R EPRESENTACIÓN DEL CONOCIMIENTO

3.3.1. The twilight of sectarian Scotland

The decline of sectarianism in Scotland is usually attributed to the rise of secularism from the 1960s onwards. Indeed, it is only from then that the loosening of religious and class cleavages and inter-marriage have significantly weakened inter-religious tensions (McCrone 2001: 25). But other factors have also been determinant. Aside from the fact that the gradual domination of Labour gave them more visibility, the 1918 Education settlement was, after two generations, beginning to deliver. As descendants of Irish Catholics were now able to climb the social ladder, the socio-economic gap between religious communities was finally being plugged. Irish Catholics and their descendants proved to be efficient institution-builders, establishing a well-organized parish system, charities and schools, as well as a football club – Celtic – which won the European Championship in 1967. The accommodation of Irish Catholics and their descendants shares some similarities with the Dutch tradition of institutionalized pluralism known as

‘pillarisation’, which lost much of its significance as a result of individualization and secularization (Lijphart 2004). By the advent of devolution in 1997, instances of discrimination and violence on religious grounds were seldom, although whether sectarianism is a fact or a myth is still subject to controversy (Devine et al. 2000).

Patricia Walls and Rory Williams (2003) conducted 72 interviews with descendants of Irish Catholics and found continuing experience of discrimination, especially in the labour market. But others concluded that this could equally be read as evidence of the

“power of social myths” (Bruce et al. 2005: 151). Despite the major economic crisis of

105 the 1980s, there has not been a return to the 1930s religious tensions. Admittedly, a community feeling among the descendants of Irish Catholic migrants has been sustained by prominent institutions and may sporadically be strengthened by residual tensions with the Protestant majority. Joseph Bradley (2006) found that it is primarily through football that an Irish Catholic identity is manifest in Scotland and that their experience and perception of continued prejudice is more apparent. This phenomenon is epitomized in the long-standing Celtic versus Rangers rivalry in Glasgow. However, this has more to do with hooliganism that with racism per se, and is largely detached from nationality.

Besides, these residual tensions at grassroots level are not reflected in the party system.

Indeed, the role of Labour in managing and mitigating tensions within its own party structure sets the Scottish case apart. It shares some commonalities with the socialist party PSC in Catalonia, which, as we shall see in chapter IV, contributed greatly to blurring the antagonism between native Catalans and internal immigrants in the aftermath of the democratic transition by appealing to common class interests. From 1964 onwards, the gradual decline of the Conservatives significantly diminished the visibility of an uncompromising form of unionism, which was the main ideological barrier to the incorporation of the Catholics into a revamped Scottish national identity, no longer equated with Protestantism but increasingly territorially-defined.

In the 1990s, the SNP explicitly intended to reach out to the Catholic vote, in order to challenge the Labour party in its Glaswegian strongholds, but also in response to anti-Catholic accusations made against the party after the 1994 Monklands East by-election (Lynch 2002: 212). The 1994 campaign took place against the background of rising sectarian tensions in this electoral district of the Strathclyde region. Although the SNP was founded in 1934 out of the fusion of the Scottish Party, which comprised a strong element of anti-Catholic bigotry and anti-Irish racism, and the National Party of Scotland that was impregnated by a Pan-Celtic ideology, its sectarian heritage had been deliberately abandoned by the 1960s (Mitchell 1996). The SNP initiated a campaign to repeal the Act of Settlement, a 300 year-old law that excludes Catholics from the line of succession to the throne. In addition, the party sought the support of Catholic bishops by vocally backing Catholic schooling. A statistical breakdown of the 1997 Westminster elections results showed that Labour attracted 66% of the Catholic vote, while only 8%

went to the SNP, 4% for the Conservatives, and 21% to the Liberals (Denver 1997). But

106 the Catholic hierarchy, who participated on an equal footing with the Church of Scotland to the 1989 Scottish Convention, proved to be a fervent supporter of devolution, as the introduction of a Scottish political arena could in no circumstances undermine its relative power (Steven 2007).

3.3.2. ‘Fresh talents’ against ‘white settlers’

Since the 1960s, the main concern of British policy-makers regarding immigration has been to cope with the sizeable proportion of Commonwealth citizens coming from the Indian sub-continent and, for many of them, what became after the 1948 partition the state of Pakistan. But this proved to be mainly an English concern, as Commonwealth immigration to Wales and Scotland remained relatively much lower. In 2001, there were only 42,577 self-identified Muslims in Scotland, against 1,524,887 in England (GROS 2001). Unlike the Catholics, Muslims in Scotland are a young community, concentrated in the Glasgow area and relatively much less numerous than in the city belt of Northern England. While the Labour party has long relied on their indefectible support (Maan 1992), the association Asian-Scots for Independence, funded by and affiliated to the SNP, was created as much for bolstering the party’s self-conscious civic positioning as for an electoral purpose. Indeed, although the Muslim community is relatively small, its high concentration in a few constituencies gives it a political weight that largely exceeds its actual size. The association’s convenor Bashir Ahmed – who became in 2007 the first Pakistani-born MSP – gave his own version of civic nationalism at a 1995 SNP rally in terms that historians may find puzzling: “[a]t the time of Robert the Bruce, the drive for Scottish independence involved people from all backgrounds and nationalities, who shared a common vision of humanity in Scotland. That is our vision too.”⁸⁶ The predominance of constitutional issues and the limited size of Asian and Black communities have led to an absence of a “racialization process in Scotland since 1945, rather than an absence of racism per se” (Miles & Dunlop 1987: 119). In one of the few systematic studies dedicated to the subject in Scotland before devolution, Miles and Dunlop also stressed the construction of the increasing number of English-born immigrants living in Scotland as the ‘significant other’, taking over the role until then occupied by the Catholic community in the national imaginary⁸⁷.

86. Quoted in the Sunday Herald, ‘SNP hits back after Billy Connolly brands party anti-English’, June 27, 1999.

87. See also McIntosh et al. (2004) for a sociological account of grassroots anti-English racism in Scotland.

107 While there is a widespread belief that the Irish constitute the single largest immigration-induced minority in Scotland’s contemporary history, census data suggests that as early as 1921, they had been overtaken by the English. First generation migrants born in England came to represent 8.1% of the population of Scotland in 2001, against 7% in 1991, after four decades of a steady increase⁸⁸. Yet the issue is barely ever discussed in Scottish politics, which led some to speak of an ‘invisible’ and yet

‘audible’ minority⁸⁹, an immigration by stealth, a constant and quiet inflow of English nationals to the northern end of the Union. The phenomenon has not drawn significant scholarly attention either, the first comprehensive study of it having been published as late as 2003⁹⁰. This lack of interest is reflected in the persistence of myths and preconceived ideas that are often far from reality. The common wisdom assimilates English migrants with middle-class pensioners relocating in the rural Highlands. But Murray Watson (2003) convincingly showed that the overwhelming majority of them actually lived in the Lowlands urban belt and presented similar socio-economic characteristics as the native population. Yet, “incomers are sometimes explicitly vilified, as outsiders with imperialist aspirations to subjugate and destroy local lifestyles and culture, described as ‘white settlers’. [the English], defined by an apparently clear – if vaguely specified – identity, has to some extent come to symbolize the negative popular perspective placed on cultural and social change associated with migration, throughout Scotland and specifically on rural Scotland” (Short & Stockdale 1999: 177-78).

To be sure, counter-urbanization trends are a well-documented aspect of late-modernity resulting from the increasing salience of post-materialist values. The ‘White settlers’

phenomenon in Scotland is no exception and tensions arising from it have been mainly of an urban versus rural kind. But the very term is reminiscent of a colonial idiom which

88. Report on Scotland’s population in 2001, General Register Office for Scotland, 2002. These figures should nevertheless be handled carefully, as they are only based on the place of birth and do not distinguish the (numerous) cases of returned Scots born in England and second generation English immigrants. These complex migration patterns illustrate the extent to which the Scottish and English peoples, bounded by a common state for three centuries, have been intertwined.

89. The concept of the ‘audible minority’ coined by Bond, Charsley and Grundy (2009) to designate ‘English immigrants’ living in Scotland captures well the important role played by speakers’ accents in the UK in general and in Scotland in particular. Indeed McCrone et al (2006) have shown that having a Scottish accent was, with birth, the most significant marker of Scottish identity.

90. Cf. Watson, 2003.

108 was common in European regionalist debates in the 1960s⁹¹ and struck a sensitive chord in Scotland. Explicitly anti-English groupuscules like White Settlers or Settlers Watch⁹² were set up, and although they never gathered more than a few hundred members, spurred the interest of the media that took the opportunity to speculate on the “warnings that Scotland’s patient nationalism could turn nasty.”⁹³ Neil Ascherson reporting for the Independent in 1993 captured this fear in a telling way: “[s]lowly and almost indefinably, the climate in Scotland is changing. To be a child with an English accent in a Scottish school yard was never an easy ride, but these days it is markedly rougher.

Unexpected people will now talk of ‘white settlers’ or of ‘rich folk from down South’, and there is a new edge in their voice. This anxiety crystallizes around the idea of English immigration.”⁹⁴ Successive rows over the intake of English students and the appointment of English staff in Scottish universities provided those denouncing the ethnic undertones of Scottish nationalism with further legitimacy.

However, while anti-English sentiments may be diffuse at grassroots level, none of the political parties ever intended to instrumentalize them for an electoral purpose. In 1994, the SNP clearly distanced itself from Scottish Watch, founded by a former SNP activist with the aim of “cleansing Scotland of English white-settler exploitation.”⁹⁵ The association New Scots for Independence, affiliated to the SNP that at its height gathered several hundred individuals, was founded to reassure non Scottish-born residents that they would not be discriminated against in an independent Scotland. In 1995, the party won an injunction against the extreme anti-English group Settler Watch to stop issuing pamphlets urging support for the SNP⁹⁶. Furthermore, English-born residents are not geographically concentrated, nor do they constitute a clearly identifiable community living on the margin of Scottish society. The ‘Scottishing effect’ (Dickson 1994),

91. For the French case, see Robert Laffont’s influential essay La revolution régionaliste (1967) and the even more eloquent Décoloniser en France (1971). The colonial idiom was especially popular among regionalist movements in the 1960s, when people’s right to self-determination was re-interpreted in order to include former colonies. However, this became old-fashioned in the 1990s and is hardly ever used today. In the British context, the term White Settlers refers more specifically to British settlers in Kenya and Rhodesia, who were a block to colonial independence.

92. These groups only gathered a few hundred members and never managed to enjoy broad appeal (Watson 2003).

93. An opinion piece published in the Independent ‘The warnings that Scotland’s patient nationalism could turn nasty’ authored by Neil Ascherson, November 21, 1993.

94. Irvine Welsh’s hero in Trainspotting (1993) put the 1990s Scottish malaise in a more telling if vulgar way: “Ah hate cunts like that… Cunts that are intae baseball-batting every fucker that’s different, pakis, poofs, n what huv ye.

Fucking failures in a country ay failures. It’s nae good blaming the English for colonizing us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonized by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonized by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us?... The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation.”

95. Quoted in the Observer ‘SNP’s tartan embrace of the sooth mooth’, November 4, 1999.

96. See UNHCR, Minorities at Risk Project (2004).

109 through which English-born migrants become rapidly incorporated into Scottish society, reflects how, for better or worse, Scotland shares numerous similarities with its Southern neighbour. English immigrants never attempted to constitute a distinct political party on ethnic lines in order to defend their interests, nor have they tried to establish specific sections within existing parties, nor sought to gain recognition as a culturally distinct minority. Reciprocally, Scottish emigrants living in England are equally invisible and the SNP never seriously considered them as a potential electoral resource. Unlike in Québec where the English-speaking community sought recognition – and was encouraged to do so by the federal government – as a distinct group, nothing similar occured in Scotland, where Britishness still provides an overlapping identity, and hence a back door to inter-ethnic tensions.

In fact, rising hostility towards English-born residents cannot be understood independently of the broader political and economic context of the 1980s. This was not so much the result of Scottish nationalism turning ‘nasty’ as the consequence of two changes.

First, the boundary between English and Scots residing in Scotland was far from being clear-cut. As support for nationalism increasingly overlapped with and reinforced the class cleavage, the ‘others’ were not so much the ‘English’, a discursive category that is particularly at odds with the sociological patterns of a territorially dispersed and loosely connected population. Instead, the national boundary increasingly excluded the native upper class, an “internal periphery strongly addicted to the symbols of Scottish

‘patriotism’” and yet well integrated into the England-dominated British state (McKenzie 1981: 162-63). Although this category is equally far from representing a socio-demographic reality, it nonetheless suggests that the boundary shift through contraction was rather a class than an ethnic mechanism per se.

The second factor has to do with the seemingly inexorable economic decline of Scotland, which found its expression in the recrudescence of emigration now mainly directed to the South-East of England. By 2001, 735,000 people born in Scotland were living in England alone – on average younger and more skilled that their English-born

110 peers living in Scotland – while merely 250.000 were residing overseas⁹⁷. The recovery brought about by the war-related industries during World War II proved to be short-lived, and the 1950s saw a further decline of Scottish traditional industries. A series of regional development policies were introduced by successive Labour and Conservative governments during the heyday of the welfare state. In spatial and social terms, the state committed itself to providing assistance and care to Britons ‘from cradle to grave’, wherever they happened to reside across the territory. Apart from mitigating peripheral dissent by diverting resources from the centre, it was meant to reduce the incentives for emigration by creating employment opportunities in economically ailing areas. The 1960s saw the creation of more sophisticated growth poles and major industrial developments were relocated to Scotland (Keating 2001a: 245). A Development Office for Scotland was set up in 1961, followed in 1964 by the Highland and Islands Development Board. However, this period of state-funded reindustrialization came to an end in the 1970s, when the priority shifted from mitigating within-state territorial inequalities to encouraging endogenous growth (Keating 1998: 27). The relative failure of post-war territorial management through diversionary policies in the context of an increasingly open economy encouraged the Thatcher-led Conservative government to advance its neo-liberal agenda north of the border. The potion proved to be particularly bitter in Scotland, where a sharp rise in unemployment combined with the prevalence of foreign-owned branch factories (Mitchell 1997) – more vulnerable to adverse economic conditions – provoked a new wave of skilled emigration from the Lowlands. Between 1981 and 1991, some 250,000 people fled the economically depressed region (Armitage 2005). The phenomenon came to be referred to as the ‘Lowland Clearances’, building a link between the “nineteenth century depopulation of the Highlands with the late twentieth-century depopulation induced by the collapse of heavy industry, coal mine and car production in the urban Lowlands” (Harper & Vance 1999: 17). The SNP emphasis on relative economic deprivation⁹⁸ was perfectly in tune with the increasing perception that emigration was but another symptom of the Union. More than ever before, home-grown talents educated in Scottish universities took their skills elsewhere and increasingly to the South-East of England, in sharp contrast with earlier periods when Scottish nationalists could at least take pride in their sons and daughters roaming

97. Scotland’s diaspora and overseas-born population, Scottish Government Social Research, 2009.

98. Peter Jones and Christopher Harvie (2000) in their book The Road to Home Rule made a link between the destruction of working class communities brought about by the ‘Lowland clearances’ in the 1980s – that dislocated traditional voting patterns – and the rise of support for the SNP.

111 the earth. The demise of the Empire and the concomitant emergence of the South East of England as emigrants’ main destination gave some substance to the nationalist claim that Scotland would be better off once emancipated from London.

As British elites saw no other option but to manage decline, Scotland faced the choice between remaining a managed periphery or profoundly revising the terms of the Union with the hope of a new distinctly Scottish impulse. This dilemma was well understood by H.J. Hanham, writing in 1969: “Now that the Empire is dead many Scots feel cramped and restricted at home. They chafe at the provincialism of much of Scottish life and at the slowness of Scottish economic growth, which is related to that provincialism.

To give themselves an opening to a wider world the Scots need some sort of outlet, and the choice appears at the moment to be between emigration and re-creating the Scottish nation at home” (quoted in Devine 2006b, my emphasis). This touches upon another fundamental aspect of centre-periphery relations in the United Kingdom, which for a time mitigated peripheral dissent as centripetal forces were powerful enough, but ultimately could no longer stem the tide. The geographical frontier between England and Scotland has remained unchanged since the thirteenth century, which makes it one of the oldest borders in Europe. After 1707, the symbolic significance of the border remained, although by then, the numerous Scots who crossed it were no longer in a foreign land inhabited by their Auld Enemy⁹⁹, but on the way to the political, economic and cultural centre of the British nation/Empire in the making. Yet, by the 1980s, the

To give themselves an opening to a wider world the Scots need some sort of outlet, and the choice appears at the moment to be between emigration and re-creating the Scottish nation at home” (quoted in Devine 2006b, my emphasis). This touches upon another fundamental aspect of centre-periphery relations in the United Kingdom, which for a time mitigated peripheral dissent as centripetal forces were powerful enough, but ultimately could no longer stem the tide. The geographical frontier between England and Scotland has remained unchanged since the thirteenth century, which makes it one of the oldest borders in Europe. After 1707, the symbolic significance of the border remained, although by then, the numerous Scots who crossed it were no longer in a foreign land inhabited by their Auld Enemy⁹⁹, but on the way to the political, economic and cultural centre of the British nation/Empire in the making. Yet, by the 1980s, the