The SNP: Talking Scotland Down

Alex Massie writes:

These days "Talking Scotland down" is both the gravest sin imaginable and the standard SNP response to any suggestion there might be even the occasional or minor drawback to independence. Thus when Philip Hammond makes the obvious point that Rump Britannia might not build warships on the Clyde he's being "anti-Scottish". Thus too when George Osborne suggests some firms might want the constitutional questions - including EU-access - clarified to assist their long-term planning he too is guilty of "talking Scotland down".

It is true, as Joan McAlpine says, that we have been here before and the sky did not fall. True too that Osborne could not name any firm reconsidering its Scottish plans for the very good reason that a) he couldn't and b) he was speaking generally or theoretically rather than specifically. Nevertheless, all this is a reminder - should you need it - that Unionism is only now beginning to train for the fight. There will, alas, be low blows aplenty once battle is joined properly.

The SNP's success in May owed a good deal to the sense, shared by many who would not consider themselves fans of independence, that whatever one might think of the nationalists' longer-term aims they at least offered a refreshing combination of competence, confidence and optimism when it came to the dreary stuff of day-to-day governance. The contrast with a crabbit, pallid Labour party was complete and this, as much as anything else, helped carry the day for Eck and his merry band.

Salmond was rarely better than in his victory speech in May; an adress which showed him at his open best. Since then the sands have shifted. The great leader's speech to the party conference was a poor and narrow, partisan thing. Salmond seemed to be talking to his party and forgetting the country. That way trouble lies.

These days, SNP ministers sometimes seem to spend as much time complaining about Westminster and the dreadfulness of a Conservative-led government as they do making a case for their own ambitions. That's politics, of course, but it produces this curious effect: sometimes it's the SNP who, implicitly, are "talking Scotland down".

Sensible Unionists (a minority, perhaps?) should always concede that there's no reason to suppose an independent Scotland couldnae thrive. The question is not one of viability but of necessity. Arguing that Scotland is some impoverished, shilpit land uniquely ill-equipped to take its place in the wider world is a depressing, demeaning, stupid business.

But so too, in its way, is the SNP's argument that Scotland must, at all costs, be protected from the ravages of a Liberal Unionist government at Westminster. Like so much else in Scottish politics - or at least in terms of the psychological aspect of Scottish self-esteem that forms such a vital part of the game - this cuts both ways.

Is Scotland really such a feeble place, so lacking in resilience, that it cannot endure a few years of Tory government in London? Surely not! And yet this, in the end, is what the SNP says. Happy, frankly, is the land that needs no champion. To argue otherwise, then, is to agree, albeit for different reasons, with the base assumption that Caledonia's meeker and weaker than you might think or have been led to believe by the SNP's glad, confident electioneering. Who's talking Scotland down, now? Everyone it seems.

Anti-Toryism is not, or certainly should not, be a stout enough platform for the independence cause. Perhaps asking nationalism to be better than this is hoping for more than nationalism can reasonably be expected to deliver. Nevertheless, one may dream.

To be sure, there are good tactical reasons for such an approach. A recent YouGov poll reported that support for independence was notably stronger in the "lower" socio-economic groups (36%) than amongst what might, however tactlessly, be labelled "elite" opinion (31%). A vehemently anti-Tory campaign must appeal more to C2DE voters (some of them Labour deserters) than to their wealthier compatriots.

Yet the advantages of this tactically-appealing approach may be compromised by a quiet but strategic downside: it makes the SNP look smaller than they need. This narrower approach, populist as it may be, makes it harder for Salmond to speak to the country as a whole. Gains in one area are partially offset by losses in other subsections of the population who would prefer Salmond to rise above such trivial party political concerns and present himself as a statesman capable of speaking for the whole nation.

Here again accusations of "anti-Scottishness" are dangerous. The Tories may not win many victories but there are still 300,000 or so Scots prepared to endorse Conservative candidates at Holyrood. Are these Scots also intrinsically "anti-Scottish"? Even nationalists should be consider whether accusations of quasi-treason are really helpful to their cause. Indeed, banner year or not, the SNP only won a minority of the votes cast in an election in which nearly half of those eligible to vote chose not to do so. (This does not cheapen Salmond's triumph; it merely places it in a too-often forgotten context). Since his own mother was a Tory, the First Minister surely knows all this.

More generally, it cannot be the case that a majority of Scots are intrinsically "anti-Scottish". To claim so is a manifest nonsense and seen as such by most folk. Just as no one man has the right to fix the boundary of a nation's progress, so no party has a monopoly on patriotism or concern for the common good.
Again, Salmond is at his best when he presents himself as a uniter, not a divider. It is one of the distinguishing and unusual features of Scottish nationalism - at its best so civic and so restrained - that the less it owes to emotion the more appealing it is and vice versa. It is, perhaps counterintuitively, ill-suited to flag-waving. From that stems the theory that Salmond diminishes himself, his movement and his country the more he divides its people into patriots and renegades. There may be occasional and concrete advantages to such an approach but they are, I submit, trumped by the psychological (though therefore harder to measure) drawbacks to a strategy that is exclusive rather than inclusive. And in hyping the threat posed to Scotland by Conservatism, the SNP rather ironically falls into line with the depressingly negative view of Scotland as a weak and troubled place they so rightly find intolerable when expressed by Labour politicians.