|
||
|
|
||
|
A distant province Commenting on the Scottish referendum, Jeremy Seabrook says that the visionless ignorance that Britain's rulers displayed in their campaign to keep Scotland from breaking away only served to underscore their remoteness from the rebellious Scots. THE referendum in Scotland on whether the people wanted it to become independent or remain part of the United Kingdom was, ostensibly, an expression of what politicians call 'the settled will' of the people. In practice, they were subjected to a formidable barrage of propaganda, menaces and prophecies of doom from the No campaign. Leaders of the three main political parties rushed to Edinburgh, united in an heroic epic to save the union, and offering promises to offer greater devolution of power than ever before. Banks, financial institutions and big companies threatened to abandon Scotland, to 'disinvest' and remove their headquarters to London. Scotland would not be permitted to use the pound sterling. Jobs would be forfeited, and Scotland would become, not a flourishing small country like Denmark or Norway, but a kind of iceberg, floating, isolated and friendless, in the wastes of the North Atlantic. The media were almost unanimous in support of the No campaign, only the Scottish Sunday Herald a sole advocate for an independent country. Listening to the rhetoric of the No campaign, it sounded as though Scotland were already a foreign country. When Westminster politicians talked about 'winning the hearts and minds' of the Scottish people, these were precisely the words they had used in relation to Afghanistan and Iraq; only, of course, those places, they invaded and occupied. Scotland was merely subjected to what the press called 'love-bombing', a sort of benign air strike. The British state concentrated its formidable power on ensuring that the United Kingdom 'family of nations' - a distinct echo of the Commonwealth - should not be rent asunder. In any case, that domestic 'family' has historically been treated with scarcely greater tenderness than its fictive international equivalent when this remained empire - the Glencoe massacre, the destruction of the clan system after Culloden, the Highland clearances, large-scale emigrations of despair, the economic violence of industrialisation, and its equally arbitrary dissolution. The ties that bind have also been bonds that tether. These memories evaporated in lachrymose exaltations over 'our shared history', particularly the overarching (and seemingly imperishable) story of the Second World War. When banks and businesses orchestrated their wails of economic disaster for a separated Scotland, the profession of sorrow sounded eerily like punitive economic sanctions: rhetoric lately used in relation to Putin's Russia, to Iran and Assad's Syria was heard in the authoritative tones of those who know that it is economics which determine the stability or fall of regimes. In a clich‚ which must be familiar even to those who have only the haziest notion of Scotland, the threat of rising prices in the shops would surely appeal to the Scots, who irresistibly attract the epithet 'canny', as befits the thrifty inhabitants of the home of political economy. Even the Queen suggested that the people should 'think very carefully' before casting their vote; such counsel, issued while in her Balmoral retreat, could scarcely have been interpreted as a vote in favour of independence. Rudimentary understanding The establishment, swooping on the country with its imperial portmanteau of clich‚s of (mostly failed) foreign policy initiatives elsewhere in the world, only confirmed what many Scots knew - these people have only a rudimentary understanding of the sensibility they wish to conciliate or, perhaps, subdue. And true to lingering imperial custom, their first recourse was to invoke the identical disastrous consequences of independence forecast during the long retreat from empire. They deployed familiar, if now archaic-sounding, arguments widely heard during the period of decolonisation in the middle of the last century. There was desperation in David Cameron's reference to the heartbreak a 'yes' vote would cause him. That far-from-delicate organ, his heart, has remained intact through greater misfortunes, not least the ruin of the lives of others, caused largely by his deeply inhumane policies, against which many Scots were also rebelling - bedroom tax, benefit 'sanctions' (there we are again, since the poor are also foreigners, who must be coerced into 'behaviour' acceptable to their betters, masters or overlords), the dismantling and privatisation of the National Health Service. Cameron's grief must have been inflected by the easily imaginable epitaphs on his political career, had he permitted such an important piece of territory as Scotland to drift away from the three-hundred-year-old union. In the events leading to the Falklands War in 1982, many people in Britain believed those islands to be located 'somewhere off the Scottish coast'. It was now Scotland's turn to be treated as though it were some distant outpost, a colony perceived only dimly, through the mists, not so much of northern latitudes as of imperial unknowing. What Westminster belatedly offered to Scotland in the closing days of the campaign - 'devo-max' - also aroused ancient colonial echoes. For were not most of the former territories governed by Britain offered something like 'home-rule', 'autonomy', 'federalism', as a substitute for independence? 'Self-government' was the term offered as an inducement to remain under the imperial umbrella, that increasingly threadbare shelter, until such time as peoples reached the maturity necessary to 'govern themselves' (the ruled are always infantilised), a prospect adjourned indefinitely at the time of the offers of limited self-rule. It all underlined the clouded insight of the ruling classes into those they would clasp to their insentient bosom. Devoid of understanding of their 'subjects', they can only bluster and threaten, a position of last resort for a truncated imperial entity threatened with secession in its heartland. It was easy to see how political, business and media elites made such a hash of their campaign. It had not even occurred to them, until alerted by an opinion poll in early September, that the beneficiaries of their wise rule would consider leaving the union. This was why David Cameron had refused a third option on the ballot paper of 'greater devolution', so certain was he of victory. First victims of colonialism Nor is the visionless ignorance of our rulers confined to their response to mutinous Scots. It is apparent in every aspect of what they call, in their lordly vocabulary, their 'governance' of the rest of us. 'Senior politicians', 'high-placed' CEOs, 'influential' opinion-formers, the whole range of strategies designed to paint the indissolubility of a United Kingdom, show that their detachment from the people of Scotland is matched by their remoteness from the North-East, Wales, Cornwall, the North-West or even the Midlands. They speak only for the counties that used to be designated 'home' - and the Conservatives seem bent on alienating even those it has always thought of as 'its own people', by its espousal of fracking, the construction of HS2 (a new railway costing untold billions that will make Birmingham accessible in under an hour), building on green belts and relaxing planning rules. This is good reason for the rest of us not to be divided from the Scots. We, in England and elsewhere, desperately need their scepticism, generosity of spirit, political consciousness and radicalism, to help us resist the manipulations of a political class which sought to browbeat Scotland into submission with threats, as well as promises that, true to form, did not outlive the day which dawned on the No vote. As soon as the 55%-45% victory was announced, and the union secured, David Cameron appeared in Downing Street, an avenging angel, determined to unpick the very union he had so passionately defended: he demanded that 'English voices' also be heard, and that if the devolved powers promised to Scotland - including control over taxes and welfare - were to be honoured, then the English should have a right to control their own affairs, and Scottish MPs would have to be excluded from voting on laws affecting England. This showed how close to the surface remains the imperial divide-and-rule instinct. Cameron's Conservative Party is scarcely represented in Scotland; by appealing to a renascent English nationalism, the opportunity to nullify Labour's advantage in Scotland took precedence over the very unity which he claimed to cherish above all else. It cannot be stated too strongly that all the people of Britain were the first victims of colonialism: the enclosure of common land, brutal poor laws, a punitive penal code, the laying waste of traditional communities, repression, transportation of felons, the economic violence of industrialism - all this was tried and tested at home, long before such elegant policies were exported to the rest of the world, significantly coloured blood-red on the map. If the union is secure, perhaps we in the rest of the country may learn something from the vigour and passion that galvanised Scotland: those of us untouched by the perpetual shimmer of wealth and power also feel we are treated as restive and wilful, lesser people, over whom those born to rule have once more asserted their claims. And when they reappoint bankers and financiers to be both bearers of morality and arbiters of the good of the people, we all become like the occupants of a spectral Afghanistan, whose lives are constantly reshaped by their unaccountable necessities, but whose hearts and minds are closed to their malignant probings and their attempts to win us over to their version of peace, progress and plenty. Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK. His latest book is The Song of the Shirt (published by Navayana, June 2014). |
||
|
|
||
