Liz Truss didn’t insult Scotland – it was home-grown fans of Oor Nicola who did that...
WHIG historian and proud imperialist Lord Macaulay knew of ‘no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality’.
Had the old rogue lived to see our times, when he wasn’t being cancelled for his decidedly problematic views, he could have observed the most ridiculous spectacle of all: the Scottish establishment in one of its daily fits of grievance. There is no sight quite so extravagant and yet so utterly routine.
The past week brought an absolute doozy, when the Scottish political class, media, academia and broader civil society threw a collective tantrum worthy of the toy aisle in Tesco on a busy Saturday morning. The cause was a Tory leadership hustings in which a party member said he was concerned about Nicola Sturgeon’s campaign to break up the United Kingdom and asked frontrunner Liz Truss what she would do about it.
Truss reassured him: ‘I think the best thing to do with Nicola Sturgeon is ignore her. She’s an attention-seeker. That’s what she is.’ She then went on to set out her stall for enhancing the Union.
A run-of-the-mill spot of political bombast, you might have thought. Oh but you do not belong to the infinite devocrat blob who report, study, opine on, and set the parameters of politics in this country. The SNP was outraged, of course, but most of the torch-lighting and pitchforkwielding was done by that mighty herd of independent minds, civic Scotland.
Arrogance
The media fretted that Sturgeon had been insulted. The Scots commentariat agreed that Truss had signalled indifference to Scotland and made it harder for the Scottish Conservatives to win votes. The professoriate vented about Tory contempt, Tory arrogance and Tory wickedness in general.
One commentator found Truss’s language ‘reminiscent of a colonial governor dismissing a subordinate satrap’, intoning that there was ‘a touch of oldfashioned imperialism here’.
In her follow-up remarks about ‘making sure that all of our government policies apply right across the United Kingdom’ – an apparent, if clumsily worded, reference to devising UK policy with devolved realities in mind – he detected a more sinister import. ‘That runs directly counter to the spirit and the practice of devolved self-government,’ he warned. ‘It is Westminster and Whitehall rule.’
This is the difference between nationalists and unionists. Nationalists are convinced unionist politicians are plotting to dismantle devolution. Unionist voters just hope their politicians will let them have another five years before agreeing to a second referendum.
The Foreign Secretary has some way to go to catch up with Macaulay on the imperialism front. But the very invoking of the language of colonialism underscores the broader emergence of a modern revisionist nationalism.
These revisionists rewrite the history of the Union, an arrangement entered into voluntarily by Scotland and re-endorsed less than a decade ago, as an ongoing occupation and colonisation by a foreign power. (This is of a piece with efforts to downplay Scotland’s involvement in and culpability for the sins of actual British imperialism.)
Indignation on Sturgeon’s behalf did not stop there. A professor of history pronounced Truss’s comments to be ‘insulting to the whole nation of Scotland’ on the basis that ‘Sturgeon is the democratically elected FM’. Boris Johnson is just as much the democratically elected Prime Minister but anyone suggesting a mild bit of verbal directed at him is actually an insult to the whole UK would be laughed out of the public discourse.
The academic added: ‘The ways in which Tories now openly show their contempt for Scottish voters really is quite jaw-dropping.’ She lamented that the Tories were failing to ‘uphold basic principles of respect for the democratically-elected leader of one of the devolved nations’.
If respect for elected officials is a basic principle in modern times someone should have a word with the MSP who branded Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie a ‘pathetic attention-seeker’ on the floor of the Holyrood debating chamber in 2018. I understand she can be reached c/o Bute House. Besides, an academic – a historian, no less – demanding more deference to the head of government from her opponents. What a time to be alive and what a country to live in.
We are able to tease this thread out further thanks to the intervention from Deputy First Minister John Swinney, who claimed Truss had ‘absolutely no right or no foundation to make these remarks’. No right to make these remarks. There was an old offence in Scots law of ‘leasing-making’, which involved ‘slanderous and untrue speeches, to the disdain, reproach, and contempt of his Majesty, his council and proceedings’. Bell’s Law Dictionary defines it as ‘verbal sedition’, though it was seen as especially scandalous for being directed at the person of the Sovereign rather than the state, as in the case of sedition.
For those nationalists who regard Sturgeon as a popular monarch, Liz Truss was guilty of leasing-making. The wouldbe Tory leader had not offended the electors but the Elect, the political and political-adjacent class that went to the same universities, thinks broadly alike and now dominates Scottish public life. Sturgeon is one of them and they were merely sticking up for one of their own.
A certain kind of Scottish nationalist mithers about the Prime Minister being referred to by his forename, yet is entirely unperturbed by an entire civil society that either thinks the First Minister is their pal, or wants her to be.
Parochialism
As for those devolutionists wringing their hands and shrieking ‘Won’t somebody please think of the Union?’, they might want to reflect on what they’re saying about the Union. If it can be brought down by politicians saying mean things about their opponents, then it really is in grave peril. In which case, the arguments of those of us who advocate legislative reform of devolution are sound after all.
The notion that Nicola Sturgeon must be accorded more deference is up there with the idea that true socialism has never really been tried. Sixteen months ago, a cross-party committee concluded that she misled the Scottish parliament and she not only remained First Minister, the country agreed to forget about it.
This is not enough for the ‘Oor Nicola’ cult of personality and the twee parochialism that says it’s the UK Government that needs the scrutiny because the Scottish Government means well and, anyway, is ‘one of wir ain’. There are all kinds of structural and institutional reasons why the Scottish Government is not held accountable, or at least not as rigorously as Westminster, but the Oor Nicola mindset surely must contribute. You can’t run the rule over someone when your first instinct is to run to her defence.
I hold no brief for Liz Truss. I thought her regional pay boards proposal, which would have cut the salaries of doctors and nurses, was not only ill-conceived during a cost of living crisis but a near caricature of brute, unfeeling Toryism.
Nor was I all that impressed with her answer to the hustings question. I don’t want to hear her firing off zingers about Nicola Sturgeon. I want to hear her telling how she intends to stop Nicola Sturgeon unravelling the UK.
But Liz Truss is not the one who insulted Scots last week. It was all those terribly clever people who assured anyone who would listen that we can’t distinguish political rhetoric from a personal insult.