Monday 7 January 2008

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.

11 comments:

  1. If you honestly believe that speaking Welsh is a "an indicator of impenetrable upper-middle-classness" then I would suggest you visit Caernarfon, or porthmadog, or Llangefni, or Pwllheli, or Dolgelau, or Bala or in fact any town in the North West.

    If you did happen to visit you'll find council estates full of Welsh Speakers, homeless hostels full of Welsh Speakers and dole queues full of Welsh speakers.

    While your comments may well ring true in Cardiff, Wales is a whole lot bigger than it's Capital.

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  2. But Cardiff is where the decisions are made.

    I can't tell you how many emails I've had from people in Wales saying thank God that at last someone east of Offa's Dyke has woken up to this racket.

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  3. Concerning Welsh, Welsh is taught in classes in local prisons (i.e. prisons of first commital after being dealt with by the courts - remand or sentenced) which serve the courts in Wales. Due to HM Prison service being an Anglo-Welsh organisation, that means Welsh language classes and I believe signage is provided in such prisons in England, namely Shrewsbury and Altourse in Liverpool. HM Prison service part of the plot eh?

    Concerning the churches, one thing. You are a Catholic. Although your church semi-recognises the UK by sending a Papal Nuncio to the UK, the hierachy of the Church does not recognise the UK.

    There are three primates in the UK. England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland (the church does not seem to recognise partition). Surely as a hardline unionist catholic you should be campaigning for a single primate for the UK?

    Concerning the law, Scots law is different in a number of aspects from English law. Such as the law of property (even the working class own/rent houses), laws of inheritance etc. Scotland even has a different law of murder from England, once the difference of whether you ended up on the end of a rope of not.

    Scottish universities operate differently in several ways from English ones. Four year degrees, office of rector etc.

    Lets go for a working class pastime shall we? Why does Scotland continue to have seperate football team. Apart from a few crazy Rangers fans (who with their ultra protestant views and in some cases neo-nazi views - I am sure you would love to meet their aquaintance) there has always been hostility towards the creation of a single UK football team. Even for the Olympics.

    Unless of course the Tartan Army is controlled by a tartan Tory conspiracy that is-----------

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  4. One of the emails to which I referred was about prisons, actually. The prisons are part of the lunatic gravy train of it all, yes. At least, those serving densely populated South Wales are.

    Numerous people have passed on to me the story of the man drowning in a swimming pool (or sometimes on a beach) in Wales who calls out to the lifeguard. The lifeguard replies that he can't swim, "but I can speak Welsh".

    And lest we forget that absolutely nobody only speaks Welsh, or Gaelic, or Irish. Give that one a moment to sink in. By all means let Welsh, or Gaelic, or Irish be spoken in their actual areas (such as there are), but there is absolutely no reason at all for thoroughly middle-class, heavily publicly funded industries attached to them. Good God, there are even Gaelic road signs in Caithness! To the fury, I might add, of the inhabitants. Still, that's no dafter than Welsh ones in, say, Newport.

    There are two Primates in the Church of England, for pity's sale. And the Church of Ireland no more (or no less) recognises partition than the Catholic Church does. But yes, I do think that there should be a single hierarchy, at least for Great Britain, where it would be easier to achieve. Most Catholics are in and of the heartland, after all. So the Primatial See should be here, too.

    The law is different only while Parliament says it is. It would of course be perfectly within the letter and spirit of the Treaty of Union for all three of the church, the law and the education system to be exactly the same in every substantial detail on either side of the border, just so long as they were formally separate by means of being headquarted one at London and the other at Edinburgh. I'm not advocationg this, but it's perfectly possible in principle.

    And how come none of this ever works the other way? If Scotland had a legal system without a legislature until devolution (as is sometimes asserted), then not only has she very largely still, but so did and does England; in fact, of course each of them did have a legislature, which just happened to be the same one, but so what?

    No one suggests that the terms of the Union make the English legal and teaching professions ungainsayable because they are somehow the essence of the national character, yet this is accepted without question of their Scottish equivalents, including by Westminster at least as much as by Holyrood politicians. Why?

    Likewise, nobody ever suggests even so much as that only English MPs should vote on ecclesiastical legislation, whereas the Church of Scotland (arguably in breach of the Treaty of Union, since it is arguably no longer an Established Church) has been set up as a sort of danegeld.

    As for football, don't lower the tone. Although it is a recurring gripe of the rest of the world that Britain gets to have four international teams. But that is unlikely to matter now that three of them will almost certainly never qualify for anything again, and the fourth one looks fairly unlikely to, either.

    Still, if the best that you can come up with is football, then you have conceded the point about the working class. It is the case that their employment rights and their benefits arrangements are not and never will be devolved, that they would not want them to be, and that that is no doubt why they almost never vote either Lib Dem or SNP.

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  5. Sorry to keep the tone low, but football is actually now a Unionist force.

    Even the English are starting to wake up to the fact that they aren't very good at it and only have the biggest league in the world beacuse it's full of foreign players, managers and owners.

    Now that football is getting bigger and bigger in Africa, Asia and America, there seems as good as zero chance that Scotland will ever qualify for another World Cup or whatever. As for Wales and Northern Ireland, well, enough said.

    So the four of them, and also the Irish if they wanted to come in, are looking forward to just playing each other for ever more. And very homely it would be too, with all cups presented by the Queen.

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  6. Glasgow Govan not working class?
    Aberdeen North not working class?
    Dundee East not working class?
    Dundee West not working class?
    Edinburgh East not working class?


    Concerning the legal systems, much of Scots law (particuarly criminal law) has no statutory basis but was made by the judges as they went along over the years. English law is however heavily codified by Acts of Parliament. It was just that the UK Parliament could not be bothered making seperate laws covering Scotland and left it to the judges.

    Example: theft and other crimes of dishonesty etc are regulated in Scotland by the common law. In England these are regulated and charges brought under the Theft Act.

    Another example concerns attacks on the person. Under Scots law it has evolved that a non-lethal assualt without intent to kill is assualt with various verbs such as "assualt to injury", "assualt to severe injury" etc.

    In England equivalent charges are regulated under the Assault and Battery Act and the Offences Against the Person Act. Assault and Battery lay out in statute the crimes of assault and of battery (assualt is to threaten, battery is to hit in English law) whilst the Offences against Person Act laid out the statutory offences of ABH, GBH/Malicious Wounding and GBH with intent.

    It is a common fallicy that GBH is a charge in Scotland.

    To give some examples----

    Now concerning lingo, are we going to have a proper debate about the resurrection of the official use of Czech in the Hapsburg Empire when Czechs could perfectly communicate in German? Or are you going to edit that one out?

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  7. Even you wouldn't suggest that the SNP was going to going to kep these places at the next Holyrood Election, or win the equivalent seats in the Westminster Parliament that retains sole control over the employment law and Social Security that matter most there. Would you? (Labour offers such communities nothing either, of course. But that is a whole other, nationwide, story.)

    It is interesting to think what would happen if the SNP won, say 20 Westminster seats, not least because they would probably win them in a hung Parliament. I suspect that the sort of Nationalists allowed to stand in target seats 18, 19 and 20 are the sort who would refuse to take the Oath if (very improbably) elected. Quite a squandering of influence. But this is all hypothetical, of course.

    Whenever Westminster has suggested legislation covering great tracts of Scots Law, it has been told that these things are dealt with by judges in Scotland, and has bizarrely accepted that that makes it impossible for them ever to be covered by statute (or, at least, by Westminster statute), usually on the grounds that it would be a breach of the Treaty of Union. Parliament would simply never consider such krytocracy (not least with all its class implications) anywhere else.

    Contrast the absence of democracy even in matters of theft and assault in Scotland with the fact that the very DOCTRINE of the Church of England has been found in court to be whatever the Parliament of the United Kingdom says it is at any given time. In approving the Priests (Ordination of Women) Measure, for example, Parliament made a specifically theological decision, and was held in court to have been perfectly within its rights to do so.

    I ask again, why does the "three red lines" reading of the Treaty of Union with regard to the law, the church and education only apply in Scotland? Could it - just could it - be that the whole theory is an anti-democratic instrument of class privilege, wildly at variance both with the Scottish character generally and with the composition of Scottish society in actual fact?

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  8. There has never been an SNP MP who has not taken the oath. Occassionally there are members who take the oath after stating their reluctance to do so. "Republican Rose" Rosanna Cunningham for example took the oath and then said "she lied".

    There are of course Labour MPs (pace Dennis Skinner for one! - are you going to say he is not working class? - I dare you!) who do/done the same thing as well as Communist MPs. Tony Benn is another example. He took the oath whilst trying to introduce a bill into Parliament to abolish the monarchy - The Commonwealth of Great Britain Bill. Maybe you should tell your former party to get its own house in order.

    Why does Scotland have seperate institutions? Because they were agreed to and it helped ease the union in by protecting the monopolies of those most likely to whip up hostility against it. It was these institutions that helped whip up the covenanting wars a few years earlier and helped plunge the British kingdoms into civil war.

    Scots (of all classes I might add) see the institutions as symbols of our nationhood. It is a bit like all the concessions being rung out by British governments out of the EU such as exclusion of the social chapter (under the Tories) and the Euro. Along with other red lines.

    You seem to want to "abolish Scotland". You seem to have the same mentality towards the Scots as Franco had towards the Basques - which worked well did it not.

    I have come to the conclusion you are a Stalinist. Would that be a fair description?

    Remember what happened when Christian II of Denmark tried to keep Sweden in the Kalmar union by chopping off the heads of the members of the Swedish Parliament. He provoked a situation leading to Swedish independence.

    Fortunately you are in no such position to bring even a minor influence.

    Concerning employment law, the STUC are interested at looking at aspects of it being repatriated to Scotland. Are the STUC not working class?

    Concerning the Kirk, its semi-disestablishment was brought about by the disruption, which in turn had been brought about by the Westminster statute the Patronage Act. Whilst the church no longer receives taxes as such, the soverign is still obliged to take an oath to uphold it and of course the Lord High Commissioner at every General Assembly. Not exactly the priveledges of the Methodist church.

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  9. But there have never been that many SNP MPs. I'm talking about the people allowed by the SNP to stand in target seat number 20 or whatever, with no expectation of getting in. What if they did get in? I suspect that a substantial number of them would be from the SNP's fundamentalist wing. (Dennis Skinner, by the way, is nowhere near as left-wing as people think he is.)

    I have no desire to "abolish Scotland". I just wonder why the allegedly sacrosanct institutional expressions of Scottish nationhood are so utterly ruling-to-middle-class (a question which pretty much answers itself, of course), and why no comparable protection ever seems to apply to the corresponding English institutions.

    Full-time trade union officals are a sort of class in themselves. But no, I can't see any of them being able to display their mangle-reddened hands if called upon to do so. And the STUC will have stopped "looking at" any such innovation now that the SNP is in office. No such further devolution would ever have been forthcoming from Westminster anyway.

    Methodists get annoyed when you tell them that their church is a privileged product of an Act of Parliament, but of course it is, as is the URC. And those two and the Baptists have a long history of producing joint reports bemoaning establishment but rapidly adding that they'd be the last people to want rid of Forces chaplians, NHS chaplains, collective worship in schools, and so forth. Spot the deliberate mistake.

    As for the monarch's oath in relation to the Church of Scotland, the Coronation Oath in relation to the Church of England has been found to mean whatever Parliament says it means at any given time, and if the Scottish equivalent doesn't mean the same thing, then the politest thing that one can do is ask why not.

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  10. It was only a couple of months ago that the STUC were looking at it.

    The SNP were definately in charge then. Probably they will get sucked into Wendy's constitutional commission once it gets up and running.

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  11. And absolutely nothing will come of that.

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