My country is dying

The country I was born in and love is dying. The last week has seen a bare majority in polls for the Yes campaign in Scotland and all three main political parties in Westminster signal their support for a package of measures to radically devolve power to the Scottish government should it remain within the United Kingdom. Whichever way the vote goes, these developments have convinced me that the Britain I love is all but gone, and will not be seen again in my lifetime.

I should say from the start that the Britain I believe in is not simply the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the political union of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Should the No campaign prevail and, as seems likely, Gordon Brown’s plan for greater devolution be adopted, my Britain would still be a thing of the past, for all that the Union would remain.

There are two strands to my Britishness, the political and the cultural. I’ll deal with each in turn. My political vision of Britain has been influenced more than anyone else, I have come to realise, by such an unlikely figure as the late Tony Benn. I disagree with the majority of his politics, but I once spent an evening listening to him wax lyrical about the history of parliament and British radicalism, and a devotion to both has stuck.

I believe in a Britain in which all nations send elected representatives to a single parliamentary assembly, which is to all intents and purposes the highest authority in the land. I like the simplicity of it, I find having such power invested in a democratic body awesome and majestic, and it reflects where the British constitution, in its tangled and contradictory wanderings over the centuries, has come to rest. I like the multinationalism of it, based not on the borders traditionally occupied by one European linguistic-cultural group, but incorporating several. I do not care to justify the history of its formation, but to celebrate what it has become. For all that this was brought about by (to put it crudely) conquest in Wales, colonisation in Northern Ireland and dynastic chance in Scotland and England, then what has resulted is a polity which is forced to incorporate multiple nations, peoples and identities, and to do so not by splitting them off, dealing with them separately and playing them against each other, but by gathering them together in one parliament and letting them govern together

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I do not pretend that as it does exist or has existed the British Parliament is perfect, but the vision is there and inspires me. Indeed, in many ways this vision has never existed: just as Parliament made its most recent lurch towards a more perfect democracy, expelling most hereditary peers from the House of Lords, devolution was beginning to eat away at its unity. And now the vision will never be.

Further devolution of the kind proposed would break the British Parliament, even if the Union remained. The core historical reason for parliaments was to raise taxes, on the grounds that subjects ought to be represented on decisions of how to dispose of their property. Giving Scotland its own tax-raising powers destroys this ancient linkage, and would intensify the West Lothian question about Scottish MPs voting on English matter which do not affect them. So much power would be devolved to Edinburgh that the unified British Parliament at Westminster, if one even exists, would be a façade. It would be forced to either fragment entirely, or to only sit together on the remaining shared matters, largely defence and foreign policy, with perhaps some macroeconomics, making it a rather strange and rarefied political body, far removed from the jack-of-all-trades assembly we have now and which, for all its faults and shortcomings, I love.

From the political vision of many nations under one parliament, my cultural Britishness follows. Listen to Scottish nationalists like Alex Salmond or (as I did at the recent Greenbelt festival) the writer Alastair McIntosh, and you would think British identity is an imperial left over, all about nostalgia for when more of the globe was coloured pink and Britannia ruled the waves, about Horseguards and Her Majesty. But that is very far from what I think modern British identity is, can be and should be.

Because the  Scots, English and Welsh have all had to make room for each other under the umbrella ‘British’, then there’s enough inherent flexibility in it for others to join in too. Migrants and their children and grandchildren from the Caribbean or the subcontinent aren’t asked to give up their separate identities at the door but, like everyone else in Britain, is invited to keep it and be British as well. Because I’m already English and British, it doesn’t matter if my neighbours want to be British and Pakistani: we’re both British and we both live on the same street.

This is what makes Britain better than France or America, say. In those countries, national identity very much requires the stripping away of other loyalties and preferences. Modern Britishness is a triumph over the nationalism that has scarred Europe for two centuries. Because of the doublethink involved in being simultaneously British and [insert here], and because being British forces one to accept rather different people as being British as well, then we have thankfully been unable to take nationalism as earnestly as the rest of Europe.

Britishness is a triumph over imperialism, too, or at least it should be. This seems an odd thing for a former imperial power to claim. What I mean is this. Look at the later stages of the British Empire, and it is a remarkable diverse place: Indians, Africans, Arabs, Asians and, of course, the white British rulers all labour under it. But it is pervaded by racism and oppression, all excluded from power except the British, who put themselves on a civilising mission: it is doing diversity wrong. Now look at modern Britain: many of its inhabitants come from former imperial possessions, and live and work alongside the native English, Scots and Welsh. They are free and equal citizens, irrespective of race, and their cultural and religious expression is protected by law. We live in an experiment, never before tried, of people from all over the world living together as equals and trying to keep their own distinctiveness while also forming a greater whole. This is doing diversity right.

Neither the proponents of independence or of greater devolution would agree that their plans, which herald the end of my political vision of Britain, also herald the end of my cultural, or rather multicultural vision. But I worry that the yoking together of two old European nations, the English and Scots, and forcing them to forge an identity together, is the central prop of British inclusiveness without which the whole delightfully broad tent will collapse.

It is melodramatic to say that multiculturalism will end with the Union, but those who think that our society’s tolerance and appreciation for diversity and equality will continue unchanged if Scotland secedes, in whole or in part, are taking those things for granted. Where we draw our borders matters. The structure of our political institutions matter. Both independence and DevoMax are predicated on the idea that for a nation to effectively look after its interests it must not share power with other nations, but be alone. How can we talk of the need for greater understanding and cooperation in the world if the English and Scots are unable even to set a common taxation policy? A Britain which cuts itself in two is one which has concluded that the problem of coexistence is too hard, and has given up the struggle against divisive nationalism.

I am aware that my chosen vision of Britishness probably betrays me as a middle-class Englishman and that for many others, not least millions of Scots, Britain does not look the same, but I do not think it has any less nobility for that. I am taking what is happening in Scotland hard for three reasons, each bringing its own layer of emotion.

 First, as I strongly identify as British, I cannot help but feel rejected, unwanted. Second, I am having to face the future collapse of my vision of my country; I mourn for it. Third, and most uncomfortably, I am having to confront the fact that my Britain has failed on the terms I have set out for it: I see Britain as a multi-nation project, and a large part of one nation is dissatisfied. I see Britain as diverse, but its largest and longest-standing minority feel neglected. I see Britain as democratic and representative, and I want Parliament to be a body in which all can trust that their voice will be heard and their interest protected, but the core of the case for independence or devolution is that it is not. This leads to a host of self-doubting questions.

Am I naïve to think that the nations of Britain could rule themselves in a single assembly? Am I such a complacent English liberal that I’ve neglected the needs of others in these islands? Is a unitary Parliament actually a poor way of protecting the interests of minorities against majorities and the provinces against the centre? My belief in the intrinsic worth, equality and common humanity of everyone leads to me to treat national labels as unimportant: is it so foolish to think we should structure our politics on the same principle?

I don’t know where I go from here, in terms of identity. Physically, I know that from here I will be going to Scotland in the days after the vote, to live there for several years at least. Despite what I’ve written here, I am greatly looking forward to it; Scotland is also a country which I love. But what will I be when I’m there? Will I be an Englishman? Will I be welcomed and incorporated into whatever Scotland eventually emerges from the coming upheaval? Will I be able to still be British?

I sincerely hope that the answer to the last question will be YES, whatever answer come from the referendum; I have enough trust in the generosity and ingenuity of the Scots that they will allow me that. But it will not be being British as I know it now, because my country is dying, and when it is finally gone, I will find myself in a foreign land.