Nationalism

Modern Jacobites

Allan Massie

Lord Rosebery, one of the more in- teresting of our prime ministers, ()nee observed that 'every Scot is a Jacobite at heart' — a sweeping statement since it would seem to apply to Campbells, that most Whiggish of clans, but containing 3 profound truth: most Scots are divided

heart and head, some in their heads and indeed hearts for good measure. heart and head, some in their heads and indeed hearts for good measure.

One of the most tiresome, yet inescar able, expressions employed by the Scottish literati is 'the Caledonian AntizyzYgY: Coined apparently by G. Gregory Smith in his Scottish Literature: Character and Infla" ence (1919), and employed with great relish by Hugh MacDiarmid, it is tiresoMe because one has almost always to explain what it means, inescapable simply because it is so convenient as a description of oil! cast of mind. For Smith, it meant 3 reflection of the contrasts which the Scot, shows at every turn, in his political and ecclesiastical history, in his polemical resi" lessness, in his adaptability, which is another way of saying that he has made

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allowance for new conditions, in his prac- tical judgment, which is his admission that two sides of the matter have been consi- dered'. It is then an expression of duality, an acknowledgment that the Scottish Mind (inasmuch as one can intelligently speak of the existence of such a metaphysical con- cept) habitually contains opposites. Smith seems to have seen this as a reconciling characteristic. It can be interpreted other- wise. As MacDiarmid put it, 'I'll hae nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur/ Extremes meet. . .

You can see the principle of reconcilia- tion at work in Sir Walter Scott. The heart is Jacobite, longing for a vanished or vanishing Scotland; the mind, formed in the sturdy optimism of the Scottish En- lightenment, accepts the United Kingdom and rather than see strife break out again between the northern and southern parts of that kingdom would be prepared to see Scotland sink to the level of 'a species of Northumberland'; then, in this Hegelian formulation, the synthesising intelligence devoted itself to restoring Scotland to a proper pride in its own past within the new framework, while simultaneously persuad- ing England to recognise and value the difference between the two elements in the United Kingdom. Such was the work of a living imagina- tion and strenuous intellect. At an inferior level, however, the divided mind can reject the effort of synthesis and fly off in opposite directions, wanting to have it both ways. The best-known litereary expression of this tendency is Jekyll and Hyde, though Hogg's masterpiece, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, is a more penetrating treatment of it. This theme of duality was comprehensively, if confusingly, explored by Karl Miller in Doubles (1985), a book that seemed to be misunderstood by most critics south of the Border.

The Scot is both Realist and Romantic; that is to say, he accepts what is, while longing for what is dead and dying. Rose- bery was right in judging that we are all Jacobites at heart. Perhaps half the songs that touch our heart are Jacobite, but they were written of course — by Burns, Lady Nairn, Scott, Hogg, Alexander Geddes, William Glen, and even Andrew Lang after, in some cases long after, Jacobitism was a dead cause.

Modern Jacobitism takes a different form. Its object of lamentation is the decline of industrial Scotland, particularly the old heavy industries of the West. The shipyards and steelworks are touched with glamour. They are taken to represent a great achievement being killed by the cold Policies of London just as surely and callously as Cumberland's troops des- troyed the Highlanders at Culloden and laid waste the country after the battle. In this mythology, being formed before our eyes, the march to London to save Gart- cosh takes on the same glamour of failure as Prince Charlie's march to Derby. At Easter, BBC Scotland put on a play by Bill Bryden called The Holy City, in which Christ came again to Glasgow; at its climax the actor playing the new Christ stood arms extended to embrace the Clyde and prom- ised the regeneration of the shipyards. It was an image as sodden with Romantic nostalgia as any Victorian painting of a wounded Highlander after Culloden.

It is natural, that tears should be shed for the decline of shipbuilding and steel, though they were hardly loved while they flourished. Nevertheless these industries have a sombre grandeur which the modern hi-tech factories in their industrial zones and green park sites can hardly match. Moreoever the human cost incurred in their decline cannot be gainsaid. You can hardly expect a 50-year-old steelworker to retrain as a computer operator. When a steelworks or shipyard closes many men know they will not work again. The old working-class society of the west of Scot- land is being broken up: Strathclyde has more than 200,000 unemployed, and more than 50,000 of them have not worked for two years. These are miserable statistics, as miserable in their way as those which relate to the break-up of traditional Highland society after the '45.

Yet it is also a fact of historical and economic life that what is rather tiresomely called structural change can only be denied if we are prepared to accept stagnation; the alternative to structural change is to be- come a sort of Sicily, forever groaning over old injustices, caught in a debilitating nostalgia. When one sees Mr lain Lawson make his much publicised departure from the Scottish Conservative Party and join the SNP over the issue of Gartcosh, one wonders at how low he has set his horizons. If he lifted his eyes and looked to the east of Scotland he would see a country which is generally prosperous, which has attached itself to the world of today and not the last enchantments of the Victorian Age.

To say this is not to deny that there may be some future for both shipbuilding and steelmaking in Scotland. Both may sur- vive, despite global over-production and over-capacity in both industries. Defence requirements will support some Scottish yards; hiving off Scottish steelmaking from BSC could secure a future of a sort. Though it may be that the fall in oil prices and consequent reduction in exploration activity will at least initially lessen demand in both industries, if this leads to a revival in world trade, both could benefit. Yet to say this is to evade the real issue.

Realistically, we all know that Scotland is more likely to do well in hi-tech indus- tries, high-value-added manufacturing, service industries (tourism, financial ser- vices), forestry, farming and fisheries, than in heavy, capital-intensive industries where we face competition from Third World countries. (After all, nobody suggests that our shipyard workers or steelworkers should be paid Third World wages.) Yet the romantic image of the Clyde as the workshop of the world, and the romanti- cisation of a certain type of Scottish indust- rial worker, get in the way of such realism. The Scottish tendency to live in the past mars the present and blurs the future.

What of nationalism in all this? The SNP was founded by latter-day Jacobites like Compton Mackenzie, men and women who had never fully accepted the Union. (Incidentally most of them detested Glas- gow and had little time for the industrial worker.) But the SNP has come to identify itself with the status quo in the Scottish economy. It defends any threatened indus- try. It may seem odd that a party commit- ted to constitutional change should be so averse to structural change within the economy. It is perhaps less odd than Scottish. There is of course a case for saying that steelmaking would survive more easily in an independent Scotland, for then Scotland would receive its share of the EEC quota instead of being included in the total British production figure; but when one looks at the investment needed, and at the return likely on such investment, then one realises that to survive is not the same as to flourish.

Realism and Romanticism — both sur- faced in the months leading up to the 1979 referendum. At any time, both then and now, the majority of Scots have been in favour of a parliament in Edinburgh, and therefore few doubted that we would vote for devolution. As it turned out, some got cold feet when the dream threatened to become reality; others looked at the provi- sions of the Scotland Act, and their gaze turned cold. Either it would establish a permanent Labour administration in Edin- burgh (supported by a minority of the electorate) or its flaws and contradictions would feed the SNP demand for independ- ence. In either case it seemed that Scotland would be delivered into the hands of a party in love with the past; that is, a Jacobite party. Well, we may all be Jaco- bites and nationalists in our hearts, but a lot of Scots reserve sentimentality for whisky sessions and, when sober, don't like to let bread fall jam-side to the floor. Support for devolution withered as the referendum came closer, and though the

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Scotland Act achieved a narrow majority among those voting, it failed to pass the 40 per cent provision inserted in the Bill by George Cunningham; and for all the subse- quent squawking it must be fairly assumed that many opponents of devolution, and many who were simply doubtful, did not bother to vote, knowing that abstention was the same as voting 'no'.

Whatever their hearts said, they were ruled by their Whig heads, and probably the SNP will do no more than attract discontented Romantics till it becomes a Whig party demonstrably on the side of the future, and ready to consign the past to museums.