While you were laughing
Politics Notebook #13: The not-so-funny side of the Redcoat Cafe furore.
It began where all soul-defiling displays of collective idiocy begin: Twitter.
Or ‘X’.
Or whatever it’s calling itself this week.
Edinburgh Castle, which has just completed a refurbishment of its Redcoat Cafe, fired off a tweet to let visitors know the eatery was open to the public again.
This anodyne announcement was met with spittle-flecked fury by Scottish nationalists. The redcoats were the soldiers who, under Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, put down Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobite rebellion in the Battle of Culloden. For nationalists, redcoats — named after traditional British Army dress — are among the most accursed English oppressors of the Scots, second only to members of the Labour Party.
That many of the redcoats in 1745-46 were Scots themselves, and the Jacobites fighting not for ordinary Scots and their sovereignty but for the Young Pretender’s claim to the British throne, is lost on most Scottish nationalists. You could travel the world, from Tighnabruaich to Timbuktu to Townsville, and never meet anyone as ignorant of Scottish history as a Scottish nationalist.
Among those joining the social media pile-on were SNP MSP Kevin Stewart, who really should know better, and SNP MP Douglas Chapman, who really can’t be expected to know better. Stewart called the name of the cafe ‘a huge misjudgment’ while Chapman urged ‘a swift rebrand’. Others went further, with 4,000 people signing a petition demanding a name change and some posting negative reviews of the cafe on TripAdvisor. As if the SNP hasn’t done enough damage to Scotland’s hospitality industry.
The separatist freakout prompted much guffawing from Unionists on social media and various anti-independence commentators. All in good fun and Lord knows we need a laugh every now and then. But I didn’t write about it or comment on it in any way, and for a very good reason: I knew what was going to happen.
And it has. The Scottish Sun reports that Historic Environment Scotland (HES), which runs Edinburgh Castle, is to ‘review’ the name of the cafe. A spokesperson told the paper:
The name has been in place since 1992 and reflects the military history which is told throughout the castle, however the way we interpret history is constantly evolving. As part of our future plans for Edinburgh Castle, the names of both the Redcoat Café and Jacobite function room will now be reviewed.
I don’t care what Edinburgh Castle calls its cafe and regard this entire episode as irredeemably silly. But just because it’s silly doesn’t mean it’s trivial.
While it might have taken the form of a social media tantrum, this was an exercise of raw political and cultural power. A historic Scottish building uses a name for three decades, nationalists belatedly take offence, and the name is now under review. Can you think of a recent example of the other side of Scottish constitutional politics — people opposed to nationalism and independence — enjoying that kind of influence over the culture or heritage sector?
Over any sector?
An SNP MP suggested one of Scotland’s most important heritage sites rebrand part of its operation because he disapproves of it being named after 18th century British soldiers, and instead of politely ignoring him like a street-corner mouth-foamer claiming to be Elvis, Historic Environment Scotland decided to indulge him and his fellow infantrymen in the national grievance army that is the SNP.
There’s nothing wrong with deriding your opponents but derision without political action is nothing more than a coping mechanism. Perhaps it’s the humourless age we live in but I’m not convinced the old Mark Twain saw, ‘Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand,’ still holds, or at least it does not hold in the realm of politics. Politics is not about punchlines, it’s about power. It’s about who wields power, how they exercise it, and to what effect. Unionists may have had a chuckle but it is the nationalists who will have the last laugh if Edinburgh Castle rebrands its cafe to erase a term steeped in British and Scottish history.
One of the reasons this sort of thing happens, and you can file the Redcoat Cafe alongside campaigns to banish British branding from supermarket products, is that mainstream pro-UK politicians will have nothing to do with such matters. They regard fixations on cafe names and Union Jack branding on Scotch beef to be petty, if not downright mad, diversions from bread-and-butter matters such as poverty, education and healthcare. The language of priorities is the religion of socialism, and all that.
Yet while the material is more urgent than the symbolic, the symbolic does matter. The nationalists understand that. That’s why they routinely romp home in elections despite their dismal record of delivery. Elections aren’t fought on outcomes, they’re fought on impressions.
The SNP and their sympathisers have spent the past 17 years chipping away at outward signs of British culture and identity in Scotland and have met with little resistance. I don’t want anti-independence politicians spending their days trawling Twitter in search of fresh victimhood but I reckon it would be a good idea if the debate over political culture in Scotland had two sides participating instead of just one. The reason institutions and organisations cave to SNP politicians and the nationalist mob is that they know there will be no comparable pushback from Unionist politicians.
Counsell’s Second Law says: ‘The two most powerful forces known to contemporary humankind are peer pressure and the desire for a quiet life.’ If pandering to nationalists is the swiftest route to an easy life, and it very much is in modern Scotland, then that is what institutions will do. However, if doing so were to bring counter-pressures, such as questions about political neutrality, quizzing senior executives before committees, and parliamentary debates about the relationship between arms-length bodies and Scottish ministers, giving into the SNP would no longer guarantee an easy life. If Historic Environment Scotland, whose board members are appointed by the Scottish Government, thought that agreeing to review the name of the Redcoat Cafe would bring enhanced scrutiny and criticism from opposition politicians, such a review would never have been initiated.
Proposing to the average Scottish opposition politician that they take more of an interest the politics of culture and identity will inevitably bring a dismissive response that contains the phrase ‘culture wars’. When a politician tells you they’re not interested in ‘culture wars’, what they mean is that they deem your concerns vulgar and an intrusion into their refined priorities. They didn’t get into politics to be distracted by the preferences of the voters.
We have heard such arguments before, not least in relation to the defacing or destruction of statues of British historical figures such as Winston Churchill or rewriting museum exhibits and even school curricula along plainly ideological lines. At every stage along the way, there has been a terribly clever politician there to scold us for paying attention to such trifling affairs when there were Serious Issues to contend with. The archetypal Scottish opposition politician is someone who considers it their job to lose to the SNP in the most high-status way possible.
I have written a piece for The Critic magazine on recent polling showing half of all No voters consider devolution to have been bad for Scotland. I ask why this sentiment is not reflected in the main anti-independence parties. Three parties, with 57 MSPs and 11 MPs between them, and I cannot think of single voice of any prominence talking candidly about the failings of devolution and how they have been greatly to the benefit of the SNP and the broader movement for Scottish independence. Do you reckon a view held by half of all Yes voters would go so deafeningly unechoed?
The same is true of cultural and identity politics. There is a not insignificant cohort of pro-UK voters out there who want political leaders prepared not only to challenge but rollback the SNP’s annexation of Scottish civil society. Not to mimic confected nationalist resentment with confected Unionist resentment, but to stand up for British identity, history and cultural expression in Scotland when the tartan chauvinists attempt to drive them out of public life.
We get the politicians we vote for, or rather the politicians we are prepared to settle for. If the current crop will not deign to take cultural politics seriously, then perhaps pro-UK voters should get themselves some elected representatives who will. Because while you were laughing over Redcoat Cafe, the nationalists were winning — again.
After reading your articles now for a few years, this piece really gets to the heart of where our opinions are as one. For one who once knocked on doors before the 1997 election for the SNP then after studying Scottish history for 4 years, I am resolutely against nationalism in all forms.
I would expect a simple case where Scotland created Britain far more effective than belittling idiotic msps with a Twitter account.
Is there a 'Save the Redcoat Cafe' petition I can sign?