Episode 4 - Scotland - THE HISTORY BEHIND THE HEADLINES

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Brexit of course has huge implications for Britain's relationship with continental Europe. But it also has disturbing implications for the long-term survival of the United Kingdom itself. That's because Brexit has provided renewed impetus to Scotland's independence movement. For many centuries, Scotland traditionally saw itself as being geopolitically closer than England to continental Europe – and indeed the majority of Scottish voters voted against Brexit in the referendum of 2016 and against Brexit-supporting parties in the recent general election. But, apart from Brexit, what lies behind the growth of Scotland’s independence movement and why do so many Scots see their destiny as being so dramatically different to that of the English. What lies behind the spectacularly different national aspirations that currently exist in the two largest nations of the UK. In essence, the transformation has come about through a combination of long-term factors going back many centuries, and more recent developments that have taken place over the past 65 years. Of course, the most important factor is Scotland’s status as a distinct nation – a status that is grounded in its separate political history, its different legal system and different religious tradition. In political terms, Scotland was an entirely separate kingdom with its own monarchy and its own parliament for around 700 and 400 years respectively, before the Act of Union in 1707. Scotland owed its medieval and early modern independent statehood to the fact that it simply hadn’t been conquered or settled, to the same extent, by the peoples and powers that determined most of southern Britain’s history – namely the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans. Instead, Scotland’s own native Pictish tradition of kingship (the kingdom of Fortriu) merged with the western Scottish Gaelic ‘Scots’ royal dynastic system (the kingdom of Dal Riata) to produce a distinctively non-Anglo-Saxon ‘super- kingdom’ in northern Britain. Later on, England’s late 13th/14th-century attempts to conquer Scotland forced the Scottish state to ally itself to continental European powers (especially France) in order to protect itself against English takeover. This fundamentally changed Scottish culture. Educationally and in terms of its legal system it moved closer to Europe than England. Whereas before the English invasion of Scotland, many Scots had been educated at Oxford and Cambridge, after the conflict ended with Scottish victory, they tended to go to Paris and Orleans (in France) and Padua (in Italy). What’s more, competing Scottish and English ecclesiastical claims over who should control the Scottish church had led to the pope enforcing a long-lasting compromise by which the Scottish church had become neither Scottish nor English governed – but, uniquely, a ‘Special Daughter’ of the Papal See. This too led to the Europeanisation of Scottish culture, education and law. A third home-grown development also reinforced these trends. Whereas the medieval English state had become increasingly centralised (partly courtesy of the later Anglo-Saxons and the Normans), the Scottish state system was relatively decentralised with local landowners having substantial political and judicial responsibilities. In order for the system to work, landowners therefore had to be well educated. This, in part, lay behind the Scottish parliament’s decision, in the late 15th century, that the elder sons of all medium to large Scottish landowners had to be schooled in the law, Latin and the arts. This, in turn, contributed to an extraordinary educational expansion in Scotland. Whereas, by 1600, England had just two universities, Scotland had no less than five, albeit smaller ones. The creation of all these universities helped generate a large, highly educated class that wanted political influence and helped produce an extraordinarily vibrant civil society. These devolutionary and educational trends helped to generate another great factor that has historically differentiated Scotland from England – namely its religious tradition. For the Protestant Reformation in Scotland occurred in a very different way to that of England – and produced very different results. In England, Protestant supremacy was partly imposed from the top (following Henry VIII’s famous clash with the pope over his royal intention to divorce his first wife), whereas in Scotland what became the country’s dominant Protestant tradition – Presbyterianism – grew from the grass roots up. Consequently, Presbyterianism (as opposed to England’s Anglicanism) was relatively democratically organised – with its clergy accountable to popularly elected local church bodies rather than appointed from on high. All these factors generated a distinct and more egalitarian civil society and an enduringly different national identity. Nevertheless, after the largely Scottish-Highlands-based rebellions of the early to mid 18th century, Scotland had, by 1760, largely evolved into a loyal participatory member of the United Kingdom. Forming the union in 1706 and 1707 had been an act of political and economic expediency on Scotland’s part. It had just emerged from dire economic problems. The decision to join England in forming the UK (and to therefore scrap its own Scottish parliament and sovereignty) had been taken by the old Scottish parliament itself. But, although the Scots entered the UK somewhat divided in their enthusiasm for it, subsequent developments gradually won over the vast majority. First, Britain’s imperial and mercantile expansion created huge economic, industrial and professional opportunities for the Scots – and many became prominent in the British army and imperial administration. Then, in the 20th century, the experience of the two world wars seems to have generated a spirit of common destiny and solidarity which helped reinforce loyalty to the union. And, lastly, the postwar UK-wide ‘welfare state’ settlement lifted living standards in Scotland and helped change key aspects of Scottish society. But the passing of the empire, the establishment of relative peace in Europe and the late 20th-century perceived erosion of some elements of the welfare state created a new situation in which there were no obvious unifying factors. These historical developments formed the background against which more recent factors have come into play. Over the past seven decades, the Scottish political landscape has changed out of all recognition. Just 65 years ago – in 1955 – half of Scottish voters supported the Conservative Party. Today the figure is less than half that ( they got just 22 per cent in the last Scottish parliamentary election). In the first election for the Scottish parliament in 1999, almost 40 per cent of voters backed the Labour party. Yet, in the most recent Scottish parliament elections (in 2016), only 23 percent did so. In the UK general election of 1987 only 14 per cent of Scottish voters supported the Scottish Nationalists. Yet by 2019 45 percent did so. It’s an extraordinary transformation but what lies behind it? Four key factors stand out: the change in the nature of the British Conservative party, especially as perceived in Scotland; resentment over North Sea oil revenues; the idea of Europe as an alternative supranational umbrella to the UK; and the launch of devolution in 1999. First, Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of Edward Heath’s more traditional brand of Conservative ideology, ‘one nation Toryism’, led to an acceleration in the decline in Scottish support for the Conservatives. A key event in that process was Mrs Thatcher’s decision to introduce the widely unpopular poll tax in Scotland a year ahead of England. But it was the consequences of Thatcher’s economic policies (triggering increased de-industrialisation and unemployment in the 1980s) that perhaps caused most fury in a country that depended even more on heavy industry than England. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, as the SNP and others gained from the Conservative party’s Scottish decline, Labour decided to counter the SNP’s independence policy with a ‘halfway house’ product: devolution complete with a Scottish parliament. Labour hoped that devolution would harm the SNP electorally by making its independence policy irrelevant – but, at least in elections to the Scottish parliament, the SNP’s popularity grew. The re-establishment of a Scottish parliament (after an absence of almost three centuries) confirmed the Scots’ sense of nationhood. And the Edinburgh parliament gave the SNP a custom-built platform from which to operate. So, why did the UK Labour government create the Scottish parliament? The answer lay, in part, in the nature and history of the Labour party itself. Ever since the days of Labour Party co-founder, Keir Hardie (a Scot from near Motherwell), and particularly since the late 1980s, Scottish Labour politicians had been extremely influential in the Labour party at Westminster. Key leaders (including John Smith, Donald Dewar and Gordon Brown) were sons of Scotland who knew the importance of the Scottish Labour vote in UK electoral arithmetic and feared the SNP’s potential impact on it. With the creation of the Scottish parliament, the SNP’s rise quickened, especially when they managed to produce an effective administration despite operating as a minority government between 2007 and 2011 and since 2016. In 2011, they won the Scottish general election and formed a majority government, committed to holding a referendum on independence.They lost that independence vote by 10 percentage points (45% against 55%). However Brexit seems to be dramatically increasing Scottish support for independence. The most recent opinion poll puts support for independence at 49%, three percentage points ahead of anti-independence Scots (with 5% of the population still undecided). The U.K.'s survival lies in the balance every bit as much as it's future relationship with continental Europe does.