On Scotland’s nationalist fringes, a new Tartan intolerance rises

From a distance, it looked like just another rally for Scottish independence: Saltires billowing in the wind, slogans broadcast through a megaphone, the sound of the bagpipes blasting from a portable speaker. At gatherings like this you can usually guess what kind of Scotland those attending yearn to see: an independent progressive country alongside the Nordics, where strangers are welcome. But the activists beside Aberdeen’s seafront on January 18th had come with a very different message: “stop the boats”. This crowd, which had gathered outside a hotel housing asylum-seekers, chanted “remigration now” and “save our kids”, as speakers warned that native Scots are being replaced in their homeland.

Scottish nationalists tend to pride themselves on their progressiveness. The populist right could be dismissed as a minor branch of an English movement. That has changed. For one thing, polls suggest that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK could well beat Labour to become the second-biggest party in the Scottish Parliament at elections in May. And the leaders of Sunday’s demonstrations were as Scottish as Irn-Bru. A boy addressed the crowd wearing a kilt as “Scotland the Brave” played on a speaker. A poster for this “Unite the Clans” rally featured tartan-clad warriors charging forward under the Saltire and Royal Flag of Scotland.

The impetus for this recent wave of protests is the growing number of hotels being used to house asylum-seekers. This hits a particular nerve in Scotland because illegal migrants are considered an English problem. A veteran canvasser in one of Edinburgh’s shabbier suburbs recalls speaking to frustrated voters who had come round to independence because it would, in their view, give Scotland the power to turn away those who had entered Britain by crossing the channel. After all, the dinghies arrive in Dover, not Dundee.

Scotland’s attitude to migration more broadly is also becoming harsher. In 2023 just 28% of Scots said the number of migrants should be reduced. Last February 45% did. In part that reflects anxiety about Scotland’s declining, but still high, white population: 91.8% of Scots identified as White Scottish/British at the 2011 census. In 2022 that had fallen to 87.1%.

Supporters of Scottish independence find it hard to accept that their movement has this anti-immigrant side. One prominent writer in favour of Scotland leaving Britain ridiculed the English flags that far-right activists put on lampposts last summer. But their Scottish counterparts had done the very same, albeit with the Saltire.

The party that benefited from this prideful anger was once the Scottish Nationalist Party. Those voters are now flirting with others. John Hall, a 44-year-old fish filleter from Aberdeen, said he had voted for the SNP all his life but was now thinking of taking a punt on Mr Farage’s lot. The decision to open the hotels “lies with Westminster”, he said. “But there has been no opposition from the SNP.” That, he believed, was the true betrayal.

There are many people like Mr Hall. Polling from last October found that 20% of current Reform voters in Scotland backed the SNP in 2019; and 45% said they had voted SNP at some point in the past. That helps explain why Reform’s Scottish leader has not ruled out a second referendum on independence.

It should come as no surprise that as the share of Scots identifying as “wholly or mostly Scottish” has reached a record high of 60%, according to last year’s social-attitudes survey, so have attempts to define “Scottish” along narrower lines. It seems that an ideology which views Scotland as a conquered people by a foreign foe can just as easily be turned against a new enemy.■