The Scotland we've lost

How 15 years of nationalism changed a country for the worse.

Douglas Ross’s speech to his party’s conference was one of his better ones.

He tore into the SNP's 15 years of failure, lambasted its fixation with independence even as war rages in Europe and made a pitch for the Tories as the 'real alternative' to nationalist flag-waving and inertia. 

He spoke powerfully about how the loss of maternity services in Moray had affected he and his wife Krystle during her second pregnancy. About his despair when the doctors said the baby's heartbeat was falling and Krystle would have to be rushed to Aberdeen by ambulance for further treatment.

Mercifully baby James pulled through and was still being doted on by his big brother Alistair, who had just celebrated his third birthday and was now equipped with a roaring toy chainsaw, a gifting decision Dad was already regretting. In the Morayshire Chainsaw Massacre, the only thing getting slaughtered is Mr and Mrs Ross's attempts at a long lie. 

It was a speech that telegraphed Ross's human side as loving husband and doting dad and underscored a quality I have always liked in him: he is an ordinary bloke who somehow stumbled into politics, with all the rough edges and missteps that brings. 

However, as the weekend drew on, and I returned to both the video and text of his speech, something began to overshadow everything else. It was a theme summed up by this line: ‘The nation I grew up in was confident and outward-looking, yet the nation my kids grow up in today is bitter and inward-facing.’ How stark, how sad — and, yet, how true. 

Ross contended that 15 years ‘gripped by the dead hand of nationalism’ had left us ‘divided against ourselves’ and our nation was ‘becoming a smaller country every day that the SNP remain in power’. Westminster was the constant bogeyman and independence ‘the same fantasy panacea’. 

These words stuck with me because they describe how I feel. I suspect many of you reading this feel the same. Scotland has become smaller, more bitter, more insular. Since the SNP came to power in 2007, and especially since David Cameron gave them their referendum, this country has grown apart. Families have been divided, friends have gone their separate ways.

The constitution has gone from one of the issues of Scottish politics to the only issue, boring its way into every area of public life like an infestation of political termites. The rot has long since set in. Anyone not troubled by that must have some special insight into houses divided against themselves that can nonetheless stand. 

The journey to this point has been one of needless rancour, imaginary grievance, exaggerated difference and cold, cynical political calculation. Countries at ease with themselves tend not to vote for political and economic tumult and if turning Scot against Scot was the price to pay, it was stumped up willingly. A path cut right down the middle of the Scottish people has made our public square angrier and our discourse meaner but it has made a lot of politicians much more powerful.

Along the way, some signposts stand out. There was the despicable tormenting of Charles Kennedy. A decent man with enough demons of his own, Kennedy spent the final months of his life pursued by nationalist hellhounds. There was the SNP activist who followed and filmed Labour MP Margaret Curran as she canvassed her Glasgow East constituency during the 2015 election, terming his actions ‘hunting’. There was the man who chased then councillor, now MSP, Paul O’Kane down the street with a chainsaw during the same election, shouting ‘Red Tories get out of here’ and ‘I’ll cut your head off’. 

Then there was the rally in the last week of the referendum campaign, when Labour MPs travelled from across the UK to show their support for the No side. As Labour leader Ed Miliband tried to deliver a speech, pro-independence activists shouted ‘you don’t belong up here’ at him and ‘traitors’ at his MPs. One nationalist campaigner confronted Labour’s Jim Murphy and, after yelling ‘slaves’ and ‘Uncle Toms’, did what a broadsheet newspaper described as ‘a grotesque parody of a black slave from the American Deep South’ while crowing ‘No thank you, massuh! Just tell us where ah sign mah expenses form, massuh! I is a good white n*****!’ 

There was the nationalist mob that descended on the BBC’s Glasgow headquarters on the eve of referendum day and later the hounding of Sarah Smith. The Scottish Government adviser who branded Unionists ‘anti-Scottish’ and the nationalist campaigners who gathered on the Scotland-England border in the beginning of the pandemic, bearing saltires and SNP-branded flags, screaming ‘plague carriers’ at motorists crossing over from England, demanding they ‘stay the fuck out’ and warning: ‘If they’ll not stay at home, we’ll shame them to death.’ 

There was the then Scots Makar, or national poet — a member of the SNP, naturally — who lamented ‘a shortage of Scottish people working in the National Theatre of Scotland’. The celebrated novelist and independence advocate who said some English ‘settlers’ who came to live and work in Scotland integrated but the rest were ‘colonists’ who ‘look forward to a future back in England through promotion or by retirement’. ’These colonists,’ he pronounced, ‘were invited here and employed by Scots without confidence in their own land and people.’ 

I recall, too, the eminent Scottish historian who spoke at a Better Together event about his book on the history of the Union and was rewarded with an SNP minister contacting his university bosses to complain. I also remember when the principal of one of Scotland’s leading universities expressed reservations about the impact of independence on higher education funding. I remember how the Scottish Government tried to harry her into signing an effective retraction of her comments. Further down the educational hierarchy, I note the efforts to push nationalist propaganda through the school curriculum and via the soon to be gone, never to be missed Education Scotland. 

Look at this Scotland. Do you recognise it? I don't. It snarls where my Scotland wryly smiled, it gurns in self-pity and animus where mine rolled its eyes and threw a chuckle at life's travails. My Scotland had its problems and did not regard their discussion as a kind of treason. My Scotland had its hatreds — plenty of them — but in quiet moments of reflection it reproached itself for them. It did not revel in cruelty and contempt as virtues.  

It's easy to fall into nostalgic yearning for an idealised era when civility reigned, politics was about principle and people could leave their doors unlocked at night. There have been times of intense ideological division much sharper than Scotland in 2022. In the 1930s, amid soul-crushing poverty and unemployment, communism and fascism did battle on the streets, as significant segments of the population convinced themselves either of these inhuman doctrines of social misery held the answer to the ailments of the time. We are more fortunate than we realise to have lived during the last seven decades of relative peace and societal harmony.  

Even so, something has clearly changed. Scottish politics has ceased to be about right and left or even right and wrong and has become about who has a right to speak and who doesn't and who is a true Scot and who isn't.

At the same time that we have been distracted by these synthetic divisions, the real gap, one that has grown into a chasm, is between the mass of the Scottish population and a small, faddish clique of pliable power-seekers, unreachable bureaucrats and ideologues with all the right connections.

These are the people who rule Scotland and they would much rather you hated your neighbour over a flag than turn your attention to them. Maybe one day, when they are no longer in charge, we can be confident and outward-looking again.

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Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on March 21, 2022.