Devolution Reboot: Immigration, multiculturalism and Scotland’s future

IN MY ARTICLES here I’ve been discussing an essay by the economist Edward Glaeser, who gave his recommendations for Scotland at the outset of devolution. He argued that the powers of the new Parliament could be used to improve the quality of life here – better schools, lower crime, faster transport, higher-quality housing and urban environments – and that skilled workers and business investment would flow in response.

I now want to address something Glaser did not mention, because it was not a salient issue for Scotland twenty-five years ago. It is now: mass migration and multiculturalism.
There is no doubt that population is one of the defining issues of our time and a primary concern to a growing proportion of the public. It is also one of the main drivers behind Reform’s rise in the polls.

Discussion of immigration usually takes one of two forms. Either it becomes a slightly hysterical and polarised argument about culture and nationhood, with one side accusing the other of racism or fascism for raising concerns about immigration. Or it turns into a rather dry economic debate, with immigration enthusiasts arguing we need more workers to support an ageing population, and sceptics pointing to an intolerable burden on public services.

In a recent BBC interview John Swinney managed to combine both approaches, saying that “we have a shortage of working-age population in Scotland … That’s the rational argument for immigration and I don’t see the rational argument against it, but there will be people who are against immigration because they hold racist views”.

Humans have a persistent tendency to form tribes, and many tribes just can’t seem to get on

The economic arguments may sound important but are relatively trivial in the wider scheme of things. If we are genuinely facing either the rise of fascism on the one hand or cultural Armageddon on the other, it hardly matters if the pension age has to go up a bit or we need to build a few more houses.

So who is right about mass migration? Can we really forge a multicultural nirvana as John Swinney thinks or is there trouble ahead?

Instead of indulging in crystal-ball gazing or sweeping assertions about cultural or religious behaviour, a better approach is to look at historical experience. And the truth is that the evidence – on which any rational assessment must be based – is against Swinney.

An unsettling but inescapable feature of recent history is the link between multiculturalism and civil conflict. Ethnic, religious and cultural differences have been at the root of many of the nastiest and most intractable conflicts of the modern era. Partition and the wars between India and Pakistan; civil wars in Sri Lanka and Lebanon; terrorism in the Basque Country; apartheid in South Africa; and conflicts across the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe. The massacres in Bosnia, in Rwanda, and the relentless conflict in Israel/Palestine all have at their root the difficulty of multiple cultures – or identities – trying to coexist within a single political framework.

Humans have a persistent tendency to form tribes, and many tribes just can’t seem to get on. Even the mild-mannered Canadians and epicurean Belgians can’t resolve the political tensions that arise from their linguistic and cultural divisions. It is, in fact, difficult to point to clear and durable multicultural success stories. The Swiss Confederation, perhaps, though even there the talk is of a referendum – you guessed it – to halt immigration.

liberty needs democracy and democracy requires the nation-state

Why this troublesome tribal tendency? Human conflict is nothing new of course. Our own history is replete with stories of skullduggery, murder and massacre. Scotland has thousands of castles, each a monument to the unfortunate human propensity to violence.

But there is also a particularly modern dimension, rooted in the development of the nation state in nineteenth-century Europe. Historians point to the French Revolution and its rejection of dynastic or religious legitimacy in favour of the nation – “la patrie” – composed of “les citoyens”, or individual citizens. The rise of national consciousness went hand in hand with liberty and democracy in opposition to rule by kings, emperors and popes (or sultans).

While ethnic conflict is not confined to democracies, democracy itself appears to require a reasonably cohesive sense of shared nationhood. Citizens don’t like being governed by those they see as belonging to a different group. You could go so far as to argue liberty needs democracy and democracy requires the nation-state. Play with that at your peril.

So you don’t need to be racist to be concerned about the prospect of a multi-cultural Britain. You could be the most culturally tolerant person alive and still observe that states work best as nation-states. It just seems to be an unavoidable – if perhaps regrettable – feature of the human condition.

We have seen this dynamic closer to home. Four hundred years ago, migrants from southern Scotland crossed the sea and settled in Ulster. The resulting conflict has still not been fully resolved, despite the strong similarities between the two cultures. The advent of democracy hasn’t helped. Citizens in Northern Ireland vote overwhelmingly on sectarian grounds rather than on who can fix the NHS or grow the economy, to the detriment of good governance. The shadow of violence persists.

That division is notoriously echoed in Scotland. Sectarianism is serious enough, though mercifully gentle by comparison with the murderous divisions in Ulster, Bosnia, Lebanon or the Donbass. Even so, every year the Scottish Government spends millions trying to assuage community divisions. Meanwhile, many Scots are apparently not even sure if our neighbours in England and Wales are culturally compatible enough to share a country with, let alone people from Africa, South Asia and the Middle East.

Given what we know about multiculturalism, you would have thought that politicians would be wary of encouraging large-scale immigration from overseas. Not a bit of it. They have spent the last few decades foisting a vast multicultural experiment upon us, in the fond expectation that it will lead to a happy, diverse and rich society, a kind of Switzerland-in-Strathclyde, despite the overwhelming evidence that Lebanon-in-West Lothian is far the most likely outcome.

The SNP takes the biscuit for double talk on this issue. It has a £6m budget for tackling sectarianism, stokes enmity towards the English, while simultaneously lecturing us about racism and extolling the virtues of mass immigration. John Swinney, square that circle please!

The experiment is starting to bear sinister fruit closer to home. The recent Gorton and Denton by-election was fought largely on sectarian lines with parties openly seeking votes on the basis of religion and ethnicity and issues such as Gaza. Gorton and Denton is now only one of dozens of seats in mainland Britain where this is the case. The great cities of England have been implanted with the politics of Belfast, Bosnia and Beirut, with disastrous implications for democracy and social cohesion. Violence is not far behind – attacks on Jewish targets or soldiers or simply people having a good time; the notorious rape gangs; mass demonstrations about Middle Eastern issues; pressure for anti-blasphemy laws – all are signs of the cultural conflict that accompany multiculturalism.

It is not racist to be worried about this, First Minster. It is entirely rational. Mass immigration to cure perceived labour shortages simply isn’t worth the risk.