A view from the edge

Simon Hoban offers an "incomer's" view of some identity questions

As an Englishman with an Irish name living in Scotland I have perhaps an unusual personal view of nationality and its trappings. My great-great-grandparents escaped from An Garta Mor, the great Irish famine, in the late 1840s. For four generations the Irish Catholics faithfully, and characteristically, married other Irish Catholics, until my father, rejecting his parental culture in more ways than one, married a Saxon Protestant whose family claim to have farmed the Warwickshire/Staffordshire border since c.500 CE; not an impossible claim, if almost certainly exaggerated. At 35 my partner and I bought a house in north-east Scotland, have lived here for 16 years and fully intend to die here. Though my partner’s mother was born in Scotland and even lived locally many years ago, neither of us is remotely ‘Scottish’ in any meaningful sense of the word. So what am I?

The problem with nationality, as Ian MacLellan tries briefly to illustrate in his essay, is when you start counting. After the retreat of the last Ice Age c.10,000 or more years ago, the peoples who wandered to the north of Scotland and beyond in search of peace and space and a sustainable life do not even have a name, and yet scientists working on DNA at Oxford now suggest that most of us are descended from most of them. Some years ago a skeleton was discovered in the caves at Cheddar in Somerset, and one tooth provided enough DNA to work with. The body is estimated to be c.8,000 years old. A survey was done of local people, and a History teacher in a local school proved to be the direct descendant, mother to mother, through mytochondrial DNA, of the body in the cave. A nice local family, you might say.

Since then these islands have been more marked by apparent change than stability. At least two waves of Celts, distantly related but speaking different languages and with differing cultures, pass through, and move back and forth all over the islands: Glasgow is a Brythonic Welsh name, superseding a Pictish Welsh hegemony, fighting a North Saxon power to the south and east, and falling eventually to a Goidelic Celtic invasion from Ireland. The word ‘Scot’ specifically means one branch of the Celts returning from Ireland. Later the area is governed as part of a North English Saxon hegemony, as part of the MacAlpine and Canmore dynasties, briefly receives the name of ‘North Britain’, and is now probably seen by many as one essence of Scottishness, whatever that may be. Throughout these local changes the Romans pay a visit, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes come to stay, the Vikings pass through, and the Normans (a French race of Norse descent) establish a powerful state that in some ways lasts until today. But throughout all this apparent unheaval the population remains relatively unchanged. The most lasting ‘conquest’, that of the Normans, brought c.55,000 invaders into a population of at least 2-3 million; the conquest is administrative, not racial. There is rape and pillage and displacement of course, but 80+ % of the modern white population of the islands is descended from those who were here long before the Celts wandered in.

Even if we take a much narrower field of view, the situation is complex and filled with ironic potential. James VI of Scotland becomes king of England not by conquest but by the failure to breed of Henry VIII’s children, leaving him in 1603 as the only male, Protestant great-great grandchild of Henry VII ( there were plenty of them about) who was already a king. Later attempts to keep, or return, the Stuarts as monarchs, lead to Dutch and German monarchs who have no problem in squashing their rebellious subjects, and then, in victory, punishing the Highlanders who supported the Jacobites with a severity that rivals any modern Shock and Awe. This is probably the immediate source of much popular feeling about Scottish-English relations, and the horror felt is quite justified, but the Scots were not picked upon. The Irish suffer just as badly and certainly for much longer, the French fight a war lasting much more than the nominal One Hundred Years, and any Saxons who put their heads above the parapet could expect treachery and humiliating violence. In the period of Empire, when God apparently allowed and approved the naughtiness, whole continents are raped and subjected to genocide. None of this is done in pursuit of aggressive Englishness, whatever that may be. The people doing it are of many different races, and the Scots, Welsh and Irish are notably enthusiastic in pursuing the fruits of Empire. It is done in pursuit of power and control. When you’ve got it, you must hang on to it: when you haven’t, you must pursue it at all costs.

Nationality is by definition an accident of birth; how could one construct a meaningful sense of ‘pride’ in such a matter? We take it for granted that noone need feel ashamed of who and what they are, but this cannot be inverted simplistically to make us ‘proud’. Should I be proud of my Irishness and Saxonness, which at least have some depth of physical reality, so long as we stop counting at the right dates? Or my specific place of birth in the English Midlands? It would undoubtedly be seen as offensive if I were to fly the Cross of St. George - as many Northern Irish of Scots descent bizarrely do - from my Moray barn: as a challenge to the Saltire, as a statement of non-Scottishness. It does not help that St.George and St. Andrew cannot reasonably be thought of as having anything whatsoever to do with either England or Scotland. In the end, we construct identities as a series of negatives: I am not obviously Scots, or French, or German, or Indonesian, or Mongolian; is this enough to make pride in being English? Hardly. Thus the construction of nationalistic pride must in the end be negative, an inversion of racism. Thank God I am not Scots/Irish/Welsh/French/German/ Whatever! I am.....(Fill in your accident of birth here)! This is both historically and intellectually meaningless, and morally repulsive.

What then of the Homecoming? Americans, Australians, Canadians, etc, etc, will pour off boats and planes wearing their appropriate kilts to devour shortbread and Tunnock’s Teacakes and sing Auld Lang Syne. We - Scots and incomers alike - had better make room, for hundreds of millions of non-residents account themselves of Scots descent, and that’s a lot of teacakes to go round. Much Burns will be sung and recited, though I presume nothing of the markedly superior poets Robert Henryson or William Dunbar or Hugh MacDiarmid: for some reason you’re not so proud of them; perhaps it’s ignorance of ‘your’ own culture. The pipes will be played, often indoors, which is ridiculous. Perhaps a Scotsman who openly despises the English will win Wimbledon? (Don’t laugh.) American billionaires will develop vast tracts of Aberdeenshire to entertain the very rich, and sod the locals and their environment; they’re only Scottish, after all. Is this not what the SNP and their stooges want? Surely all decent Scots want it? The poisonous myth that leads to such assumptions must be resisted, and it is no easy matter.

In England I had the pleasure (usually) of knowing and working with many Scots. The only examples of clearly racist remarks against such people came from other Scots: ‘What do you expect from a f***ing Jock?!’ I presume this was intended humorously. Since moving to Scotland I have encountered some examples of anti-English sentiment, rarely personal, often anecdotal, always ridiculous. A man from Ullapool was verbally abused over a bit of poor parking in Elgin. ‘What do you expect from the English?’ ‘You think I’m English?’ ‘I can tell from your accent...’ I fear this was not intended humorously. I also assume that the aggressor was unusually stupid, a quality which transcends national boundaries. One of my former neighbours belonged to Settler Watch, and had a Home Office file opened on them because of allegedly ‘terrorist’ remarks made in a speech in Aberdeen. Such sentiments have little to do with nationality - I doubt if this person had even the vaguest notion of broader Scots history - and exist in pretty much all communities. The feelings arise from ignorance and fear, a sense of powerlessness, a conviction of threat. I wonder if this person would have been as enthusiastic for burning out the aristocracy in their huge houses and off their vast estates as she was for burning out the relatively poor English settlers. After all, the Clearances, though made easier by pervading attitudes towards the Highlanders, were done by wealthy Scots against poor Scots, just as the enclosure of land throughout the islands was done by the rich against the poor; and those attitudes were probably strongest in the Scottish lowlands. I heard a lowland joke: why is Bonnie Prince Charlie so called? Because Drunken Lecherous Charlie doesn’t sound as good... Is this racist? Are there ‘good’ Scots and less ‘good’ Scots? Apparently so.

We all have tribal feelings. I tend to trust my family, and my neighbours, more than strangers. I’d rather live in my street than your street. At least here I speak the language... But to allow such feelings to extend beyond the unconscious, even to form ideologies, is disastrous in the modern world. Noone minds a bit of kilt-wearing and shortbread eating, but such activities are meaningless in the context of true human identity, simple constructs which have more to do with encouraging tourism and getting politicians re-elected than anything else. Scotland is a wonderful country, and I love living here, but it would be just as wonderful if it were called Erewhon, and if some accident with a time machine left the inhabitants speaking Turkish and wearing pointy hats. In the C21 we must have the courage to reject simplistic prejudices and their inversions and be proud to be what we truly are: citizens of the whole world, members of the whole race. That’s who I am.

Simon Hoban