Recently I noticed that I had got into trouble with the National again. A little while ago I wrote
If you think you are Scottish and not British, then please renounce your British citizenship & rip up your passport. You can then be deported from the UK as you won't have the right to live here. Alternatively, you can accept that you are indeed British or else be a hypocrite
Obviously, this is intended to be humorous. We struggle
in the UK to deport anyone at all even those who arrive here illegally, so the
idea that we could deport people who were born here and have lived here all their
lives while committing no crimes is clearly not supposed to be taken seriously.
The National concludes
Unfortunately for Deans,
it appears she's fighting a losing a battle. The latest census found that
two-thirds of people in Scotland identify only as Scottish, not British. That's
a lot of citizenships to renounce, Effie. You best get to work.
But it is not me that is fighting a losing battle. It’s
you. I don’t need to get to work. The job has been done.
The point I was making was to point out the absurdity
of people claiming to be Scottish and not British when clearly the vast majority
are British whether they like it or not. To suppose that a British citizen is
not British is to suppose that a square need not have four sides.
Nearly all Scots apart from those “new Scots” who have
just arrived from Afghanistan, Syria, France or Chad are British citizens so how
have we arrived at a situation where quite so many deny the truth? Perhaps it
is like those people with penises denying that they are men.
It is indeed the case that the recent delayed census
found that those with a Scottish only identity increased from 62.4% to 65.5%
since 2011. While those with a British and Scottish identity decreased from 18.3%
to 8.2%. The number of those with only a British identity increased from 8.4%
to 13.9%. But what must be frightening for the National and indeed the SNP is
that even with such demographics Scottish nationalism could not win the
referendum and now has been decisively defeated at the General Election.
The SNP won just 30% of the vote at the election and
there is no credible alternative route to independence than the SNP. It doesn’t
matter if 100% of Scots tell polls that they want independence if they don’t
vote for the only party that might make it happen.
By all means argue that the SNP must go and be
replaced by a genuine independence party, but you have already tried that. If
Alba is not that party what is? Three years after being formed Alba got 11,784
votes. Create a new party if you wish called Caledonia led by the ghost of
Robert the Bruce, but it is not obvious that it will do better.
But the more devastating issue for Scottish
nationalism is its almost unique failure to turn a separate identity into separatist
votes.
Two thirds of Scots think they are only Scottish which
is downright peculiar because there is no sovereign nation state called
Scotland. We commonly call Scotland a country or even a nation, but it is clearly
neither a country nor a nation in the way that Germany or France are these
things. If it were, Scottish nationalists would not be seeking the independence
which would grant Scotland that status.
So, although Scotland has never been a member of the
EU, the United Nations, has no diplomatic relations and there are no Scottish
citizens who have been issued with Scottish passports, two thirds of Scots deny
that they have the identity of the place that gives them citizenship, and which
represents them internationally. This is so peculiar that I struggle to find
any comparison with anywhere else in the world. It is as if two thirds of people
from Burgundy claimed that they were not French.
But despite this unique situation and despite the SNP
being in control of education and despite “anyone but England” more than half
of those Scots who think they are only Scottish voted in a British General
Election and voted Labour because they wanted it to form the British government.
Yet they claim to have no shared identity with anyone else outside Scotland who
also voted for this government and view it as a foreign if not an occupying
power.
Two thirds of Scots view themselves as already
independent. If I am Scottish and not British, what else can I be? We don’t
call people from the UK United Kingdomers, the word we use is British. So, denying
that you are British is to deny that Scotland is part of the UK and perhaps to
deny that the UK even exists or exists as a country.
The suffix land does not make a place a country as the
examples of Maryland and Sunderland demonstrate. The fact that somewhere was
once an independent country does not mean that it still is as the examples of
Texas, Bavaria and numerous other places demonstrate. Yet the mere fact that
Scotland was once a kingdom leads two thirds of Scots to conclude that people
from England are not our fellow countrymen, we have no shared space and the
country that unites us does not exist.
The Scottish not British identity that is held by two
thirds of Scots is obviously false to the extent that it amounts to a collective
mass delusion, but far from helping Scottish nationalism and the SNP reach its
goal it hinders it.
I am forced to conclude that up to half of those Scots
who lack any sort of British identity feel that Scotland is already independent,
for which reason there is no reason to vote for it to become independent. You
cannot become what you already are.
Given that Scotland has already achieved independence
or perhaps has never lost it, there was no reason to vote Yes in the referendum
of 2014 and no reason to vote SNP in the General election of 2024. Why risk all
the trouble that actual independence would involve such as border controls and
a new currency if you can happily maintain the fond illusion that Scotland is already
independent because we have a separate football team and sometimes say words
like “braw”.
The National appeals to a certain sort of Scottish nationalist who actually wants Scotland to become a nation state like France, but the devastating message is that more than half of Scots who think of themselves as only Scottish are quite content with pretendy Scottish nationalism, pretendy independence and a pretendy identity that does not reflect any sort of reality. It's all just pretendy separatism to go with a pretendy national identity.
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