Sad Scottish schadenfreude

Those who say Morris dancing and incest are the only things one should not even try once really ought to get out more. Parliament might be an auspicious place to start.

After England was knocked out of the World Cup, the newly elected SNP MP Lara Bird posted a photo alongside a Scottish Labour MP and a television showing the victorious Argentine team. Bird was the most exuberant panel of the triptych: mouth wide open, baring top teeth, neck veins protruding, fist festooned with rings pumping the air like a marauding Berserker. For all his scything tackles during the match, Lionel Messi appeared restrained by comparison. Could a brief waistcoated prance or sibling tryst really be as unappealing as this modern minstrel act?

Formerly Pyla Lara Bird-Leakey, Bird is half English (a biographical wrinkle that might explain her well-advertised glee at England’s loss). She is privately educated, attended university in England and is listed as a main contact for an unlikely home to Scottish nationalism: Fulham Running Club. Like Nicola Sturgeon, now living in London, Bird appears to embody the mantra “England for me, independence for thee.” Since entering parliament, her English accent has hardened into a Scottish brogue. Her bannock knows from whence it is buttered.

The Proclaimers were willing to walk 500 miles for love, which, it turns out, is only a fraction of the distance some of their countrymen will travel for schadenfreude

For Bird and several of her colleagues, England’s loss to a country 7,000 miles away seemed like just the ticket. The Proclaimers were willing to walk 500 miles for love, which, it turns out, is only a fraction of the distance some of their countrymen will travel for schadenfreude. Of course, not all Scottish politicians signed a blank cheque to England’s opponents. Douglas Alexander, Scottish Secretary, and Torcuil Crichton, Scottish Labour’s Western Isles MP, both implored Scots to support England against Argentina. But they are firmly in the minority: a YouGov poll conducted before the World Cup found that around one in three Scots said they wanted England to perform badly, compared to just 3 per cent of English people who said the same of Scotland.

England-bashing may therefore play well with some Scottish voters, but political opportunism cannot wholly explain why for Bird & Co England’s loss was a cause for public celebration. Gratuitous needling is hardly going to bring Scottish independence any closer, or ingratiate Bird with parliamentary colleagues. The impulse, evidently felt by many Scots, appears to be far pettier than that.

The Scottish are not alone in relishing England’s misfortune — a narrow pleasure also favoured by some Irish and Welsh — but it finds its most pitiful and exhibitionist form when draped in tartan. Upon being sworn into Parliament last month, Bird declined to swear her oath on the bible, crossing her fingers and shaking her head as she said: “I take this oath only so that I can serve the people of Arbroath and Broughty Ferry. My first allegiance is and always will be the sovereign people of Scotland.” There we have it. The first layer of grievance is that, by Bird’s lights, Scotland is a sovereign nation being held hostage within the Union.

But does that hold water? Scots voted to remain in the United Kingdom in 2014, admittedly one year, as the SNP is wont to remind us, before La Débâcle — that concatenation of unfortunate events known as Brexit (which Scotland voted decisively against). The Scottish have run their own domestic affairs since 1999, while the SNP has been in power since 2007, affording successive nationalist governments nearly 20 years not to make a hash of things. Yet Scotland still has lower health and educational outcomes than England; accolades the SNP implausibly attribute to their lack of sovereignty. Nor does that explain why Scotland has in recent years devolved into a low-grade banana republic: ruled for nearly a decade by the likes of Nicola Sturgeon, who was too busy trying to put biological males in women’s prisons to notice her husband’s financial crimes, and Humza Yousaf, Sturgeon’s successor, who spent his time in office launching third worldist jeremiads. Scotland’s rotten governance is quite clearly orthogonal to England or Westminster.

Behind this grievance often lies another that is even more risible than the last. Some Scots labour under the impression that they were colonised by the English — embraced by a southern bosom from which they are now old enough but have so far been unable to escape. In truth, Scotland joined the Union in 1707 after its own colonial misadventure went up in flames. The state, left financially crippled by a botched attempt to build a trading colony in Panama, was duly bailed out by England. Over the following 250 years, Scots proved more gung-ho imperialists than the English, consistently overrepresented in both the administration and armies of the British empire. Projecting serf status on Scottish agents of empire is not merely anachronistic; given how well Scotland has prospered under the Union, it whiffs of a trust fund baby railing against tax havens.

As such, we should recognise Bird’s performative Anglophobia for what it is: the politics of “look at me” draped in a stubbornly fashionable grievance that leads its adherents to mistake England’s loss for Scotland’s gain.