. Their hope is that Scottish
independence by partitioning Britain would unite Ireland and their revenge
would be complete. Every taunt would be repaid.
Mordaunt therefore is correct. It does not follow that
every Scot will treat an English person badly. But it does follow that without
hatred of England and without hatred of Britain, there would be no SNP.
