IN 1867, Walter Bagehot said that “the key to the difficulties of most discussed and unsettled questions is commonly in their undiscussed parts”. One way to understand Scotland’s “most discussed and unsettled” independence question is to consider more deeply the consequences of one set of Scots in 1707 signing away the country that belonged to all Scots. Union supporters flag up the benefits of this act of self-harm or self-preservation but have little to say about who gained, who lost and what that did to Scots through time.

There’s much that is “undiscussed” here, though it’s hiding in plain sight. In her new book Thrive, Lesley Riddoch says “Scots have for years been denied the experience of owning, running, managing and deciding the shape of our own lives”, so they just “spend their lives waiting and watching”. But who exactly were denied this experience? Patently not everyone. Particular Scots colluded and benefited. Many were well rewarded, existing privilege was embedded and new positions of power gained. Many Scots were entirely in charge of their lives; many thrived at the expense of the rest.

The uncomfortable undiscussed truth here is that the current resistance to Scottish independence by 50% of Scots is due to a good portion of them (“the decideds”) being entirely comfortable with the current iteration of the 300-year-old Union. This is not simply an interesting fact about different constitutional views; it goes to the heart of things. Scots colluded, some Scots benefited, but for many Scots it was a disaster. It still is. Scots did it to Scots and this legacy of winners and losers has been festering (undiscussed) like a supressed family secret ever since. It has left the nation down through the years estranged from itself. As William McIlvanney declaimed to devolution supporters in Edinburgh in 1992: “We gather here like refugees in the capital of our own country.”

In the The Social Distance Between Us, Darren McGarvey notes that a consequences of the distance between British governing elites and the governed leads to rule “by a political, managerial or class elite that tries to bring top-down, off the peg, ideologically driven policy into communities dominated by poverty [which] is in many ways a colonial act”.

What needs to be discussed in Scotland is how much worse this is for a nation who did it to itself. A double whammy famously identified in 1707 by Fletcher of Saltoun: “Without help or consolation we shall shed tears in vain, the English themselves will laugh at our distress, and the moral will be pointed that we brought it on ourselves.”

What remains undiscussed is the current complicity of those who Tom Nairn rightly identifies as the “self-colonised”: those who have assimilated well, made their accommodations and willingly or unwittingly been co-opted into the project of self-interest and privilege. This Scottish equivalent of Darren McGarvey’s managerial elite are certainly not denied the experience of “owning, running, managing and deciding the shape of their own lives”.

And what of those in Scotland to whom things were done and continue to be done? After years of elite management we have the highest prison population in the UK, the highest drug-related death rate in Europe; chronic alcohol problems exacerbated by chronic health inequalities which in 2021 led to healthy life expectancy for men 5.6 years lower in the most deprived areas compared to the least. Lesley Riddoch has observed that there is a way out for Scotland, “but it needs us to question what we currently regard as normal and inevitable”.

Darren McGarvey gives an example of how things are seen as normal in Scotland, enabled by a form of moral blindness. In 2018, drug deaths stood at 1264, the equivalent of five Lockerbie bombings. And yet “no national emergency was declared”. And here’s the thing. What we see as normal and inevitable, what is undiscussed, the moral blindness which Darren’s example represents, is an undiscussed consequence of Scotland’s constitutional position. The current constitutional arrangement causes harm. Sometimes, as in Darren’s example, it kills people.

Why? Because we don’t have the powers we need to even begin to consider the possibility that just maybe we could achieve remedial change. Why? Because not everyone sees the need. Roughly 50% of us in fact. Why? Because they’ve made their accommodations. The managing elite see no national emergency in the condition of their poorest citizens. Ultimately, the elites are fine. The current constitutional arrangement is fine. Mitigation is fine. The Union is fine.

Or, to adapt Darren McGarvey, what is undiscussed in Scotland is that Unionism “is the location where everyone with a stake in the ailing status quo meets to occasionally decide what they are not prepared to give up to help [those] still trapped in the quicksand”. Discuss.
Frances Roberts
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