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Blur: quintessentially British
The mixture of sport, culture, identity and politics can make an intoxicating brew and many have been guzzling since Friday night. Much of the build-up to the Olympics left me cold and profoundly uninterested. Despite increasing doses of media hype, my sense of anticipation was undernourished. But the sense of story, imagination and pageantry of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony was astonishing.
It was arguably the most impressive articulation of a people’s Britain in recent times. It stood as a rebuke to a political class that has been unable to add compelling new chapters to a book to which many people, Scots included, are emotionally and instinctively attached. The ceremony, and the range of responses it provoked, encouraged some other observations.
Political and economic themes gave way to social and cultural ones after 1948 and this might be interpreted as a comment on how the two pairings have been antagonists for much of the post-war period. British culture now carries the prestige that has been so willingly abdicated by our political and economic institutions. An appeal to this cultural affinity might be the best bet for Scottish unionists wanting the people of Scotland to give the institutions one final chance to improve. I think many Scots still feel a sense of attachment to a Britishness expressed in social and cultural terms – even Alex Salmond is committed to the idea of the social union – despite what Alex Wood has observed at the Linlithgow marches in recent years.
Political capital was quickly sought on the back of the ceremony. Douglas Alexander said: ‘It captured authentically a modern Britishness that is confident, generous, warm, inclusive and funny’. So not the Britishness we are too often served then? Murdo Fraser struck a slightly more circumspect note, cautioning that we should be wary of attaching too much significance to set-piece spectaculars and sporting events. This is surely correct. Any upsurge in Britishness can quickly subside and it will probably prove difficult for contemporary political managers to capture. Time is also against unionists who hope it can play a decisive role in the constitutional debate because the referendum is still two years away. To paraphrase Jim Sillars, there is the potential that the ceremony might have created two-week unionists. There has to be some scepticism about how unionist politicians will handle and nurture the ‘legacy’ of the ceremony.
As Lesley Riddoch argued in the Scotsman, the current British political class seems incapable of articulating a sense of Britishness that even comes close to what Boyle achieved. She persuasively suggested that this is because it is unable to embrace the popular culture that continues to be its strongest anchor. Tony Blair’s cringe-worthy attempts to appropriate the short lived ‘Cool Britannia’ movement did little except allow Noel Gallagher to get a free tour of Number 10. The northerner Boyle chose Blur to represent the Britpop era, possibly a subliminal comment on the capitalist distortions of the working man’s game epitomised by the Gallagher brothers’ Manchester City.
It was hard to escape the conclusion that a number of nationalists – the nationalist left in particular – were disconcerted by the left-wing tone and themes of the ceremony. Gerry Hassan, for example, tweeted: ‘This is heritage trash history Britain. Olympics opening may be confirming world view of us as insular, self-obsessed and living in the past’. Well, I suppose we could have asked the Chinese to do a repeat of 2008. What is now commonly called ‘Progressivism’ was meant to have retreated to the still faithful north; its dying British embers accumulated here to be stoked up into a beacon once independence was achieved. Of course the ceremony contrasted sharply with the agenda and attitude of the current coalition government but this will not last forever and it was a powerful declaration that there was an alternative British story to draw from in the future.
History often seems like a severely discounted commodity in nationalist thinking. Its importance is trivialised and there is a relentless focus on the future that is strangely cold. There is a certain logic to this but it overlooks the importance of history and memory and the simple appeal of nostalgia.
It is sometimes possible to catch a glimpse of the assumption that an independent Scotland would never elect a right-wing government or that right-wing politics would be of little relevance post-UK. A narrowly social democrat political culture would quickly succumb to myopia and would silence the many Scots whose political sympathies lie on the other side of the centre. It discounts the idea that someone might find electoral favour by articulating the sort of popular Toryism (with a different label) that has been missing since Teddy Taylor lost his parliamentary seat in 1979.
Nationalists need to talk about how the political culture of an independent Scotland would facilitate debate and the expression of opinions and identities that are different from their own. The failure to create this would lead to a sterile and distorted politics that would be as unattractive as the current UK political culture.
In a Scottish context, the ceremony arguably posed more of a challenge to unionists than it did to nationalists. It was an indictment of those who profess to believe in the UK but who undermine its unity with their actions and complacency. It was a reminder that stories about the past can be as enthralling as stories about the future but both are important and should be complementary.
A ‘no’ vote in 2014 will not be a vote for the status quo but a final statement of belief that Britain can do better. It remains to be seen if unionists across the UK are ready to rise to this challenge.
Alasdair McKillop is a PhD student in history at the University
of Edinburgh
