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Douglas Alexander: Breaking up the UK would be a retreat from our progressive tradition

Of the competing Scottish views of Scotland’s future, only keeping Britain together serves progressive ideals
Pride of Scotland: a generation brought up on hit 1981 film Gregory’s Girl looks forward rather than back
Douglas Alexander|Shadow Foreign Secretary
30 June 2014

These are extraordinary times for our country. In 79 days Scotland will face a momentous choice. To stay as part of the United Kingdom or walk away.

The referendum asks of each of us in Scotland deep and deeply personal questions about who we are and what kind of nation we want to become.

I am Scottish by birth, by choice, and by aspiration. I was born in Glasgow. My dad grew up during the Second World War just south of the city in a village called Eaglesham where his dad was the parish minister.

As I attended the Armed Forces Day service in my constituency in Renfrewshire last weekend, I was reminded of a story my dad tells of one evening during that war, being taken to the upstairs bedroom of the manse. From the window he was shown the distant flames amid the darkness of the Blitz raining down on the poor souls of Clydebank.

As my father describes it, the whole family knew that the suffering of Clydebank was real, immediate and terrible but also that this suffering was being shared by our people — the people of the East End of London, together with Coventry, Belfast, Cardiff.

To my parents’ generation pride in Scottish identity never required a denial of that part of their identity that is British. So to my dad, today, the idea that Scotland would walk away from the rest of the UK in a few weeks is something that diminishes his sense of Scottishness and his sense of self rather than enhances it.

To my generation — the generation of Gregory’s Girl more than The Dambusters — our rejection of nationalism is not so much rooted in pride in past history as our understanding of the claims of the future.

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Nationalism in Scotland today suggests that the people across the rest of the UK are so different from people in Scotland that separation is not only inevitable but necessary.

That is not a view that I — and millions of us across Scotland — actually hold. We don’t believe that our common experience and moral obligations end at the banks of the Tweed.

The Nationalists’ narrative — with its talk of “London rule”, “London Labour” and “Westminster politicians” — all too often seeks to make London in particular the “other” against which they invite us as Scots to define ourselves. Their story ignores the fact that London is today an extraordinary multi-ethnic, multicultural, global city — as the whole world saw during the triumph that was the 2012 Olympic Games. Indeed the Nationalists try to engender a misplaced cultural conceit that suggests that everyone south of Berwick is somehow an austerity-loving Tory.

When I look at London I don’t see a foreign city so different that we need to walk away. Instead, I see a city with real challenges — like a scarcity of affordable housing, inequality and poverty — that are common to communities across the country.

And I see extraordinary individuals and organisations working to find solutions to these challenges and build a common life for local residents. People like my Labour colleague Stella Creasy, whose pioneering work against legal loan sharking began in Walthamstow and reached all the way to Westminster. Organisations like London Citizens that from its base in the East End has campaigned so tirelessly to deliver the Living Wage to many of London’s poorest workers.

These individuals, organisations and ideals and the practice of solidarity they embody is what most challenges the Nationalists’ assertion that somehow Scotland needs independence because Scots are better at being fair than the English, or at least would be better at it if the English weren’t around.

Tell that to William Wilberforce, who led the fight to outlaw slavery. Tell that to Emily Davison and the Pankhurst sisters, who fought for women’s rights and equality. Tell that to William Beveridge and Clement Attlee, who created the Welfare State. Tell that to the thousands from across the whole of the UK who marched with us against poverty in Scotland in 2005.

Nationalists argue that independence is an enlightened act that should be supported by progressives in England in supposed solidarity with progressives in Scotland. But that is a case that the Scottish Left has, for decades, rejected, not least because the break-up of Britain would represent a defeat for progressive ideals.

The Nationalists want the referendum debate to be Scotland v Britain. But the real choice is between two Scottish visions of Scotland’s future: a Nationalist vision that severs all political links with Britain, and a patriotic vision of a Scottish Parliament that is part of a system of pooling and sharing risks and resources across the UK.

It’s not just that our grandparents stood shoulder to shoulder in the fight against fascism but that they then built the NHS and the system of national insurance that enshrined the principle that sharing of risks by all of us provides rights for each of us.

To now reject this and instead spend the coming years erecting new barriers between the nations of these islands would, for me, represent a retreat from that progressive tradition.

So when my children and grandchildren ask me what I did in the referendum I will say that I understood that standing up for Scotland did not mean we needed to break up Britain. And I’ll explain to them that I, and millions of other Scots, understood that rivals Scotland and England may sometimes be but by geography we are also neighbours. By history, allies. By economics, partners. And by fate and fortune, comrades, friends and family.

So on September 18 I will vote for a principled and pragmatic solidarity that shares risks, rewards and resources across these islands. A positive vote to sustain the deep connection expressed in our political, economic and social ties with our neighbours in the United Kingdom. A patriotic vote for Scotland to have the best of both worlds — more decisions taken in Scotland backed by the strength, stability and security of the UK.