Friday 21 December 2018

Brutain's Hardy Sons


Two views of Britain

Brutain's hardy sons

My grandfather, who was in the Royal Navy during the second World War, would probably (I’m putting words into his mouth) have thought of himself as “chust one of Brutain’s hardy sons,” to echo Neil Munro’s description of Para Handy. I imagine my grandfather thinking of Britain as the plucky island that faced down the barbarity of a continental European dictator. Britain, including England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and its many colonies, because sailors and soldiers from Ghana, India, Kenya and across the Empire also gave their lives to save ‘Brutain.’

For some, this is still the image of Britain; plucky islanders, sensible, organised people, with a Queen on the throne and a mother of Parliaments at Westminster. There is nothing wrong with this view. It is founded in an era when her hardy sons and daughters had to fight and die for her, leaving those acres of white gravestones across northern France, Belgium and Holland.

Imperial Masters

But there is another, darker view of Britain. It’s the view you get from outside the scepter’d isles, specifically from a place within another former imperial power. From here in Catalonia, in still-Imperial Spain, the view of Britain is of an Empire whose vassal states include Scotland, Wales and the top right corner of Ireland, along with the convenient money laundries in Gibraltar and the Channel Islands.

Compare Scotland with Ghana, and the parallels as a colony of an English Empire are obvious. 

The horror of slavery in Ghana has no direct comparison in Scotland, but the Scots were cleared from their lands and sent over the seas to the new colonies in the Americas. Ghana’s chieftains were corrupted with land, power or gold in the same way as the clan chiefs in Scotland were bought over with a mixture of threats and powers over their ‘tenants’ (formerly, the members of their clan). Ghana’s human assets were stripped by slavery, as Scotland’s were with the Clearances, and Ghana’s gold was smelted for Empire just as, much later, Scotland’s oil was refined to enrich England. (Just note the levels of poverty in Scotland, an oil-producing nation, or in Ghana, once West Africa’s richest gold-producing nation, to understand how little of that wealth ‘trickled down’ to the poor.) 

Ghana was ruled from Westminster until 1957, in the same way as Scotland is now. And Ghana’s concerns had little or no echo in the House of Commons, in the same way as Scotland is ignored, and her MPs told to ‘go back to Skye’ by the English government.

The Bùrach

The Brexit bùrach has highlighted the Empire-colony relationship between England and Scotland. 

Scotland’s parliament, it turns out, has no powers. The end of the ‘Sewel Convention’, and the power grab by Westminster are clear evidence of that. Scotland’s Government has been treated with disdain by Westminster, its proposals ignored, and its representations shunned. That Scotland has different needs from South East England has not penetrated the Tory party conscience, in part because Scotland is represented by a fluffy poodle, not a wee ginger dug. Specifically, Scotland needs young migrants – none of whom will earn more than the £30,000 threshold set by the anti-immigrants in the Cabinet – to fill the places in factories, hospitals and the service sector that our ageing population cannot fill.

The easy racism of old Empire has been exposed by Brexit. In the first Cabinet meeting after the half-cocked (that’s you, Mr Corbyn) Commons Brexit debate, Ministers discussed their new post-2022 immigration policy, designed to stop anyone who is not a high-paid executive, and thus probably white-skinned, from entering the country. Nothing was said about the Empire’s emigration policy…because of course British ‘expats’ are decent folk who enjoy a pink gin on the terrace of their retirement villa in Malaga, whilst ‘foreign immigrants’ eat a chapati on their front step in East Hackney [yes, this is irony. It is hard to portray the easy, inherent racism of Empire without employing it.]

Decline and Fall...

What happens next? With Brexit, I have no idea. But for Empire, the pattern is 300 years old, and unlikely to change; the ‘Union’ of nations will continue to be one Imperial power and three vassal states. Powers will continue to be centralised in London, whether that is under a Tory or a Labour government, because that is the only logic that works for an Imperial Parliament. Poverty will continue to be obvious in the streets and housing estates of Scotland, because whatever wealth we have will continue to be removed South, for the sake of Empire.

...or Walk Free


Scotland is different from England, her needs are different from those of Her Imperial Majesty’s Government, and she has no more need to kowtow to Westminster. 

It is past time that Scotland, like Ghana and most of the rest of the Empire’s former colonies, stepped away from this abusive relationship.  We can still be Brutain’s hardy sons and daughters (because we will still be living on the British Isles), but no longer tied to the misery and warmongering of a concussed, mortally wounded Imperial overlord.