Scotland the Not-So-Brave?

The initial emotions of last week’s Scottish independence referendum have retreated a little even if they still lie close to the surface for many people. It is also clear that both the emotions and the political bargaining that were unleashed in the last few weeks leading up to the vote will take years to work through. Good luck with that, whoever ends up leading the UK after the next General Election.

I know that this is a gross simplification of the debate, but I think that there is some truth in the assertion that for many people (though not all) their hearts said yes to independence while their minds said yes to the Union. Their eventual vote depended on which was stronger: the pull of the heart or the demands of political logic.

I have also been struck by the number of English people that I have spoken to who realised for the first time that they were, in fact, British and not just English. The Union matters to them in a way that they had not understood before its dissolution became a possibility through a process in which they had no say: their country might have been hung, drawn and quartered by four million Scots in belated revenge for the grisly sentence meted out in Westminster Hall to William Wallace some seven hundred years previously.

All of which leads me to ask, what is it that shapes our identity? Regardless of the economic and social arguments, I suspect that most people who voted for independence and some who voted for the Union did do because of a sense of what they were or (for some) of what they were not. Where do such things come from?

Again, I suspect that very many people simply accept that they are what they are without thinking that they can decide which things they want to shape their identity. I cannot alter the place of my birth and upbringing or the history associated with it, but why should that demand my loyalty or shape my present sense of identity? At the very least, ought I not to determine to what extent my ethnicity, nationality and cultural upbringing ought to be relevant to whom and what I consider myself now to be?  Why should such things simply be accepted with much feeling and without much thought?

The heart is too precious a thing to be handed over to an accident of birth and the mind is too powerful an instrument to be allowed to sleepwalk through issues of identity. In the end, I wonder if either hearts or minds were really sufficiently engaged in the referendum debate….