Written by Henry Hill | 08 June 2011
Posted in Comment - Britain

Union Jack. Photography: Gabriele Roberti

You would not have thought, from observing the SNP's wildly successful election campaign in May's Holyrood elections, that separation ranked very high on Alex Salmond's list of priorities. Nary was a whisper of it made. Instead, the Nat's campaign focused on their reasonably competent minority administration in the Scottish Parliament and stressed Mr Salmond's strengths as First Minister. It was just what the all-knowing Scottish Labour politicians who had pushed for devolution had always hoped it would be, except they weren't winning.

Yet fast forward a month, and the situation is rather different. Despite essentially ignoring - and when it came up, specifically disavowing - the constitutional question during his re-election campaign, First Minister Salmond is now pressing hard for all manner of concessions to separatism, while gearing up for a referendum at the very end of the current Scottish parliament. Rumour has it that he might even be able to choose his own question at will, as well as the timing.

People who believe in the continued existence and value of the United Kingdom should not under-estimate this threat to it. It can be hard to imagine for somebody living on the British mainland, where the union has been the status quo for over three hundred years, but given Mr Salmond’s impressive track record there is every risk that he might pull of this latest, and final, coup de grâce. Nobody should draw false comfort from the polls that demonstrate that the pro-independence vote in Scotland is stagnant, and stuck at around 20%. While these polls show that an independence referendum can be won by unionists, the latest Holyrood campaign abundantly demonstrated that an effective campaign against weak opposition in the right conditions can overturn a substantial poll lead in a short amount of time. Like their Quebecois counterparts, the SNP will spend the next five years on the hunt for the right 'winning conditions'.

But why should you care? Since Irish independence and the end of the last existential threat to the union a century ago, unionism has faded from mainland political memory. This makes sense - after all, the union quite simply hasn’t been under threat since the creation of the Free State in 1922. Only in Northern Ireland did the risk of the break-up of the United Kingdom remain palpable, and due to the unfortunate circumstances of that province those on the mainland who think about 'unionism' at all recall only of violence, bigotry and the Orange marches. As an Anglo-Irishman of Catholic background and a devout unionist, I've always been saddened by the dominant position that radical Ulster Protestantism occupies in people's perceptions of unionism and those who are passionate in their belief in the United Kingdom. Few today consider what a positive and inclusive force unionism can be. It is time we remembered, before it is too late.

At its best, unionism represents the belief that nobody is defined by one identity, or incapable of cohabiting with people who are different to you. The maintenance of things such as Scottish Law after the signing of the Treaty of Union on the 1 May 1707 was testament to unionism’s belief that somebody can be both Scottish and British. I myself hold both Irish and British citizenship and identity without any tension. This origin of British identity is one of the reasons that British identity is so cosmopolitan. Efforts to define British culture in narrow terms - usually revolving around red phone boxes, cricket, the empire and such - are always hopelessly anachronistic and inaccurate because at heart British culture is so fluid, flexible and tolerant.

For all the efforts of the Mosleys and Powells of this world, the British have never thrown themselves into the arms of the racialist right, as so many countries on the European mainland did over the course of the Twentieth Century. Whilst the sudden changes brought on by mass immigration can still invoke fear on part of the communities unsettled by their arrival, this is never permanent. For all the fears about black immigration during the fifties and sixties, the idea that black people cannot be British is justly laughable today. Deep down, the majority of Britons know that theirs is an identity that is not the preserve of one race, be it Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, or otherwise. Our three-hundred year union is the result of people of a multitude of different identities working together. It makes a poor basis for racism.

This inclusive approach contrasts with the nationalist belief, which is that you can be one thing or another, but not both. You are either Scottish/Welsh/English/Irish or British – but never both. The fundamental poverty of the nationalist argument lies in its belief that people from different nations must be strangers, foreigners, aliens. Where real life belies this argument - as in the UK - then nationalists do what they can to invent or resurrect ancient divisions and grievances. The SNP have plans to put Scottish Gaelic on every road sign in Scotland, despite the fact that it is only spoken by 1.2% of the population (of which only a portion are monoglot). The motivation behind this is to try to make England appear a foreign country to Scots before they seek to make fact of that in a referendum. The same instinct can be seen when the Welsh Assembly tries to make all Welsh school children spend one of their GCSE options on Welsh, or when Irish nationalists consciously built Anglophobia into the core of the Irish identity they were trying to create - narrow, prescriptive visions of identity that contrast markedly with the fluid, cosmopolitan British equivalent.

This is the main dividing line between nationalism and unionism. Where the unionist asks "What have we in common?", the nationalist asks "What divides us?" I make no secret of the fact that I consider nationalism an ugly, divisive doctrine. Yet I am continually surprised by the number of people who appear apathetic or actively hostile to the United Kingdom. Simon Jenkins, a man apparently of the progressive left, derides the union as "England's First Empire". Not only is this argument a gross insult to the millions of Scots, Welsh and Irishmen who continue to believe in the principles of the union, it is also a bizarre alignment between progressive politics and the entirely un-progressive, identity-driven phenomenon of separatist nationalism. He further refers to David Cameron's commitment to the union as 'Anglo-Saxon machismo', perhaps narrow partisan politics leading him to such a deeply ungenerous interpretation of the Prime Minister’s sincere unionist beliefs..

The British people, and especially leftward-leaning students, should not be taken in by this approach. For all that it is fashionable to lay many of the ills of the world at our country's feet, it remains true that the Union represents something better than the narrow, divisive visions of its nationalist opponents. There is nothing progressive about advocating a world where who we are is prescribed to us by a discordant, nationalist elite, and where borders - or potential borders - are worshipped as a sacrosanct and inviolable part of the human condition.

The Union is under serious threat for the first time in almost a hundred years. I hope that when the time comes all students, whether progressive, patriotic or both will join me fighting to defend it.

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