Taki's Mag

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Thursday’s referendum in Scotland on independence from the United Kingdom is difficult for contemporary Americans to understand, since secession has been unthinkable in the United States from the moment Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg fell a few yards short of success. Americans, as General George S. Patton observed, love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. And secession didn’t win.

But earlier Americans appreciated that nothing human is eternal, and that political arrangements can and should be restructured to serve new needs. As an American once observed:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

On the other hand, the Scottish National Party that controls Scotland’s Parliament has yet to declare a particularly persuasive set of causes for separating from what has been, on the whole, a wildly successful 307-year-old union.

We are supposed to believe that the Scots have endured too long under the insufferably alien lash of David Cameron, Gordon Brown, and Tony Blair. Yet the names of the last three Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom suggest how powerful Scots have been in the U.K., going back to when Queen Elizabeth I handed the English throne to the Scottish Stuart royal family in 1603.

Likewise, the brilliant British political sitcom The Thick of It chronicled the bollockings of genteel English cabinet ministers by Malcolm Tucker, foul-mouthed enforcer for the Scottish Mafia that has dominated recent Labour governments. Tucker was apparently based on Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell.

Arguably, thirteen British PMs have been of Scottish ethnicity on at least one parent’s side: Bute, Aberdeen, the great Gladstone, Rosebery, Balfour, Campbell-Bannerman, Bonar Law, MacDonald, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Blair, Brown, and Cameron.

(Granted, some were more Scottish than others. Brown is impeccably Scottish by birth and upbringing. Blair was born and went to public school in Edinburgh, but also spent some of his childhood in Australia and England. Cameron’s wealthy paternal family illustrates Dr. Johnson’s gibe to his Scottish biographer James Boswell that “The noblest prospect which a Scotsman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.” But facilitating escape from their far northern land has been a major privilege of Scotland’s voluntary union with England.)

Similarly, the Scots were disproportionately represented in running the British Empire: for example, seven of the twelve Viceroys of India were Scots. Imperialists, business tycoons, and engineers of Scottish descent spread golf around the world.

The domineering concept of our times, however, is anti-majoritarianism, the righteous revolt of the fringes, even (or especially) if the group in question is not terribly marginal, as in the case of Scots, Jews, women, and gays.

We live in an era when the reasonably powerful pretend to be oppressed African-Americans circa the era of Martin Luther King. As far as I can surmise, moral legitimacy in current Anglo-American thought is determined by relative social distance from the Prince of Wales: e.g., Princess Diana was a plucky underdog because, while she was a Princess, she wasn’t Prince Charles. (By the way, Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, promises that an independent Scotland would retain its link to the Windsor royal family, which has become quite popular again due to two generations of marriage to attractive women.)

Indeed, the Scots have been constitutionally privileged over the English since the devolution in 1999 under Blair’s government of control over internal Scottish matters from the British Parliament to the new Scottish Parliament. In contrast, there is no English parliament in which only Englishmen decide matters pertaining only to England.

In 1977, Tam Dalyell, an anti-devolutionist Labour MP from Scotland’s West Lothian, asked what the intensely logical Tory Enoch Powell christened the West Lothian Question:

For how long will English constituencies and English Honourable members tolerate … at least 119 Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on English politics while they themselves have no say in the same matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

The answer so far has been: indefinitely. The English represent the majority in the United Kingdom, and thus their dominance is, under current ways of thought, illegitimate and oppressive, indeed no doubt racist.

The West Lothian question remains of interest to those concerned with fair play, but their numbers are scant in an age more given to considering politics in terms of what Lenin memorably called the questions of “Who? Whom?”

For example, I spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out if former Labor PM Gordon Brown—currently the MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath and as of the last week the chief spokesman against the independence referendum—would be ejected from the Westminster Parliament as a foreign national if Scotland becomes a separate country.

As far as I can tell, however, according to one reference in The Telegraph, Brown “could serve in both Parliaments.” That sounds bizarre and may be wrong, but the entire topic doesn’t seem to have come up much in the London press, presumably because it would be in poor taste to discuss depriving Scottish politicians of their seats just because Scotland becomes a foreign country.

While secession is unthinkable in American politics, its thinkability in Britain raises interesting questions about other regions within Europe. For example, after I wrote a 2007 column defending French nationalism against the ambitions of the European Union, a Celtic-speaking Breton nationalist wrote me, not unreasonably:

In my case, Brittany is the optimal size to allow people to realize themselves and feel they have a meaningful existence. Brittany is about the same size as Denmark. But we would still need cooperation with other European states, and I think the EU would be a good way to do that. What prevents us to do that is France, a noxious organization that has been destroying us for several centuries. By the way, we are an older nation than the French, and our ethnic cohesion is still much higher than anything you could find in France. But still, our final dissolution will probably occur in the next few years, by means of French and third-world mass immigration, organized by the French.

Since then, the failure of the Euro currency has damaged the realistic prospects for would-be breakaway republics like Brittany or Scotland. Indeed, the SNP claims Scotland will retain the British pound, although how withdrawing from political influence in formulating British monetary policy will aid Scottish autonomy is a conundrum.

Still, it’s worth noting that both France and Britain are authoritative states that evolved to do battle effectively with each other through extreme centralization of power in their capitals.

By American standards, they are strikingly lacking in checks and balances. For example, it’s absurd that Prime Minister Cameron could unilaterally grant Scotland a secession referendum predicated on a simple majority of Scottish votes and without the voters of the rest of the United Kingdom having any say. (In contrast, a majority in the San Fernando Valley voted to secede from Los Angeles in 2002, but the remainder of the city voted to keep their tax cow, so secession was blocked.) But Britain has no written constitution, so Prime Ministers, even of a minority government like Cameron’s, have arbitrary powers resembling those of the captain of a pirate ship.

The leaders of Her Majesty’s Government have rights over local authorities that Presidents would envy. For example, Blair redrew ancient county lines willy-nilly, and Mrs. Thatcher, displeased by the politics of the Mayor of London, simply abolished his job. This British insensitivity to local prerogatives is one reason why Americans like Jefferson rebelled in 1776.

The Scottish independence movement inevitably inspires the question of secession in America. As John Derbyshire has pointed out, the United States represents a vast expanse of territory, and people from distant regions increasingly get on each other’s nerves. In an era of free trade zones and military alliances, wouldn’t it be simplest for the U.S. to break up like the SNP wants the U.K. to end?

I don’t think so, however. The big difference is that that the U.K. is primarily a north-south country, while the U.S. is an east-west country. Latitude divides people more than longitude. In America, the most important political divide is distance from deep water, such as oceans or the Great Lakes: what I call the Dirt Gap. San Francisco and Manhattan, for example, are 2900 miles apart, but are similarly liberal because family formation is equally unaffordable due to both being similarly constrained from expansion by water. Hence, the “family values” party is less relevant where family formation is prohibitively expensive.

That means, however, that the U.S. would be harder than Britain to split ideologically along geographic lines. The lines between Red and Blue America tend to run indistinctly through the exurban fringes of coastal metropolises.

That makes secession less practical in America than in Britain.