The flag waving We’re not nationalists we’re British brigade are seriously rattled by the Celtic Alliance, although of course they’d never admit to it, they’re currently doing their best impression of the Catherine Tate character Lauren, screaming, “Lookit my face am I bovvered?” as they go red white blue and puce in their ostensibly unbovvered faces. Eight elected members of the DUP are travelling to Edinburgh to set out a “positive case for the Union” on Thursday at a Shared Heritage, Shared Future Summit with the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland.
This is rather like the ebola virus leading a Travel to Congo campaign for the Kinshasa tourist board, or Countess Elizabeth Báthory – who infamously slaughtered local virginal peasant girls so she could bathe in their blood in an attempt to restore the lost beauty of her youth – advertising a health spa where you can bathe up to your knees in Fenian blood. I have very little in the way of shared heritage with members of the Orange Order, and I am quite sure a very large majority of 21st century Scots feel the same. Scotland shouldn’t become independent because of the shared heritage of drunken brawls in Duke Street outside the Bristol Bar is certainly a novel argument. The Orange Order represents the ugly sectarian disease of Anglo-British nationalism which most people in Scotland find viscerally repugnant. Sectarianism is not culture, it’s just hate.
Not even the Tory and Reform supporting commentators in the Der Stürmer that is The Herald’s comment section were impressed with this idea, even though some of them with a staggering lack of logic still managed to blame John Swinney and the SNP for it. What was also lacking in The Herald’s comment section was any attempt by the paper’s frothing Unionists to formulate a non Orange positive case for the Union of their own.
Long term readers of this blog may recall the fruitless wait for the positive case for the Union which was always just about to be published during the 2014 independence referendum campaign. Assorted Better Together supporters frequently announced that they would shortly set out a positive case for the Union, yet that positive case for the union proved to be more elusive than Nessie, at least some people claim to have photographed Nessie and there’s a clear public idea about what she looks like. The few attempts to formulate a so-called positive case for the Union quickly descended into scaremongering about how Scotland needs Westminster to do all the things that normal independent countries do but which Scotland would be incapable of doing, because, reasons, or they became appeals to irrelevancies which would remain unaffected by Scottish independence. In the end the referendum came and went and with the No vote in the bag the Westminster parties got right back to their traditional habits of lies and deceit and any thought of a positive case for the Union went the same way as Magrit Curran’s seat in the House of Commons.
These irrelevancies typically included as part of a supposed positive case for the Union comprised such things as a shared history and culture, we’d still have a shared history, with history the clue is in the name, it’s in the past. The past remains unaffected by the future. Scotland also has shared history with Norway and Ireland, this however does not constitute an argument that we should be governed from the Dáil or the Storting. There are undoubtedly shared cultural and historic links between the nations of the British and Irish archipelago, the problem about using these as an argument against Scottish independence is that Scotland shares these links with Ireland as much as with England and Wales, and in any event these links will remain unaffected by Scottish independence. Like many Scots, especially those of us from the West of Scotland, I feel a much stronger cultural tie with Ireland than I do with England. British nationalists might like us to forget the fact but Ireland, or at least twenty six counties of it, is very much independent and still a part of the European Union. There is a distinct lack of appetite in Ireland to come back under Westminster rule, despite the occasional musings of some of the more delusional British nationalists.
Another perennial favourite was an appeal to cross border family ties, as though in the event of Scottish independence you’d no longer have a cousin in Bolton. Family ties are unaffected by international borders, especially by passport free international borders such as those within the Common Travel Area of Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands which an independent Scotland would most assuredly remain a part of.
The case for the Union is based squarely on scaremongering, threats, and unremitting negativity about Scotland and its potential. That’s how it was in 2014 and it’s even more so now post-Brexit and with twelve years of broken Better Together promises.
The fundamental issue facing the DUP, the Orange Order, or anyone else seeking to formulate a positive case for the Union is that if such a compelling case existed, we’d have learned all about it years ago. It would have been trumpeted ad nauseam in Scotland’s overwhelmingly anti-independence media. BBC Scotland would actually have spent money on home produced Scottish programming and years ago would have commissioned a six part series all about it fronted by Susan Calman and John Barrowman. The mere fact that anyone in 2026 is still promising that they are going to announce a positive case for the Union, all by itself tells us that no such case exists.
Others have responded to the Celtic Alliance by throwing their dummies out of the pram. Rupert Lowe of the neo-fascist Restore Britain party blames the devolution settlement for creating a demand for self-determination in the Celtic nations and has announced that a Restore government would “roll back” devolution. Lowe has the cart before the horse as usual. Devolution was an attempt to prevent the demand for independence, not the cause of it. Admittedly rolling back devolution would be amongst the least of our worries with a Restore Britain government which would also roll back on common decency, humanity, and fundamental human rights, deporting millions of legally settled people and imposing a Christian fascist regime. Lowe would then find that the clamour for Celtic self-determination would be deafening.
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