The Scottish Question

"James Mitchell is a professor of public policy at Edinburgh University. Previously he was at Strathclyde. In many ways, what he does here is very similar to what Devine does. But Mitchell does it from the political and governance perspectives, which is also vastly interesting. When he says ‘the Scottish question’, he doesn’t mean there’s a single question. It’s in the broader sense, the way people used to talk about ‘the Schleswig Holstein question,’ or how we might talk about ‘the Korean question’, meaning the divide between North and South Korea. The Scottish question brings in a ton of issues and ideas and problems of various times. One of the very funny statements he makes in the book is when he relates the Scottish question to the previous Irish question; every time they came up with an answer, he says, they changed the question. What it illustrates is that the nature of Scottish nationalism changes over time—nationalism today would be unrecognisable to the Scottish nationalists of eighty to a hundred years ago. “When Scotland became part of the United Kingdom, it maintained its own legal system, its own educational system, and its own church” Earlier we talked about how England and Scotland came together and formed a union, the United Kingdom. You asked about how Scotland maintained itself within that. Devine’s point is, and Mitchell also talks about, how if you go back 150 years, people’s contact with central government was almost non-existent. You might have had contact with government at a local level. But that’s what help Scotland maintain its own identity. It was left to look after itself. Mitchell looks at the transformation from what a lot of political scientists and social scientists call the ‘nightwatchman state’, a small and limited state just there to keep the peace, into the modern state, which is integrated fully with society. So what happens through all that is that Scotland created firmly Scottish institutions. First there was the creation of the Secretary of State for Scotland, who was Scotland’s champion in Whitehall. Indeed, I think Mitchell compares the Secretary of State for Scotland to Oliver Twist —continually asking for more. Which is exactly what their job is. And before we had devolution at the end of the 20th century—or rather, legislative devolution—we had administrative devolution, the Scottish Office. When it came to Scotland, the Scottish Office was primary, and it made decisions that would have been made in other departments for England and Wales. As I said, Mitchell does an excellent job of illustrating the distinct nature of Scotland and the Scottish question over time. He shows that while the politics change, and Scottish nationalism changes, the question changes, but it always remains a question. He wrote this as we were heading into 2014. As he writes, we don’t know the result. So it’s fascinating, very insightful. Because as he illustrates, there can be no definitive answer to the Scottish question, because the question may change again. As fundamental changes have taken place across the UK and within UK society, Scotland and Scottish nationalism has continued to adapt. I don’t think so. There have been other examples. Everyone points to the so-called ‘Velvet Divorce’ of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. And, if I can go back to Mitchell, one of the points he makes very clearly is that, even if Scotland votes for independence, it’s not going to mean an end of Britishness. Britishness will still be a very strong identity, and the relationship between Scotland and England is going to continue. Brexit has illustrated how a clean break doesn’t work; Britain has been part of Europe for fifty years. Well, Scotland has been part of the United Kingdom for over 300. So, irrespective of what decision the Scottish people may take in the future, there is going to be an evolving sense of Scottishness that is firmly allied to that sense of Britishness. You can’t talk about Scotland, even in its early days—during the wars of independence in the late 1200s and early 1300s—without referring to England. To come back to a point I made earlier: plenty of nations have come and gone throughout history, but though Scotland stopped being a state, it didn’t stop being a nation. Scotland has been a constant throughout the last thousand years or more. It stopped being a sovereign state, but it continued to appear on maps, and continued to exist in the minds of Scottish people. Benedict Anderson once famously said that a nation is an imagined community of the mind. And he’s not wrong. I can very much see a future where Scotland votes for independence. It didn’t last time, and it might not next time. I could point to the example of Quebec, which came a lot closer than Scotland did in 2014. In 1995, Quebec came within about a percentage point of voting for independence. But it’s no longer on the political agenda in Quebec right now. So, it could happen. It could not happen. But what will definitely happen is that the idea of Scotland and sense of Scottish national identity, and sense of Scottish nationalism—whether small-n or big-N—will continue."