In Scotland, separatists love ‘money and the ethnic vote’ – Doug Saunders

Doug Saunders compares Scottish inclusiveness and the recent divisiveness strategy of identity politics in the Quebec Values Charter of the PQ. Ironic as the PQ used to have an inclusiveness strategy prior to the shock of the 2007 election when the ADQ (predecessor of the CAQ) became the official opposition by running on identity politics:

Behind many old-school separatist movements lies the late-19th-century concept of ethnic self-determination, which was given half-hearted official recognition in the Versailles Treaty and went on to create considerable bloodshed in the 20th century as former empires and federal countries collapsed into ethnic territorial claims. The uni-ethnic state was never more than an artifice of the imagination, and its legacy is so sad and unsuccessful that few voters are likely to back the creation of a new one. Ms. Marois learned this too late: The majority of potential separatism supporters, it turned out, were interested in economic and political self-sufficiency, but not ethnic solidarity.

Scotland’s separatists figured this out a generation earlier. “The SNP was never happy with ethnic-nationalist types within its ranks. It marginalized them at every opportunity,” says Peter Lynch, the author of a history of the SNP and a lecturer in politics at the University of Stirling.

In the early 1990s, SNP leader Alex Salmond led the most recent major purge of SNP ethnic nationalists. The party banned the right-wing Siol nan Gaidheal (“seed of the gaels”) movement and expelled party members who had joined the radical Settler Watch and Scottish Watch movements. The SNP’s most famous slogan, “It’s Scotland’s Oil,” and its centre-left message of higher social spending financed by petroleum windfall held a lot more appeal than Braveheart-flavoured jingoism. Besides, the Scottish people had become increasingly multihued and multireligious.

In Scotland, separatists love ‘money and the ethnic vote’ – The Globe and Mail.