Jockophobia is not my word and it’s not quite the right word. In our Times podcast this week my colleague Hugo Rifkind coined the term to describe what he sees (and abhors) as a growing English hatred of Scotland. He believes English antipathy to Scotland’s politics — and perhaps to Scots themselves — could be a big issue in the coming general election. On that, at least, England’s Tories would agree with him, as the flurry of interest this week in the party’s new poster of a tiny Ed Miliband in a giant Alex Salmond’s pocket suggests.
But this isn’t phobia. Mr Salmond would love to paint his country as a victim of a kind of racism, but to suppose his nationalist mission has stirred such passionate antagonism flatters him.
What we’re seeing here isn’t passion. It’s worse than that, it’s irritation: a cold disregard, a curl of the lip, a far more corrosive force. It’s a turning away, a hardening of the heart. When English voters say “Why don’t they just sod off then, if that’s what they want?” they really mean it now. I may regret, with Hugo, that the love has gone but it has gone. The iron has entered England’s soul.
The Union died last year during the Scottish referendum campaign. When I wrote in a column here six months ago that “whoever wins this vote, the Union is dead”, I little thought to be vindicated so fast.
Both sides conducted that campaign shamefully. “Better Together”, panicking that they might lose, forgot the positivity implied in their title, forgot the generosity of David Cameron’s early approach (that Scotland could certainly make it alone, but this would be a pity) and opted instead for scare tactics. “Stay with us or else” was no way to win hearts.
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The Scottish National Party’s “Yes Scotland” movement shocked the rest of Britain by the biliousness of their campaign. Stories of internet harassment together with widespread reports of an atmosphere of bullying and intimidation were not lost on England. Not, I suppose, that Scottish separatists care, but what their campaign revealed has sunk into the English heart.
So, no, this isn’t a wave of Jockophobia, it’s a sadder, steadier and sourer thing and here to stay. I remember where I was when I saw the second of the two TV debates. Bullying, interrupting and shin-kicking as the audience cheered, a pumped-up Salmond flattened a transparently decent man, Alistair Darling. A sort of iciness stole over me; I changed my view of Salmond completely and of the Scots, too, a bit: how could they admire such a person or his party?
If the polls are to be believed, their admiration swells. I grow cold towards such an electorate, and I’m sure millions like me in England do too. We haven’t been heard from much.
There’s a problem here and I must tread carefully in describing it, because many of the crowd I refer to are (like Hugo) my friends, and many of them (and their work) I admire more than I can say. It’s the phenomenon of a super-intelligent, super-articulate breed of expatriate Scots embedded in politics and in the print and broadcast media too. The breed are ubiquitous, distinct, persuasive, passionate about the Union — and completely unrepresentative of most of Britain.
This group exists in sometimes uneasy alliance with a breed of often rather posh, rather Tory English politicians and journalists whose concept of the Union strays uncomfortably close to an idea of Scotland as a smashing place for leisure time. Though they’re well bred and well educated in the cultural debt that England owes Scotland, I’m afraid that an element of well-meaning paternalism in their attitudes is impossible to ignore. They tend to adopt unionist Scots as political soulmates, the latter learning to bite their lip during conversations about fishing, shooting, ghillies and the like.
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I’ll cut to the chase here. If you’ve left Scotland in search of broader English horizons for your talents, your Scottishness will always be dear to you but so will your sense of ownership, as a unionist, of Britishness too. Naturally you want both. You are not an émigré in London. You are not a foreigner. You have not forsaken your own country.
And England’s people are also your people — this you feel sincerely. You will be inhabited by a very particular sense of the meaning and importance of the Union, for it widens your canvas and affirms your move south. This means that all through the British establishment, all through the best and the brightest, are capable people who are speaking to England, and about England, and who know England, but who are seeing the Union through their own glass. They care too much to be typical. The Union is close to their heart.
This makes them oddities. Most of their English audience haven’t cared, haven’t thought about it, and didn’t until recently harbour any feelings, positive or otherwise, towards Scotland. These indifferent English have been mirrored north of the border by millions of Scots who gave little thought to what the English think or feel.
I cannot speak for those indifferent Scots, but let me try to characterise the English attitude I think I observe to be typical. Well, more than typical. In hundreds of conversations I’ve joined or overheard in the last year in England — conversations far from the shadows of Westminster: on buses, on the doorstep, in pubs and with non-political friends — I have hardly once heard anyone express sorrow or apprehension that Scotland might leave the Union. Two remarks recur. “Well it’s up to them, but if they’re going to go, let’s do it, and have an end to all this argy-bargy”; and “why can’t we have a referendum in England about this? I tell you if I see Alex Salmond’s grinning chops one more time I think I’d vote for them to leave.” Words to this effect are heard everywhere.
Beneath these waters the independence referendum shot like a torpedo. Scots seemed to discover an anger that had not been apparent. The English are discovering a disdain that their politicians have noticed and will now exploit.
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I may think (I do) that England must take some blame for the way we have smudged the idea of “union” into a sort of colonialism; and that the Scottish Labour party must take some blame for nurturing the blame-the-English serpent that now comes back to bite them.
But what’s the point of blame now? The Union is over, this general election will confirm it, and the choice is between separation and federation. It is about this that we must soon start thinking.