Meanwhile the SNP are trying to manipulate the independence referendum to secure a maximum vote for themselves, by holding it in the anniversary year of the Battle of Bannockburn and lowering the voting age to include sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, because polls have shown that age group is most likely to vote for them. This smacks dangerously of electoral manipulation by a ruling party to stay in power and increase its power. God knows we have seen enough of that in modern European history. John Gray has recently written that while the dictatorships of the 1930s are unlikely to return, ‘toxic democracies based on nationalism and xenophobia’ could emerge in a number of countries and be in power for long periods.11 Scots are proud, rightly of seeing their country in a European context. This, today, is the context.
Scotland and England have been politically and economically united for over three centuries. They have not been at war as states since the sixteenth century. The civil wars of the seventeenth and the Jacobite wars of the eighteenth centuries, though they had strong nationalist elements too, were both essentially about the nature of kingship and its relation to Parliament, society and religion within all the nations of the British Isles. This is not a historical narrative the SNP would approve, of course. They want a people drugged on historical legend, replete with holy national sites (such as Bannockburn) and myths. These things are the dead, empty heart of nationalism, always said to be unique in every country, always drearily similar. The British people have intimately shared everything, good and bad, involved in the experiences of the first Industrial Revolution, the rise and fall of the British Empire, and two world wars. Economic division in Britain has been, since the 1930s, not between Scotland and England but between south-east England and the rest. There are probably millions like me who are British Anglo-Scots and wish to be allowed to remain so.
Prejudices between the Scots and English have on the whole been mild in recent history. In my view, at least, the Scots and English are very good at knocking the rough corners off each other’s national cultures. But, beneath the empty populist bonhomie of Alex Salmond, the prospective breakup of Britain is already creating a new culture of hostility and bitterness on both sides of the border. I hope with all my heart that Scotland votes to remain in Britain, because then at least one nationalist spectre that has grown during my lifetime will vanish from Europe. If this book can persuade even one person of the dangers of nationalist politics in Scotland as in the rest of Europe, and to vote ‘no’ in the referendum on Scottish independence, it will have made the whole labour worthwhile. The recent record of other parties in Scotland has not been good; that is never a reason to vote for something worse, and to do so irrevocably; and a party which is often referred to by its members, as the SNP is, as the ‘National Movement’12 should send a chill down the spine of anyone who remembers what those words have so often meant in Europe.
Endnotes
1. Jenkins, R. Churchill (London 2001), 197–200
2. Mukerjee, M. Churchill’s Secret War (2010), 276
3. Roberts, A. The Holy Fox (1991), 67
4. Griffiths, R. Fellow Travellers of the Right (1980), 223–4
5. Roberts, op. cit., chapter 21, is the best account.
6. Pearce, R. Attlee (1997), 97
7. Butler, R. The Art of the Possible,143, quoted in Sandbrook, D, Never Had It so Good (2005), 85–6
8. Charmley, J. Churchilclass="underline" the End of Glory. A Political Biography (1993)
9. Ibid., Preface, xvii
10. Evans, R. The Third Reich at War (2008), 645
11. Gray, J. A Point of View: The Trouble with Freedom: BBC News Magazine. (24 Aug 2012).
12. Torrance, D. Salmond: Against the Odds (2011), xi
First published 2012 by Mantle
This electronic edition published 2012 by Mantle
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Copyright © C. J. Sansom 2012