England’s identity crisis is Scotland’s opportunity

Scotland has an England problem. The largest country in this so-called union is currently in the grip of a strange national psychosis, and has fallen prey to the venomous snake oil salesmen of the English nationalist far right, who offer simplistic and hate filled nostrums for all that ails England, the housing crisis, the cost of living, crumbling public services and infrastructure, NHS waiting lists. It’s all the fault of migrants, it’s the fault of people who look different, the fault of people who pray different, the fault of people who dare to speak foreign languages in public spaces. It’s the fault of the woke and the trans lobby. It’s the fault of European bureaucrats and foreign judges who hate England and want to keep limiting the God-given absolute sovereignty of Westminster which is the birthright of every Englishman and woman.

It’s mysteriously not the fault of greedy billionaires who hoard their wealth like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold and who fund those far right parties and the media ecosystem which relentlessly promotes their messaging.

But this toxic brew finds particularly fertile soil in England’s green and senescent land. England is a country which has lost its sense of self, a superiority complex in search of a modern identity. Amongst the nations of Britain and Ireland England was always the top dog. Its larger size and relatively flat and fertile agricultural land gave it a huge advantage over the smaller and more mountainous Scotland and Wales or the smaller island of Ireland.

Historically the Scots and the Welsh could harry and raid the English border lands but they could never invade and occupy large swathes of England, never mind attempt to conquer the entire country. But England could and did attempt to invade and conquer Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and absorbed the relatively tiny Cornwall at an early date. England was successful in its conquest of Wales and Ireland and eventually secured Scotland following a campaign of economic pressure, threats of invasion and bribery which led the the Treaty of Union of 1707, following which John Smith, the speaker of the English parliament in 1707, said, “we have catch’d Scotland and will bind her fast”. There was never any conception on the English side that this was a union of two equal countries. It was a takeover of Scotland.

Always unchallenged as the most powerful country amongst the nations of the archipelago off Europe’s north west coast, England’s geography also gave it a privileged position amongst European nations, insulating it from the threat of land invasion and the need to maintain a large standing army. Unlike just about every other European state – including Scotland – England’s land borders never figured large in its culture, the border with Scotland was remote from England’s centres of population and wealth while Wales had been conquered and politically absorbed by the end of the Middle Ages.

This combination of circumstances allowed England to put its military focus into building its navy, which then permitted England’s colonial enterprises, creating a far flung empire with England at its heart as the ruling and dominant nation. English domination of the other nations of Britain and Ireland led this empire to be conceptualised as British, Scots, Irish, and Welsh participated enthusiastically in the imperial project, enriching themselves in the process. But it was English culture, English power, and the English language which the British Empire spread.

The English were happy to subsume their national identity in their British Empire, after all it posed no threat to Englishness, but rather was Englishness writ large. In English eyes, British and English became synonymous.

Even after the loss of empire, the English still did not have to confront the reality of England as a medium sized European country. England remained politically dominant over Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the UK with its possession of nuclear weapons, its status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and the carefully nurtured one-sided fantasy of the special relation with the USA allowed the continuation of British pretensions to great power status and with it the idea of Britishness as Englishness writ large.

However this centuries long experience of domination, first over the other nations of these islands, then as the centre of a global empire, combined with England’s geographical isolation from the rest of Europe, forged a deep rooted sense of exceptionalism which left England’s state vehicle, the United Kingdom, or more accurately England and the countries it still dominated, uniquely ill suited to the co-operation and compromise necessary as a member state of the European Union. Compromise was resented as domination, co-operation as humiliation.

Brexit has exposed the true nature of the UK as a political construct. This is no partnership of nations, the comforting myth that has been fed to Scots for many decades.

But Brexit was never capable of doing what its advocates promised. It could not restore English sovereignty because England had never lost its sovereignty in the first place.Absolute sovereignty is a myth, but it suited the proponents of Brexit to paint England as a victim, and all England had to do was to free itself from its EU oppressors in order to regain its lost glory. Brexit could not provide solutions to the alienation and dispossession felt by England’s working classes because these were never created by Britain’s membership of the EU in the first place but rather by the greed of England’s own wealthy middle and upper middle classes, by decades of austerity and tax cuts for the better off.

The failure of Brexit to solve the problems it was sold as the answer to has left English nationalism in search of another enemy which is oppressing and ripping off England. It has identified that enemy as migrants, unleashing a nasty racism which had always been present, but granting it a new respectability and legitimacy. In recent weeks the far right has taken to festooning every lamppost with Union flags and St George’s flags in an aggressive territorial marking signalling the far right’s rejection of immigrants. Unlike in Scotland where members of the Asian community tend to regard themselves as Scots and are widely accepted as such, migrant communities in England are less inclined to espouse an English identity, identifying as British instead. The English St George’s cross excludes that community.

The rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism has also fed into England’s resentment and sense of victimhood. Scotland and Wales have their own parliaments, even though they are tightly constrained by the devolution settlement. However the truth is that Westminster has always been England’s parliament, a parliament in which Scotland and Wales have representation, but not enough to be able to force their will on England the way in which England can force its will on them.

There are still almost four years to the next Westminster general election and Nigel Farage’s political vehicle may well implode before then, just as his other parties have collapsed under the weight of his ego, but as things currently stand, we are looking at the likelihood of a hard right English nationalist UK government. Meanwhile in Scotland and Wales we could see the SNP and Plaid Cymru winning most seats and Sinn Féin win most seats in Northern Ireland. With pro independence or Irish reunification parties winning at Westminster and the largest parties in their respective parliaments it’s hard to see how the UK could survive the capture of Westminster by far right English nationalists who would regard Scottish and Welsh independence supporters as anti-English racists and who would certainly abolish the Barnett formula in the supposed name of ‘fairness’.

This would not be a UK Government which would respond positively to a polite request for an independence referendum, so the Scottish Government and the SNP will need to be far more assertive and confrontational than they have been to date. They should simply refuse to implement Farage’s anti-immigrant racism in Scotland and refuse to be constrained by the devolution settlement. This is why it’s critical to return a pro-independence majority to Holyrood next year.

Meanwhile in Westminster the SNP post 2029 needs to deploy every arcane procedural rule to hinder and block the operation of the Commons. There can be no business as usual when dealing with the far right. But it would also be a UK Government whose patience with the other nations of the UK would be limited and it’s quite likely to seek to cut its Celtic losses in order to secure its rule in England. If we are bold and brave, Scotland could easily be independent by 2030. England’s identity crisis is Scotland’s opportunity.

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