A Fantastical Better Past
Posted on June 29, 2008
Hawking the Scottish ‘Government’s’ Homecoming Scotland 2009 (or should that be Will Ye No Come Back Again?) ‘celebration’ on BBC Scotland’s evening news bulletin a couple of weeks ago, nationalist First Minister Alex Salmond said
people who don’t understand that Scottish history is about romance and mystery don’t understand Scotland.
On the face of it the statement is outrageous, completely ridiculous, reactionary — even dangerous. Pace Marx, Scottish history, the same as the history of any other nation or region, is concerned with the interplay of competing social forces — the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. However, the statement, if considered from the Salmond’s point of view, is also true, insofar as the SNP and other nationalists peddle their own mythological version of ‘history’ to further the nationalist agenda.
Cultural critic Jonathan Meades describes Scotland thus:
more than most [it] is a nation folk-woven from frail myths … whimsical fictions — pure corn. The Celtic revival … populist, sentimental, risible … another pragmatic fiction in a country which is composed of pragmatic fictions — Highland dress, Celtic bards, pipes, shinty, Gaelic roots, Jacobite nostalgia and so on.¹
Meades is incorrect when he avers Scotland relies on mythology ‘more than most’, all nationalism is by necessity similarly constructed, a vision of a fantastical better — usually — past, imposed upon the present. He does however correctly identify the prevailing populist ’shortbread tin lid’ version of Scottish history. This narrative seeks at all times to divert attention from the actions of the Scottish ruling class, and to lay the blame for ‘centuries of oppreeeession’ squarely at the feet of ‘the English’. Hence the First Minister has the brass neck to paint Scotland as the benighted victim of imperialism, when Scots soldiers and colonists were the more than willing right arm of the British Empire. The colony of Hong Kong was built on the profits of Scottish businessmen Jardine and Matheson’s legal tea and silk trade with Britain … and their highly destructive illegal opium trade with China. Glasgow grew wealthy on the profits of the slave trade and the associated tobacco and sugar business. Churches in Scotland are full of memorials to soldiers and their families massacred doing what they had no business doing in places they had no business doing it.
In nationalist mythology the Act of Union is portrayed as the act of a rapacious and powerful neighbour eager to devour its rival, when in fact the Scottish ruling class, bankrupted by failed imperial adventures of their own — such as the disastrous Darien scheme — and desperate for access to American markets, effectively sold Scotland to England for £398,000, in return for favourable trading terms, pledging their support to the Hanoverian succession, and retention of their feudal rights (on these they were most insistent) to imprison or string up their tenants as they saw fit. Nationalist mythology applies a form of selective amnesia to the Highland Clearances, glossing over the responsibiity of the Scottish ruling class for the forcible clearance and enclosure of the Highlands and co-opting events into the nationalist ‘Scotland as victim’ narrative — not actor, but acted upon.
Salmond’s supporters include hypocrites such as the snob and proponent of violence against women — they want a smack — ‘Sir’ Sean Connery, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, who ‘refuses’ to live in Scotland until it is ‘independent’ despite having accepted a British imperial ‘honour’, and the singer Annie Lennox who thinks
Scotland could take a stand in a wonderful way, ecologically and morally and ethically.²
There is a first time for everything.
The petit-bourgeois nationalists are hand in glove with local ‘business interests’ such as the right wing homophobe Brian Souter and others who seek to monopolise capital and free themselves from competition with English capitalists; the nationalists lick the arses of American billionaires; and willing to go to any lengths to further their agenda, the nationalists were petitioning the murderous Burmese régime even as it was slaughtering democracy protesters in 2007 — ‘taking a stand in a wonderful way’. The nationalists use their romantic, ‘historical’ narrative to distract attention from the real sources of poverty, misery and disadvantage in Scotland, which are the same as in the rest of Britain — inequality and the uneven distribution of wealth and resources — and, in the short term, to divert the voters’ gaze from a string of broken election promises.
Meanwhile Scotland’s ’socialist’ parties tailend this reactionary rabble and their lies in the apparent belief that the interests of the Scottish working class have more in common with those of the Scottish bourgeoisie than they do with the working class in the rest of Britain, and that a bourgeois nationalist Scottish state would bring the Scottish working class closer to socialism. If Scotland is to be independent, it must be as a completely transformed socialist state, not as the first of a series of ’stages’. It is the duty of socialists to educate and organise for the fight for socialism, not for bourgeois fantasies and chicanery. As for those who employ mystification and obfuscation to further anti-human ends, they deserve nothing more than for the Maiden to be brought from the Museum of Scotland and erected in Parliament Square, and to be submitted to her tender mercies.
¹ Abroad Again in Britain: Edinburgh Castle — Jonathan Meades, BBC Four, 2005.
² Sweet Dreams for SNP as Annie backs independence — The Scotsman, 27 June 2008.
