London Review of Books 45 (2023), 10

‘My only country​/is six feet high,’ Norman MacCaig wrote in 1973; ‘and whether I love it or not/I’ll die/for its independence.’ This sort of muscular individualism, teetering on the edge of satire, is now unfashionable in MacCaig’s country. Scotland styles itself instead as a place of co-operation and the commonweal. It is afflicted by the same soaring levels of poverty and workplace exploitation as the rest of the UK, but devolution has enabled the Scottish government, controlled by the SNP with the co-operation of the Scottish Greens, to try and compensate with the highest top rate of income tax in the UK: 47 per cent for those earning more than £125,140 and 42 per cent for anything over £43,663. This is supposed to help fund the expansion – or at least slow the contraction – of the devolved social state, to which a new range of social security benefits, a national investment bank and plans for a national care service have recently been added. To protect tenants from their landlords, the Scottish government is planning to implement a system of rent controls in 2025.

All this is worthwhile in principle, but that doesn’t mean it is free from political calculation. As one disgruntled Labour MSP, George Foulkes, complained during the vigorous early days of the SNP’s first government, they are ‘doing it deliberately’. These are state-building manoeuvres, designed to establish the credibility and groundwork for a transition to independence, carried out by two pro-independence parties locked in constitutional combat with the UK government. The intention is also to display and substantiate the collectivist, left-leaning ‘Scottish values’ which have been the rhetorical basis of Scottish nationalism since the 1980s.

The association between Scottish identity and the left isn’t new. In 1924, the Independent Labour Party MP James Maxton spoke of turning ‘the English-ridden, capitalist-ridden, landlord-ridden Scotland into a Scottish socialist commonwealth’. In 1968, Tom Nairn criticised the ‘common myth of Scottish left-ness’, arguing that although Scotland was ‘certainly a more egalitarian country than England’, its ‘gritty sense of equality derives from the old theocracy, not from Jacobinism or Bolshevism ... the democracy of souls before the Almighty, rather than an explosive, popular effort to do anything.’ The problem was that in the years between Maxton and Nairn, the most commanding Scottish electoral performance was by a right-wing alliance of the Unionist Party – in Scotland the Conservative and Unionist Party was known as the Unionist Party until 1965 – and the National Liberal Party. Together they claimed 50 per cent of the vote in 1955.