SNP's dirty afternoon
Allan Massie
It is now ten years since the Scottish National Party electoral surge initiated the five years of the devolution debates in Scotland; and five years now since the botched referendum and Mrs Thatcher's first victory snuffed out the excitement. With hindsight 1974 looks more like 1848, the year of so many abortive revolutions, than 1789 or 1917. Was the whole devolu- tionary experience, one asks oneself, no more than an exercise in national self- deception, in nothing more clearly manifested than in the assumption that England would have complacently sur- rendered North Sea oil if we had decided to take the further step to independence? Was the whole thing merely an irrational but in- substantial wave of feeling?
Though Scots nationalists have looked for comparison and encouragement to the history of suppressed nationalities like the Catalans, Basques and Quebecois, Scottish nationalism has always lacked the linguistic element that gave body to such nationalist movements. A comparison with L'Action Francaise or the later Gaullist RPF may be more instructive.
The declaration to be signed by adherents to La Ligue de l'Action Francaise began with the words: '1 promise to fight against republican rule. The Republic in France is the rule of the foreigner. The republican spirit disorganises national defence and favours religious influences inimical to the traditional Catholicism. France must once more be given a system of government that is French.' Substitute England and English (or in that favourite nationalist coinage 'the imperial British state') for republic and republican, amend the religious clause to one that discourses on native democratic traditions, and you have something to which most Scottish nationalists could assent.
`Tome ma vie, je me suis fait d'une cer- taMe idee de la France,' wrote de Gaulle, himself nurtured in the traditions of L'Ac- tion Francaise, however successfully he eventually disembarrassed himself of them. L'Action Francaise attracted intellectuals and unthinking patriots alike, all those on whom the word 'France' acted as a potent intoxicant. Likewise the SNP. L'Action Francaise was never able to convince the mass of Frenchmen that it could do anything to improve their lot; the SNP has met comparable failure. To maintain momentum, because the loved object demands an opposing force, it was obliged to invent or dramatise enemies: Jews, Pro- testants, freemasons, socialists. So does the SNP: the English, the multinationals, the Pentagon, the Common Market, all have at different times (the English always) been objects of attack. Charles Maurras, the chief theorist of L'Action Francaise, employed the concept of `meteques', non- French Frenchmen. In the same way Scot- tish nationalists have been ready to accuse those fellow-Scots who declined to put the national question first of being less than Scottish.
Still L'Action Francaise is a long time ago, and it made the mistake of saddling itself with an obsolete ideology — the restoration of monarchy — which prevented it from ever acquiring the mass momentum of a Fascist movement which might have brought it success. Nevertheless Maurras's observation that 'noire na- tionalisme commenca par etre esthetique' remains true of Scottish nationalism too; you can see it in MacDiarmid's poetry.
De Gaulle's post-war RPF (Rassemble- ment du Peuple Francais) took up the tone of L'Action Francaise but shed the fantasy of a restored monarchy, and spoke a language suited to mass democracy. Conse- quently the similarities with the SNP are greater. 'The RPF will continue to expand until it embraces the entire nation, with the exception of the separatists of course (for it is not their task to form part of the nation) and also a few "general staffs" without any following, and a few soured and melan- choly individuals.'
The separatists for de Gaulle were the Communists because their first allegiance was to an international ideology represented by a foreign power. For the SNP, separatists would be (paradoxically) unionists, the North British; the 'general staffs' those business leaders who cannot contemplate a distinctively Scottish economy.
Just as de Gaulle despised the political parties, so the SNP declined offers of col- laboration with the Liberals, and, except in those months when the Scotland Bill was being debated, kept loftily clear of the con- cerns of the British parties. So, when asked to comment on something like the Budget for instance, SNP spokesmen are always quick to dissociate themselves from its terms of reference; they are like the Irishman who was asked the way to Kilken- ny and replied: `If I was going to Kilkenny, sir, I wouldn't start from here'. The response is, on their terms, logical. , Like the RPF, the SNP has attempted to exclude ideologies of Right and Left; such matters are subsumed in the National Ques- tion. Like the RPF, having achieved some measure of electoral success, it didn't really know what to do, for in both cases the movement's reason for existing was the desire to destroy the institution it had penetrated, and the regime of which that in-
stitution was the expression.
Both the RPF and the SNP set out to be mass movements capable of winning P°'ve,,r in a mass democracy. To do so both needed to win the support of the working-class. Neither succeeded. The French working class remained obstinately loyal to the Communist and Socialist parties, the Scot tish to Labour. Consequently, neither movement was able to do more than shake the system it was attacking, and could a°1 have done more for two reasons. First, the denial of left-right ideology cut across the received thinking of the day; it meant that neither could convincingly articulate to policies which would appeal specificallY those accustomed to think of themselves, however loosely, as being on the Lect' Second, when a few of the movement,: intellectuals tried to do that, they vief immediately threatened with the loss 0t. existing 'patriotic' supporters; hardlY 511 prising, since patriotism is the natura language of the Right. In the Scottish case' 'as the example of the '79 Group has shmvne' the party establishment itself rejected th°s who sought an opening to the Left.d by Both movements in fact were traPPe-0o the constraints of their intellectual posi,11„,, at least as much as they were thwartea events and forces opposing them frinhe without. For the reality was that hcit,h,;01 RPF and SNP were demanding a natilw revolution while neither could conterrIP;ois a social one. In effect they were hourg' in groups calling for a bourgeois revolution a state that was already bourgeois' Ate. Of course there were two striking "der ferences. The SNP has never had a liea,,ris figure, not only no de Gaulle trailing ally of historic achievement, but none at &ble spokesmen, at least since it stopped beinflave dream-child of romantic intellectuals, of all been decent wee men. When someonethe force, Jim Sillars, did attach himself vi'"', party and threatened to take it over, the
men saw him off fast enough. different
Second, they were faced with ""- of problems. Whereas de Gaulle and the oh wished to take over and renew the Fr e to state, the SNP had first to se,Pafore Scotland from the United Kingdom,Defact, setting up a new state where,, i whY nothing else would be changed. of is, the they have never admitted to the truth to French comparison and preferred tol°0riog the submerged nationalities while igli aloe the essential difference that gave their c this a substance the SNP's lacked. Bat SNP distinction between de Gaulle and the 'ore also meant that the Gaullist aim was lie Int practicable. When the Fourth RePab f the ched into terminal decline as a result 0 h Aetac Algerian War, de Gaulle was able to " of. himself from the rump of the failed. _ had ands assume the national leadership always demanded. It is impossible tent if agine how the nationalist mover featof Scotland could bring off a similar '„ state legerdemain; it is easier to take over full than to create one. This is why 197
later tlt,rnpe.ci glorious morning' has ten years into a rather dirty afternoon for the
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