Nationalism and unionism: let's rediscover political respect

But our political culture is stuck too. Scotland’s rival tribes seem determined to misunderstand and misrepresent each other.

And they each seem so focused on their respective destinations – recreating a Scottish sovereign state or preserving the existing British one – that they do not seem to care about how they get to where they want to go.

This is bad news. For all of us.

Because the ‘how’ matters. It matters how we become independent. It matters, equally, how we stay in the union. And it matters how we conduct our public discourse in the meantime.

Stephen Noon made this point before Christmas. Speaking on BBC Question Time, the former chief strategist of the Yes campaign, set out what I guess most of us would call a “gradie” path to re-establish Scottish sovereignty: the long-term building of state-like capacity while maintaining good relations with the rest of the UK.

“I believe we need to become an independent country but we need to become an independent country well,” Mr Noon told a TV studio audience more used to yah-boo hyper-partisanship than such thoughtfulness. “So we need to take it slowly. I think we need to do it in steps.”

Now the former Alex Salmond advisor remains convinced that independence will happen, or says he is, in a decade or two.

Me? I think Mr Noon is guilty of assuming that devolution and the extra new powers that he wants the next Labour government to deliver for Holyrood are milestones on the way to inevitable Scottish statehood.

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I am sure, in his heart of hearts, that Mr Noon knows as well as anybody else that you can never be sure where your “steps" take you.

Mr Noon signed off his QT contribution with an evergreen observation. “The success of independence,” he said, “will be determined by how we become independent as much as anything else.”

Well, of course. A new state born amid fractious internal politics and with poor relationships with its neighbours will have a tough infancy. The world is full of examples of this.

Any independent Scotland would have to find ways to accommodate those who did not believe in sovereignty.

Back in 2014 – no doubt on the advice of smart people like Mr Noon – Yes leaders thought they had done enough to reassure people who felt British that they could keep their cultural and social connections with the rest of the UK.

Mr Salmond, in particular, talked of preserving the monarchy as an institutional link to the old state. Nicola Sturgeon, who had an English granny, even acknowledged her own limited Britishness.

These overtures did not work, not really. There are people inside the SNP who admit, privately, that they did not anticipate or appreciate the sheer depth of “British” feeling in Scotland.

People who identify as as British – or as British and Scottish – are a minority north of the border. But they exist. And for some of them the very idea of Scottish independence has been profoundly upsetting, un-anchoring. In the view of some Yessers (especially those trapped in very online bubbles), such British-ID-ing unionists are either contemptible football thugs, sectarian bigots or daft Tory toffs.

But Britishness runs way deeper than the stereotypes of hyper-partisan internet politics.

So any independence campaign has to find a way to disagree well with people who believe in the UK, whether as a nation state or a plurinational one. Yessers have often failed to do this and portrayed their opponents as the brainwashed victims of false consciousness.

But it is not just nationalists who get their foes wrong. So do pro-UK leaders and influencers.

What Mr Noon says of independence is every bit as true of union.

The success of the UK will be determined by “how” Scotland – and Wales and maybe Northern Ireland – stay in it.

The fundamental test is whether the British state and its supporters can accommodate, accept and acknowledge citizens who do not primarily identify as British.

I guess this is where we normally choose to talk about the mechanics of government, about subsidiarity, about constitutional arrangements. But, as with the nationalists who misunderstand their opponents, what is really needed here is cultural respect.

Scroll through the union jack social media and you will find pro-UK voters who think nationalists are “neds”, “fenians” and “zoomers”.

The Scottish electorate is pretty well studied. We know fine well that Yes voters are not, despite the stereotypes of their haters, disproportionately poor, Catholic or uneducated.

There are still too many unionist politicians and commentators who think standing up for Britain means demeaning Scotland and Scottishness or indulging hyperbolic criticism of devolved institutions or services.

There are pro-independence leaders who love this, who see these British nationalists as natural allies. They are wrong: nobody wins when rhetoric plunges this low.

Politicians on both sides of the constitutional divide seem happy to dogwhistle to the worst of their bases, demonising opponents. This seems unwise.

At their hearts, Scotland’s two tribes have very similar aims: to either create or preserve sovereign states which coincide with their competing concepts of nation.

But to succeed, I think, unionist and nationalist leaders have to find ways of making citizens who have have a different national ID feel safe and comfortable. This aspiration is the very basis of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement.

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Mr Noon talked about a unifying Scottish independence. But unifying – under a new state or the existing one – is not about making us all the same, it is also about accepting and respecting our differences.

And that is especially true when our constitutional politics is stuck.