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The Political Thought of Scottish Nationalism
BEN J ACKSON
The brand of nationalism that now plays
such an inuential role in Scottish politics is
of a surprisingly recent vintage. Barely fty
years old, its origins lie not in the medieval
battles for Scottish statehood, the Scottish
Reformation, the Act of Union, the Scottish
Enlightenment, or any of the other familiar
historical milestones that regularly crop up in
debates about Scottish identity. Rather, Scot-
tish nationalism as we know it today began to
take shape only in the 1960s and 1970s, and
achieved its present ideological maturity in
the course of the 1980s and 1990s. The nation-
alism that emerged from this testing period of
Scottish history was unusual, in that it did not
primarily demand independence for Scotland
in order to defend a threatened ancestral
culture. Instead, Scottish nationalists empha-
sised that independence was the most eec-
tive way to promote the political agenda of
the left in a neoliberal era. Insofar as an
ancestral culture was believed to be
threatened by the British state, it was the
culture of social democratic corporatism,
which Scottish nationalists regarded as well-
suited to Scotlands long-standing egalitarian
and democratic traditions. In the face of the
neoliberal restructuring of the British econ-
omy that emanated from London, Scottish
nationalists interpreted growing opposition
to the Conservative party in Scotland as
expressive of a deep political divergence that
could only be resolved by the creation of a
new Scottish state.
This article examines the political thought
of this form of Scottish nationalism. What are
the key arguments and intellectual inuences
that have come together over recent decades
to produce this now ubiquitous case for Scot-
tish independence? How do the major polit-
ical ideas deployed in this nationalist
discourse sit together? In particular, the art-
icle draws attention to three crucial, but dis-
cordant, ideological themes that have become
recurrent features of the arguments for a yes
vote in the 2014 referendum: an analysis of the
British state indebted to the New Left; a
surprising enthusiasm for the politics of the
British labour movement; and a belief that we
are witnessing the end of the era of absolute
state sovereignty.
In the debate on Scotlands future that is
now unfolding, the ideology and history of
unionismhas been the subject of considerable,
and at times coruscating, analysis. But the
character of Scottish nationalism has thus far
escaped detailed analytical discussion
(though not knockabout political argu-
ment)a reection, perhaps, of the irresisti-
ble compulsion to expose the deciencies of
the Labour party that has gripped the Scottish
blogosphere and many of the heavyweight
commentators on the Scottish political scene.
The myths, traditions and outright fudges
that have shaped Labours unionist social
democracy have been mercilessly dissected.
But no comparable exercise has been under-
taken with respect to Scottish nationalism.
This article is therefore not intended to be
solely descriptive. It is also a contribution to
the development of a more forensic investiga-
tion of the ideological foundations of Scottish
nationalism analogous to the critical treat-
ments of unionism readily available else-
where.
Anderson (and Nairn) country
The pages of New Left Review might seem an
unlikely location for the origins of modern
Scottish nationalism, yet this journal of rigor-
ous Marxist analysis has a good claim to such
a title. In the writings of Perry Anderson and
Tom Nairn in the 1960s and 1970s, later to
be collectively immortalised as the the
AndersonNairn theses, lie some of the foun-
dational assumptions of twenty-rst century
Scottish nationalist rhetoric. This rhetoric
focuses as much on the nature of the British
state and the hierarchies of English society as
it does on Scotland. The lens through which
Scottish nationalists now view England and
#The Author 2014. The Political Quarterly #The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2014
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Britain is more or less that established by
Anderson and Nairn in their path-breaking
but controversial account of British history.
According to Anderson and Nairn, the history
of Britain is exceptional in comparison to
other nations because of its priority as the rst
country to industrialise and because it never
had a full-blooded bourgeois revolution. As a
result, the aristocracy retained their social and
political pre-eminence and formed a partner-
ship with the middle class that excluded the
working class from signicant inuence. The
rise of British imperialism pushed the aristoc-
racy and the bourgeoisie even closer together,
and victories in both world wars left British
institutions safe from any radical reconstruc-
tion that might otherwise have been under-
taken. On this account, the unreformed British
state remains essentially an imperial state,
suused with the style and fripperies of
empire. The British labour movement, mean-
while, was likewise channelled down an
exceptional historical path because it emerged
too early in the nineteenth century to benet
from the insights of Marxist theory. The result
was what the New Left dubbed Labourism:
a conservative form of working-class politics
that unquestioningly accepted British parlia-
mentary traditions and pursued gradual
reforms rather than radical social change.
1
Tom Nairn later elaborated on the place of
Scotland in this account. According to Nairn,
Scotland was fortunate both to benet from
union with the rising world power and to take
its place as the junior partner in the British
imperial project while preserving intact most
of its distinctive social institutions and cul-
ture. As the rst to industrialise, Britains
economic development proceeded in a much
more haphazard and decentralised fashion
than was the case in the nations that came
after Britain in the rise of capitalism. Scotland
was therefore aorded a high degree of
autonomy from London. In this sense, Scot-
land was also a unique nation, following a
developmental path quite unlike those of
other subordinate nationalities, notably of
course the Irish, whose dominant culture
was far less congruent with the demands of
British capitalist development than that of
lowland Scotland. As Nairn argued, the union
of Scotland with England and Wales was in its
own terms a highly successful arrangement
for both parties. Scottish nationalism, or as
Nairn termed it neo-nationalism, only ser-
iously entered into the political arena once
British imperialism was on its last legs. Over-
taken economically by the other advanced
capitalist countries, the crises of the 1970s
left the British state adrift, the victim of the
conservatism and stasis induced by being the
rst to industrialise. As the ship of British
imperialism began to list after the Second
World War, it was only rational for the Scots
to make for the lifeboats.
2
Nairn was initially
quite sceptical of actually existing Scottish
nationalism, believing that authentic Scottish
self-government could only be secured under
socialism. As he put it in his inimitable style:
The SNP Nationalists are merely lumpen-
provincials whose parochialism nds its ad-
equate expression in the asinine idea that a
bourgeois parliament and an army will rescue
the country from provincialism; as if half of
Europe did not testify to the contrary.
3
But
during the 1970s Nairn became more sympa-
thetic to the bourgeois nationalist prospectus
and should be credited as one of the rst to set
out the intriguing political vision of an inde-
pendent Scotland as a member of the EEC (as
it was then called).
4
Over thirty years later, the AndersonNairn
analysis remains more or less the understand-
ing of the British state that informs Scottish
nationalist discourse today. Fundamental to
the enterprise of Scottish nationalism is estab-
lishing a clear political distinction between
the Scots and the English (and, by implication,
the Welsh and the Northern Irish). While
there are various demotic ways of setting
out such a distinction, the most sophisticated
is to present Britain, its state and its attendant
political culture as an antiquated relic of
British imperialism. In an inuential recent
article setting out his commitment to a new
Scottish state, Irvine Welsh argued that the
nature of the UK imperialist state has ham-
pered England as well as Scotland:
This state has stopped England from pursuing
its main mission, namely to build an inclusive,
post-imperial, multi-racial society, by forcing it
to engage with the totally irrelevant (from an
English perspective) distractions of Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland. From the view-
point of the Scots, it has foisted thirty-ve years
of a destructive neo-liberalism upon us, and
prevented us from becoming the European so-
cial democracy we are politically inclined to be
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. . . If we rid ourselves of the political imperialist
baggage of the UK state, new possibilities
emerge.
5
How well does an analysis that was, in its
essentials, completed in the 1960s and 1970s
meet the demands of contemporary political
argument? The remarks of Irvine Welsh
reveal some diculties. The noticeable extent
to which race relations have improved in
English society since the 1970s suggests that
the chief factor inhibiting English (and for that
matter Scottish) racial equality was not what-
ever trappings of imperialism remain
attached to the British state. Indeed, the Brit-
ish state from the 1970s onwards, usually
when under the control of Labour govern-
ments, has itself played an important role in
advancing racial equality through legislation,
agenda-setting and the power of government
agencies. Similarly, the Scottish nationalist
reading of Britain as a peculiar example of
an unreconstructed ancien regime does not
seem to have been updated to take account
of the large constitutional changes wrought
by the Labour government of 19972010.
While the British state does not tick all of the
boxes of a Charter 88 checklist of constitu-
tional propriety, the constitutional landscape
of Britain has been transformed since the dog
days of Thatcher. Serious innovations have
been undertaken, such as the Scottish Parlia-
ment; the Welsh Assembly; the Northern Irish
Assembly; the Greater London Assembly and
Mayor; the Freedom of Information Act; the
creation of the Supreme Court; the embed-
ding in domestic law of the European Con-
vention on Human Rights; proportional
representation for Scottish, Welsh, Northern
Irish, European and London elections; and the
removal of virtually all hereditary peers from
the House of Lords. These fundamental steps
towards making Britain a more plural, inclus-
ive and democratic stateregardless of
whether they are ultimately far-reaching
enoughsuggest a exibility and capacity
for reform in British political institutions
that is underrated by nationalist critics.
Labourism without the Labour
party
A pervasive inuence on modern Scottish
nationalism has been the Labour party, or at
least a certain image of what an earlier, pris-
tine British labour movement looked like,
before the grubby compromises and vacilla-
tions of whoever happens to be the current
Labour leader. Given the unagging energy
that Scottish nationalists and nationalist-
inclined commentators devote to criticising
the antediluvian character of the Labour
party, it may seem surprising, or even contra-
dictory, that Scottish nationalism seeks to
imitate the oldest of Labours antique tradi-
tions. But for many nationalists the core of the
case for Scottish independence ultimately
reduces to the argument that Scots want to
build a social democratic or socialist country
while the English do not (the views of the
Welsh and the Northern Irish are usually put
to one side). On this account, Scottish state-
hood is not so much about the expression of a
national identity as an instrumental device for
the realisation of a more egalitarian society.
Scottish nationalism grew up as a political
movement in the shadow of the Scottish
Labour party in the 1970s and 1980s.
Impressed by the apparent capacity of Scot-
tish Labour to hold on to the support of its
working-class voters even as the English
working-class electorate fragmented into
Thatcherite and non-Thatcherite blocs, some
of the SNPs supporters and key personnel
owed fromLabour to Scottish nationalismas
and when they lost patience with the long
struggle to elect a Labour government before
1997. Others who had never been seriously
tempted to join the Labour party, such as Alex
Salmond, nonetheless calibrated their polit-
ical strategies to win over Labour voters.
6
The
familiar Labour narrative of a working-class
movement formed out of mutualist organ-
isations to overcome the inequalities of
nineteenth-century capitalism was imbibed
wholesale by Scottish nationalists, who were
often open in their enthusiasm for the import-
ant role played by the Labour party and the
trade unions in their early days in giving a
voice to the powerless. Scottish nationalists
also emphasised that it was Scottish Labour
that had kept the ame of home rule ablaze in
the early twentieth century through the estim-
able work of Keir Hardie and the Independent
Labour party. In his account of his journey to
Scottish nationalism, Jim Sillars, the most
talented of the converts from Labour to the
SNP, buttressed his arguments for independ-
52 Ben J ackson
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ence with a glowing tribute to the labour
movement that could rival any sentimental
oration ever delivered at Labour party con-
ference:
The Labour Party is the most important institu-
tion in the history of the working people and
that part of the intelligentsia which gives itself to
progressive causes. Labour was not born in a
vacuum but emerged from a movement of
struggle for justice which had its roots buried
in the formative years of the industrial revolu-
tion. The heartbreak, the sense of solidarity, and
the stepping-stone victories of that struggle are
in its genes. Even although it is a twentieth-
century creation, it is in direct descent from the
poor, their leaders and their sacrices of pre-
vious times. There is too the history of success to
which the Labour Party can lay claim. At the
parliamentary and local government level,
Labour has been central to the advancement
made in housing, education, the welfare services
and the creation of an atmosphere in which
concern for people can ourish.
7
Above all, however, it was the experience of
the Scottish struggles against deindustrialisa-
tion during the 1970s and 1980s that injected
the classic themes of Labour politics into
Scottish nationalist thinking. The epic quality
of the union-led battles for industrial survival
in Scottish shipbuilding, coal mining, car
manufacturing and steel making blurred
together class and national identities. The
eorts of the workers in these and other
industries to maintain their livelihood in the
face of decisions meted out from London, or
the remote headquarters of multinational cor-
porations, were perceived as national rather
than sectional demands, and a strong associ-
ation developed in this period between work-
ing-class politics and eorts to secure home
rule for Scotland.
8
Particularly when con-
fronted by the implacable face of the Thatcher
government, Scottish nationalism began to
orientate itself towards the concerns of the
trade union movement and the defence of
corporatist bargaining against neoliberal
shock therapy.
Labour parliamentarians, Scottish national-
ists contend, have betrayed the distinguished
political tradition of the Labour party in order
to win power in London. Fundamental to the
self-understanding of Scottish nationalism,
then, is that a new Scottish state, freed from
the neoliberal shackles imposed by the need
to win over English voters, oers Scots the
chance to achieve the traditional social demo-
cratic goals of the Labour party. A narrowing
of income and wealth inequality, a reduction
in poverty, greater economic securityall
this, Scottish nationalists argue, can be deliv-
ered through the agency of a Scottish welfare
state and an active government in Edinburgh.
Although this was an argument frequently
made in the 1980s, it only really started to
gain traction after 1997, as nationalists capita-
lised on the advent of the Scottish Parliament
and the perception that Labour in London
was watering down its values to please the
English nancial and media elite.
One cost of this argument is that it skates
over the genuine tensions that have riven the
social democratic project in the late twentieth
century across a number of dierent nations.
The easy assumption that New Labour repre-
sented a straightforward capitulation to a
reactionary England in thrall to nance cap-
ital leads Scottish nationalists to lack curiosity
about the international economic and social
forces that have remade social democracy
since the days of Attlee and Wilson. Scottish
nationalismtoday essentially oers what Tom
Nairn would once upon a time have dis-
dained as Labourism: a gradual pursuit of
social reform bound by the conventional pro-
prieties of parliamentarism. But a Scottish
Labourism in one country would have to
reckon with the same headwinds now faced
by Labour at a British level: the pressures that
are exerted on individual nations by inter-
national capital markets; the shifting class
composition of the electorate; the aftermath
of an overly rapid period of deindustrialisa-
tion that has polarised the labour market and
created a service-based economy; and, of
course, a large nance sector that exerts a
disproportionate political inuence. Financial
services, it should be remembered, constitute
a signicant part of the Scottish economy. The
assets of the banking sector in an independent
Scotland would amount to 1254 per cent of
Scottish GDP.
9
Scottish independence does
not oer a straightforward escape route
from the power now wielded by nance in
contemporary capitalism.
A second diculty with this line of argu-
ment is that it rests on a caricature of England,
namely that it is fundamentally Conservative
and neoliberal in character. The Conservative
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party won 39.5 per cent of the vote in England
in the general election of 2010.
10
England is a
large, variegated and diverse country, some
parts of which share the same left-of-centre
political culture as urban Scotland and the
majority of whose residents do not vote Con-
servative. And neither the political cultures of
Wales nor Northern Ireland resemble the
vision of deracinated neoliberal individual-
ism Scottish nationalism seeks to vanquish.
One of the most powerful virtues emphasised
over many years in the British Labour tradi-
tion is solidarity. Solidarity with the other
residents of the United Kingdom who are
not Conservatives, or who do not want to
live in a country governed by neoliberal nos-
trums, is one element of the British Labour
tradition that Scottish nationalists do not want
to make their own.
The post-sovereign state
From what I have said so far, it might appear
that Scottish nationalism is an ideology
that demands only autarchy for Scotland.
But this would be misleading. Scottish
nationalists have in fact developed a very
intricate account of how an independent Scot-
land would simultaneously enjoy self-
determination in certain respects but in other
respects share institutions, laws and society
with foreign nations. This third aspect of the
political thought of Scottish nationalism has
given the nationalist case greater political
purchase, because it acknowledges the real-
istic limits to Scottish autonomy and situates
the quest for Scottish statehood in a more
general reinterpretation of ideas about na-
tional sovereignty in the wake of European
integration and growing global economic
interdependence.
In this sense, Scottish nationalists at times
even suggest that they are not nationalists.
Alex Salmond, for example, has on occasion
ventured: Im a post-nationalist.
11
An elo-
quent theorisation of this approach to sover-
eignty can be found in the writings of the late
Neil MacCormick, the legal theorist and SNP
MEP, who in a signicant body of writings
has advanced the case for what he called the
post-sovereign state. MacCormick has
argued that European integration has
replaced the absolute sovereignty previously
exercised by EU member states with a more
pluralistic arrangement in which new rules
bind together these states at the European
level, removing certain of the powers pre-
viously exercised nationally. At the same
time, the doctrine of subsidiaritythat deci-
sions should be taken at the lowest possible
levelmandates that powers should also be
decentralised from the state towards regional
authorities or even to newly created national
institutions that break away from existing
large multinational states. On MacCormicks
account, the demise of the traditional model
of absolute state sovereignty invites Scotland
to participate in a new era in which Scottish
institutions can take over some important
powers previously held at Westminster while
in other domains simultaneously remaining
subject to institutions at a European and
perhaps even British level.
12
This theoretical vision of a pluralist pooling
of sovereignty at the national and suprana-
tional level has percolated quite deeply into
the practical case that nationalists articulate
for Scottish independence. Scottish national-
ists are for example content with a new
Scottish state retaining the 1603 union of the
crowns and thus with Elizabeth I (of Scotland)
remaining as its head of state. Membership of
the EUand NATOwill embed the newstate in
the larger framework of European integration
and in the transatlantic military alliance. A
number of state institutions and services
might, Scottish nationalists have suggested,
be shared by the Scottish state and the rest of
the UK: the Ordnance Survey, say, or the
DVLA, or the Civil Aviation Authority.
13
Most strikingly, in a recent departure from
the usual Scottish nationalist emphasis on the
necessity of transferring economic policy-
making powers to Edinburgh, nationalists
now propose that the Scottish state will
instead outsource its monetary policy to the
Bank of England by retaining the British
pound as its currency. In order to use the
Bank of England as a lender of last resort,
the likely consequence of this arrangement
will be that the Edinburgh government will
have to sign up to tough euro zone-style scal
rules, in eect returning a hefty portion of its
scal policy to London as well (but without
any representation of Scotland in the House of
Commons). In the long run, perhaps, some
Scottish nationalists still hope that in due
course Scotland will enter the euro zone itself.
54 Ben J ackson
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The fetters on Scottish economic policy exer-
cised from Brussels and Frankfurt would at
any rate be similar to the constraints that
would be exerted from London after inde-
pendence, although in that scenario there
would be ocial Scottish representation
within the currencys governing councils.
Scottish nationalism is also concerned
about retaining the close social bonds
between the residents of Scotland and the
rest of the United Kingdom. Support for the
social union between Scotland and England,
Wales and Northern Ireland has been a staple
of nationalist discourse for many years. The
idea of a social union is a slippery one, which
has taken on a variety of dierent meanings in
Scottish public debate. When used by the 2009
Calman Commission, for example, it referred
to, among other things, the shared institutions
of the welfare state that bind Scotland
together with the rest of the United King-
dom.
14
Scottish nationalists use the term in a
dierent sense, to refer to the family relation-
ships, friendships and professional networks
forged across the national boundaries within
the United Kingdom, which will, they argue,
be untroubled by the new constitutional
arrangements established after Scottish inde-
pendence. On this account, the free social and
cultural interaction that is rightly prized
across the British Isles is quite independent
of shared political institutions and will be
cultivated in exactly the same way after the
creation of a new Scottish state.
Contemporary Scottish nationalism is
therefore a creed devoted to both expanding
and delimiting the boundaries of Scottish self-
determination. The danger with this approach
(from a nationalist perspective) is that it can
be read as suggesting that the creation of a
Scottish state is not worth the eort, since
much will remain the same as before. But
this is of course also the political advantage
of this position for Scottish nationalists. It
reassures anxious voters that the journey to
independence is an incremental progression
from todays devolutionary settlement rather
than a radical rupture. This dimension of
Scottish nationalist thinking therefore tries to
strike a delicate balance between, on the one
hand, maintaining that something signicant
is at stake in the debate over Scottish inde-
pendence while, on the other, reassuring
sceptics that a great deal will in the event
remain the same. As this formulation sug-
gests, striking such a balance has in practice
proved elusive. With respect to economic
policy, the space that would exist for a dis-
tinctively Scottish social democratic strategy
would be narrowed by retaining the pound
and signing up to the scal rules that the Bank
of England deems to be appropriate for the
new state. Indeed, the major new economic
tool that would be available to an independ-
ent Scotland is, judging by its prominence in
SNP policy, the quite un-social democratic
one of reducing taxation on corporations to
encourage inward investment.
Meanwhile, the distinction between the
political and the social that underpins the
idea of a persisting social union independent
of constitutional trappings underestimates
the dierence that shared political institutions
make to social relationships. The argument
often made by nationalists is that the social
relationships between the Irish and the Scots
today are broadly similar to the connections
that exist between the Scots and the English,
so little would be lost socially after the ending
of the union of parliaments. There is no doubt
that at present relations between the Scots and
the Irish are generally close and amicable, and
characterised by the free movement of people,
trade and ideas across national borders. But is
there a social union between the Scots and
the Irish in the same sense as there is between
Scotland and England? This seems implaus-
ible given the much greater density of civil
society organisations, media outlets, busi-
nesses and trade unions that operate across
the border between England and Scotland
compared to those across the border between
Scotland and Ireland. And this greater density
is connected to the common political institu-
tions and public sphere that bind together the
fate of the Scots and the English and give
them a shared parliament to lobby and lam-
bast, shared news bulletins to watch, a shared
business environment, a shared welfare state
and, the SNP excepted, shared political par-
ties to support and participate in. Under the
umbrella of a common political space, the
social union is inevitably deeper and closer
than it would be without any shared insti-
tutions. The political and the social cannot
be as neatly separated and isolated from one
another as Scottish nationalist arguments
suggest.
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Conclusion
The political thought of Scottish nationalism
combines several diverse elements. As a
result, there are tensions between each of
the important ideas I have identied as
constitutive of contemporary Scottish nation-
alist arguments. It is not straightforward to
combine a New Left history of the British
state, a commitment to Labour-style social
democracy and the retention of key British
institutions and connections in a post-
sovereign polity. A Labourish vision of
ameliorist social democracy is a rather
underwhelming response to the sweep and
scope of the AndersonNairn theses on Scot-
tish and British capitalist development (and
to the challenges that have emerged to social
democracy long after Anderson and Nairn
wrote their classic articles). Indeed, the reten-
tion of traditional British institutions such as
the monarchy and the Bank of England
would leave an independent Scotland still
under the dominion of some of the very
antiquated imperial structures they
excoriated. Similarly, the pursuit of a social
democratic Scotland would be inhibited by
leaving control of monetary policy, and sig-
nicant elements of scal policy, in London.
And the emphasis on the continuing social
and cultural links between Scotland and the
rest of the UK raises the pregnant question of
why, if there is such a close anity between
these societies, matters of common interest
could not be decided upon in shared political
institutions, perhaps by electing representa-
tives to a democratic body? If Neil MacCor-
mick was correct to diagnose our times as
witnessing the advent of post-sovereignty,
then the devolutionary arrangements that
now exist seem to express this spirit quite
well, with decisions about Scottish aairs
already diused across Edinburgh, London
and Brussels. There is certainly scope for
debate about how best to distribute respon-
sibilities between these three levels of gov-
ernment, but the removal of Scottish
representation from London, while still rely-
ing on Londons goodwill in fundamental
domains of public policy, would be an
abrupt and rather fraught departure from
these promising new constitutional arrange-
ments.
Notes
1 P. Anderson, Origins of the present crisis, New
Left Review, no. 23, 1963, pp. 2653; T. Nairn,
The nature of the Labour Party, part one, New
Left Review, no. 27, 1964, pp. 3765; T. Nairn,
The nature of the Labour Party, part two, New
Left Review, no. 28, 1964, pp. 3362.
2 T. Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, London, New
Left Books, 1977, pp. 12695; see pp. 1378 for a
discussion of the fortunate circumstances of the
union.
3 T. Nairn, The three dreams of Scottish nation-
alism, New Left Review, no. 49, 1968, p. 18.
4 T. Nairn, Old and new Scottish nationalism, in
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56 Ben J ackson
The Political Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 1 #The Author 2014. The Political Quarterly #The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2014