John Lloyd | The Spectator columnists & writers

The Scottish National party and its supporters like the world to see Scottish independence as a final act of decolonisation, Scots throwing off the yoke of English imperialism and, with it, the taint of having been imperialists themselves. Last week Scots academic Sir Geoff Palmer compared it to the process that led to his native Jamaica gaining its independence. Yet Scots were the greatest of British colonialists and, for most of the 300-odd years of the Union, strong unionists. Scots statuary of figures from before the 1707 Act of Union is quite sparse. But even those few earlier Scots haven’t been exempt from the wider debate about our monuments. In June the statue of Robert the Bruce, close to the site of the Battle of Bannockburn, was daubed with ‘Robert was a racist, bring down the statue’.

The SNP has an Anglophobia problem

When Boris Johnson said no to another referendum on Scottish independence, Alex Neil, a former health secretary in the Scottish government, called on Scots to force the PM’s hand by emulating Mahatma Gandhi. Passive resistance, “securing rights by personal suffering” as Gandhi put it, was the way, thought Neil, to shame the British oppressor into acquiescence. To borrow a tactic for Scots dissent from the Indian national movement is to reveal how nationalists see Scotland (once a great reservoir of imperial officials, high and low): as an oppressed colony under the despotic rule of the South England Company. Nationalists have long believed Scots are a more moral people than the English (a view not confined to nationalists, to be fair).

The Scottish literary giants who stoked the fires of Anglophobia

Though Scots are doubtful about secession from the UK, Scots literary figures and intellectuals are likely to be strongly, even aggressively, for it. Conspicuous in this is Anglophobia, which is a default position for many. At an extreme, it amounts to a rejection of the English and Scots unionists which conjures up the rhetoric of racial hatred. The influence of two large 20th-century figures has soaked into the Scots literary ground. These are the poet and polemicist Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978), and the intellectual Tom Nairn (born 1932). They have a close disciple in the figure of the novel-ist James Kelman (born 1946), the only Scots Booker Prize winner in the past half-century. In an interview a little before his death, MacDiarmid said that when he was in the army medical corps in the first world war, he and the Irish and Welsh recruits ‘didn’t get on with the English at all… and I became more and more anti-English as time went on’.

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