“No! This country is bending over backwards to accommodate immigrants but if it was us going to their country do you think we’d get the same courtesy?” – Facebook comment 30 March 2015
Mirror, mirror … A 21st century fairy tale holds that when it comes to tolerance, fairness and open mindedness, Scotland soars above the rest of the United Kingdom. So that Facebook comment surely comes from some lost soul in a dark southern reach of UKIP territory, right?
Wrong.
As a sceptical Irish-Scot, I’m mindful of British and Scottish Social Attitudes Surveys showing that on welfare, EU membership and, even, free tuition – Scots and English share remarkably similar values.
But what about immigration? According to the 2014 Oxford University Migration Observatory (OUMO) survey, Scotland is less anti-immigration than England, though “not massively.” Even so, I was taken aback by the volume and vehemence of response to a Facebook question put by STV Edinburgh:
Cześć: Should the Polish language be part of the school curriculum? #FountainbridgeShow.
The question was prompted because Angela Constance, Scottish minister for education, is considering a report recommending Polish should be one of the languages taught in primary school.
“No!” said Jean:
Where would it stop? Polish.Romanian…Spanish the list could go on and on, I remember the drive to bring Scottish Gaelic back into schools and it was refused.”
There were more comments in the vein of ‘coming over here, taking our jobs.’ So many that others began to respond, pointing out the benefits of both immigration and learning a language – any language – at primary school.
Perhaps this was just a freak response. Perhaps STV Edinburgh unwittingly roused a vocal minority, some of the 10.5% of voters who returned a Scottish UKIP MEP (David Coburn) to Brussels. Or is this evidence of another tendency identified by OUMO: opposition to immigration was higher among people likely to vote No in the referendum?
That might explain one odd comment by ‘Sarah’:
Why adopt the language from a group of natives who take our homes and jobs while claiming benefit that they’re not entitled to? #independentscotland #votesnp.
Do those hashtags indicate Sarah thinks this is what will become of voting SNP and supporting independence? Or is she an SNP supporter that wants to cut down on migrant workers?
There’s another complicating factor. Recent Edinburgh University research found slightly more than half of Yes voters (52%) were born in Scotland while almost three quarters of people born elsewhere in the UK voted No to independence. More than half (57%) of those born outside the UK also voted No.
Are those No voters likely to be more opposed to immigration? (Not impossible: last arrivals are sometimes inclined to pull up the drawbridge.) Or are some Yes voters expressing resentment about newcomers who might have blocked the route to independence?
And, if Scotland is genuinely more welcoming to immigrants, Robert Wright, professor of economics at the University of Strathclyde, points out the country has not yet been tested with mass immigration. “I think the difference between Scotland and the UK really boils down to the fact there has been less immigration in Scotland than the UK for a significant period of time.” About 7% of Scots were born outside the UK, compared with almost 14% for the rest of the UK.
Running through all of this I hear the voice of Fintan O’Toole, the Irish Times journalist who wrote some of the most powerful commentaries in the run-up to the referendum. Supporting the cause of independence, O’Toole made acutely perceptive observations on nationalism and the nationalist psyche. When it acquires freedom, he said, a small nation has to acquire the self-confidence to tell the truth about itself:
Nationalism is a form of myth-making; independence demands a lot of myth-breaking. It has to replace the distorting mirror of fantasy with the sharp reflection of a real self.
Scotland’s supposed moral superiority is too often unchallenged by media and politicians alike. Isn’t it time we took a long, hard look in the mirror?
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