Mark Smith: I do not want to be a unionist any more

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And yet, as far as my colleague, and others, was concerned, I was “Protestant” – something I said, or did, had given me away – and, what’s more, my colleague was annoyed with me for not behaving like one. He found out that friends of mine had invited me to a football game and that I’d gone, sitting with them in the Celtic end. As far as the colleague was concerned, this was bewildering and treacherous. I told him I would happily come and sit with him for a Rangers game too. But no. The damage was done.

I realise part of the problem here is that I was a naïve young man coming from a city where religious sectarianism pretty much didn’t matter to a city where it mattered a lot. But even so, it struck me at the time that you do not always know how you’re seen, and that you can be walking around for a long time without noticing the labels on you. It’s like that game people play at parties, the one where you stick a piece of paper on your forehead and try to guess what it says: other people can read it, but you can’t.

The sad thing is I think a similar trend has been emerging more recently in a related but different way. Until 2013 or so, I would never have considered myself “unionist”. Part of the reason for that was the SNP were nowhere politically and the constitution, although it was discussed, was not a pressing issue. Also, most of us had not been forced to take sides and weren’t really thinking about the labels that might be stuck to us.

The referendum in 2014 changed that and, more rapidly and violently that I would have expected, we started to attach the labels “unionist” or “nationalist” to each other. It applied all over Scotland and in certain places, like Glasgow, “unionist” and “protestant” were conflated. Of course, the rule is not universal – I have friends from a Catholic background who voted No and friends from a Protestant background who voted Yes – but the point is: the labels were there and there was only a choice of two: Yes or No. Choose your side? Right, that’s it: you’re a unionist or you're a nationalist.

Some of you may think all of this is a bit rich coming from me and that I’m part of the problem with my “unionist columns” and certainly I think we are now prone to look at every issue through Yes and No telescopes. Take the recent meeting between Gordon Brown and Prince William for example. You’re likely to make a judgement about it depending on whether you’re a “unionist” or a “nationalist”. Perhaps you see it as the latest attempt to hold back the worrying rise of the SNP; perhaps you see it as royals plotting with unionists. Check the label on your forehead for the answer.

The recent argument over the statue of William III in Glasgow is also interesting in this respect. The statue has been vandalised a few times and in the most recent incident the horse’s tail was broken off. In a statement, the Orange Order said it was yet another anti-Protestant attack and that all things Protestant and Unionist were being demonised in Scotland. “With recent rhetoric by the usual political rent a quotes and the accompanying media frenzy,” it said, “Grand Lodge is hardly surprised that such mindless actions have happened.”

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The reaction of the Order goes back a long, long way – which is part of the problem – but my worry is their binary outlook is no longer as unusual as it once was. The Orange Order see the world as unionist and non-unionist and, instead of that approach fading into the past – as we might expect and hope – there are more Scots who now see the world this way, with or without the added division of Catholic and Protestant. In other words, even if you reject the idea of the "Ulsterisation" of Scotland - and Scotland and Northern Ireland are different places, of course they are - the idea of a society divided into two camps is now much more familiar to Scots than it would have been 20 years ago.

The fact that we’ve seen this happen over the last few years is utterly depressing to me. Perhaps it is a perverse comfort to some that the divisions that exist in Scotland are not unique and that politics is more divided along identity lines around the world (encouraged and inflamed by social media). And, in some ways, Scotland has become a more diverse and more tolerant place.

However, in other ways, if we're being honest, Scotland has become distinctly less tolerant, particularly if you belong to the “other” camp and the label on your forehead says the wrong thing. And my worry is that, now we think in these terms, the labels will never disappear. As long as Scotland remains in the UK, we are all either unionist or nationalist, and even if we do become independent, the resentments associated with the labels are unlikely to go away. Because labels stick.

All we can do, I suppose, is try to resist as much as we can. In the years that I’ve been writing this column, I’ve been called pretty much everything: unionist, Tory, right-wing, “woke”, SNP hater, SNP spy, and someone even speculated about whether I used to be a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party (um, no). The point is some of the labels are laughable and some are just wrong but none of them is entirely accurate because simplistic labels rarely reflect the details of who we are and what we think. I do not want to be a label. I do not want to be this or that. I do not want to be a unionist any more.

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