Upper and Lower Cases

Letters

Vol. 17 No. 17 · 7 September 1995

From Keith Flett

While I am sure that Scotland is entitled to whatever form of autonomy or independence its people may decide they want, how does Tom Nairn (LRB, 24 August) think the experience of the ordinary person in Glasgow is any different from, for example, that of the ordinary person in Tottenham? If the answer is that there is no difference of significance, as I believe it is, then the question becomes not one of Scottish independence but of how ordinary people can get the profit system off their backs. This leads to a second point. If it is possible to achieve some form of Scottish independence, why stop there? Why no discussion of John Maclean’s workers’ republic? Finally, does Nairn think that Tony Blair and New Labour will grant Scotland independence?

Keith Flett
London N17

Vol. 17 No. 18 · 21 September 1995

From Tam Dalyell

It is surely not truncating Tom Nairn’s article (LRB, 24 August) to the point of distortion, to suggest that he makes the underlying assumption that most Scots now want the break-up of Britain. We don’t. We never did this century. And there is something else. Your readers might like to know that many Scots have second thoughts when nightly on the TV news we see the results of the break-up of states, peacefully though acrimoniously in Czechoslovakia, in Mother Russia from Central Asia and the Caucasus to the Baltic, and, yes, like it or not, in Yugoslavia. The comfortable assumption that ‘We’re different!’ is increasingly perceived to be a little bit complacent. I am not Jeremiahing that Britain would become like Yugoslavia: simply, that as a consequence of endless headline reports from that unhappy land, many people in Scotland are becoming more cautious about espousing a party which has as its ostensible raison d’être the break-up of the United Kingdom. (Tom Nairn himself was right to refer to those who supported the SNP in Perth and Kinross ‘less for its ideology than because it registers the most effective protest against Them’.) Just as there is the problem of the ethnic Russians in Latvia, so there is the situation, not only of the Scots (many occupying key positions!) in England, but of the English in Scotland. Of the views of the Sociology Department, I cannot speak, but your readers can be certain that there is a very different view about the break-up of Britain in those departments of the University of Edinburgh, particularly in the biological, medical, chemical and physical sciences, where the University enjoys a European and international reputation. Those like Nairn who argue for the break-up of Britain should recognise that many of their fellow Scots would be dismayed at the prospect of lurching into such a situation.

Tam Dalyell
Labour MP for Linlithgow

Vol. 17 No. 19 · 5 October 1995

From Tom Nairn

It is truncating my article to the point of distortion to suggest as Tam Dalyell does (Letters, 21 September) that it assumes most Scots ‘now want the break-up of Britain’. No such assumption or statement appears there. What the majority certainly appears to want is a degree of collective responsibility for its own affairs – approximately along the lines now advocated by Dalyell’s own Labour Party, and quite likely to be implemented after the next election. This is what he really detests, not an imaginary heresy in a book review. Here Dalyell’s view has been unchanging over the twenty years since his opposition to devolution – ‘the slippery slope’ – in the Seventies. Setting up even a semi-detached Scottish democracy will be unworkable, Dalyell believes, and any version of home rule must lead to break-up.

He is ‘Jeremiahing that Britain would become like Yugoslavia’. The only way to get across such a crazed suggestion is to deny one is making it. An additional discomfort of aligning Mother Russia with Mother Britain is that the Tory tabloids do this kind of thing far better. The same applies to his remarks about the Sociology Department of Edinburgh University, which may have befogged some LRB readers. The Department’s ‘European and international reputation’ needs no elaborate defence from me. The relevant point here is that it has for some years been running courses dealing with the sociology of nationalism, and recently regrouped its efforts at postgraduate level as ‘Nationalism Studies’. But Dalyell (like the Mail and the Express) sees such academic activity as indistinguishable from the SNP recruiting or running a Braveheart appreciation club. In the Sixties Conservatives saw sociologists as the maggots of moral decay and anarchy. Now they think sociologists are colluding with Scottish Nationalism too. Scandalous waste of public funds etc.

The only scandal visible to me is that of a Scottish Labour MP so incorrigibly hostile to the extension of democracy in Scotland. Non-Westminster (i.e. non-élite) democracy is the real issue here, not nationalism. No one wants the Scots ‘lurching into a break-up situation’. The point of having a parliament will be to avoid lurching by making rational decisions. I am hardly alone in having come to think that a democratically elected Scottish Parliament should assume the right to make the momentous decisions Dalyell is concerned about: staying in or leaving the UK, or the European Union. For example, were such a body to decide (like its 1707 ancestor) on dissolving itself again, I mightn’t like it but I would accept it. But would Dalyell accept the alternative – a return to statehood, or the difficult construction of a new federative UK system? Obviously not: they will say or do anything to prevent the possibility of such a decision ever being made.

There is no pseudo-ethnic problem of ‘the English in Scotland’. There is, however, the genuine problem well expressed in Dalyell’s letter: that of the diminishing but still influential number of unrepentant and inflexible British Nationalists in Scotland (most of them Scots).

Tom Nairn
Sociology Department