States of Being

I am writing up some of the correspondence on a previous post into a post of its own.

Making Scotland and (almost incidentally) Northern Ireland as different as possible from England and Wales, and then emphasising the difference both of and within Wales by means of the language (which eighty per cent of the Welsh cannot speak, and which is in fact largely an indicator of impenetrable upper-middle-classness), really does seem to have been done on purpose by the Tories.

For example, I never cease to be amazed at how the evisceration of local government, which probably mattered more than any other aspect of Thatcherism, simply never happened in Scotland, where councils continue to employ school caretakers directly and such like. No previous government ever just exempted any one part of the United Kingdom (or, at least, of Great Britain) from practically its entire domestic agenda.

Perhaps Thatcher really did (very uncharacteristically) buy into the Scottish elite insistence that Scotland is so "different" as to be beyond the ken of anyone except the Scottish elite. But she never accepted that sort of argument from any of the many other old oligarchies with which she came into what could very politely be called contact. If she did fall for it in the Scottish case, then she was the first Prime Minister at least since the War to do so.

And in any case, Scotland really wasn't very "different" at all in the post-War period, or even as "different" as all that for at least a hundred years before the War. Until she made it so by not doing there what she did in England and Wales. Major, Blair and Brown have all followed suit in this as in so much else.

For, by so doing, she and they have divided the British middle class, the British working class, and various other bastions of this country's traditional pluralism and criticism. They have done this throughout the United Kingdom, and they have specifically done it in the Kingdom's "heartland" politically (and, in the past, economically): Wales, the Midlands, the North of England, and the Scottish Lowlands. That is where General Elections are won and lost, and that is where the various class and other interests are most concentrated in immediate proximity to each other.

It is usual at this point for Scots to cite their legal, educational and ecclesiastical arrangements as proof of their utter, utter, utter "difference". But compared to what? And even the claim that the education system or the church was especially different doesn't really stand up.

The schools were run by local councils as elsewhere in the United Kingdom, a situation which had not applied anywhere (except haphazardly, because of myriad local initiatives) at the time of the Union, and which was introduced across the board by the Westminster Parliament at much the same time everywhere. They had shifted from selection to comprehensivisation over the same period, for exactly the same reasons, and actually in the Scottish but not in the English case formally on the orders of central government.

The English universities had become rather Scottishised, training lawyers and doctors and such like in the way that the Scottish universities had historically looked down on them for failing to do. The two allegedly distinct systems were paid for in exactly the same way, and the UK has had a single academic research culture since well before living memory.

The extremely close links between the Church of Scotland and the English Free Churches, between the Kirk's Conservative Evangelical wing and that of the Church of England, and between its Moderate school and English Broad Churchmanship, go back as far as any of these things has existed, and have never been remotely threatened with interruption. Where do you think that the Westminster Confession of Faith came from, just for a start?

And so one could go on.

These are very middle-class things to focus on, of course. And Scotland was not a predominantly middle-class place in those days, if even now. But Nationalism was, as it still is, positively posh rather than in the middle of anything. Hence the focus on these matters.

The unions used to scorn even devolution on exactly the ground that their members' interests were identical throughout the United Kingdom. In their heart of hearts, they probably still do think that. Old Labour in general certainly does. (It remains a bit of a mystery why devolution of all things was carried over into New Labour from the Smith years, when so much else wasn't. Frankly, it seems to be because the concerns underlying the other things were a bit non-U. Poverty, that sort of thing.)

And then there is the single Social Security system, vastly more important than any of the above, and the reason why Westminster is a far bigger spender in any given part of Scotland than Holyrood will ever be, making the benefits culture undoubtedly the guarantee of a No vote in any referendum on independence.

As an anonymous Scottish comment on a previous post puts it:

It was Labour's portrayal of the Tories as "English" that did for them here, not any objection to Thatcherism. On the contrary, as David has said, Thatcherism was in principle quite popular in Scotland, and we hardly experienced it anyway.

Mainstream English opinion on these matters is much more progressive and humane than mainstream Scottish opinion, I'm afraid. Total opposition to help for the able-bodied poor, at least, is a perfectly respectable view for a sober person to express in public here.

Much of Thatcherism's intellectual ballast came from Saint Andrews University, and all of it looked back to Adam Smith and David Hume.

And as one ff comments:

Way back in the run up to the first devolution referendum, Leo Abse said that devolution would lead to rule by a Welsh-speaking elite that used Welsh to keep out the common people.

Well that happened anyway under the Tories, who were eventually led by an Englishman who had married into the Welsh-speaking elite. And devolution has entrenched it completely.

All Welsh-speakers are completely bilingual, you know. Absolutely nobody at all can only speak Welsh. Do people in England know this? Do they know that eight out of 10 people in Wales don't speak Welsh? And do they know that they, the English, are paying for the totally unnecessary double-sized road signs?

Any emphasis on Englishness, Scottishness, Welshness, Irishness or Northern Irishness, rather than on Britishness, always bolsters those institutions that can therefore depict themselves as the essence of that identity: the Scottish Bar and academocracy, out of which latter the Church of Scotland is run; the Welsh-speaking elite; Ian Paisley and Martin Maguiness (it is also impossible to progress beyond a certain level in the professions in the Irish Republic if one cannot converse in the practically dead Irish language); and doubtless before long, if not already, the public schools, Oxbridge, the English Bar, the London cultural elite, and the upper echelons of the Church of England (which, like the Church of Sotland, does at least have a branch office in every community, however unresponsive the centre might often be either north or south of the Border).

Such are the SNP and its Scottish Tory allies. Such are Plaid Cymru and the Welsh Tories. Such are the DUP and Sinn Fein. Such, for all the affected liberal-leftishness of many Oxbridge academics and metropolitan culture vultures, are the English Tories. And such, all round, are New Labour and the Lib Dems.