She also loves Tom Nairn. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Nicola Sturgeon has yet againĀ declaredĀ that an independence referendum is at the heart of her government’s programme. āOur democratic mandate,” she said yesterday, “is to allow people to decide the countryās future is beyond question.ā And now that she has the zombie Scottish Greens in her grasp as junior partners in a coalition, getting a majority for holding a referendum (“Covid permitting”) is, for the moment, beyond question.
Depressingly for thoughtful nationalists, the folly of independence is now also passing into the “beyond question” area. Scots-born, Ivy League economist Mark Blyth, who recently (remarkably) accepted a role as an adviser to Sturgeon, claimed that the endlessly repeated trope that an independent Scotland would quickly become like Denmark and other Scandinavian states was impossible, and that plans for an independent economy showed “a complete lack of specificity”. In earlier comments Blyth said that the effect of independence on the Scots economy would be like “Brexit times ten”.
That Scotland should now be careening towards an economic train wreck has many authors. But one above all stands out, for imbuing the country with a heady, and electorally powerful mixture of Anglo-hatred, romanticism and boundless faith in European Union membership.
The mixture was concocted over 40 years ago by the Scots writer and academic Tom Nairn, who will be 90 next year. He can reflect that his writings ā especially The Break Up of Britain (1977) and to a lesser extent After Britain (2000) ā provided Scottish nationalism, the most potent of European secessionist movements, with a framework within which secession could be seen as essential for Scotsā self-respect. Though a Marxist, his is not primarily a programme for a more equitable economy, or a march through the institutions to craft a political system dominated by the working classes. It is most powerfully a textbook for despising England.
He has been adamant that his polemics are not anti-English, and has pointed to polls showing that Scots donāt hate English people ā denials which are echoed by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (her now shamed predecessor, Alex Salmond, is a different matter).Ā But that is not the point.
Scots can be as friendly to the English as they like, but England can only be seen as a ball and chain round Scots legs. In The Break-Up, Nairnās favourite trope is firing off baroque fusillades of abuse aimed at the degraded husk of England ā and the Britain it dominates ā which now finds itself āa creaking English snail-shell of archaic pieties, deferential observance and numbing self-inhibition”; a country of Ā ārapidly accelerating backwardness, economic stagnation, social decay and cultural despair;ā āa sinking paddle wheel stateā, a āpalsied corpus of Unionismā, an āindefensible and inadaptable relic, neither properly archaic not properly modernā, requiring āa motorised wheelchair and a decent burialā within the āhopelessly decaying institutions of a lost imperial stateā.
As well as hopelessly decaying, England is hopelessly racist. In After Britain, Nairn yokes a āmalign Euro-scepticismā to Englandās āown brutish (racial) prejudiceā and āpost-imperial exclusivenessā ā and produces the murder of Stephen Lawrence in south London as the prime example. Yet it was a murder which produced an outpouring of revulsion from all layers of British society, a report accusing the Metropolitan Police of institutional racism, a campaign by the Daily Mail ā that most English of papers ā to bring the culprits, at first acquitted, to justice, an appointment of Stephenās mother, Doreen, to the peerage and the funding of a Stephen Lawrence Trust. The Lawrence killing showed the opposite of Nairnās slur: it showed an English population, with a proportionately much higher number of people of colour than Scotland, appalled by it: in 2012, nearly 20 years after the event, a poll showed 66% of the British thought the sentences on the two men convicted too lenient, while two per cent thought them too harsh.
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