In a previous article in The European Conservative that accounted for the absence of a conservative nationalist movement in Scotland, I pointed to signs that such a movement was finally emerging. In this follow-up article, I will explore whether recently established nationalist parties such as Sovereignty (2020), the Independence for Scotland Party (2020), and Alba (2021) mark the beginning of an historic uncoupling of nationalism and liberalism and will argue that two of the main drivers of this long-delayed rise of a conservative nationalism are, first, the ‘progressive’ politics of the Scottish Government in recent years, and second, the macro socio-economic changes that necessitate the reconfiguration of politics.
The nationalist movement in Scotland is enduring several ongoing crises. To cite one high-profile chain of events, the Scottish parliament passed the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in December 2022, giving 16-year-olds the legal right to change their ‘gender’ by completing a form without any evidence requirements or input from medical professionals. This law was passed to “comply with international human rights law.” In another example, double rapist Adam Graham was jailed in February 2023. However, based on his claim that he is a woman, Graham was sent to a women’s prison. The ensuing outcry led to the public spectacle of the First Minister being unable to defend or explain her own government’s policy. Within days, Nicola Sturgeon resigned from office, while her predecessor, Alex Salmond, described the new legislation as “self-indulgent nonsense” inspired by a “daft ideology imported from elsewhere.”
In the ensuing leadership contest within the Scottish National Party (SNP), the ‘culture wars’ within the party similarly emerged into public view on an almost daily basis. These divisions are also present in the wider, ongoing identity crisis within Scottish nationalism. The cause of independence is now distinct and even separate from the SNP, thanks to the latter’s perceived drift to an authoritarian liberalism and adoption of a fundamentalist feminism and toxic identity politics. The result is a nationalist movement that is deeply divided. On the one hand, there are those seeking political power to pursue ‘identity politics.’ Conversely, some conservative nationalists left the SNP to avoid complicity with nationalism being used as a Trojan horse for a cultural Marxist agenda intent on redefining the family, marriage, and the imposition of a host of unwanted ‘human rights.’
While critics accuse the ‘New SNP’ of a divisive dogmatism, where adherence to identity politics functions as a ‘test act’ for party members hoping to pass internal vetting procedures should they wish to stand as an SNP candidate, identity politics is far from unique to the SNP. For the 1997 general election, the Labour Party imposed all-female shortlists to increase the number of female Labour MPs. Sex-based identity politics has expanded to the championing of sexual orientation-based identity politics, with same-sex marriage legislation passing through Westminster in 2013 and Holyrood in 2014. At the 2016 Holyrood election, the SNP introduced all-female shortlists in the event of a sitting member of parliament retiring or standing down. In 2018, the SNP changed its party constitution to allow outside groups to sit on the National Executive Committee, whereas previously only party members could do so. This change was made on the grounds that the committee was not ‘diverse’ enough. Sexual minorities, the disabled, and people from ethnic minorities now sit on the committee, where they champion, inter alia, ‘gender identity’-based identity politics. Finally, in 2021, the SNP entered a coalition deal with the Green Party, in which legislating for ‘trans rights’ was key to the arrangement.
A coup against civil society
As well as attending to such details that have transpired in the reified political sphere, however, it is impersonal macro changes that are more fundamental to explaining not only the emergence of a post-liberal conservative nationalism but an explanation of how a left-of-centre nationalism and the new Home Rule era have ended up with accusations of the Scottish Government mounting a coup d’ état against civil society.
The advent of generalised material affluence from the 1980s and 1990s saw an exodus from scarcity and the defeat of Marxism as a valid analysis of the free-market economy and society. From this point onward, a new political status quo was created in the absence of anything fundamental about the economy for politicians to change, and this has fundamentally changed what politics can be about and what parliaments are for. Since this period, all political parties have been obliged to repurpose themselves, and politicians have needed to find new causes to represent. Liberalism, then, required a new iteration of itself to stave off political oblivion and avoid the fate of socialism and communism. In order to do so, and in light of socio-economic conditions improving and being enjoyed, rights and freedoms previously unheard of (such as the right to identify with any sex or gender, the total decriminalisation of abortion and drug use, and even the right to suicide) have been invented. In the view of French sociologist Luc Boltanski, writing in the journal Thesis Eleven in 2002, if economic Marxism and socialism have died, a cultural Marxist analysis and agenda have been set free after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of neoliberalism in economic policy and practice. As such, Marxist delusions of ‘engineering’ the economy have transformed into fantasies about ‘engineering’ the hierarchies and inequalities of nature and culture.
More generally, we may say the exodus from material poverty has also created an extreme or toxic humanitarianism characterised by unprecedented political ambitions to wipe away every tear across all political parties. This new ambition is the driver of an aggressive, integral humanitarianism and state-funded ‘therapeutic turn,’ which justifies unprecedented state entry into every nook and cranny of the lives of citizens. In this regard, therapism becomes the new raison d’être of the contemporary Jacobin state’s immense power. Hence, accusations have followed that the Holyrood-era government has taken over the family and civil society, adopting an intrusive authoritarianism that imposes upon every citizen unwanted legal rights. Along with state-funded campaigns to abolish non-political evils, such as the violence of men against women, there has emerged legislation and guidelines for the right to be free from offence via ‘hate speech’ legislation. Examples include the 2012 Offensive Behaviour at Football Act (OBFA) and Scottish government ‘expert group’ proposals to criminalise parents who refuse to affirm the ‘gender identity’ of their child or refuse to use their child’s preferred pronouns.
This unprecedented ambition to police language in sporting venues, schools, and homes has awakened organised resistance. The OBFA was repealed in 2018, as it was judged to have criminalised football supporters for singing their political songs and expressing their history and cultural identity. In 2016, historian Tom Devine warned, “I argued strongly against this to no avail before the Justice Committee of the Parliament before its implementation. The legislation is likely to go down in history as the most illiberal and counterproductive act passed by our young Parliament to date.”
Other examples of resistance to the state’s ambition to ‘engineer’ culture include the successful campaign by a coalition of groups against the SNP’s Named Person Scheme, which would have involved every child in Scotland being assigned, from birth, a designated person (such as an NHS health care worker) as the point of contact should the child require access to social services. The Scottish government, in documentation supporting the bill, said the law would reflect its commitment to the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child. In 2016, these proposals were struck down by the UK Supreme Court due to their infringement on the family’s right to privacy. Similarly, Be Reasonable Scotland was established to oppose the Children (Equal Protection from Assault) Bill (2019), which criminalised parents smacking their children, while the Scottish Union for Education and Safeguarding Our Schools (Scotland) and the Women Won’t Wheesht campaign groups were set up to oppose the infiltration of gender theory and self-ID into schools. The Scottish government’s ‘deposit return scheme,’ which is currently in danger of being scrapped after UK government objections, while proposals to limit human activity in Scotland’s waters as part of a marine protection policy were abandoned in June 2023 because of resistance from coastal communities. And although opposition to the Gender Recognition Reform bill was unsuccessful in the Scottish legal system, the UK government sided with these organisations and blocked royal assent in January, thus preventing the bill from becoming law.
More evidence of alienation within the SNP came from leadership contender Ash Regan, who resigned her ministerial position in 2022 over ‘gender self-identification.’ “We have really lost the trust of the country on the way that this [Gender Recognition reform] was handled … a range of views were not being listened to,” she stated at the first leadership hustings in March 2023. Similarly, leadership candidate Kate Forbes, who voiced her opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage, and ‘gender self-identification’ during the leadership contest, highlighted the lack of inclusivity in government policymaking, saying, “We deem some people as beyond the pale, that we just can’t tolerate people with particular views anywhere near the decision-making table.” In further remarks Forbes made in June, referring specifically to Christians in the SNP, she said, “When you see a public figure being absolutely traduced, then I do think it does make you fear you too will be treated in the same way. So, whilst I might not use the word persecuted, I do think there is a fear right now.”
Post-liberal individualism
These new opposition campaigns and intra-SNP criticism signal a ‘democratic deficit’ not only within the SNP but within Scottish democracy more broadly. However, despite the growing litany of contested, repealed, and abandoned legislation and the promise of more divisive legislation to come, such as the total decriminalisation of both abortion and drug use before 2026, I propose that we are living through the end of the liberal idea of the individual. This is something of a revelation, given the ‘individual unbound’ and the ‘autonomous individual’ traditionally being liberalism’s ideological centre of gravity.
Two or three generations after the 1960s liberal revolution, liberalism is no longer ‘fit for purpose’ as the custodian of the ‘free individual,’ because it no longer has a credible account of authentic individuation. Some sixty years after the advent of unprecedented individual freedom, the individual enters his dotage more likely to resemble the lost souls described by American sociologist David Riesman, whose The Lonely Crowd (1950) appears all the more prophetic in light of the explosion of research into loneliness and its impact on mental health. The abstract autonomous individual has been empirically falsified because such an individual is incapable of using freedom to erect and defend the institutions of the family, nation, and religion, as these means of happiness are supplied by culture.
Today, the free individual is free of any cultural patrimony or ancestors to politicise and defend. Indeed, the free individual has no doctrine of human nature because, according to the latest iteration of advanced liberalism, the self has no immutable sexed nature to obey and defend via legislation or to anchor his freedom to in order to fulfil himself. Hence, because liberals believe nothing special has happened before modernity, when affluence coerced the re-founding of politics upon the basis of the politicisation of culture, the liberal turns up to the ‘battle of integralisms’ rather empty-handed, or with a model of ‘freedom’ that is either obsolete or toxic.
As a final point, I propose that another consequence of the exodus from deprivation and driver of a conservative nationalism is the increasing unlikelihood of liberal nationalism satisfactorily representing an affluent electorate. We know the rise of nationalism in the 1970s was fuelled by the prospect of prosperity, thanks to the discovery of North Sea oil in Scottish waters, and this discovery led to the politicisation of national identity in a way not seen since the 18th century. An integral element of rising political expectations, then, included the novel expectation to be fully or integrally represented, and so the element of cultural representation was added to social and national representation in order for there to be some degree of representation among post-1960s generations. Voters, then, are no longer the identical abstract individuals or ‘persons’ of liberal ideology, but sexed bodies and natures, often belonging to pre-modern religions, embedded in social classes with cultural traditions, so that to represent this reality requires a representative similarly immersed in these particularities.
Historically, this political mimesis was true of political leaders on the Right and Left. However, in affluent societies, left-wing leaders have great difficulty finding a new iteration of this effect, especially among the working class. Conversely, right-wing leaders have more success when competing against the ‘pitiful’ or ‘thin’ representation on offer from liberal democrats, insofar as affluent electorates expect integral or ‘thick’ representatives or representation.
As soon as the possibility of integral or full representation arrived, it became impossible to avoid the politicisation of culture in which ‘thick’ cultural selves, rather than mere abstract liberal selves, are located. Affluence, then, fuels the reimagining of political representation, and if this has primarily taken the political shape of a liberal or civic nationalism, a new synthesis is taking political form upon the basis of very different convictions as to what constitutes the flourishing of individuals, families, and nation-based politics. Eighteen years after the ‘extinction’ event that befell unionist conservatism in Scotland in 1997, another political extinction occurred in 2015 when the Labour Party lost 40 of its 41 seats to the civic or liberal nationalism of the SNP. Perhaps, then, a third extinction event will see the end of this nationalism because of the long-delayed rise of a conservative nationalism in Scotland.
