Scottish Nationalism – The Rancour of the Meek

by Robert Bruce (August 2015)

Consider if you will Natalie McGarry MP for Glasgow East’s musings on her swearing in to the mother of parliaments:

Today I made an affirmation, not a sworn oath. As a Republican I believe that no child should be born unequal, no one child should be subject to another. I think the act of swearing allegiance to a monarch is antiquated and reinforces inequality. However in order to represent my constituents in parliament, I made the affirmation. I will always stick up for my constituents where I can.

[1] Of the latter needless to say Scotland has become something of a storehouse; few nations can boast so many invented traditions, and its favoured motif of nationhood – the sartorially embellished Highlander speaks volumes about its declining aspirations. To point out the plagiarisms of the Highland myth in all its mock tartan idiocy[2] is beside the point – the real issue is why anyone would be attracted to it and just as the Scots, in happier times, created the modern world so today they are trailblazers of the postmodern. To the kitsch romantic sensibility of the 19th century Walter Scott’s costumed melodramas offered up that most sumptuous of spectacles – the noble savage heroically defeated, and if for a reactionary tory-like Scott this was never intended as a diversion from the hard tasks of empire, the 21st century’s cult of the victim has given this sentimentalisation of a marginal and primitive identity a new lease of life. Scots as unpolished martyrs and eternal victims make excellent walk on parts in this well-worn psychodrama, and to judge by the preening self-righteousness of the new Scottish bigotry they have learned their part well. The Irish mindful of the need for genealogically obsessed Americans to inhabit a dream world of pseudo-Celtic authenticity have occupied this niche market for some time, and we have the horrors of rain dancing and terrorist chic to thank for it. That Scots should flock so keenly to inhabit this mental wasteland tells its own story.

[1] The choice between atavistic self-absorption and the civilizing ambition was famously posed in Dostoyevsky’s Possessed by the pan-Slavist Shatov:

The Jews lived only to await the coming of the true God and left the world the true God. The Greeks deified nature and bequeathed the world their religion, that is, philosophy and art. Rome deified the people in the State, and bequeathed the idea of the State to the nations. France throughout her long history was only the incarnation and development of the Roman god, and if they have at last flung their Roman god into the abyss and plunged into atheism, which, for the time being, they call socialism, it is solely because socialism is, anyway, healthier than Roman Catholicism

[2] The Ur foundation myth of tartan Scotland was laid by George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822. George IV had for the delectation of his hosts, squeezed his fat arse into a kilt and tights and Scott further obliged this sartorial obsession with a pageant of fake Highland regalia (a supreme irony given he was a direct descendant of Butcher Cumberland). Not all observers were impressed by this collective hallucination – Thomas Macaulay expressing astonishment that a monarch should seek to ingratiate himself with the historic nation of Scotland by ‘disguising himself in what, before the union, was considered by nine Scotchmen out of ten to be the dress of a thief’.

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The author is a low ranking and over-credentialled functionary of the British welfare state.

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