Oliver

Proud to be a true Brit
MELANIE REIDJanuary 23 2007
www.theherald.co.uk/fe...93.0.0.php

On being British in Scotland: discuss. Jings, crivens, golly gosh. Gordon Bennett, even. It is as if I have been handed a dish containing some rather sweaty dynamite and as I juggle it, I have a flashback to an old lady in Dundee who spat at my feet when I spoke - this being 1975, and Dundee being . . . well, less cosmopolitan then. Thus commenced my long and painful lesson about the perils of possessing an English accent in Scotland. (Leprosy, in retrospect, being an easier burden.) But let me begin, tentatively, with some relevant facts. There are now at least 400,000 people living in Scotland who were born in England - the nation's largest immigrant group. In the past decade, Scotland has had a net gain of 53,000 immigrants from England. At least two and a half million Scots have relatives in England. There are 820,000 Scots resident in England, and possibly another million who consider themselves Scots by origin. That includes everyone from Gordon Brown to Jim Naughtie to my second cousins, 50 years removed from the fresh soil of New Deer, Glen Clova and Fettercairn, but still Scottish in their hearts.

The Act of Union is a well-cooked thing, then: a 300-year-old stew of multiple personal, cultural and economic connections, a dense weave of inward and outward migration which defies any unravelling. Within it, dual identities flourish. It offers a bedrock upon which to build diversity and ethnic individuality: Scots, English, Polish, Scottish-Asian, Scottish-Italian, Welsh, Irish, Gaelic. It has been flexible, tolerant and empowering. According to identity-related analysis by the Institute of Governance at the University of Edinburgh, the majority of Scots (86%), given a multiple choice of identities, choose Scottish. But 50% also describe themselves as British, and 41% choose both.

At this point, things start to get more complex. Ask non-Scots who have been resident in Scotland more than 25 years how they regard themselves, and 82% feel themselves to be Scottish. Yet at the same time, from the indigenous point of view, being born in England is a significant barrier to a successful claim to be Scottish. The majority (54%) of Scots would not regard an English-born Scottish resident as Scottish, but 70% would bestow the privilege on a non-white Scottish resident.

Confused? You are not alone. Welcome to the dark and swirling waters of Britishness, the label which narrow Scots despise, but to which millions of others with a real and genuine claim on Scotland cling with pride and gratitude. No, we are not pigeonholeable as right-wing. Yes, we are British first and Scottish second; but also sometimes Scottish first and British second. And yes, we are in our own way as emotionally Scottish, if not more, than the most rabid seeker of independence. But are we allowed legitimacy? Not really.


This is what offends me most about the current independence fervour: the sense of being disenfranchised. They don't want British people around, these "real Scots". They believe they are the true voice of this country on the basis of never having left it - a fact which for them constitutes ethnic purity, but for those with a wider perspective is a claim to be inward looking. Perhaps independence-seekers don't mean it, but by attacking the Union they dismiss my right, and that of millions like me, to retain the peaceful political and economic structure to our lives. How arrogant and alienating that is, making one want to cry out: "This is my country too, you know."

And I'm sorry if this offends, but I have lived in Scotland long enough to be very aware of the small-mindedness which underpins a certain strand of nationalism; the lack of logic which decries the immense success of the union. I'm not talking here about sophisticated nationalism, but its boorish little brother, for whom the whole concept all too often stands for anti-Englishness in disguise. For me, underlying much of the grumbling is a negativity about a powerful neighbour rather than any inherent positivism, any sense of self-worth. This is not, whichever way you look at it, a sentiment upon which to base a new political settlement.

I am also confused by the Scots' attitude to Britishness: an irrational, pick'n'mix way of claiming what they fancy and rejecting what does not suit them. Take, for example, men like Colin Montgomerie and Sandy Lyle, both eagerly lauded in their time as Scottish heroes. Yet both speak with English accents. That they are treated differently to some unknown chap, who is disliked for a similar accent, is an inconsistency which has always revealed the Scots at their weakest.

The same meanness of spirit is evident in sporting fixtures. Of course, at Murrayfield, it is wonderful when the Scots beat the English: but when the English teams, rugby or football, are playing Australia, I want them to win. That's Britishness in action. It's about supporting the next best team on the list you long to belong to.
Welcome to the dark and swirling waters of Britishness, the label which narrow Scots despise, but to which millions of others with a real and genuine claim on Scotland cling with pride and gratitude.

You have to come from somewhere to be nationalist, you see. This is a truism; but one that makes me a little wistful. When I speak of being British I speak for all those rootless people, who by birth and upbringing span many borders within this small island. Britain has one shore, one predominant language, a sense of shared values and certainties: a stage upon which the Scots have progressed to some of the highest political, economic, industrial and academic posts available. That very fluidity, that opportunity, is priceless.

Coming from nowhere is sometimes a little lonely. Is it any wonder that those of us who feel British and Scottish, but can claim no real sense of home, do not wish this country to be fragmented? We want to accentuate the things that unite us, not emphasise what divides us.

Allow me, briefly, to explain the source of my Britishness: a fairly typical story, I suspect, of mobility, Scots self-betterment and a sense of looking outward. In the 1890s, my grandfather left a croft in Buchan which was too desperately poor to sustain him, became a jobbing millwright and then rose to become the head of a multinational engineering company. Between the two world wars, working by night, he masterminded the extraordinary installation of lifts and escalators across the London Underground. My father claimed this heritage. My mother was Northern Irish, but descended from the Scots plantation settlers. They had me in London; while being born in a stable did not make me a horse, it did make it hard to be Scottish.

In 1971, my brother was working for Singer in Clydebank and came to visit, bringing a copy of The Glasgow Herald, which contained an advert for a ex-Forestry Commission cottage in the wilds of Roxburghshire. Offers over £1000. My father, at that point crippled in hospital, put in an offer of £1125 and got it. Thus, from early teenage years, my first experience of living in Scotland was in one of the remotest parts of the cold, dry Cheviot Hills, in a house with walls made of rendered wood pulp and no appreciable heat retention.

It was good training in alienation. As anyone who has ever lived there knows, the Borders is not really Scotland: it is a separate country, a place apart, with its own language, tribes, rivalries and jealousies. Unless you have been there for four generations, unless you are a Jethart man, or a Teri, or Selkirk or Gala flow in your bloodstream, you are not one of them; and will remain so. Coming from England was irrelevant; it was about coming from anywhere other than there.

Not until the age of 18, on an old green bus travailing up over Soutra, did I feel the temperature rise a few degrees. Here, before me, lay the lush hanging gardens of the central belt: the place where Scotland began; and thus my long, slow bid for a relationship with it. To this day, a generation on, I remain firmly British; rooted nowhere. Old English friends think I sound Scots; the Scots still think I sound English. Mostly, I have given up caring. But just sometimes, when the natives start huffing and puffing about divorce from one of the largest and most successful economies in the world, I just get mad.

Stats of the nations
# The population of the UK is more than 60 million, with Scots accounting for one in 12 of the UK population.

# England had a population of 50.4 million in 2005, while Scotland had 5.1 million, Wales had three million and Northern Ireland 1.7 million. The Scottish Executive estimates the population will rise to 5.13 million in 2019 before falling to 5.07 million in 2031.

# The average Scottish man can expect to live to 74, while for a Scottish women, present life expectancy is 79. South of the border, the figure is 76 for men and 81 for women.

# Between 1996 and 2005, 53,000 more people arrived in Scotland from other parts of the UK than went in the opposite direction.

# A recent study by a team of Scottish researchers has found Scots who have moved to London to advance their careers were returning home in their late-20s or early-30s rather than remaining south or moving elsewhere in the UK.

# Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have sought to emphasise the family links between the nations, claiming that in 1707 there were about 30,000 Scots, 3% of Scotland's population, with relatives in England. Now there are 2.5 million, or half the population. The statistic has been disputed by academics.

eublues

A well-written article.

However, the Britishness thing is just a temporary concern of people like Gordon Brown who want top jobs in the UK government for a while longer.

In the longer term a "European" identity is what those in charge want people north of the border to cultivate (with a touch of Scottishness being OK as a secondary regional identity).

Oliver

Dont forget the EU categorise Scotland as a Region anyway the overlap is less painful.

The region of Scotland, the nation of Scotland all the same to me.