A Queen and country of parts
Attempts by broadcasters this week to view Scotland through a nationalist lens were simplistic and misleading. Even in death, the late Queen is showing us why.
AT 10pm on Monday evening, millions of people across the United Kingdom settled down to watch the BBC news. For the previous four days, broadcasters had by and large taken the nation through this momentous moment in our history with sensitivity and clarity. On Monday, however, as the world’s attention focussed on events in Edinburgh, our national broadcaster told a distinctly weird version of events.
On the one hand, the BBC’s army of cameramen and women set out the remarkable scenes we all witnessed on the Royal Mile, as thousands of people from across capital and the country turned out on the streets to be with the Queen and her grieving family. They showed us the beauty and simplicity of the service in St Giles’ Kirk. They cut to the huge queues stretching to the Meadows and beyond. They spoke to people who told them how they just felt compelled to “be there” and to say thank-you, despite the chill of the autumn night. They showed Edinburgh and Scotland coming together to pay a beloved Monarch their respects, in exactly the same way that the public in other parts of the United Kingdom were doing.
The pictures showed a nation coming together. Yet walking through those crowds on Monday, its correspondents sought to tell us something completely different. “The King returned to a Scotland that has been diverging from the rest of the UK politically for forty years, where support for independence is as high as it’s ever been” began the news report by Alan Little, the BBC’s “special” correspondent, (in BBC speak, the word “special” appears to denote a higher status, allowing said correspondent to say whatever is at the top of their mind, but sonorously). The Queen’s reign, he explained had been marked by the “long slow contraction of British imperial power”. For the new King, there now lay the possibility that his own reign would be defined by “the eventual dissolution of the United Kingdom itself.”
Powerful words. But all a bit odd. The streets around Mr Little were packed with people from around Scotland who had felt moved to come to Edinburgh on Monday to mourn their Queen and support their King. While one protestor abused Prince Andrew over his personal behaviour, not a single member of the crowd mentioned independence. But, actually, the BBC suggested, Scotland was on the point of insurrection. This brief moment of affection for the Queen was just a passing moment. The message from the BBC to anyone watching in Barking, or Birmingham, or Bristol was that, give it a couple of weeks, and the Scots will be back yelling for freedom again.
On balance, I happen to think the national broadcaster has risen to the epic challenge of recording this moment in our history with great skill and professionalism. But I think the slant of the BBC’s report on Monday requires calling out.
Mr Little’s reading of events leant on a simplistic nationalist narrative of Scotland, one we’ve been given relentlessly over the last fractious decade. It emerges from a kind of group-think prevalent in progressive British society, of which the BBC is a leading part, and which continues to mis-read the reality of modern Scottish culture. And it has entirely passed over the deeper, more complex, and more accurate story about Scotland and the United Kingdom which the last five momentous days since the Queen’s passing have re-introduced us to.
It is a pity Mr Little didn’t notice.
HALF-stories are built on half-truths. The caricature of a united Scottish nation marching together in an uprising against the rest of the UK, one built up over the last forty years, reinforced by an all-powerful SNP Government over the last decade, and told by the BBC this week, does just that.
It starts by noting that people vote very differently in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK. It asserts that since they vote very differently, they must be very different too. it insists those difference are growing wider. It concludes that the end of the Union is therefore somehow inevitable. It claims that anti-gravitational forces are at work; that the tectonic plates of culture are shifting. We’re no longer like them. It’s all just a matter of time.
Some of the story is true, of course. Arithmetic tells us that many of those who lined the streets of Edinburgh on Monday will have voted SNP and support independence. Polls tell us that most pro-independence supporters want to get rid of the Monarch altogether. Meanwhile, we all know that Scotland is not the north of England. Scotland will never be a mere “region”. Scotland’s laws, religion, education and culture are and always been entirely distinct.
The problem with the story, as repeated by the BBC this week, is that it is a highly partial reading of events. It’s not just that Mr Little was wrong to say that support for independence is “as high as it’s ever been” (in fact polls show consistently that it is lower now than its high point in 2020 and 2021). It’s that the entire nationalist politics-first take of modern Scottish culture simply doesn’t relate to the experiences of most people who actually live here.
Obviously, it ignores the many thousands of Scots who continue to see no contradiction in feeling both passionately Scottish and patriotically British. This, I am afraid, is what happens when you don’t change your mind and you back the status quo – your opinion is no longer deemed important. But while I acknowledge that this may be beneath special correspondents whose job is to read the great arcs and sweep of history, it also ignores the huge chunk of Scotland which isn’t actually bothered about the Union, or independence, or indeed anything about the constitution at all.
Nationalism assumes that, for most people, its brand of politics comes first. This simply isn’t the case. But it’s something our media and political class don’t like to admit. Instead, we are told that the nation is gripped in a “national conversation” in which few of us are taking part.
It’s something I’ve seen personally. Over the last twenty years, I have worked as a political journalist and a political advisor at the frontline of Scotland’s constitutional debate. My working day has been to obsess over polls, research, and the latest twists and turns at Holyrood and Westminster. Then I went home to my part of Glasgow to discover that hardly anybody in my house or street was in the least bit interested.
Indeed, if there is a real story here, it’s not that nationalism has overcome Scottish culture, it’s that despite all the efforts of a powerful governing party, and a political calendar that has put us on a near constant political high alert for the last decade, most Scots remain impervious to it. Polling conducted by the think-tank I work for, Our Scottish Future, has found that in “middle Scotland” – that large chunk of the Scottish population which is neither strongly Unionist or nationalists - the question of the constitution ranks way down on their list of priorities, while support for another referendum is low. The hum-drum truth is that, despite it all – despite the independence referendum, despite Brexit, despite all the drama at Westminster and Holyrood of the last few years - Scotland’s political “journey” is not one many people are taking.
Whisper it, but whether they voted SNP, Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat, the people who lined the streets in Edinburgh on Sunday and Monday don’t just have similar views on the Queen, they also share the same worries that people in the rest of the UK have too: over the steepening cost of living, the rising rates of poverty, the state of the NHS, the quality of their children’s’ education, the need for safe and secure neighbourhoods. One of Scotland’s great ironies is that the one leading institution in Scotland that really does understand this is none other than the SNP itself. Nicola Sturgeon’s party knows us intimately and understands Scotland’s mood. It gets the country’s innate conservatism and distrust of change. It explains why this most cautious of nationalist movements tacks with the wind, clinging to institutions such as the monarchy at times like these, before demanding independence yesterday when the moment passes.
There are now signs that this nationalist story is withering, however. While correspondents on the TV insist that Scotland is having a “national conversation” on its future, events are moving us onwards. The pandemic reminded us of a wider, and more dangerous world. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did likewise. The cost of living crisis dominates our thoughts. And the momentous events of the last week, and the passing of the Queen, serves to further underline the point that the tightly-bound nationalist depiction of Scotland’s past, present, and future just doesn’t connect with our reality.
Did the Queen want to make this point? I can’t be alone in wondering whether the Queen’s death in Scotland was somehow preconceived. For it feels to me that in dying here, at her beloved Balmoral, the greatest communicator of our times – the woman who mastered the art of telling nothing but saying everything – wanted still, in death, to teach us a fuller and richer story about our land.
To England, she has reminded that nation that the rest of us exist. Laid in a coffin wrapped in the Royal Standard of Scotland, and the crown of James V placed upon it, the Queen reminded the English people that they live in a multi-national country. The King’s visits to Northern Ireland yesterday and Wales today have underlined the point.
To Scotland, she has reminded us that our politics only explains a fraction of our traditions, our inheritance, and our culture. Eight years ago, ahead of the referendum on Scottish independence, the Queen famously told bystanders outside Crathie Church near Balmoral that she hoped Scots would think carefully about the future. Over the last five days, even in death, she has led the country again to think hard again.
And for the United Kingdom as a whole, she and her successor King Charles have reminded us that unity across this land is not to be found in uniformity. They are showing us that baked into Britishness is a wondrous and chaotic diversity of institutions, memories, cultures, and histories. It is something we should all treasure.
The late Queen and the new King, who have travelled further and deeper into this land than most us, have done more than anyone to tell this deeper, more complex story of our land. For the correspondents on our news channels, they had better keep up.
ENDS
This article first appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail 14th September 2022