Ah, the dear, dwindling remnant of the SNP. It is time to take seriously their ostensibly insane notion that opposition to their cause is somehow anti-Scottish. They have become like a Dutch pillar of old (far less so now, except perhaps for the conservative Protestant one), or like an Austrian Lager. Separatism is their entire society and culture. They genuinely do not know anyone outside it, and broadly assume that such people do not exist. To them, separatism is Scotland, without remainder.
So all else passes them by. Even including the fact that between them the Lib Dems and the Tories in Scotland have just taken more votes than the SNP managed at the last election to the Scottish devolved body. Or the fact that the SNP failed to win anything like the 20 seats that it noisily expected, indeed failed to pick up any extra seats whatever. Or the fact that David Cameron is only Prime Minister, not because of anything done or not done by the SNP, but simply because the SNP exists at all, unconscionable and untouchable to all other parties at Westminster except one that seems unlikely ever to repeat the error of association with it, just as it is unconscionable and untouchable to every other party at Holyrood.
However, they do imagine there to be any separatist tendency worth speaking of in Wales. There is not. If anyone does hold such views, then they do presumably vote for Plaid Cymru, but only in the absence of anything else. Unless, that is, they have followed Forward Wales into the Cameron camp. Why not? Cameron has expressed his complete indifference as to the constitutional status of Wales. But Plaid Cymru is a much more interesting phenomenon than that, both in the good way of its continuation of the tradition of rural Radicalism that was largely and disastrously allowed to die out as an electoral option in England after the First World War, and in the bad way of its definition of Welshness strictly in terms of fluency in the language of only one fifth of the population of Wales.
A view, it seems, fully signed up to by the ethnic minority, as closed as the Amish, that the SNP vote has become. But not one signed up to by most Welsh-speaking voters, several of whose centres of population voted No even to the present level of devolution, in marked contrast to several areas where Welsh is spoken hardly, if at all. There were also relatively high No votes in several Gaelic-speaking areas, and discontent with the conduct of devolution is strong in the North of Scotland; the new Secretary of State has dropped more than broad enough hints in his time.
The SNP tribe, however, certainly cannot be accused of sharing the Radicalism. But then, it has no working-class base, as Plaid Cymru has and as the Tories historically had, which latter has still never gone away, remaining probably the single most loyal class-based vote. At its own request, Holyrood is about to be given further fiscal powers at just the time when central government spending is going to be slashed to the bone. Is Alex Salmond going to tax more, or borrow more, or both? Or is he going to let jobs and services go, even though he now has it in his power to save at least some of them, possibly all? Which approach does he think is going to make him more popular? Be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.
Welsh flourishes like the bay tree in the United Kingdom, so it is no wonder that, while any Welsh separatists that there might be are presumably Welsh-speakers, they constitute a negligible proportion. Irish also increasingly does far better in the United Kingdom than outside. As with what may be called the more seriously Catholic Irish Catholics, do not be too surprised if those most zealous for Irish, or who happened to grow up speaking it and want to pass on its culture, quietly move to the Greener parts of Northern Ireland as the Republic becomes even less Catholic, in any serious sense, than is already the case, and as Irish becomes even more marginalised there. Westminster sees preserving the Catholic and Gaelic aspects of Irishness as part of the price for preserving the Union. Whereas Dublin sees them as "the bad, old Ireland". People who still want to live in the old Ireland won't make too much noise about doing what they therefore have to do. But they will do it. They may already have started doing it.
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The SNP have working class votes. Curtice et al's analysis of them pre-return of Salmond showed that their problem was that they had almost exclusively working class votes, in a country with a shrinking working class. Salmond got them middle class votes by being anti-Labour, while promising collectivist policies, in the same way as Blair was anti-Tory while delivering individualist policies. Similarly, just as New Labour abandoned its perceived fundamentalism, so did Salmond's SNP. However, you are correct that the SNP have a problem. They never had their 'Clause IV moment', so much of the party thinks they're still fundamentalists. The election of Cameron effectively calls their bluff: if the Scots don't vote for independence with the Tories in London, then they never will. Therefore, if the SNP believe in it, then they must campaign unambiguously for it this year. Electorally, this is a blind alley, but Salmond's leadership may depend on it.
ReplyDeleteThe SNP have been known as Tartan Tories from the start, and the sheer poshness of their base has always been remarked upon. Look at the redoubts to which they have just been driven back, the only seats that they can expect to hold next year.
ReplyDeleteTake out the fundamentalist principle, and what is the point of the SNP? There may not always be only one reason to vote for it, but there is always only one reason to join it, or to knock on doors for it, or to deliver leaflets for it, or to give it money.
Any attempt at an independence referendum before the Holyrood elections would look like a distraction, and would in fact be a distraction. It would bring home just how well-heeled the SNP was, that this was what they considered important in the midst of enormous job and service cuts. They are going to badly anyway. Do they really want to be wiped out?
But if no referendum has been held on their watch, then what is the point of them?
Lindsay is on one of his anti-Scottish diatribes again. Lets be blunt, being anti-SNP is not necessarily being anti-Scottish.
ReplyDeleteHowever Lindsay has shown his hostility and contempt to long established Scottish institutions and the fuctionings of the nation. And those institutions etc predate devolution.
As for devolution - he hates it and uses all his prejudices against it. His rants about the working class etc, blissfully ignorant/or contemptously ignoring that the SNP hold in the Scottish parliament such affluent areas as Glasgow Govan, Edinburgh East, Ochil, Dundee East, Dundee West, Mid-Fife, Kilmarnock and Loudon, Livingston, Falkirk East, Falkirk West.
Ignorance and prejudice is the only thing Lindsay knows about Scottish politics. He even brings in the "anti-catholic" element - ignorant that John Swinney is a catholic. That Salmond's personal special advisor Stephen Noon is a catholic. Former minister Linda Fabiani is a catholic. Environoment minister Roseanna Cunningham is a devout Catholic. No he wants to wallow in prejudice, bigotry and hate.
The young tartan pimp fogey who does not know who the original Don Roberto was.
Lloyd George spoke Welsh. Indeed he preached in it at Baptist services.
ReplyDeleteAre you suggesting DLG was for Welsh independence.
DL shows his ignorance as usual. People in Scotland vote differently in Westminster and Holyrood elections. A thousand opinion polls have shown that over 10 years.
ReplyDeleteDL likes to see himself as some sort of latter day hammer of the Scots. Indeed I would not be surprised if he has picture of Longshanks and a little rubber hammer to hit Proclaimer CDs with!
Don Roberto, thank you for proving my point, as ever. Scottish Nationalism: a world as closed as any on earth, and utterly impervious to anything outside itself. Fascinating, in its way.
ReplyDeleteWill you even notice when you are wiped out at the Holyrood Elections? You don't seem to have noticed "winning" (if you like) the last ones, since you have done absolutely nothing with it.
Taffy, the very reverse, of course. *No One* is in favour of Welsh independence. Apart from a few people who have now joined the Tories.
Donnie Donaldson, the only difference is that they vote Labour (an entirely London-based party in membership terms - you join the national party, from Shetland to Cornwall)) more than they vote Tory (membership of which is locally association-based).
The combined populations of the parts of England of which that can be said add up to at least double the population of Scotland, and quite a bit more than the populations of Scotland and Wales combined.
Thank you so much. I get so angry when people assume or suggest that Welsh-speakers must be nationalists.
ReplyDeleteDo they think that we didn't fight in the War? Do they think that we want to starve ourselves for the sake of some Victorian fantasy by people who were barely Welsh and barely spoke it, not the same thing but both found in them?
Both found in their successors, too. How dare anyone suggest that the Welsh should feel less British than the English, especially those of us who speak Welsh. For their information, we do not.
Keep up the good work. Particularly on the no votes to devolution in many Welsh-speaking areas and how the Assembly-funded Welsh-speaking elite has nothing to do with North Wales, refusing to live here because we common people would be able to understand what they were saying. Hardly anyone in England knows these facts. Your work in publicising them is vital.
Very many thanks.
ReplyDeleteYou write like a Welshman, and I like that. A lot of people don't, as you no doubt know. But I do.
You have really got the measure of the Nats, a parallel society who think that they are the only people in Scotland. If you never meet anyone who is not like you, then you are bound to think that everyone is like you.
ReplyDeleteYou are also right about how middle-class the Nats are, in the sense that you decry elsewhere as "the middle of what?" Spurgeon won't be keeping that seat in Glasgow. Even she knows it, and she is none too bright, so Salmond has undoubtedly written her off.
Interesting point about Wales. The Nats think that there should be Welsh Nats and cannot understand that there aren't. Plaid Cymru is something different, as you say.
Sturgeon will presumably be put at the top of the Glasgow list, and thus guaranteed a seat on the back of monied suburban votes.
ReplyDeleteIn Wales, of course, there is no myth of economic self-sufficiency. The SNP's electoral success, or lack of it, indicates that rather fewer people in Scotland have fallen for that one than is widely assumed to be the case. But no one at all in Wales thinks anything remotely comparable.
Plaid Cymru sometimes talks about replacing the Westminster teat with the Brussels one. But even they, never mind their voters, are not really interested. If, for the sake of argument, there ever were a referendum on the EU, then no one expects the result in Plaid Cymru (or SNP) constituencies to be any higher than anywhere else. Same with Lib Dem ones, including in England.
And I expect that most Plaid Cymru people would rather have had an Assembly for North, Mid and West Wales, even if it had reduced powers, than have had something in Cardiff, a city which is nothing to do with them. There might not have been anything like such large No votes in either North or South Wales if each had been offered its own regional provision instead. I am not advocating this, just saying.
As I said, the really interesting thing about Plaid Cymru is not that it is a separatist party but that it is not, and that it is instead, not only a party of the language even to a fault, but also the continuation of the rural Radicalism, not least including a very strong peace tradition, that, largely by the afult of the nascent Labour Party, became mostly confined to Wales after the First World War, having previously been a powerful force throughout the country.
To return to Taffy's comment, that was where Lloyd George started out. In terms of domestic policy, he never entirely left it. Even then, he was therefore known as a Welsh Nationalist, since he and others framed it in terms of Welsh grievances; that it was always particularly vigorous in Wales was undoubtedly why it survived there, and still does survive there. But, as Taffy says, Lloyd George was not remotely a separatist, any more than Bevan was. And Bevan was most certainly not.