“[It’s Nae Good] Blamin It Oan the English Fir Colonising Us”: The Enduring Colonial Interpretation of Scotland’s Place in the UK in Scottish Nationalist Circles
As underlined by a Welsh critic, “[t]he novel Trainspotting is interspersed with allusions to Scotland as the victim of an English colonising mission” (Homberg-Schramm, 2018, p. 53), allusions which are however intended as emblems of relations of domination on multiple levels, rather than as literal...
সংরক্ষণ করুন:
| প্রকাশিত: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises, |
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| প্রধান লেখক: | |
| বিন্যাস: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| ভাষা: | Anglais |
| প্রকাশিত: |
Études écossaises
2025
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| বিষয়গুলি: | |
| অনলাইন ব্যবহার করুন: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| সংক্ষিপ্ত: | As underlined by a Welsh critic, “[t]he novel Trainspotting is interspersed with allusions to Scotland as the victim of an English colonising mission” (Homberg-Schramm, 2018, p. 53), allusions which are however intended as emblems of relations of domination on multiple levels, rather than as literal comments on Scotland’s status. Yet, one passage from Trainspotting is regularly invoked in popular culture to back up literal claims to colonial status. The quote “It’s shite being Scottish! We’re the lowest of the low! The scum of the fucking earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was shat into civilisation!” (taken from the film Trainspotting, rather than the novel) was for instance used to point to Scotland’s state as an actual colony of England in an ordinary Scot’s tweet made on 23 November 2022 in the wake of the UK Supreme Court’s judgment that the Scottish parliament cannot hold an independence referendum without the British parliament’s approval. As evidenced by the popularity of the #ScotlandaColony hashtag at the time of this judgment, Anglo-Scottish relations continue to be seen in colonial terms in certain Scottish nationalist circles. The aim of this article is to study this enduring colonial interpretation of Scotland’s place in the Union.Historians Stephen Mullen and Ewan Gibbs have delineated a recent shift in nationalist thinking away from an understanding of Scotland as an “internal colony” of England within the borders of the UK State to one that better accepts its role as part of the imperial core (Mullen & Gibbs, 2023). However, if there has indeed been a growing acceptance of Scotland’s historical role in the colonial enterprise in Scottish nationalist circles and beyond, to what extent has the reference to Scotland as a colony been abandoned in contemporary nationalist discourse? What’s more, to what extent have claims to colonial status been meant in a literal, material sense? It is to answering these questions that this article is directed.The first part of the article studies the SNP’s use of a colonial discourse in pre‑devolution decades, more specifically the 1970s and 1980s. It sheds light on the relative popularity of a colonial rhetoric in those decades among SNP elite politicians (more specifically party chairmen and MPs). It also looks into the extent to which claims to colonial status were meant to be taken literally, or rather to point to economic and political subordination. The second part of the article widens the study to the whole independence movement and examines more recent examples of Scottish nationalists’ colonial rhetoric, focusing on nationalist reactions to the UK Supreme Court judgment of 23 November 2022.The article demonstrates that, contrary to what had been the case in the 1970s and 1980s, the SNP elite (party leaders and elected representatives) now clearly distances itself from a vision of Scotland as a colony. However, it also reveals the extent to which a colonial discourse survives in the wider independence movement, among many grassroots nationalists and among members of certain nationalist groups, where it is used to back up calls for independence. It also suggests that contemporary claims to colonial status are more often intended in a literal, material sense than in previous decades when, as in Trainspotting, they pointed in a more general direction to relations of domination within the UK. |
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