In Scotland, the Nationalists will Sweep the Board, but which ones?

IN SCOTLAND, THE NATIONALISTS WILL SWEEP THE BOARD – BUT WILL IT BE THE ENGLISH NATIONALISTS, OR THE SCOTTISH ONES?

We can only imagine it must have been something of a heartsink moment for Anas Sarwar. His London leader, Sir Keir Starmer, had sworn undying fealty to the cross of St George and everything it represents in, of all papers, the doggedly right wing Sunday Telegraph. ‘Labour must not flinch at flying the flag of St George – it is the patriotic party now’ he puffed, speaking off his ‘great pride and gratitude to be English.’ The English Defence League couldn’t have put it better.

Asked how such a triumphalist sentiment might go down in Motherwell, Lochgelly, or Dundee, a grim-faced Labour spokesman spluttered ‘Jings, Crivvens, and help ma boab’. I paraphrase slightly, but that probably just about sums it up. Meanwhile that dyspeptic old Scotophobe, Samuel Johnson, might well have reverted to his thoughts on patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel, an aphorism later appropriated by Oscar Wilde. 

So what gives, now that the game’s afoot (as Shakespeare – born on St George’s Day – has it). The Curtice calculus is that Labour is on course to pick up 35 Scottish seats, against the SNP’s 11, so that would seem to be the tartan vote in the bag, then. The focus must now be on Brexit-inclined ‘red wall’ constituencies like Burnley, in the English north west, where five of the party’s ten target seats are located. That explains why Sir Keir, when not wrapping himself in the St George’s flag, stands at a podium flanked by two Union Jacks.

So might the Labour Party and its advisers, drunk on optimism for now, be unwisely counting their unhatched chickens? Put another way, might one or two fair scunnert Scottish voters be toying with the idea of sending Sir Keir and his troops homeward, to think again? The ‘in the bag’ prediction hardly represents fresh thinking. Two years have passed since Labour adviser John McTernan tweeted ‘kind of the First Minister to gift Labour Scottish seats at the next general election.

Admittedly, there was endless turmoil in SNP ranks during the twilight days of the Sturgeon regime, and there would be more turmoil to follow under the ill-starred Humza Yousaf interregnum, but some take the view that the newly established Swinney-Forbes alliance could yet rescue the party from total oblivion. This is a hopeful prospect, perhaps, and the First Minister’s (possibly misplaced) loyalty to beleaguered former health secretary Michael Matheson may not have been such a wise move, but the SNP is undoubtedly in a better place than it was. It still anticipates losing seats, and Alex Salmond’s Alba party might weaken its performance, but the question is, how many seats?

We are, off course, operating in an ever-changing political landscape. For one thing, in a comic attempt to throw sand in our eyes and distract us from his disastrous economic record, Rishi Sunak has come up with the oxymoronic term ‘mandatory volunteering’ in the context of the re-introduction of National Service. Teenagers, it seems, are a sort of national enemy needing press-ganged into some form of forced labour, military or otherwise. The thinking is that this will appeal to the Daily Mail blue rise brigade, and thus retain their Tory-voting loyalty. 

They forget that National Service was abandoned in the 1960s for the simple reason that professional military types were fed up being exploited as baby sitters for bored teenagers. A pal of my uncle’s claimed the benefits for him amounted to learning a lot of new card games and catching up on his reading, with the occasional foray through wet bracken in outer Wester Ross on the way to some remote pub. One doubts the nation was any more secure as a result.

As appeals to the heart go, flirting with patriotic tropes doesn’t always guarantee a political payback. In 2008 Gordon Brown decided it was a good idea to fly the flag of St George above Downing Street. A year earlier he had ordered that the Union Flag should fly permanently from public buildings ‘to encourage a stronger sense of shared national purpose.’ In addition, mindful of his holidays in Cape Cod, where the stars and stripes was a regular feature on many American suburban porches, he suggested we should all plant flagpoles in our garden and run up the flag of the union to promote British values of ‘liberty, a sense of responsibility, and fairness.’ 

No one seems to have told him that in some parts of post-Culloden Scotland some still refer to it as ‘the Butcher’s Apron,’ while a lady in York – yes, York! – who objected to being patronised threatened to fly a black bin bag instead. Tom Nairn duly dubbed the incoming Prime Minister ‘The Bard of Britishness’ and quoted Bertold Brecht’s ironic idea that where the public fail to be compliant with the state’s wishes the government should ‘dissolve the people and elect another.’ 

For Scotland’s nationalists, such unfettered displays of bombastic English nationalism offer an opportunity which they would be foolish to miss. If leaflets bearing caricatures of Sir Keir wrapped in the flag which England shares with Greece and Catalonia were to be posted through every letter box in Motherwell, Lochgelly, and Dundee, one can only wonder what the outcome might be?