A night out with Nicola (and Brian)
Listening to Nicola Sturgeon and Brian Cox was enjoyable - but it offered an insight into the strange world of Scottish nationalism
ON Monday night, me and my wife spent the evening with Nicola and Brian. It was the final night of the Edinburgh Book Festival. The First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, had been booked to interview Brian Cox, the star of HBO’s hit show Succession, and leading Scottish independence supporter. And along we went.
We wanted to find out what it is like to be the star of a major drama, watched by millions, in which you play a long-standing leader surrounded by a shark pool of potential successors. And we looking forward to hearing from Brian Cox as well. OK, so we were being childish. In the end, however, we came away having experienced something stranger and, frankly, a little unsettling. For if you want to understand how political nationalism has now embedded itself in Scottish cultural life, then a seat in Edinburgh’s Central Hall on Monday night would have made a good place to start.
It wasn’t all bad. Indeed, for the most part, the pair took part in an engaging and, at times, very funny conversation. Mr Cox has a lifetime of stories to fall back on. He spoke tenderly and warmly of his Dundee childhood, and especially his late father. He meandered into a series of excellent anecdotes about his time as an actor both in Britain and in the United States. Ms Sturgeon – who had gone to the trouble of reading his new autobiography – asked some decent questions; whatever else you may think of her, she is a professional and fluent interlocuter. They had us laughing along.
Which made it all the more jarring when they got onto politics. Mrs Sturgeon wanted to know why Mr Cox had left Labour to support the SNP. From an enjoyable conversation about his book, we suddenly found ourselves in a party political broadcast for the party she runs.
We listened as Mr Cox set out his own very novel interpretation of the last 70 years of Scottish history. In the years after World War II, peoples’ sense of Scottishness had been “subdued”. They didn’t even speak in their own accents (a bizarre claim which Mrs Sturgeon, equally strangely, did nothing to counter). Only in the 1970s and 1980s, he added, “and the rise of your party and now my party” did something “extraordinary happen….we became true to ourselves.” By then, he had also begun to understand “the particular nature of what a Celt is”. After the Labour government invaded Iraq, he decided enough was enough. It was Celts for independence.
Mr Cox then went the full Logan Roy. “Anybody who comes here sees the difference between the north and the south. It’s so evident now,” he insisted, though with little factual evidence to back it up. To a large burst of applause, he added: ”I just wish the people of Scotland would have a bit more confidence.” The trouble was our “conditioning.” They (that is, those of us who support the Union) had been conditioned to lack belief in Scotland. Mr Cox’s view was that, once we became more confident, we would all understand that “we should have our own country, and it should happen now: country first, not politics.” Ms Sturgeon nodded in agreement. “Do you think there’s something about living outside of Scotland and seeing it outside that allows you to see it much more clearly than people here can?” she asked, with a tabasco splash of passive aggression. Unsurprisingly, Mr Cox agreed. The night concluded with him telling the audience we should be lucky to have such a leader in power. “What she’s doing for our country is incredible so let her do it, please”.
Outside the hall, the streets of the capital were covered in rubbish, the consequence of two weeks of strike action by refuse workers and the failure of the Government to find a prompt solution. Inside, in front of an overwhelmingly supportive crowd, Ms Sturgeon and Mr Cox held up each other’s arms and accepted their rapturous applause. We clapped too. They had both been highly engaging. But, walking out, a few things were jarring in our minds – and, I think, are highly relevant when understanding something of the character and future of modern Scottish nationalism.
The first was the lack of a filter. To be fair to Ms Sturgeon, she spent most of the evening on subjects other than her own political project. She is also a politician, not a journalist, and she has no debt to objectivity. But as the evening wore on, it became clear that both she and Mr Cox simply took it as read that they could use the stage provided by the Edinburgh Book Festival to promote their political stance. I don’t think either of them saw it that way - as Mr Cox said, he views his position on Scotland as about “country first, not politics”. That tells you everything about nationalism. Other politicians practice politics. Nationalists on the other hand, view themselves as being in the just and moral business of advancing a nation. Other politicians might have filtered out partisan politics at such a non-political event. Neither Ms Sturgeon nor Mr Cox felt the need to do so.
The second jarring note was just how normal this now feels in Scotland. Thirteen years of dominance by the SNP as the main force in Scotland has made the politicisation of events feel perfectly routine. This is because nationalism in Scotland has achieved what might be termed cultural capture; for thousands of people, they have defined the one way to be Scottish. The consequence is that, on Monday, Mr Cox was able to set out what was a deeply partisan and almost nativist view of Scottish history and current affairs, and hardly anybody blinked an eye. It feels important to remind oneself that this is not actually normal at all.
And finally, there was that remarkable lack of empathy to those who still oppose this cultural hegemony. Mr Cox appears to believe pro-Union supporters suffer from a form of national false consciousness. Like the 19th century working classes who Marxists claimed had been duped by their capitalist masters, so he seems to believe that pro-Union supporters are wilfully subordinating ourselves to the ideology of our British overlords. We have been “conditioned” to accept things as they are. If only we could all be packed off to America for a few years like Mr Cox, mused Mrs Sturgeon; perhaps then we’d see the light. A few million dollars in my back pocket might help as well, to be fair. This is an astonishing failure of understanding. Pro-Union Scots don’t oppose independence because they lack confidence in Scotland. They simply – and rightly – lack confidence in a nationalist project which, despite plenty of time and effort, continually fails to set out why it might be of benefit to Scotland.
Scottish nationalism is a strange place. And while Mrs Sturgeon and M Cox basked in the applause on Monday, I am not convinced that it is a healthy place to be either. They exist in a nationalist cultural bubble that believes we will be holding a referendum in a year and will be liberated soon after. More likely, they are leading Scotland into a dead end. Meanwhile, the litter on the pavement outside, a testament to Mrs Sturgeon’s reign, continues to blow quietly and insistently in Edinburgh’s autumnal breeze. Perhaps Scottish nationalism’s grip on the country’s imagination will hold sway for the coming months. Perhaps Mrs Sturgeon’s presentational skills can continue to hold us in a spell. More likely, it seems to me, is that the wind of reality will intrude. It is one thing to hold court amid the artifice of a theatre. But Scottish nationalism’s confrontation with grubby normality over the coming months promises to be a harder sell altogether.
ENDS
This article first appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail 31st August 2022