Scotland in Limbo

For a long while it made sense to talk about Scotland as a liminal space – a space in between – that was going through a process that would allow it to emerge in a different state (hopefully literally). Now that makes little sense. Scotland is in limbo. We are stuck, moribund and directionless.

The SNP’s debacle of standing next to representatives of Israel who are knee-deep in blood was only the latest – and possibly the last – grave error of judgement that will hang over them for some time to come. The idea of a re-boot under a Swinney leadership always seemed far-fetched, now it seems grotesque. Not all of this is of the SNP’s making: the Branchform inquiry hangs over the party like a bad smell, but the party’s inability – or unwillingness to take a root and branch response to their various crises that have swept over them have left them looking like a group who have circled the wagons and indulged in the ‘one more heave’ tactic in the face of all of the evidence of certain failure.

Our profound sense of drift and stagnation is mirrored in a different way down south. Jason Cowley, The New Statesman’s editor has written (‘England in Pieces‘): “Order has returned to the streets of England but the mood in the country is uneasy, and this feels more like a temporary respite from chaos than something settled. The King, perhaps more in hope than expectation, has called for the nation to unite around “shared values of mutual respect and understanding”.

Who knows what this message from the King means, or could mean, or how on earth this could have any impact on the state of rage and racism? The archaic semi-feudal relic that is the trappings of the British state is meaningless in the world of coked-up ethnonationalism, Telegram and inchoate white male violence.

The order of the day is to suppress and ignore. The news that over 1000 people have been charged and prosecuted for a variety of crimes just adds to the idea that you can just ‘lock up’ the problems that we’ve witnessed on the streets and they’ll somehow go away. But beneath this assumption is a deep confusion about what’s going on. Cowley again:

“Through the power of the state, order has been restored after the riots but as the new Labour government embarks on the long process of social repair it feels as if the time is out of joint. David Lammy, author of Tribes, a memoir about transcending social and cultural division, says far-right rioters have “forgotten about what it means to be English” and should reintegrate “back into Britishness”. But what does it mean to be English, or even to integrate back into Britishness, when the Prime Minister himself says he wants to lead the country on a rediscovery of who we are?”

But from all the ink-loads of print that have been spilt about the riots very little is clear. What does it mean to be English, and what on earth is ‘Britishness’? Without having the guts or the insight to separate these concepts there will be very little progress in understanding what’s happened.

We are mired in such category confusion it is impossible to make any sense. Talk of ‘populism’ and ‘national unity’ are misnomers because we don’t acknowledge whose populism we are dealing with nor whose ‘national unity’ we aspire to. Britishness is overlaid on Englishness as a veil to hide the void and over Scotland to quell the restless natives. Starmer’s victory was heralded as a balm to soothe a broken and scarred society, but it won 63 per cent of the seats on only 33.7 per cent of the vote. Salvation is shallow and votes were cast from disgust with the Tories not love of the alternative.

Now an emboldened Labour government are announcing Osborne economics and the political map is changing rapidly. Reform are ahead of the Conservatives in the polls and are aiming to exploit the summer of hate for their own gains, the SNP is disintegrating in real time before your eyes and the Scottish Tories are collapsing in a sulphuric internal war that is a joy to behold. Beyond this electoral confusion lies social disorder and destitution.

The idea that Labour have arrived and will put everything back in place is a particular fantasy of Scotland’s own commentariat who have heralded the return of Labour as a reset to the great days of the past when the constitutional questions were marginal and the media and political class of Labour and Liberalism were one and the same.

But this is not the Labour party of Smith, Cook, Dewar or Blair. The forces that took to the streets have not gone away, disappeared by a prison sentence for a few hundred people, they still exist out there, desperate and angry. As Jonathan Rutherford has written (‘Hatred and division in deep England‘): “In these unfolding conflicts the political class has been supine. The writ of the British state which once stamped its authority on half the world is now barely capable of maintaining domestic social order.”

Overdogs and Underdogs

The challenge then is to create a coherent narrative for a whole Britain, one that is inclusive and multicultural, or to empower the forces of English nationalism and give them free rein. The political class is incapable of the former, which is gone forever, and terrified of the latter. In the acres of newsprint published about the riots much has been dissected: the use of external influencers and technology, the rise of ‘populism’ across Europe, the power of social media and on and on. But very little has been said about the rise of English nationalism and possible responses to it.

At the very heart of the social disorder we have seen is an ethnonationalism, an ugly variant of English nationalism that nobody is allowed to talk about. In the silence the forces of the far-right make gains, in the darkness of social media the disaffected are being spoken to. This silence has dire consequences.

As Ralph Leonard writes: “The subconscious claim of the violence was that the (white) English are a beleaguered and declining ethnic majority whose unique way of life is threatened by unrelenting mass immigration. Beyond this was the sense that England has been overtaken by an asymmetrical multiculturalism that privileges the right of ethnic minorities to celebrate their unique identities, while excluding the majority.”

But this is in juxtaposition to the claims often made about ‘Global Britain’ and ‘Britannia Unchained’ by the now disgraced Conservative government. The disaffected who took to the streets to commit what were acts of terrorism – not ‘disorder’ – are living in the remnants of a ‘nation’ that no longer exists and are being sold a notion of imperial swagger and exceptionalism that doesn’t match the material reality of their community or their household.

At least some of this is amplified by a complete inability to confront, channel or champion English identity and culture. Leonard again: “Unlike the nationalisms of our Celtic cousins, modelled on the classical small-nation European romantic nationalisms of the 19th century, we don’t have a flamboyant national dress based around bagpipes and kilts. We don’t have any need or desire to save an “indigenous” language from extinction, since English is the global lingua franca. Nor do we have a romantic underdog story of overcoming and emancipating ourselves from an imperial occupier to fuel our sense of nationhood. Instead, England, historically, is an overdog nation that for many nations across the world was an invader, conqueror and occupier.”

“This is partially a product of treating England as byword for Britain. Our histories and ancestries naturally overlap (in both directions). But following devolution inside Britain and the transformation of Britishness into a post-imperial civic nationalism, the task of adapting Englishness to the 21st century lingers on. The racist rioting that has engulfed England in the wake of the dreadful stabbings in Southport has made this issue more salient because it was powered by an ultra-nationalist narrative.”

The consequences for just ignoring all of this are not good. It’s not going away and the idea that Keir Starmer – a competent technocrat at best – might be able to articulate and be some ‘voice of the nation’ or speak to and for the disaffected seems far-fetched at best. Labour policy, as its already rolling out will serve to heighten not alleviate poverty – as we have seen this week with the announcement about the winter fuel cap – and their response to the rioting has been to reduce it to purely a matter of criminal behaviour.

Rachel Cunliffe has written (‘Does Labour have a cure for England’s turmoil?‘): “What the government needs in the meantime is a narrative. And it doesn’t have one. There has been frustration within the Labour party that Starmer, while adept at looking stern and solemn on television as he warns rioters about the consequences of their actions, has not yet found a way to tell a story that brings the country together. A story about who we are as a nation, about British values and resilience.”

The idea put forward by Leonard of Britishness as a ‘post-imperial civic nationalism’ seems overly optimistic at best. The idea is often suggested given data that immigrants cleave to ‘Britishness’ more than ‘Englishness’. But this is a low bar, and overlaying Britishness as an attempt to hide the uglier aspects of English nationalism isn’t going to work.

It’s not going to work because its a denial of the forces that are driving English nationalism but also because the markers, symbols and infrastructure that helped hold a notion of ‘Britain’ together have been destroyed. Britain is a hauntological idea. The Queen is dead. The public utilities have been sold off. The devolution that was intended to ‘shoot the nationalist fox’ missed. Few people under fifty identify as British in Scotland and the momentum for Irish unity continues to grow. Brexit has happened and only gone to show the cracks and fissures of Britain and Britishness. None of the wild claims that Brexit would lead to a great resurgence of British trade and commerce have come to pass, and rather than assuage Faragism it has only fuelled it. Added to the void space where Britain once stood we have a new government who are telling us plainly that they don’t have the money to rebuild and fund the sort of social policy that might, just might, offset the desperation of impoverished communities and make them less open to scaremongering by the far-right.

Scotland in Limbo

However – having said all this – having looked at our own stagnation and powerlessness, and our neighbours identity crisis, is there some, albeit feint light in the darkness? The present social and political crisis in Britain and in Scotland exposes and dismantles several shibboleths that have held us back and acted as misinformation about possible ways forward. Here’s two.

The first is the idea that the SNP were or are going to be the vehicle that would deliver independence and transform Scotland. The party have benefitted from this mythology and at first it seems unfathomable how we could achieve real change without them? Even if you disagreed with large sections of their policy, you might still have assumed them to be a convenient if inadequate vehicle of change. That now seems not just wrong but absurd.

This is not about individual failures, incompetence or wrong doing, it is about the incoherence of strategy and the timidity of politics. As Jonathan Shafi writes in his re-booted Independence Captured column: “… the core of the issue for the SNP is philosophical and ideological: are the SNP themselves sufficiently confident in their own case for independence? This question is rarely asked, in part because Unionist opponents have an interest in rendering the SNP as “independence obsessed” at the expense of the “day job” of devolved government. But it does bring to light important dynamics that are far more troublesome. Beyond the mechanics of a referendum, or winning Scots in their majority to the idea of Scottish autonomy, leaving the UK is rich with the kind of complexity and conflict the SNP leadership are politically allergic to. Independence, including economic control, necessitates a break with a series of interconnected and powerful institutions: financial, political, military and diplomatic. This, from the perspective of the SNP, must be negotiated in a process of acquiescence and permission-seeking, rather than defiance and confrontation.”

The fallout from the actions of Angus Robertson and John Mason – and John Swinney’s completely inadequate response – will be profound and add to the picture of the SNP as a dying political force. This does not translate into a gift for any political alternative, because there is none. But it does mean that the case for independence will need to be rebuilt entirely from the ground up and on completely different terms. This is not a revelation but it is a new understanding.

The second shibboleth that the present crisis reveals as bankrupt is the idea of Britain as a safe haven, a culturally open, politically progressive polity that Scotland should cling to lest we descend into ‘parochialism’ and the world of ‘narrow nationalism’. That is a genuine problem and prospect but it is not one resolved by cleaving to a greater Britain.

None of this is easy but at least we will be no longer working under misapprehensions and misinformation. Movements of change will have to work on multiple levels: community, city, region, nation and inter-nation to be effective. It is impossible to see, for example, how Scotland could respond to the toxicity of the tech platforms that have amplified anomie and monetised violent disorder. As Adrian Pabst has written: “In their current configuration, tech platforms unleash barbaric forces that portend a post-democratic and anti-political age in which technology rules unopposed. Social media destabilises not just governments but the social fabric of countries by injecting poisonous propaganda into the body politic.” While you might wish Humza Yousaf luck in his battle against Elon Musk, you might think he’ll need a hand.

On immigration too, any response will need to be international, as the forces of destabilisation and colonialism and climate devastation aren’t going away. The challenges facing us as individuals and as a larger political community are vast and overwhelming. But now at least the period of pretence is over and the task of rebuilding can begin.