The patriot game is one the left can’t win
An otherwise unremarkable tenement flat in the street next to mine had a flagpole installed last year. After a break of a few months, it is once again flying a large Saltire.
The head of an ostensibly left-wing think tank compares Scotland’s place in the UK to that of Elisabeth Fritzl.
A few weeks ago the Scottish Labour party changed its rulebook to include a commitment to ‘the patriotic interest’.
These things aren’t connected other than that they all say something about Scotland’s ‘new political situation’. This is one where the Patriot Game is the only one in town, or rather the only one that anyone seems interested in playing.
This isn’t a state of affairs that anyone on the left, either in Scotland or beyond, should be happy with. Because ‘new political situation’ is simply a euphemism for an upsurge in nationalism, and the Patriot Game is one progressives can’t win.
That the prevailing political trend in Scotland is nationalism is seldom acknowledged. Had anyone managed to copyright the phrase ‘I’m not a nationalist but…’ they could long since have retired on the royalties. Instead, the flag waving and transformation of the SNP into a mass party is attributed to ‘anti austerity politics’, or ‘an embrace of democratic potential’ or other such warm words – anything but nationalism.
Advocates generally deny all nationalist motivation, claiming rather that the SNP deserve support because they will ‘push Labour to the left’ or, bizarrely, help ‘reclaim Labour’s soul‘ . This ignores the inconvenient reality that it is the SNP who have only recently adopted Labour’s plans for a 50p tax rate, having previously voted against the principle.
It took until after the leaders’ debates last week for the SNP to adopt a policy on zero hours contracts. They now support Labour’s proposals word for word. The SNP are widely proclaimed as an anti austerity party despite a governmental record that has seen over 50,000 jobs lost in public services, while they adamantly rule out using any of the tax raising powers they have and boast of having the lowest business taxes in the UK.
The SNP are a ‘radical anti-establishment force’, as anyone who has read the serialisation of Alex Salmond’s memoir in the Scottish edition of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun would know. The SNP are ‘progressive’ in a way that Labour somehow aren’t, having adopted all-women shortlists, some two decades after Labour. And so on. But pointing these things out makes little difference. In today’s Scotland, flags beat facts.
Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. Nationalist movements, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, are ‘dual phenomena, constructed essentially from above, but which cannot be understood unless also analysed from below, that is in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist.’
Put more bluntly, nationalist movements do not arise in a vacuum. As we can see right across Europe, they do better in hard times. And the last time a nationalist movement said ‘Let’s get rid of the foreign influence and get poorer’ was never.
Scottish Labour’s response to all this has been an attempt at a ‘Clause 4’ moment. The ‘Aims and Values’ statement of the Scottish Labour Party was rewritten by Jim Murphy so that it now has 12 references to ‘Scotland’ or ‘Scottish’ and a commitment to ‘work for the patriotic interest of the people of Scotland’.
It is difficult to believe this move stems from a sense of mission on Mr Murphy’s part. Rather it’s a response to grim polling numbers and an acknowledgement of a situation where arguments need to put more emphasis on saltire than sense. The ‘patriot clause’ exemplifies where Scottish politics is now – to gain permission to speak you have to be seen to be, and only be, ‘speaking for Scotland’. This isn’t progressive at all – it’s the opposite.
The politics of identity seem to have all but displaced the politics of economic interest north of the border. The party arguing that the country wins ‘when working families win’ is trailing badly behind the party that promises to be ‘strong for Scotland’.
The nationalist movement by definition seeks to divide rather than unite and looks to emphasise difference and particularity ahead of common endeavour. Their advance is not something the Left, however broadly defined, should be welcoming.
Stephen Low lives and works in Glasgow
225 Responses to “Nationalism is sweeping Scotland – and progressives should be concerned”
Donald Carthlan
If Scotland was out of the EU as evidenced supposedly by this http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/scottish-independence-scotland-would-go-to-the-back-to-the-queue-to-join-eu-says-david-cameron-9475319.html then how could Better Together possibly argue that Tuition fees would be illegal under EU Law as they do here – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/scottish-politics/10575630/Alex-Salmond-tuition-fees-pledge-illegal.html
” Alistair Darling, leader of the Better Together campaign, said: “It is as clear as day that, with independence, England would become a foreign country. EU law has outlawed discrimination against students from a foreign country.”
Unionists lied they argued a completely contradictory argument that “Scotland would be thrown out of the EU – but, er, still subject to EU laws”.
JustAnotherNumber
Start taking a little more water with it, would be my advice to you.
Mairi
I get really tired of people telling me why I vote SNP. Newsflash! I actually know why and it’s nothing to do with flag waving. The recent migration from Labour to SNP is due to Labour’s loss of the values on which it was formed. There seems to be an arrogance among unionist parties, and particularly Labour, that people in Scotland who are turning to the SNP are in some way not intelligent enough to know what the party really stands for. Rather than spending so much energy demonising SNP leaders and insulting SNP supporters, Labour would be better to take a long hard look at what they have done to chase people away. They might even learn something by asking previous Labour voters what changed their minds. I suspect their answers might consist less of flag-waving and anti-English bias and be more to do with Labour’s policies on things like Trident, welfare cuts and illegal wars.
Mairi
And I got an egg thrown at me from a moving car, told to shove my leaflets up my ….. and called a bitch who “was sticking the knife into soldiers fighting for our freedom”. And more. Both sides have their idiots but for some reason the unionists seem to take the moral high ground and tar all independence supporters with the same brush. Someone told Andy Murray he wished he had died at the Dunblane tragedy ffs! Both sides should be encouraging their own to have a decent civilised debate not trading points on who has the most loutish supporters.
Mairi
We serve our cause better by ignoring insults and letting people who insult us make fools of themselves by their childish behaviour. Not easy to do but the case for an independent Scotland is too important to be sidelined by name calling and mudslinging – there are plenty of politicians to do that!