Every Scot recognises that twinge of irritation when an English newspaper or broadcaster says UK, when what they mean is England. A twinge can become a quiet expletive when a foreign head of state on a visit to London talks about England when they should be saying the United Kingdom.
Recent examples of London press carelessness include saying the UK was experiencing an outbreak of English flag displays (not in three of its constituent parts, I’d wager), that the UK was waiting for GCSE results (Scotland doesn’t do GCSEs) and, during the 2024 summer riots, the headline claim that they were UK-wide. There were no riots in Scotland.
Am I being simply a chippy Scot? Shouldn’t we just grin and bear it?
Well, no. If unchecked, such behaviour will lead eventually to erosion of identity in the three smaller nations of the UK. By default, we’d all be English. Making such a thing happen was all the rage throughout the 18th century and well in the 19th. There was a vogue for calling Scotland “North Britain”. For decades, what is now Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel was called the North British Hotel.
Even further back, the fashion for dropping the Scottish name led Robert Burns to write in his song Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation.
Fareweel to a’ our Scottish fame,
Fareweel our ancient glory,
Fareweel ev’n to the Scottish name,
Sae fam’d in martial story.
The “Parcel of Rogues” does not refer to the English but to those Scots who voted in May 1707 to disband the Scottish Parliament and unify it with the Westminster Parliament in London. “We’re bought and sold for English gold,” said Burns, for it was an open secret that palms had been generously crossed with bribes from the London treasury. Scotland’s lawyers and universities were bought off with the promise that Scots law and the Scots education system would be preserved. Daniel Defoe was an active English spy and spin doctor during that tumultuous time in Edinburgh.
Almost every other government function of importance would transfer to London: foreign policy, defence, taxation, rules of trade, currency and dozens of other government competencies. It was not until 1926 that the Secretary of State for Scotland became a full cabinet rank post. After the Union of the Parliaments Scotland, for all intents and purposes, was subsumed into England. That the name of Scotland survived is something of a miracle.
A giant hole in English education
Of course, nobody in England is taught any of this. There is therefore a giant hole in the education of English journalists. There is often a casual disregard for accuracy about the structure of the UK and considerable ignorance of how the non-English elements of government work. Among a certain class of Englishman (and not only men) there’s the unquestioned assumption that God is an Englishman and all other nations or races are simply inferior.
Let’s start with education. I know the Norman Conquest began with a landing in England in 1066, Magna Carta was signed at Runnymede in 1215, that Henry Vlll had six wives and the Great Fire of London was in 1666. Many of my fellow Scots know these dates. They will also know that all the events occurred when Scotland and England were separate sovereign states. They are all English history.
How many English journalists could, off the top of their heads, tell you the date of the Battle of Bannockburn (1314) that saw Bruce drive Edward II out of Scotland; when Mary Queen of Scots succeeded to the Scottish throne (1542); how many universities there were in Scotland before the Union (four, St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and the youngest, Edinburgh) and when was the Union of the Parliaments that was the very event that gave birth to the United Kingdom?
By the way, Oxbridge managed to prevent any other universities being established in England until 1832, when Durham received its royal charter. The Oxbridge monopoly of English higher education ensured that the aristocracy and the landed wealthy were, with a handful of exceptions, the only class to be sufficiently educated to run the English state.
Thus, Oxbridge has been producing England’s and the UK’s diplomats and senior civil servants for centuries. These are the people that brief our political leaders, rub shoulders with ambassadors from other nations and provide briefings to the embassies of foreign states.
Avoiding annoying
I ask myself, how often in such briefings are ambassadors advised that their president or prime minister should not say England when they mean the UK?
On his last visit to the UK, President Macron of France talked about England, not the UK. There is of course no such sovereign state called England, just as there is no sovereign state called Scotland, or Wales or Northern Ireland. Who briefs whom?
In 1805, just two years short of the 100th anniversary of the Union of the Parliaments of Scotland and England to create the United Kingdom, Lord Nelson, on the eve of his famous victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, sent one of the most famous naval signals in history.
Nelson might have said, “Britain expects that ever man will do his duty.” He didn’t. He said, “England expects…”, thus annoying the hell out of this Scotsman ever since being told about the battle while a child in my Scottish primary school. Five of the captains of Nelson’s 27 ships that Trafalgar day were Scots, as was the surgeon who tried to save his life. According to Ian Laird on his family history website, 55% of seamen were English, 35% Irish, 7% Scots and 3% Welsh. So, 45% of the 18,000 men who served that day were not English.
This conflating England and the UK is centuries old. Nowadays, high-ranking English politicians are usually careful to say UK. Two events helped induce this change. The first was the rise of the Scottish National Party in the 1980s, following the discovery of North Sea oil. The SNP’s cry that “It’s Scotland’s oil” put the fear of death into Margaret Thatcher.
The phrase UK began to be heard
The idea that the Scots might opt out of the Union and take their oil with them made London think seriously about how Scotland and the Union were described. The way of doing this without giving comfort to the SNP was to avoid saying England and reduce the use of the word Britain (polls were beginning to show Scots describing themselves first as Scottish and secondly as British, in a reversal of long-established practice)*. The term UK began to be heard. Its use was boosted by the threat posed to the Union by the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence.
The world of constitutional terminological nuance may be about to change again. Nigel Farage and Reform have pressed a button called English nationalism, a phenomenon that mirrors Trump’s MAGA strategy. In a UK run by Reform, being sensitive to Scotland’s place in the Union is unlikely to rank high in the Farage cabinet’s priorities. In this case England will expect that Farage will do his duty and, in the words of the British national anthem, “Those rebellious Scots to crush.”
Scotland will have to decide to grin and bear it or say, “enough is enough” and vote to end the Union. In real life, things will be more complicated. Scotland still has plenty of rogues who can be persuaded that the grass will not be greener on the independence side of the street.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of the Union will be greatly threatened by a Farage government. If the English press wants to accurately report events around the Union’s demise or survival it would do well to read some history and do some research.
Lest anyone accuses me of being anti-English, I might mention that I lived happily in England for almost four decades. My three children are English. I love them greatly and stand ever ready to leap to the defence of their nationality.
* In the 2011 UK National Census, 62.4% of Scotland’s population said they were ‘Scottish only’. In the 2022 Scotland Census, 65.5% of people stated Scottish as their only national identity, while 13.9% identified as British only. The percentage identifying as Scottish and British decreased from 18.3% in the previous census to 8.2% in 2022.
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