SCOTLAND is defined as much by what it has ceased to be as by what it has become. Scotland in the early twentieth century was marked by the dominance of Capital, local and private, by Empire, and by Protestantism. It was a rich and affluent society, but wealth was highly concentrated, and if you were unlucky enough to be at the bottom of the heap, life was short and fairly brutish. By the mid-twentieth century, much of this was being swept away by the legacy of war and the welfare state, one following the other as part of the social bargain. Scotland was ‘British’ because it was sutured into the fabric of the state. Mid-century was the high point of electoral similarity between Scotland and England, in a classic two-party system as Tories and Labour took over nine of every ten votes in both countries.
So what of Scotland today? In the post-war period, Scotland’s economic transformation owed much to the influx of foreign companies, and is subject to the ebb and flow of global capitalism in which it has little choice but to participate. Empire no more; British no more?—not quite, though in truth the vast majority of Scots owe their allegiance to national (Scottish) identity, rather than the state (British) variety. The fact that only four in one hundred people born and living in Scotland give priority to being British over being Scottish is surely a change from the experiences and aspirations of our parents and grandparents. Warfare no longer binds us into being British, and the long process of dismantling the welfare state begun by Mrs Thatcher and the neo-liberals shows no sign of retreating. Above all, the recovery of a parliament at the cusp of the new century is surely the mark of modern Scotland, and lying behind it, the assertion of Home Rule and more self-government.
Our concern is with how Scotland has changed, which begs questions—in what respect, and over what time period. The timescale of this chapter, broadly, is the last twenty-five years, taking us back to the mid-1980s. This chapter will focus on three aspects of our story: Scotland’s demography, its social stratification, and social values and attitudes. First of all, population is elemental; Scotland is its people. How demography is patterned and structured is both a reflection of wider social and economic processes, and in turn helps to determine them. Second, there is the issue of how Scotland is stratified in terms of the distribution of power and resources. Once more, there is interesting tension between reality and belief. ‘We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns’ may be a comforting tale to tell, but it doesn’t tell half the story. Finally, and relatedly, there are values and attitudes, how we as Scots see ourselves, and how we translate these into social and political practices.
Lying behind dimensions of change are issues of comparison, whether for example Scotland is changing in different ways and at a different rate than its comparators, most obviously England. The question is whether social change is driven mainly by changes in state policy (e.g. levels of macroeconomic policy), at ‘national’ (Scottish) levels, or indeed simply reflects structural changes common to all Western developed societies.
The population of Scotland has been at or around five million since the middle of the twentieth century, and the most recent official estimates put it at just under 5.2 million. Scotland’s aggregate level of population growth is abnormally low. Compared with England, Scotland’s population growth has been slower in every decade for more than two hundred years, despite being yoked together in a unitary state for that period.
In 1851 England’s population was about six times that of Scotland, and by 1901, seven times. By 2001, the differential was ten to one, and population estimates suggest the gap between England and Scotland will grow. While cautious about population projections, recent data suggest that, in the next twenty-five years Scotland’s population will grow by 5 per cent, whereas England’s will grow by almost 20 per cent, and Wales and Northern Ireland do not lag far behind with projected population growth of 15 per cent and 11 per cent respectively (General Register Office for Scotland, 2009). It is a surprising fact that, among the twenty-seven countries currently in the European Union, only Hungary, Latvia, and Estonia actually matched Scotland in having smaller populations in 2001 than in 1971.
Scotland’s failure to reproduce itself does present something of a puzzle. In part, the answers are historical, reflecting disproportionate levels of emigration and low levels of immigration, coupled with a declining birth rate. In recent years, fewer Scots have emigrated, mainly because the traditional routes to the ‘old’ Commonwealth countries of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have fallen off, but it is a complicated picture.
If there has been a falling off in out-migration, and rising in-migration, mainly but not exclusively from places like Poland, changing fertility rates also explain Scotland’s low level of population increase. Rates for live births per 1,000 women have been lower in Scotland than other parts of the UK. In crude terms, births in 2001 were only 40 per cent of what they were a century previously. It is, however, not simply a question of absolute decline, but in the general fertility rate, a measure based on the number of women of childbearing age. The baby boom of the 1960s fell away steeply in the 1970s and 1980s, while the rate of decline levelled off thereafter. The dramatic fall in fertility occurred among women in their twenties, whereas rates among older women have increased such that women aged thirty to thirty-four have overtaken women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine. By 2008, women over thirty accounted for half of all Scottish births. These changes in fertility rates reflect the expansion of labour-market participation for younger women, as well as shifts in lifestyle, changes that Scotland shares with comparable countries.
If Scotland’s rates of fertility are marginally lower than other British countries, it is Scotland’s death rate that marks it as an outlier. From about the early 1950s until the 1990s, the annual number of deaths was stable (between 60,000 and 65,000 each year), while by mid-2000 it stood at the lowest ever recorded figure of 55,000. By 2008, life expectancy1 for men stood at seventy-five, and for women, eighty, such that men now live six years longer than they did in 1981, and women five years longer. Scotland shares a similar pattern with other comparable countries, but these figures are actually lower than the average for the twenty-seven EU countries (by about four years for men, and five years for women).
Scottish rates of dying are a dubious cause célèbre. Deaths from cancer, coronary heart disease, and strokes are significantly higher than for other countries in the UK. This has led epidemiologists to talk about a ‘Scottish effect’, whereby standardizing mortality ratios by age, sex, and social deprivation still deliver a higher death rate (by around 7+ percentage points) than for the rest of the UK.2 This is not simply a feature of abnormal levels of social deprivation, for if we compare Glasgow and Liverpool, which are comparable in terms of class structure and levels of poverty, Scotland’s largest city has a higher mortality rate. Unusually high death rates are not confined to Glasgow, but occur in west-central Scotland; West Dunbartonshire, Renfrewshire, Inverclyde, and North Lanarkshire have standardized mortality ratios of more than 10 per cent higher than the Scottish average—but none of these match Glasgow City’s 27 per cent.3
It seems to have something to do with the shifting population geography of Scotland, for there have been significant movements of population in recent years, mainly from west to east, and from urban to rural. The areas that saw the largest population increases between 1999 and 2009 were West Lothian (+10 per cent), East Lothian (+9 per cent), and Perth and Kinross (+8 per cent); the greatest population decline occurred in Inverclyde (–6 per cent), Eilean Siar, and West Dunbartonshire (–5 per cent each). Glasgow’s position is complicated (its population fell only marginally by –0.5 per cent), but Glasgow’s and Edinburgh’s populations seem to be converging in size.4 Indeed, the largest absolute increase in population in any council area between 1999 and 2009 occurred in Edinburgh (+30,000). Whereas in the 1960s, the population of Glasgow was twice that of Edinburgh, by 2008 it was only 20 per cent bigger. True, the estimated population of Greater Glasgow is over 1.1 million, but as a proportion of that figure, Glasgow stands at little over half, compared with almost three-quarters half a century ago. Rural, small-town Scotland including much of the Highlands (but excluding Eilean Siar) show above-average fertility and low mortality, coupled with net in-migration; similarly, the east-coast regions around Edinburgh and Aberdeen, with high levels of inward migration, often from outwith Scotland. Post-industrial Scotland, especially in the west-central region, has lower birth rates, high mortality, levels of morbidity well above the average, and continuing out-migration.5
Longevity and a falling birth rate have also helped to change the composition of the population. Scotland now has marginally more people of pensionable age (20 per cent) than under sixteen (18 per cent). The population pyramid shows two bulges reflecting the two baby booms, the late 1940s and the 1960s. In the last decade there has been a significant decrease (almost 10 per cent) in people under sixteen, and between thirty and forty-four, and a rise of over 10 per cent among those over forty-five.
It is not simply a question of an ageing population, but in the way households are formed and re-formed. The number of people getting married in 2008, for example, was the lowest since the late nineteenth century. It is true that more people are cohabiting than ever before, but young people choose to remain unattached rather than enter formal or informal relationships. Marriage has become a minority pursuit among young adults, while a quarter of adults over sixteen have some experience of having been married, but no longer, at least to their original partner.
With these changes have come shifts in the composition of households. Single-adult households are already the most common form, projected to increase by a half in the next twenty years, closely followed by two-adult households, likely to increase by a quarter, changes with obvious implications for housing-stock needs. Concomitant decreases in household forms are likely among larger households (especially containing two or more adults with children), as well as three or more adults, all likely to decrease by one-third. Many Scots brought up to read the best-selling newspaper The Sunday Post6 will recall the classic cartoon image of the ‘Broons’—the parents (maw and paw) and eight children (Daphne, Maggie, Hen, Joe, Horace, The Twins, and The Bairn), as well as Grandpaw Broon. Manifestly, this is a thing of history, if not mythology, for the flat in Glebe Street would surely have been hard-pressed to accommodate eleven people.
The extension of adolescence by education means that most individuals aged sixteen to twenty-four are found in ‘large family’ households, indicating that most have not yet left home. If we include living with a parent or step-parent, as many as eight out of ten sixteen-year-olds7 continue to live in the ‘family’ home. The shift for them into small family units does not come these days until they are aged twenty-five and over. Almost three-quarters of Scottish households do not have children under the age of sixteen living with them, a significant contrast with as recently as the 1980s when two-thirds did. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were clear class differences in family structures, with working-class families twice the size of middle-class ones,8 but class differentials of this sort seem to have faded away to parity by the beginning of the twenty-first century. You can no longer tell people’s social class by the number of siblings they have.
Surely these demographic changes simply reflect the personal and intimate decisions individuals make about their lives? Scotland is a society that struggles to reproduce itself, unlike England. The combination of falling birth rates, above-average mortality rates, and lower levels of inward migration help to create a different set of political and cultural understandings. ‘Welcoming’ incomers is not so much a cultural trait as an economic necessity, and Scottish governments have set about policy initiatives to attract migrants (such as ‘Smart, Successful Scotland’ and The Fresh Talent Initiative).9 None of Scotland’s major political parties have policies to restrict inward migration. Indeed, in-migration to Scotland has been proportionately greater than in England, but unlike its southern neighbour, the flow is mainly from England rather than from abroad. There are 400,000 English-born people living in Scotland, some 8 per cent of its population (comparably, 800,000 Scots-born live in England, reflecting the reality of an integrated labour market).
As Michael Anderson shows in Chapter 2, the distinguishing feature of Scotland has been the propensity of people for geographical mobility, either travelling to England or overseas. If these rates have fallen in the past few decades, this reflects diminishing opportunities for economic migration, notably in the former Dominion countries. There has also been considerable movement away from the cities, notably Glasgow and Dundee, the two most ‘industrial’ settlements in terms of employment, compared in particular with English cities.
Population changes also matter with regard to Scotland’s regional geography. We might see Scotland as dominated by two cultural landscapes:10 one, that it is a ‘people-less place’, bereft of population, imagined as rural empty space (most obviously the ‘cleared’ lands in the Highlands, although population densities were always low); the other, a place of teeming towns, densely populated and dominated by tenements; in George Blake’s words, Scotland appears ‘overweight with cities’. Both, of course, are cultural fabrications, but meaningful ones. The image is of an ‘over-urbanized’ Scotland, a country of ‘toons’. Take this observation by Willie McIlvanney:11
It seems to me that the thing Scottish writing would have to confront is the Scottish urban experience. Because the truth is for most of us that is where we have been. You take the nexus around Glasgow that’s still the eye of the hurricane. I think that’s where our understanding of ourselves resides.
In a country with strong regional identities around its four major cities, with distinctive media, football teams, and local cultures,12 shifts of population to suburbs or beyond reinforce the sense of identity and change. New shifts simply reinforce rather than contradict these senses of distinct places.
Demography, of course, is neither determining nor determined, but it is manifestly connected to patterns of social inequality and social class. Arguably, living in an area of economic decline is harder than living in a more prosperous one—if nothing else, jobs are less easy to come by. On the other hand, being poor in, say, Edinburgh and Aberdeen is not the same as being poor in Glasgow and Dundee. Indeed, it may be worse, if all around you is affluence and prosperity with which you have little connection.
Levels of poverty and deprivation are concentrated in areas subject to de-industrialization. ‘Multiple deprivation’, measuring domains of income and employment, educational opportunity, health, access to services, and levels of crime, show significant levels of concentration within Scotland.13 Glasgow continues to have the highest concentrations by a considerable margin, along with Inverclyde, Dundee, West Dunbartonshire, and North Ayrshire. The most deprived area in Scotland in 2009 was the Parkhead/Barrowfield area of east Glasgow. Indeed, there are some stark contrasts within the city itself, with people in east Glasgow having a life expectancy of sixty-eight years, barely improving in more than a decade.14 The better news is that Glasgow’s share of deprived areas is diminishing, from 48 per cent in 2006 to 43 per cent in 2009, but this still reflects highly concentrated levels. The city has the highest proportion of its working-age population experiencing employment deprivation (18 per cent), and of these people almost two-thirds live in the most deprived areas, suggesting that individual and aggregate concentrations correlate highly.
Behind this measuring of ‘deprivation’ is social class, with which Scotland has a curious relationship. On the one hand, class long seems to be the key stratifier of social power, such that Scotland’s politics were ‘class’ politics; on the other hand, the legend of meritocracy and egalitarianism, that ‘we’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns’, is a deep, distinctive cultural marker. In large part, there is a long-standing dialectic between social inequality on the one hand and egalitarianism on the other. Social class helped to define Scotland such that not only did it provide the main structuring dimension of social inequality, but it became almost a proxy for Scotland itself, vis-à-vis England. This was given voice, and reinforcement, by class politics, and the hegemony of the labour movement.
The decline of the Conservatives, the buoyancy of Labour, and the rise of the Nationalists all seemed to give support to this thesis that Scotland was ‘different’; that its politics reflected something more structural in its economy and relationship to the means of production. These political developments were premised on Scotland having a larger ‘working class’ and a smaller bourgeoisie than England (usually typified as inherently Conservative). Thus, it seemed ‘obvious’ that the growing divergence between Scotland and England was the result of structural class differences, especially as they seemed a convenient way of explaining political changes in the 1970s and 1980s. Scotland was anti-Tory because it was working class. However, the decline of the Conservative Party in Scotland was too stark and too rapid simply to be explained in terms of differential class effects. Instead, and more appropriately, the explanations swung to ‘political’ factors, namely, Scotland’s constitutional relationships with the British state, and the growing ‘democratic deficit’ whereby Scots got a government at Westminster that they manifestly had not elected. This, perhaps more than anything else, persuaded many to support ‘Home Rule’ and a devolved Parliament, and if necessary, to use whatever party-political vehicle was most likely to achieve it.15
Where has that left our understanding of social class in Scotland? In general terms, its class structure reflects the facts that, as in England and elsewhere, a long-term secular decline away from manual employment has taken place. Further, the loss of indigenous commerce and industry has led to a smaller ‘bourgeois’ base, but, by and large, the trends are in the same direction as south of the border. Table 36.1 compares social-class distributions in England and Scotland using 2006 data from the British and Scottish Social Attitudes surveys.16
Although there are modest differences between England and Scotland, with Scotland having a marginally larger manual working class (+3) and England more managers and professional workers (+5), it is the similarities rather than the differences that are most obvious. The fact that the ratio of managerial and professional workers to those in routine and semi-routine manual employment is virtually 1.5 to 1 (40 per cent to 27 per cent) provides confirmation that Scotland is a very different place than it was a half century before, still less the previous century. The proportion of people in manual work during the twentieth century was much higher; in 1921 it stood at 74 per cent, and even by the 1961 census it was 63 per cent. The fact that it is now less than one-third today reflects how much Scotland, and employment generally, has changed. Men and women have different patterns of employment: proportionally fewer women in higher managerial and professional occupations (–5), lower supervisory and technical (–10), and routine (–7), but more in intermediate clerical and administrative (+10), and semi-routine (+9). In general terms, the declining size of the manual working class, and the growth in professional and managerial employment, reflects changes in the nature of work itself (from manual to automated work, for example), rather than because fewer people these days are in manufacturing or extractive industries.17 Recent analysis confirms that the largest proportional increases between 2001 and 2008 have occurred in managerial, professional, and associated technical occupations,18 and that occupations associated with the knowledge economy are more the prerogative of male and full-time work than female and part-time work.
Table 36.1 Social class in England and Scotland
* People resident in the country at the time of the surveys.
Has Scotland become a ‘middle-class’ society? Here we have to tread carefully. It is true that fewer people are in manual occupations, and more in non-manual, but we cannot simply translate occupations into social class. Many ‘non-manual’ occupations these days are ‘routine’ in being poorly paid and insecure (such as working in a call centre). Nor can we assume that people self-allocate to a social class simply on the grounds of their employment. Scots are far more likely to describe themselves as ‘working class’ compared with people in England, almost regardless of their own ‘objective’ class position. The Scottish Elections surveys of 1979 and 1999 asked people to assign themselves to ‘working class’ or ‘middle class’. By 1999, every class showed a majority called themselves ‘working class’, even the professionals.19 While, unsurprisingly, those who remained in manual jobs (the ‘working class’) overwhelmingly (almost 90 per cent) described themselves as ‘working class’, 80 per cent who had been upwardly mobile into ‘middle-class’ jobs continued to say they were ‘working class’. While in recent years proportionally fewer people in higher professional and managerial employment in Scotland say they are ‘working class’, it was still a significant minority.20 The fact that people doing quite similar jobs in Scotland and England are able to describe themselves in different social-class terms tells us that there are important ‘cultural’ differences about where people place themselves in the social stratification system, and that it is not something simply derived from their ‘objective’ social conditions.
What about the processes of social mobility, that is, class as ‘biography’? Scotland has its egalitarian myth of Jock Tamson’s bairns, but there is little to distinguish its processes of social mobility from those of other UK or European countries because they share similar experiences, notably early industrialization and the demise of a peasantry. Because their economic histories are comparable, the British countries (and that includes Northern Ireland, but not the south, which has a quite different economic history) had similar trajectories. By the 1970s, a substantial section of the ‘service class’, those in senior professional and managerial occupations, was drawn up from the manual working class; as many as one-third in the top ‘salariat’ had fathers who had been in manual working-class jobs. Modern social mobility, however, does not resemble a game of snakes and ladders such that those who climb up the ladders are balanced by those who slide down the snakes.
Indeed, the transformation of occupational structures in the last fifty years has created a cadre of new non-manual labour, well paid and highly trained, who do not, in the classical Marxist sense, own the means of their own production. We see that in the transformation from a society of manual work to one of administrators and professionals. Expansion at the top allows for movement in from below—mainly through the acquisition of educational capital—while those who are already there by dint of social background take advantage of such opportunities. Economic retrenchment and industrial reorganization under ‘Thatcherism’ in the 1980s seem to have had very little effect on processes of social mobility and social change, unless, of course, you happened to be a Fife coalminer or a Lanarkshire steelworker.
A few figures make the point. The percentage of men who were in a higher social class than their fathers—that is, who were inter-generationally upwardly mobile—in 1975 was 42 per cent; and in 1997, 47 per cent. For England and Wales, the figures were 43 per cent and 47 per cent respectively. No difference there. Women fared marginally better than men; in 1997, 48 per cent of women in Scotland and 50 per cent in England were in a higher social class than their fathers.21 Looking at the social origins of people in the ‘service class’, those in social classes I and II,22 almost half (46 per cent) had fathers who had been manual workers. There was also a lot of self-recruitment, for 32 per cent in the service class had fathers also belonging to that class, with the rest from routine non-manual workers (8 per cent) or self-employed (14 per cent). Only about one-third of the service class was ‘self-recruited’. At the other end of the scale, and largely reflecting a shrinking manual working class, as many as 72 per cent of manual workers had fathers who were also manual workers. The manual working class is much more homogeneous in terms of social origins than the ‘service class’. Few shift from that class into the manual working class—only 12 per cent of the latter, suggesting that acquiring the necessary educational and social capital to remain in relatively privileged positions keeps the children of the service class in the manner to which they have grown accustomed.
Coming from a relatively privileged class confers benefits such that people’s relative mobility rates are reasonably secure. Your chances of remaining in the service class if your origins are there have not changed very much over time. It is the changing structures of social opportunity that account for upward social mobility rather than openness in the system per se. There has been a large amount of absolute mobility, while rates of relative mobility—working-class gains at middle-class expense—have not changed very much. Two-thirds of working adults in 2001 have been socially mobile, and most of these—again two-thirds—have been upwardly mobile.23 The parents of those people born in the 1960s have themselves been upwardly mobile. However, it seems that their children may not be so much downwardly mobile as immobile, because the system has limits. If the top positions fill up, and the structure does not expand to fill the demand, which it might not if occupational change slows, then accommodating incomers and stayers at the upper levels may not be possible. Patterns of absolute and relative mobility differ little between men and women, apart from labour-market effects notably of gender ‘segmentation’, such that women are mainly in lower non-manual jobs, and men predominate in skilled manual jobs.
The role of educational expansion also plays a role between social origins and destinations, in that acquiring technical and cultural skills ‘pays off’ in occupational terms. It is, however, not the whole story; the service class has other ways of conferring privilege on their children, by using forms of cultural capital or through social networks, as well as more conventional inherited forms of material capital and wealth. The association between social class of origin and destination is weaker the more educated you are, suggesting that if middle-class children do not achieve the highest educational qualifications, they have other forms of cultural capital available to them to maintain their social position. Growing public and private service sectors have greater amounts of upward mobility compared with ‘traditional’ sectors, which are more often retrenching, offering fewer opportunities for incomers.
Structural change has its effects on ‘non-secular’ areas of life. It was once the case that older Roman Catholics were more likely to have been in manual working-class jobs than adherents of other religions, giving rise to claims of religious discrimination. These days, younger Catholics have social mobility patterns very similar to everyone else, suggesting that religion is not a barrier to social mobility, and discounting the notion that active social discrimination is what kept Catholics in their place. With hindsight, we may have seen the passing of a historical moment, with the offspring of poor Irish immigrants no longer confined to menial jobs, although whether this was due to occupational processes rather than active sectarian discrimination is a moot point.24
Let us return to our story of social change. While there may be some slowing in rates of mobility as occupational structures and employment opportunities retract, the lessons of recent history suggest that modern economies have a capacity to generate additional employment opportunities, and that it would take major social and economic upheaval to have a lasting effect on how people’s life chances are affected. What has happened in Scotland is similar to what has happened in other advanced industrial societies, including England. It is not that Scotland is little different from England as regards how it handles and interprets such processes. As noted earlier, far more people in Scotland than in England call themselves ‘working class’, even where they do ‘middle-class’ jobs. However, structures are mediated by social and cultural accounts, and in this respect Scotland is undoubtedly different. In the next section, we will focus particularly on these values and attitudes.
The most obvious ways in which Scots are different from the English is in relation to their social identities. While it is true that most Scots, like the English, describe themselves as parents, partners, or in terms of gender, the major difference relates to national identity.25 Scots are twice as likely to say they are ‘Scottish’ than the English are to say they are ‘English’; and far less likely to describe themselves as ‘British’. Put another way, around three-quarters of ‘native’ Scots26 give priority to being Scottish (and only 3 per cent to being British); among the English the figures are 37 per cent and 13 per cent respectively—the largest number, 46 per cent, are equally English and British.27 This state of affairs north of the border has not changed much in a decade, suggesting that devolution has not made Scots more Scottish; they felt ‘Scottish’ at the outset, so helping to fuel the demand for Home Rule in the 1990s.
It is important to stress two important aspects of Scottish identity: first, that there is very little variation by gender, age, social class, or religion, indicating that ‘being Scottish’ is normative and taken for granted. Secondly, there is no straightforward relationship between national identity and ‘politics’, either in terms of party or constitutional preferences. While it is true that ‘exclusive’ Scots, those who describe themselves as ‘Scottish, not British’, are more likely to support the SNP and vote for independence, the relationship is not straightforward, just as the few who emphasize that they are British are not staunch defenders of the Union. It is fair to say that Scottish national identity is, by and large, a matter of culture rather than politics.
What is it that makes people feel Scottish? The main markers of Scottish identity are being born in Scotland, having Scottish parents, and living there—roughly in that order. Being born in a country is an ‘accident’ of birth—none of us have that kind of control over our lives. What if, through no fault of your own, you don’t have the requisite birth marker? Two outlier groups are interesting. Scotland’s largest ‘minority’—some 400,000, or 8 per cent—are people born in England. Most feel they cannot claim to be Scottish; some say they are British, while others say that they did not realize they were ‘English’ until they came to live in Scotland. Many of those who have lived long-term north of the border tend to say they ‘come from Scotland’, as opposed to simply asserting that they are Scottish, a much stronger claim. The second outlier group are people who are non-white—around 2 per cent of the Scottish population—mainly of Pakistani origin, who are much more willing to use hybrid forms of identity such as Scottish Muslim28 than their equivalents south of the border for whom the ‘English’ (as opposed to the British) descriptor is felt to be unavailable.
Taking the longer historical view, Scottish national identity has had to be more ‘civic’ than ‘ethnic’, for its cultural and territorial diversity has meant that there is no singular identity marker such as language or religion indisputable throughout the land. Christopher Smout once expressed this helpfully as having a ‘sense of place’ rather than a ‘sense of tribe’, and this has had a long pedigree in Scotland for good reasons:
If coherent government was to survive in the medieval and early modern past, it had, in a country that comprised Gaelic-speaking Highlanders and Scots-speaking Lowlanders, already linguistically and ethnically diverse, to appeal beyond kin and ethnicity—to loyalty to the person of the monarch, then to the integrity of the territory over which the monarch ruled. The critical fact allowed the Scots ultimately to absorb all kinds of immigrants with relatively little fuss, including, most importantly, the Irish in the 19th century.29
This is, of course, not to imply that Scots are morally superior to others; merely that their history of diversity makes for a ‘mongrel’ people.
Given the push for greater self-government, and above all the election of a (minority) Nationalist government in 2007, might it not be that Scottish national identity is becoming more ‘political’? Like much in Scottish life, the answer is not straightforward. In the 2007 election the SNP did much better than previously at persuading supporters of independence to vote for it (previously a sizeable minority voted for other parties, notably Labour), but they also captured a significant number of those who wanted a more powerful parliament (the so-called devolution-max option), as well as a sizeable proportion of people describing themselves as Scottish not British. There is no simple relationship between national identity and political preferences. In similarly ‘understated nations’ to Scotland such as Catalonia and Quebec, we find similar weak associations of this sort, and a capacity of the electorate to play whatever system is to hand to maximum effect. While a minority of Scots claim to want independence (around 25–30 per cent), a clear majority—two-thirds—want a more powerful parliament in the Union.30 They are much more likely to trust the Scottish Parliament than the British one to work in Scotland’s interests, and to credit Holyrood with the successes, and to blame Westminster for the failures, when it comes to policies and outcomes.31
Undoubtedly, the major institutional change in Scotland over the last twenty-five years has been the setting up of a devolved Parliament. There is no simple cause-and-effect relationship, however, between political–constitutional change and national identity. In many ways, the Parliament has become another form of institutional distinctiveness and autonomy, without implying that greater self-government will lead inexorably to full and formal independence. At the start of this process in the 1970s and 1980s, many claimed that Scots had different values and attitudes to the English. After all, they had elected Mrs Thatcher’s right-wing government in 1979, and we hadn’t. Somehow this reflected different ways of seeing the world; the difference between a commitment to (Scottish) ‘collectivist’ values on the one hand and (English) ‘individualism’ on the other.
Stereotypes are rarely to be swallowed whole, even if they might contain a grain of truth. Are Scots more ‘left-wing’ than the English? And what about the stereotype that they are far less ‘liberal’ and more ‘authoritarian’ than their neighbours, as befits a nation inflected with puritanical forms of religion? Caricaturing the English as rampant individualists is inaccurate. England voted for Thatcher’s Conservatism in spite of its right-wing animus than because of it.32 Support for mildly redistributive policies on taxation and public spending characterized England as well as Scotland. The majority in both societies supports the views that ‘there is one law for the rich and one for the poor’, ‘ordinary people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth’, ‘big business benefits at the expense of workers’, and ‘the gap between those with high incomes and those with low incomes is too large’.33
The point about such questions is that they show (a) a consistent majority in favour of the ‘left-wing’ option over the past decade; (b) while Scotland has a marginally higher level of support for the ‘leftist’ option, the differences from England are modest; (c) if anything, both the English and the Scots have moved away from the leftist position to a degree, possibly because governments of all persuasions have done so themselves, and the electorate simply adjusts to the new political and economic realities of life, however reluctantly. Support for redistribution from the better off to the less well off now stands at 37 per cent in Scotland (down from 50 per cent in 2000) compared with 42 per cent in England (up marginally from 38 per cent in 2000). There is no great difference between England and Scotland with regard to ‘liberal/authoritarian’ values, and if anything, Scots are marginally more liberal than those south of the border when it comes to ‘respect for traditional values’, ‘stiffer sentences for law breakers’, ‘schools teaching respect for authority’, and ‘censorship of films and magazines to uphold moral standards’. The majority, however, in both societies support the more ‘conservative’ positions, with the exception of ‘the law should always be obeyed’ where only a minority (41 per cent) do so. Those who give priority to being ‘Scottish’ in terms of identity are more likely to adopt ‘left-wing’ values than those who say they are ‘British’, in contrast to people in England for whom ‘English’ carries no such implication.34
We might say that emphasizing your Scottishness is associated with social democratic values. So why should Scotland and England appear to be different as regards social and political values? It might seem counter-intuitive to assert greater similarity than difference given political developments in both countries, notably that the Conservative Party does much better south of the border. The key to unlocking the puzzle lies not with regard to values and attitudes per se, assuming that these drive political choices, so much as with the divergence of forms of party competition. Whereas in England Labour and the Conservatives are the main protagonists, the battle in Scotland is between Labour and the SNP, with an electoral system that gives no party a realistic chance of an overall majority. Scottish politics thus focuses around ‘social democratic’ issues, whereas south of the border the pull is around neo-liberalism and market forces, because the main parties have chosen this as their battleground. If Scotland is ‘different’, it is due to ongoing political and cultural processes creating and shaping these differences, not because there is something ineluctable about them.
That Scotland has been transformed over the past twenty-five years is not in doubt. For the better?—that is a judgement readers must make, depending on their values and perspectives. That life for most people has improved cannot be doubted. Compared with what our parents and grandparents had, Scots are much better off as regards worldly goods. Two-thirds own their own homes, and less than a quarter live in the ‘socially rented’ sector. Virtually everyone has central heating, a washing machine, fridge, and freezer, mobile phone, and TV sets. There has been a dramatic rise in the numbers with Internet access; from 40 per cent in 2002 to 64 per cent by 2008, including those on the lowest incomes.35 It is true that by not possessing such consumer goods, a person is likely to feel relatively more deprived given they have become the norm. Perhaps in the days when these items were not at all widespread and when many people were in the same poverty boat, there was comfort in knowing one’s neighbours also had to struggle. Older forms of social and community solidarity have eroded, at least among working-class communities such as those tied to particular occupations like mining, steelworking, and fishing. New forms of deprivation have emerged linked to unequal access to goods and services; people’s social circumstances dictate the quality of their lives. Being for example a single parent means having fewer savings and worldly goods than anyone else. Concentrated forms of poverty are found still in major cities such as Glasgow and Dundee, and west-central Scotland. Further, economic decline has a compounding effect on those least able to withstand its social impact. Those with more social and economic capital can leave behind those less well endowed as they migrate to places of greater opportunity.
Scotland has become a more unequal society as a result, highlighting the fact that most of the key levers of economic redistribution such as taxation lie with Westminster not Holyrood. There are structural limits to what the Scottish Parliament can do, helping to fuel demands for greater self-government, if currently stopping short of outright independence. Scotland has been transformed symbolically as well as socially by the Parliament. It is the most significant aspect of the last twenty-five years.
Has the end of older solidaristic forms of association left Scots alienated and individualized, reinforced perhaps by new patterns of consumer behaviour? It would be easy to draw that conclusion if we simply looked at what people now possess and consume, as privatized individuals. That would be to ignore both new as well as ongoing forms of social interaction. Around one-third of Scots claim to have carried out voluntary work lasting between one and five hours per week in the previous year,36 and this is true for most age groups (apart from the very elderly) and all social classes. This involves working with children, schools, young people, local communities, and neighbourhoods. Most people too are involved in cultural activities, going to the pictures, libraries, theatres, museums, and live music events, and as many as two-thirds living in the most deprived communities get involved too. Only a quarter of all Scots said they did none of these things. This, then, is the new Scotland. It is not the society our ancestors knew, but there is enough that would be recognizable to them that they could claim they left us a country in good heart.
Bechhofer, Frank, and McCrone, David, eds., National Identity, Nationalism and Constitutional Change (London, 2009).
Brown, Alice, McCrone, David, Paterson, Lindsay, and Surridge, Paula, The Scottish Electorate: The 1997 General Election and Beyond (Basingstoke, 1999).
Curtice, John, McCrone, David, McEwen, Nicola, Marsh, Michael, and Ormston, Rachel, Revolution or Evolution? The 2007 Scottish Elections (Edinburgh, 2009).
Iannelli, Christina, and Paterson, Lindsay, ‘Social Mobility in Scotland since the Middle of the Twentieth Century’, in The Sociological Review, 54(3) (2006).
Keating, Michael, ed., Scottish Social Democracy: Progressive Ideas for Public Policy (Oxford, 2005).
McCrone, David, Understanding Scotland (London, 2001).
—— ‘Conundrums and Contradictions: What Scotland Wants’, in Charlie Jeffery and James Mitchell, eds., The Scottish Parliament 1999–2009: The First Decade (Edinburgh, 2009).
Paterson, Lindsay, Bechhofer, Frank, and McCrone, David, Living in Scotland: Social and Economic Change since 1980 (Edinburgh, 2004).
Smout, Christopher, ‘Perspectives on Scottish Identity’, Scottish Affairs, 6 (1994), 107.
Sutherland, John, ‘Occupational Change in Scotland, 2001–8’, Scottish Affairs, 69 (2009), 93–121.