Scotland: Independence Referendum

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, we have had an absolutely fascinating and rich debate, led brilliantly by the noble Lord, Lord Lang. While listening to this debate I asked myself a simple question and conducted a simple experiment. The debate is intended not merely for our edification; it is intended to influence people on the other side of the border in the hope that they might act in a way that we would like them to act. So I asked myself: imagine a Scotsman, whether or not he is sympathetic to independence, sitting in our midst, listening to the debate—would he have been swayed by our arguments? What would he feel? If I for a moment am being a devil—devil is not the right word—or if I try to share with you some of the thoughts that I had, I hope you will forgive me.

I think that a Scotsman sitting here would have made two complaints. First, he might say that we are trying to engage in the politics and economics of fear: “If you break away, your kids will not be able to come to our medical schools. You will not be able to share the Bank of England and all its facilities. You will not be able to do all this”. In other words, we are trying to play on his fear. If he is strong-minded or bloody-minded enough, he might say, “Well, this is how our relations have existed for the past 300 years”. Scots have resented, rightly or wrongly, this English sense of superiority—even a certain degree of arrogance—and always felt that we were telling them what they should do. They would say, “This is precisely the language of arrogance that we have resented for 300 years”. I am not saying that that is right. I am trying to imagine the worst and asking myself how I could address an interlocutor who might view our debate in this way. So his first complaint would be that we were looking at the problem almost entirely from the standpoint of what it will do to Scotland, and what harm it will do to Scotland, rather than from a shared standpoint where, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, pointed out, we might say, “Look, we have been in it together. If you break away, not only do you suffer, but we who have been part of you, suffer as well. As old comrades, you would certainly not want to do that to us, no more than we would want to do that to you”. So I think that the first thing we would need to ask is how we can conduct the argument not simply in terms of what harm it could do to Scotland but in terms that always emphasise the shared “we”—how we would feel pain and how we would both suffer if that were to happen.

The second complaint that the imaginary Scotsman sitting here might have is that in the debate we have concentrated on self-interest, defined in narrow materialistic terms: economic, educational, political, military, defence and so on. As we know from the history of nationalist movements the world over, people are not guided by economic interests alone. If that were the case, Bangladesh would not have separated, Pakistan would not have broken away. People are guided by deeper emotions as well. What we need to be asking ourselves is: have we been able to appeal to the Scotsman’s emotions? Have we got him to feel that there is a deeper engagement required on his part? We need an appeal to emotions, to shared historical memories, to a common imagination and to a certain shared vision of the future. In other words, telling the Scot that, “This is what we have done together, and if we stay together, this is what we are capable of doing in the future, not only for ourselves but also for the rest of the world. Why do we not continue this co-operative enterprise upon which we embarked 300 years ago?”.

These would be the two points that might come to us from my imaginary, hypothetical Scotsman sitting here listening to our debate. I would therefore suggest that in addressing this question, and in participating in the debate that will take place on the referendum in September, we need to redress this balance in two ways. We should be thinking of the shared “we” rather than merely what harm this will do to Scotland, and we should be appealing to collective memories, shared memories and a shared vision—making sure that we are talking in idioms which they fully share, and which historically resonate with their own memories. People are, after all, guided by a profound sense of what they were and what they wish to be.

How would an argument of this kind be framed if I were trying to convince my imaginary, hypothetical Scottish interlocutor? I have been asking myself that, and I think that I would do it in the following two ways. First, it is striking that Britain has an ambiguous record of dealing with multiethnic and multinational societies. When we ruled over multiethnic societies in the Empire we were not terribly successful and ended up imposing more partitions than almost any other imperial country, including in Cyprus, India, Rhodesia, Ireland and elsewhere. At home, however, our record has been one of the best in the world. We have been able to sustain a successful multinational and multiethnic society in a way that no other country has. Only empires have done that, but we have beaten that record by creating a democratic framework within which a multinational society could be maintained. That has been made possible with Scottish co-operation and encouragement. We could emphasise that what we have achieved is unique in history, precisely because of this. It is not necessary for the Scots to embark along the path of independence when a much more sensible, realistic and imaginative alternative is available to them, as was suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Lang.

The second way in which we might formulate the argument would be to appeal to the liberal democratic social order that we have created. The kind of liberal democracy which we have created in Britain is a beautiful synthesis of English liberalism and the Scottish sense of community and solidarity, each regulating the other. Neither of us alone could have created the kind of liberal democracy that we have. It is not shared by France or Germany; it is unique to us. We can show that this great historical legacy that we have, and which we pass on to the rest of the world, could not have been possible without this kind of joint enterprise. I suggest that appealing to that shared history, and to a shared vision of what we can do together, might be a better way of appealing to the Scots and taking them with us, rather than merely telling them how independence would cost them dear.