Drawing by Bob Smith
It was supposedly last year, as Olympic winners wrapped themselves in the union flag, that the wintry discontents of British sport gave way to glorious summer. Media chatter suggested that Alex Salmond was glad his referendum was still a distant prospect but hoping that the waving saltires of next year’s Commonwealth Games might freshen the wind of his campaign.
But I think this year’s British sporting successes, from Andy Murray’s Wimbledon triumph to the resumption at Wembley of the world’s oldest and greatest international, are more significant – not by having the slightest influence on voting intentions (which I think are scarcely affected by any sporting triumphs or tragedies) but by displaying some of the complexities of ‘social union’ in the British Isles.
Mr Salmond assures us such a union will survive his obsession with secession from political union. Others of us take a pride in it as one of our reasons for political unionism. But this year’s sequence of sporting successes not only testifies to the existence of this ‘social union’, which keeps us at a distance from our continental neighbours, but demonstrates some of its subtlety and capacity to cope with apparent contradictions.
I have listed the Wembley game as a success simply because it took place at all after so sad a lapse, but it also showed that football fanaticism can be good-natured. It also provided a decent contest, even if it revealed no new Stanley Matthews or Jim Baxter. I also listed Andy Murray’s triumph of will and skill with some reservations about the extent to which national pride should be linked to displays of dazzling personal talent in individual contests rather than team-games.
However, Murray’s career has revealed both some of the tensions and strengths of our British ‘social union’. For it was not until his earlier Olympic victory that the English fully realised that this was someone more remarkable than Tim Henman could ever have been and that we Scots could cease to grumble that commentators discovered his Scottishness when he lost and his Britishness only when he won.
But it is in this summer’s British successes in rugby and cricket that some complexities and contradictions of our ‘social union’ in sport have been most apparent. For, strictly speaking, neither of these successes can be credited to the United Kingdom.
England, not Britain, retained the Ashes and had won the Test series handsomely even before the last encounter at the Oval (which I decline to give the ridiculous name bought by its sponsors). And although, as is now customary, not all the English XI were born between Carlisle and Dover, they didn’t this time include any of the Scottish or Irish cricketers who quite rightly see Test selection for England as their chance of reaching the summit of the game – especially now that Scotland’s national team (but not Ireland’s) seems to have lost its momentum.
Yet the vast majority of Scottish cricket-lovers, a much larger company than is often supposed, would share the same emotions as the Durham crowd – for Test matches have crept closer to the border – as an elegant century one day and a shattering bowling spell the next turned a well-fought game in England’s favour. On such occasions we become part of ‘them’ and enrol for a limited duration in their ‘barmy army’.
Some contradictions and strengths of the social union were even more apparent in the rugby successes of the British and Irish Lions in Australia when, I think, only the sourly ungracious rugby correspondent of the Herald failed to raise after the thundering Lions series victory in Sydney what used to be called ‘a rousing British cheer’.
Yet Scottish rugby, still struggling to adapt to professionalism and the world-wide growth of the game, contributed only four players to the victorious Lions squad. All of them had a ‘good tour’ on the pitch and in demeanour but only one took the field in the Test side. Yet I’m sure that there was still as much Scottish support for the Lions as in the days when Gavin Hastings captained them, Ian McGeechan was coach, or ‘Broon frae Troon’ taught the Springboks that Ayrshire can breed players as tough as any from the highveld.
But sport may have allowed Mr Salmond one score on ‘social union’, though the evidence needs to be scrutinised like pile-ups on the try-line that go ‘upstairs’ to the video referee or faint snicks of the bat reviewed by the third umpire. It was after all, the British and Irish Lions who did so well in Australia, with the Irish in the squad drawn not only from Ulster but from Leinster and Munster, now two of the great powers in European super-club rugby.
For ‘social union’ in rugby (as in cricket) has survived the partition of both the British Isles and Ireland, despite being subjected in Ireland to strains that Scotland has been spared. A president of the Irish Rugby Union was murdered by the rebels during the Easter Rising. The British foolishly denied a reprieve to a promising Dublin player who got mixed up with the IRA. More recently an IRA bomb ended the international career of a fine Ulster flanker and the English had to fulfil a Lansdowne Road fixture in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday – cheered to the echo for turning up when Scotland cried off and then hammered on the field by both Irish persuasions.
If a single Irish Rugby Union can not only sustain its own unity among such troubles but maintain all its old ties with the rest of the British Isles, is there any doubt (so Mr Salmond might argue if he knew his rugby as well as his golf) that a far less radical political change in Scotland could still sustain the ‘social union’ in sport and many other areas?
Yet before awarding Mr Salmond this consolation try, the review would have to take into account one historical factor and one more important philosophical one. The survival of much social union between Britain and the Irish Republic was often secured not through the benign nature of nationalism but through commonsense resistance to its more extreme claims and ridiculous postures. In Ireland this included campaigns against English or ‘garrison’ games and (till quite recently) the exclusion or alienation of almost all Protestants and unionists from such noble games as hurling and Gaelic football. Social union survived in spite of nationalism, often in face of nationalism, and without political encouragement.
There is a more important point of political philosophy. The state ought not to be a Lego-like construction from bits and pieces of political theory but the political expression of shared culture, history, interests, and all those personal and corporate relationships which Mr Salmond presumably includes in ‘social union’.
Political institutions ought to reflect and express social union, which is why after 50 years of European integration the nation-state remains a more effective political force than the institutions which express the strange federation of idealism and bureaucracy we call the European Union. The desirability of links between social union, national identity, and political institutions explains why, given the growth of government, Scottish unionism ran into difficulties without devolution. But it also explains the probable survival of the United Kingdom and the need for a special relationship with the part of the British Isles which seceded from it.
I dare say many sporting nationalists cheered along with me when England took the last wicket at Durham and the Lions scored their tries at Sydney. But I think my unionist position is a better political reflection than theirs of the social (and sporting) unity of the British Isles.
R D Kernohan is a writer and broadcaster
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