09.08.2006
British duality and the class struggle
National consciousness is complex. As Jack Conrad shows, British national consciousness is particularly complex, being at the same time English, Scottish and Welsh. It also involves class and class struggle
Great Britain consists of two kingdoms and one principality, according to the stipulations of the monarchical constitution. Yet the actual inhabitants themselves are united by more than having a common crown above them (incidentally described as Great Britain not for reasons of imperial braggadocio, as left nationalists and other such simpletons have it, but in order to distinguish it from Little Britain or Brittany: ie, the same as Great Russia and Ukraine or Little Russia, etc).
Besides a common state formation and a common territory, there is a common - though not necessarily uniform - historical experience, a common language, a common economy and, crucially, a common consciousness. In short Britain is a nation. A fact that still needs to be discussed today, if only because Scottish and Welsh nationalists will not - cannot - admit any such thing. To do so would be an act of political suicide for them. Eg, Bob Goupillot of the Scottish Socialist Party's Republican Communist Network, argues that only England, Wales and, of course, Scotland, are "nations" (Weekly Worker July 20).
Naturally, by definition, though not unproblematically, Britishness involves a dual national identity. That is how it was constructed at the start by its political grandees and chosen intellectuals. In other words Welshness and Scottishness survive not despite history: rather because of history. There never was a ruling class drive to abolish Scottish and Welsh identities and subsume them under an overarching Englishness, which failed due only to stubborn Celtic resistance and gritty determination to keep the flame alive - a nationalist myth. On the contrary Englishness has been played down in order to allow official Welshness and Scottishness to flourish. Hence the present-day crisis of Englishness. Of course, Britain was artificially constructed (which nation-state is not?); nevertheless it palpably exists.
Let us approach the question historically.
No national consciousness
Before and during the Roman occupation the mass of people in Britannia - a geographical expression - spoke a variety of Brythonic and Goidelic Celtic languages and dialects. Organised into a system of petty kingdoms, these states and their subjects were given a variety of names by their rulers - Iceni, Belgea, Dumnoni, Votadini, etc. However, as Simon James points out, it is unlikely that the peasant "farming families" in the countryside "identified" themselves "ethnically" with these unstable and constantly shifting fiefdoms.1 There was certainly no England, Scotland or Wales. Nothing seriously resembling national consciousness.
Nevertheless, the native peoples were collectively labelled 'Britons' by their Roman conquerors. And, while the Roman empire might not have incorporated the bulk of what is now Scotland, its influence was felt far beyond Hadrian's Wall (half military fortification, half customs post). This can be seen by legionary forts at Inchtuthil, Ardoch and many other locations, hoards of Roman coins, pottery, glassware and other such artefacts unearthed by archaeologists. The peoples of 'Scotland' - or, more accurately, the lowland and border warlords - negotiated diplomatic deals with Roman military governors, sold slaves, "hides, fur and wool" and, when opportune, raided Roman-occupied territory.2
Equally, when, in the 5th and 6th centuries, Saxon, or Germanic, warrior bands swept away what remained of the decayed and disintegrating Romano-British society, that had an effect throughout Britain. By the 8th century the majority in the Scottish lowlands appear to have been speaking a variety of northern English. Scots replaced Gaelic. The Scandinavian invasions too had an impact across the archipelago. The Vikings were neither an English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish experience. They founded kingdoms and settlements around the British Isles: Dublin, York, Waterford, etc. The same applies to the Normans. True, in the fringes, they were absorbed into Gaelic clan society. Yet, in conquering the kingdom of England and then slowly expanding their feudal domains, they coloured the culture of every part of the British Isles.
As a nationality - not a nation - the English were created negatively as a result of the Norman conquest and their decapitation of the old ruling classes. Peasants discovered they were English not through the writings of the venerable Bede or the battle cries of Alfred the Great. The Norman tornado was a different matter. It united those in the north and south as a conquered people who had above them new, French-speaking Norman lords and masters. To be English was to be on the losing side, to be inferior and to speak in a coarse, common tongue - Old English (a simplified version of Low German, brought about in part by the influence of Old Norse and which in the 12th century evolved into Middle English). By the time of Edward I, at the end of the 13th century, even the aristocracy were thinking in English. Not that French had gone away. But the elite acquired their French "in the schoolroom, not the cradle".3
God's language
Thanks to protestantism and James I, people in Britain diligently studied the Bible and interpreted its more obscure passages and verses for themselves - protestantism being a literate religion, in which the human being and god speak directly without mediation by priests. And the word of god that they read was standard English - their common language.
After the union of the crowns Scots English rapidly gave way to the standard English developed in London during the 17th and 18th centuries (a process which found its highest expression in Samuel Johnson's famous dictionary). For comrade Goupillot this provides irrefutable evidence of colonial oppression. He writes of the "historical suppression and devaluation of the Scots and Gaelic languages and culture" (Weekly Worker July 20). An ahistorical conflation. Educated lowland Scots adopted standard English - naturally spoken with a Scottish accent - "largely out of choice".4 It was a huge advantage to be readily understood by social equals, superiors and subordinates. And that is what the majority strove to achieve. Scots survived in song, poetry and the occasional literary flourish. The same process of assimilation happened elsewhere in the British Isles - northern England included.
Gaelic was ruthlessly persecuted. Indeed, after the 1746 battle of Culloden, the whole highland way of life was put under sustained attack, a Kulturkampf. Feudal relations were to be forcibly uprooted and capitalist relations imposed. Highland dress, carrying arms and other symbols of 'barbarism' were outlawed. However, the Hanoverian-Tory regime in London carried out this policy of social engineering against the Gaels with the full blessing and active connivance of the lowland Scottish elite. So this was not England versus Scotland. Rather, British bourgeois society versus highland feudalism.
Later, after that terrible work of destruction had been successfully completed, writers and poets - the most outstanding being Walter Scott - reconstructed highlandism, which provided the model for a common Scottish image and consciousness. A romantic and largely fictitious one (no less real today despite that). Unlike the old highlandism, the new highlandism was designed to snugly fit into a common British consciousness. As clan society perished, as the highlands ceased to be bandit country, as Jacobitism faded in the memory, as English steadily eclipsed Gaelic in the highlands as the first language, lowland Scots could safely adopt and celebrate a domesticated highland culture.
Highlandism thereby metamorphosed into a source of pride rather than something viewed as shameful, as barbaric, as other. Its paraphernalia - the plaid, bagpipes and a supposedly age-old, but actually forged, Ossianic literature - were incorporated into the dominant culture as defining signs and symbols, above all in the army. The highland regiments and their bonnets, kilts and distinguishing tartans were adopted by an "emergent Scottish mass culture", which due to imperialism spread throughout the empire, to wherever Scots and their descendants settled.5
In the early 18th century lowland Scottish intellectuals regarded the highlands as foreign. Some 50 years later highland culture began to pass for, and was indeed celebrated as, the culture of the whole kingdom. Eg, for contemporary wedding celebrations the well turned out father of the bride is recommended to hire a 'Bonnie Prince Charlie' coatee and vest, kilt, plaid broach, white hose, ghillie brogues, kilt pin, sgian dubh, black belt with buckle, formal sporran with chain strap and a piece of lucky heather on their lapel.6 When Tommy married Gail in 2002's "wedding of the year", that is how the image conscious Sheridan presented himself via the media, Scottish Socialist Voice included, to what he Bonapartistically hoped was an adoring public. A 'traditional' apparel that goes back not to the 8th century, as often imagined, but the 18th century, when it began to be appropriated and repackaged.
Walter Scott famously masterminded George IV's state visit to Scotland in August 1822, during which the king was decked out in full highland rig and regalia. Highland landowners - whom Scott insisted on calling 'chiefs' - were similarly dressed. As Hugh Trevor-Roper comprehensively shows, Scott knew the whole thing was cod history.7 Nowadays, Scottish society dresses the highlander for special occasions and has done so ever since the full get-up was donned by the monarch of the United Kindom of Great Britain and Ireland (and Hanover).
Empire
The 1603 union between England-Wales and Scotland was a regnal arrangement, brokered and by definition sanctified from on high. Oliver Cromwell's republic began with a puritan revolution from below, but was completed by a military dictatorship, the crushing of Leveller democracy and the terroristic confiscation of Irish landed property. Nevertheless, be they subjects of the United Kingdom or citizens of the Commonwealth, the majority of inhabitants, including a majority in Scotland, were also united by a common religion - protestantism (catholicism being the defining other).
Linda Colley argues that protestantism provided the vital glue which allowed the union of 1707 to stick.8 The consciousness brought about by reformation and counterreformation and the eventual triumph of protestantism throughout Britain begins to see the emergence of a common culture.
The 1603 union of the crowns would surely have been impossible without mutual protestantisms. It was a legal requirement for the monarch and their spouse after 1688 (and still is). Not that protestantism possesses some inherent internal dynamic towards unity. Quite the reverse. Like Trotskyism, protestantism is prone to fissure and faction. Theological and other such disputes separating Presbyterianism and Anglicanism were undoubtedly used to keep England and Scotland apart. Despite protestant commonality a significant section of the Scottish ruling class looked to catholic France and the auld alliance, in an attempt to shore up their increasingly precarious economic position. Scotland suffered from a string of poor harvests in the 1690s and widespread famine. The Darien scheme which aimed to create a Scottish empire in Panama failed - in no small measure due to English sabotage - and made matters far worse. At a stroke Scotland lost 25% of its meagre liquid assets.
The 'French turn' rapidly brought forward plans in Westminster to either forcibly incorporate Scotland or peacefully merge the English and Scottish states. Without full unity the English aristocratic-military-bureaucratic establishment feared that Scotland would opt for James Edward Stuart - a catholic and exiled in France - on the death of the childless and ailing queen Anne. The prospect of a French satellite on mainland Britain - for that is all it could be - and therefore the possibility of having to wage war on two fronts was both politically alarming and strategically intolerable.
The parliament of England and Wales agreed to import a Hanoverian protestant and form a new dynasty "¦ if the heavy wooing of economic sanctions and threats failed to persuade the elite in Scotland to accept this 'German solution', then muskets, bayonets and cannons would have to do the job instead. As things turned out, force was not required. Selected backhanders, dependence on the vastly bigger English market, along with a generous financial rescue plan did the job. The English treasury undertook to pay £400,000 in compensation to those who had incurred losses over Darien (ie, the rich, the powerful and the well-connected). In 1707 the Scottish parliament voted by 110 to 67 to abolish itself and for the Act of Union.
Given the religious wars of the 16th-17th centuries, holding to protestantism undoubtedly engendered ideologically-driven enemies abroad. Catholic Spain and France welcomed exiled catholic dissidents, sponsored invasions and generally encouraged treason, plots and assassination attempts. High politics and class interest were cloaked in religion. The desire to make catholic Ireland safe from Spain saw the first protestant plantations in Ulster. A joint empire. Colonists came from England, but by a ratio of five to one from Scotland.
Then there was the establishment of the Anglo-Scottish colonies in the Americas. They brought back fabulous wealth to Edinburgh and Glasgow and the chance for speedy advancement for Scottish churchmen, journalists, army officers and civil servants. The Scottish elite therefore had a very material interest in becoming British, in becoming joint oppressors. A key factor in making Britishness.
The growth of the British empire was certainly an integral part of the struggle for global hegemony. Spain had been effectively defeated by the mid-17th century, but the challenge of France remained. That is not to suggest for one moment that Britain fought the Napoleonic wars for reasons of religion. It did not. But religion coloured the prior competition between the rival powers. Popular mobilisation against France in the 17th and 18th centuries plus the institution of a common monarchical cult consolidated official Britain.
Neil Davidson discusses the fact that after 1789 France ceased to represent catholic reaction. Instead it leapt to the front line of political progress and freedom. Revolutionary France replaced Britain as the hope of enlightened humanity. The imperial turn under Bonaparte dimmed the glow somewhat, but did not fundamentally alter the standing of France as a revolutionary pole of attraction. Radicals in both England and Scotland copied French political terminology and sought to emulate its example.
Davidson questions the Colley thesis that protestantism lies at the core of the original British national identity. He emphasises the fact that the different protestantisms in Scotland and England were actually a source of continued tension and non-identity. Presbyterianism "acted as a divisive factor in Anglo-Scottish relations, particularly in the colonies".9 Presbyterianism was Scottish and middle class. Anglicanism represented Englishness, the establishment and the higher classes.
Amongst Scots themselves, Davidson reckons, anti-catholicism "was a source of division, rather than unity".10 In 1778 upper class Scotland wanted to implement measures which relaxed anti-catholic oppression. Such legislation was passed for England and Ireland. Catholics were to be given access to land and were to be permitted to teach, provided they took an oath of allegiance to the monarch and denied the temporal powers of the pope. Popular protest forced the abandonment of these modest measures in Scotland. Those above, those most interested in the union and the success of British identity, were the least anti-catholic. Those below, not least those under the influence of the Church of Scotland, were mobilised against the catholic demon.
The same conflictive and stratified pattern can be seen in England too. The Gordon riots in London over the 1788 legislation were the largest, most sustained riots in British history. Not surprisingly they were lower class in composition and targeted the rich and powerful besides poor catholics. Colley accounts for these plebeian objections to catholic emancipation - eg, the revival of crude anti-catholic bigotry was brought about in no small part by the influx of lowest paid Irish labour into the big cities of Britain, including Glasgow, Paisley and Dundee. Unskilled, illiterate and young, they undercut British manual workers in the labour market. Anyway neither in Colley's nor Davidson's account is anti-catholicism a permanent feature. It was markedly "shrinking" by the early 19th century.11
Conservative Britain
True, compared with what existed before and what existed elsewhere in Europe, dominant British culture was initially at the cutting edge of progress and freedom. As James Thomson, the Scottish writer of 'Rule Britannia', proudly announces, "Britons never, never shall be slaves". Post-1688 the monarchy in Britain was forced to abandon absolutist ambitions. The balance of political power increasingly resided with parliament and the office of prime minister, not the crown and court. Britain was as a consequence viewed by enlightenment thinkers on the continental mainland as a beacon of liberty, a model.
Yet, due to fighting counterrevolutionary wars against the American colonists and then the French republic, Britain never had its expected 1789. Instead aristocratic reaction gained the upper hand. Wellington not only beat the enemy without, but the enemy within. Reform of the House of Commons was put off till 1832. When it finally came, the extension of the franchise was firmly restricted to the respectable classes. Chartism rose in angry response, but was successfully rebuffed time and again.
By 1850 both wings of Chartism had to all intents and purposes exhausted themselves. The introduction of universal male suffrage happened at a time of working class passivity. Workers voted for their masters and embraced imperialism and monarchism. Obviously there were breaks and exceptions to this general pattern. Nevertheless the dominant strand in British national consciousness has been conservative. Labourism and reformist trade unionism prove it.
A British-Scottish working class
Extrapolating from such evidence, nationalist-inclined commentators insist that Britishness was artificial or fake and only real for those at the top of society. These people - aristocrats, the upper sections of the bourgeoisie, members of the officer corps, expatriate colonial officials - intermarried and sent their sons to the same public schools. They alone met together regularly - in politics, in business, in London town houses, at country balls and other such social occasions. They alone operated at an all-Britain level.
Logically, for this school of thought, it follows that those below, especially in Scotland, had an ambiguous attitude towards Britishness: the subordinate classes were apparently the main bearers of Scottishness. More, it is claimed by left nationalists such as Alan McCombes and James D Young, that Scottishness implies opposition to Britishness, and therefore the union with England and Wales, and in turn an almost innate desire for independence.
Yet, as we have already shown, there was no Scottish nation or Scottish common national consciousness prior to the 1707 union. When a common consciousness did emerge with the incorporation of highlandism, Scottishness was not in the main set up against Britishness, but was integral to it. Robert Burns and other contemporary radicals in Scotland had a dual national consciousness, which was both Scottish and British. In that respect Burns was no different from the conservative Walter Scott.
Crucially, the majority of people in Scotland, as manifested through their organisations, mass actions and political demands, were not committed to a nationalist project of independence: rather various attempts to reform or even overthrow the existing British state. This was true also for the nascent working class in Scotland during the brief burst of revolutionary militancy following the Napoleonic wars.
While the industrial revolution took place simultaneously throughout Britain, it must be stressed that changes in Scotland were much more marked and hence traumatic. Scotland went from self-sufficient peasant agriculture to capitalist industrialism within a time span of 30 to 40 years. In England a social transformation which took several centuries.
The combination of political radicalism, daily collective solidarity action in workplaces and networks of mutual support in the cramped urban neighbourhood helped organise the newly formed working class in Scotland into a powerful counterforce that could seriously challenge the unreformed Tory-Hanoverian junta. In 1820 the Committee of Organisation for Forming a Provisional Government issued an appeal for a general strike across whole western central belt. The results, notes Davidson, were "dramatic".12 Around 60,000 struck in the Clyde valley alone - a large proportion of the working class at that date.
The aim of this insurrectionary movement was to topple the government both sides of the border. An uprising was planned to occur "simultaneously" in Scotland and in the north of England.13 While some of the radical leaders thought Scotland had been reduced to the status of a conquered province, there was a general wish for a closer, just and fully democratic union.
The oath of the United Scotsman called upon members to swear that they would persevere in endeavouring "to form a brotherhood of affection amongst Britons of every description" to "obtain an equal, full and adequate representation of all the people of Great Britain".14 The secret societies of 1815 had employed a similar formulation. "I ... do voluntarily swear that I will persevere in my endeavours to form a brotherhood of affection amongst Britons of every description who are considered worthy of confidence; and that I will persevere in my endeavours to obtain for all the people of Great Britain and Ireland not disqualified by crimes or insanity the elective franchise at the age of 21 with free and equal representation and annual parliaments".15
Such programmatic material - which puts the SSP to shame - shows why Marxists concluded that at no time in the history of the radical movement between 1792 and 1820 was Scottish nationalism the predominant political ideology. The slogans and banners of radical Scotland invoked the names of William Wallace and Robert Bruce. 'Scots wha ha'e' was frequently sung. However, they also claimed the Magna Carta and other references to the imagined history of English resistance to the Norman yoke.
The same thing happened in England. 'Scots wha ha'e' was an anthem of liberty in England right down to the Chartist days. Above all in terms of its immediate aims leftwing politics was all-British in scope and ambition. Peterloo was an injury to all. The demand for 'universal suffrage and annual parliaments' would save "this country" - ie, Britain - from "military despotism". Etc, etc.
The general strike of 1820 announced that workers in Scotland had joined those in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle, Sheffield and Cardiff in forming a united working class that was British. Hence the notion that Britishness is purely reactionary or purely conservative is self-evidently false. The masses played an unmistakable role in positively making Britain. Needless to say, Committees of Correspondence, Owenism, physical-force Chartism, militant trade unionism and CPGB communism were all pan-British political phenomena.