Scottish citizens
Breaking up a country means defining who you exclude. Despite their best efforts, the Scottish Government’s plans for citizenship prove it
Scottish independence looks further away than it has for some time — to my profound relief, for now. My identity is rooted in Scottish unionist and left-liberal English versions of Britishness. I’m not just a transactional unionist. I have no wish to be left behind by history: some latter-day, London-resident echo of a kaisertreu Austro-Hungarian after Austria-Hungary.
So perhaps I shouldn’t give the Scottish Government’s latest independence papers too much credence. Humza Yousaf is performing a shakier version of the dance Nicola Sturgeon perfected. With few concrete options, growing voter weariness and an impatient base, he must pretend to advance when he knows he cannot. But a lack of independence monomania does not equate to a lack of support. Scotland is still, at best, a narrowly pro-UK country. The national question may, with luck, be on the cusp of becoming dormant for now: it is nowhere near dead.
So who the Scottish Government thinks is Scottish could well matter one day — and for me, hits very close to home. It’s at pains to prove itself more liberal on citizenship than the UK Government. Unlike British nationality law, children of any nationality brought up in Scotland would be able to register as citizens. The child of a Scottish citizen would be entitled to citizenship, wherever they were born. (The British Nationality Act 1981 generally only permits this one generation down.)
By both descent and geography, this draws the boundaries of citizenship wider than the UK. But its approach to those of us already born at the point of independence is rather narrower. As you’d expect, British citizens habitually resident or born in Scotland would, by default, be Scottish citizens. British citizens with a parent born in Scotland would have the same right, as would those born in Scotland for 10 years (or five as a child).
I can understand if this sounds broad to most. But it ignores the fact that few, if any, of us plan our lives on the basis of the breakup of our state. This is a problem of which both my sister and I would fall foul. Our father is Scottish; our mother is English. We were both born in Norway. Dad worked in oil and gas: a common enough choice for someone who graduated from Aberdeen, where he met Mum. We’d lived in Scotland, the United States, Venezuela and England by the time we turned 18. As a result, we wouldn’t meet the five- or 10-year criteria.
To add to the mix, Dad is one of a line of Scots who worked around the world. My grandfather, born and brought up in Scotland, worked for Shell. As a result, Dad, who went to school and university in Scotland and started working there, was also born abroad. (The English half of my family also travelled. The only reason applying for a British passport isn’t an all-consuming nightmare for me now is that my mother was — just about — born in England, not overseas.)
Had Scotland been an independent state in 1986, I’d have been the child of a Scottish citizen, and entitled to citizenship in my turn. But it wasn’t, and so the Scottish Government’s policy cuts me off from half my nationality. I see little justice in saying I’m not a Scot in due course, just because Mum and Dad didn’t plan for the break-up of Britain 45 or 50 years in advance. Scotland is where the family home is: I feel at least as Scottish as English. As a unionist, I fretted and simmered from 2011 to 2014 because ‘the English’ couldn’t see the danger.
One way to address this would be to extend citizenship rights to British citizens with at least one grandparent born in Scotland (I have two). This is broadly analogous to Ireland, which extends citizenship rights to anyone with an Irish citizen grandparent. The Scottish Government points to Ireland favourable, after all. And as British citizens could live (and then work and vote) in Scotland anyway, it makes little difference after independence. Another, broader option would be to extend rights to the children of those on the current list.
Inevitably, I hope this is all hypothetical. If it isn’t, and if I am eventually cut off from who I feel I am, I’d feel the emotional injustice profoundly. I accept nationality laws do people far more practical damage every day. I grant the Scottish Government is offering quite a broad citizenship law for a separate future. But its patchier provision for the unionist past and present expose something core to the nationalist project.
To be fair to them, they can’t entirely help it. Nations can’t exist without a definition of who does and does not belong, and how and whether that can change. But the British state and nation have been around a long time. We have no legal definition of who belongs to the older nations which formed them, because we didn’t need any. If the United Kingdom breaks up, we will need some. The question of who We are and who They are will take centre stage, by definition. The new Scottish and remaining UK states will have to decide whether to recognise the contents of different people’s hearts and minds.
When the UK narrowly voted for Brexit, losing European citizenship loomed larger than anyone expected. Perhaps the reality of losing something crystallised a sense of self many felt only hazily before. Perhaps there were always more of them (us, in my case) than we knew. But I’m pretty sure destroying a centuries-old union, with a nation tacked on, would cut far more deeply.
People who want to do it should have no illusions: they are in the business of creating a new Other and a new Them. That is what nationalism in a plurinational democracy means. No amount of liberal dressing — performative, genuine or both — can hide it.
