The funny thing about this vote is that I think the SNP is screwed either way. If they lose, their whole raison d’etre disappears for a generation. If they win, they will have a honeymoon period but ultimately Scotland will revert to a Labour-Conservative battleground, the nationalists having served their purpose. And all those people who would have voted Con but for their resentment towards London will return to the fold. I predict a Conservative government within ten years of any Scottish independence.
As for the rest of the UK, I think Labour will be fine. They’ll just recalibrate slightly to appeal more to England. Less of a change than the whole New Labour thing.
Maybe not ten years, but sure. The whole ‘Scotland is more left wing than England’ claim is highly debatable. What would be Scottish Conservatives tend to avoid voting Conservative as it’s seen as a primarily ‘English’ party, rather than any particular dislike of Conservative attitudes.
I don’t say that they will be flying under the name “Conservative”. Possibly still a tainted brand. But yes, I think there is a lot of latent support in Scotland for a party of that ilk.
But the SNP is more left-wing than labour, so although I guess you can theorise a latent conservatism, there isn’t any evidence of it in the voting record. From outcasts to controlling the govt in ten years - can’t quite see it.
I think more communitarian is probably true for Scotland (as a whole) than England (ditto), but these things are hard to generalise about. The Scottish conservatives I know are more like the old one-nation ones - the free-market-at-all-costs ones tend to head south as soon as they can.
Are people of South Asian, East Asian, Middle Easterner, African, or Caribbean ancestry as unambiguously Scottish as those from British, Irish, or European ancestry?
Err, yes. Are you suggesting that only white people are properly Scottish (even if their background is French, German, whatever)? Because that’s not how it works here.
Are only people who’s ancestry is indigenous to north america “unambiguously American”?
If anyone suggested to the Scottish Comedian Hardeep Singh Kohli that he wasn’t “unambiguously Scottish”, I think he’d deck you, in good Glaswegian fashion.
Absolutely true. My McAlister’s were split between Jacobeans and Hanoverians, and managed to balance things well enough, and in an area (Argyll, more or less) remote enough from the major battle, that they suffered no mortal reprisals either way when all was said and done. Some were exported to the ‘colonies’.
Interestingly to my genealogy, I apparently have an ancestor of English background, middle class, who said he and his brothers fought for Charles and had to flee with their families across Scotland, across Ireland on foot, and booked passage using fake letters of credit in order to reach Maryland. When they reached the Appalachian foothills in the Carolinas they stopped running and went into business and farming and preaching…etc…and tried to stay out of the Revolution but when they heard of and saw the atrocities visited on civilians by the British troops in the Carolinas, did help out.
I’ll be visiting Scotland soon and will talk to regular folks to see for myself whether any residual English-resentment seems to exist. From what you are saying, such will be hard to find.
I suspect Kohli’s feelings on identity are much like mine. But as members of a minority, we don’t get to control the assumptions of the majority. What I’m suggesting is that white people see non-white people differently than they do fellow white people when it comes to identity. As am Indian American, it is very common for white Americans to think of me as not “regular American.” Not necessarily in a conscious or malicious way, but definitely as being outside their concept of the basic definition of American. This is probably too complex a topic to shoehorn into this thread, but I have reason to suspect that when Kohli encounters a white Scot, the latter doesn’t identify him only as “Scottish” on first impression.
Yet, Cumberland’s orders were to kill anyone they found who had a weapon, rape all the women and girls, burn all the houses and barns. The English didn’t regard the Scots as part of their common heritage at that time. Throw in latent religious bullshit and simple desire of common soldiers to get as much booty as they could haul…
Brits and Americans both have done a lot of great things for the world, and have both done a lot of horrible things, as well. One of the best things the Brits have done in the last century is to let people decide what sort of arrangement they want to have with England. If Scotland wants independence, they won’t have to fight for it.
If you go looking for Scots who’ll say nasty things about the English, you’ll find them. Some will be sincere, most will treat the matter like they would a sporting rivalry.
Very few of us harbour seething resentments over events that happened a few centuries ago.
Please report back from your expedition. As Paul says you will be able to find some anti-English sentiment. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find any that is genuinely to do with the Jacobite stuff though.
Can I recommend a couple of pubs where you will be able to engage with “regular folks”? There’s the Louden Tavern in Glasgow, and for a different viewpoint can I recommend Bairds.
Yeah, there’s plenty of current reasons for Scots to dislike the English, since they didn’t vote for the Condems at all but devolution doesn’t protect them from all the worst policies. It’s not residual resentment based on stuff that happened hundreds of years ago where the Scots were hardly blameless either.
And Scotland is not a colony of England. It is in a union with England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scots are British citizens - people in the colonies never were.
Britain actually did fight very hard to keep some of its colonies, like India, and that was Britain the country fighting hard, Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish as well as English. Colonisation was done by the Scots just as much as the English. It annoys me when people act as though Scots were completely innocent of ever colonising anywhere. The countries worked together as a team.
Yes, anti-English resentment (of which there will be plenty) stems from rather more immediate events: Thatcherite de-industrialisation and poll-tax experimentation being the chief two. My feeling is that devolution plus economic growth plus Labour rather than Tory government cause levels of anti-English sentiment to drop significantly over the last 10-15 years.
On Ascenray’s point, there’s an interesting article here by one of the tiny number (0.16%) of black Scots. The fundamental point about Scottish tribalism is quite true; the author’s story is of initial racism that ran the gamut from curious dehumanising stares to playground fights and adult insults - but over time this was replaced by acceptance to the point that he was more welcome in a small village than a white English neighbour because at that point he may have been black but he had the accent and knew the shibboleths.
From my own experience as a white Scot who’s been living in England for more than 10 years, the point about tribalism rings true - I am becoming less and less Scottish as I become less and less familiar with the cultural touchstones and as my accent fades. If I went to** Baron Greenback’**s pubs, I would be mistaken for English and would have to fight hard to establish my bona fides as a true Scot. In a way that Hardeep Singh Koli does not.
