SUMMERTIME, and the wedding season has started. Or should that be the wedding list season, in which guests compete to see who can bag the medium-range gifts first before it is only the dear stuff and the novelty cheapskate items left? How much easier to buy an anniversary gift. Simply look up the traditional marker and purchase something accordingly. Sorted.
This week was the 10th anniversary of one Alex Salmond becoming the First Minister of Scotland, and the first Nationalist First Minister.
The 10th anniversary calls for something tin, rather tricky unless those celebrating are especially fond of Quality Street. Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, had no such trouble deciding what to give Scotland. If her take on the country is to be believed, the anniversary ought to be marked by handing every man, woman and child a tin hat, the better to withstand the constitutional strife raining down on them at the hands of the SNP.
Ms Davidson was in London giving a lecture to the Orwell Foundation. It was an occasion well-attended by the London press, who seem to view her as a Scottish Boris Johnson with a duller hairdo. Darling of the sketch writers, she can always be relied upon for a spot of colour. One paper called her “the mistress of the stunt, Boris in a brassiere”.
What a vibrant portrait of Scotland she painted as she warmed to the subject of the difference between patriotism and nationalism. “The truth is that the nationalist politics identified by Orwell – the attempt to classify and label human beings into groups marked ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – has become a key part of our political practice in Scotland,” she told the audience.
While she did not put the matter in such Animal Farm terms, she appeared to be arguing that the SNP was to blame for dividing Scotland into rival camps in which four legs (voting Yes) was deemed good, and two legs (voting No) was bad. The technique had been effective, she concluded. “If people feel bullied and hectored into supporting SNP, I don’t blame them.” She, in contrast, favoured patriotism, not nationalism. Her patriotism did not impose itself, did not take itself too seriously. It celebrated plurality. Four legs, two legs, unicycle, it matters not: if you’re Scottish, come into the parlour.
Bullying. Hectoring. Intolerance. Somehow, I don’t think Ms Davidson will be invited to pitch for the next VisitScotland advertising campaign. But selling Scotland to tourists is not her job. Her job, as she sees it, is to represent people who “have rather had enough” of the SNP. As such, she has been to the fore in framing this General Election as a referendum on a decade of SNP rule. The two events, the anniversary and the election, could not have collided at a better time for her party.
Have the last 10 years turned Scotland into a country that is better off and at ease with change, or is it a case of tin hats for plenty more years of constitutional combat ahead? Are we still one big happy family at heart, or are we a family increasingly in need of therapy?
In its marking of the anniversary, The Herald gave not a gift of tin but a peek at the past in the form of a photo of the new administration taken in 2007. How times change and how they do not. Standing at the back of a group in front of a “Scottish Executive” sign can be seen one Patrick Harvie, his party then, as now, key to keeping the SNP in power. At the front is Mr Salmond and, slightly behind, the woman who would be his successor, Nicola Sturgeon. All look youthful and optimistic, as well they might. New governments are like new marriages: the future is so bright it would be bad form not to wear rose-tinted shades.
Whatever Mr Salmond and Ms Sturgeon thought the next 10 years would bring, it was perhaps not questions as to whether they had divided the country, yet such were the inquiries made of them on the anniversary. “I don’t believe Scotland is divided,” said the First Minister. “There are differences of opinion on the constitutional future of Scotland, just as there are differences of opinion on Brexit.” Her predecessor added: “People can have disagreement without being divided. The measure is not if we disagree, it’s how we disagree.”
Not if we disagree, but how we disagree. On that, presumably, all sides can agree. It is after that the problems occur. Where one side sees healthy and inevitable differences of opinion the other sees damaging, manufactured division. One side’s zeal and 24/7 campaigning style is another side’s bullying and hectoring.
It is textbook technique when faced with opposing sides to try to find some common ground. Scottish Labour would have us believe that common ground is federalism, but each time it tries to sell the idea to the electorate the party makes it sound more complicated and obscure than the last time the policy was wheeled out. Federalism, as punted by Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale, is truly the deceased, not resting, Norwegian Blue of Scottish politics.
Now here is Ms Davidson with her nationalism bad/patriotism good pitch for the middle ground. On the face of it, it is an attractive idea. Who does not warm to a positive, upbeat pitch? As Marx (the other one) never said, who would not want to be part of a club that so badly wanted us to be a member? Patriotism not nationalism. Simple. Why did we not think of it before?
Probably because it is the same old dubious whine in different bottles. This time, it comes with an added top note of cheekiness in that the person dispensing the hard stuff was once pictured sitting on a tank while the Union flag flickered behind her. Was that the new, cuddlier patriotism we saw before us, or was Ms Davidson just pleased to see an opportunity to call to mind Mrs Thatcher?
It is a rum sort of approach that the leader of the Scottish Conservatives is taking: waving her own flag as a way of criticising others for doing the same. In truth, Ruth, I could happily wait a very long time before I saw another flag, of whatever colours, waved. Yet the way this General Election is being fought suggests that far from less flag waving in future there will be even more, that we are only at the start of a new phase of banner rippling. It suits the Scottish conservatives for it to be so. It suits the SNP. Whether it is a good look on Scotland any more is something else.
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