When I first arrived in Barcelona three years ago I was surprised to find that so many people were interested in Scotland and in the Scottish Nationalist Party. I soon realised that people here were watching closely the process in the UK as discussions took place about having a referendum. If Scotland could move towards independence then perhaps there was hope for Catalunya.
Yesterday, as I am sure you can’t have missed, the UK Prime Minister and the Scottish First Minister made an agreement to hold a referendum about independence in 2014.
The headline in todays Catalan newspaper is
Londres pacta – Madrid amenaça
with a large photograph of Alex Salmond shaking hands with David Cameron.
I feel totally unqualified to speak of either Scotland’s move towards independence or the current situation in Catalunya where it seems more than half the population now want to separate from Spain and be an independent nation.
I don’t mean I have no opinions but I haven’t lived in Scotland for 32 years and all I know of Catalan politics is hearsay as I struggle hard to understand the history, the television and the newspapers.
But I am very interested in it all and as a Scot living in Catalunya I can’t help but feel involved.
What people used to say to me when they discovered I was Scottish was,
- ‘do you think Scotland will be independent?’
- ‘what do people in Scotland feel about the English?’
- ‘why did the Scots let go of their language so easily?’
I felt rather ashamed of my lack of knowledge and even my lack of passion about these questions. While my questioners were concentrating on the similarities I could only see the differences.
I never thought of independence in Scotland as being something that would bring millions of people onto the streets. Many people, myself included, feel it is a good idea but is it a passionate desire?
After all Scotland is a separate nation already. It has or had many politicians in power in the UK government. It is not suffering greater financial hardship than the rest of the UK due to unfair taxation and redistribution. It doesn’t have to pay to use motorways while the English travel for free.
But recently I have been rethinking this first reaction.
About the English
When there is a sports event of course I want Scotland to do well and to be honest couldn’t care less if England wins or loses. An English person recently got annoyed with me for saying this, he clearly felt I ‘should’ support English teams. But I don’t feel English in any way so why would I?
However I don’t hate them.
I lived in England for years, I love some English people, I like England. But it is a different country. This is how most Catalans I meet feel about Spain. They are accused of hating Spain and Spanish people but in my experience they just want to get on with being Catalan and running their own country. Yes some people speak negatively about the Spanish but that’s normal – the Scots do it about the English.
There is a difference of degree of frustration. I can see many reasons why Catalunya would want to separate from a Spain which treats them unfairly and continues to ram Spanishness and the defeat of the Civil War down their throats.
While my annoyances with England seem rather mild in comparison.
It’s infuriating when people talk of England when they mean Great Britain. For Catalans this happens all the time and because they are not officially a nation, they can’t say with as much force as Scots can, I am not Spanish but Catalan. I have a British passport and Catalans have Spanish passports. But how would I feel if I had an English passport? If England insisted that I call myself English? Much more angry I am sure!
Of course there is the oil. But I’m not going to go there now.
And the fact that Scotland generally is more left wing than England yet has to live with the result of a nation-wide election. But I’m not going there either!
Language
Gaelic has never felt like my language – I don’t see it as something that I lost as it was never spoken throughout Scotland. There is however another language in Scotland which was treated as inferior and which was pushed aside to be replaced by English in official speech. This language is Scots and I agree that this has been suppressed and ridiculed and yet it survives. I wonder if in an independent Scotland, Scots words such as bairn, glaikit, scunnered, would brought back centre stage? Scots is a language in its own right, not just a dialect of English as some would see it. Perhaps it would be better to see both English and Scots as two dialects which have developed from the same root – an Angles language which arrived in Scotland about 1400 years ago. But clearly the two have not been treated equally and with the union of the parliaments in 1707, English took precedence.
Catalan though is a strong and totally different language from Spanish. It is an official language of the country. But everyday there are reminders that it is not treated equally – there is much to swallow with a smile and it is hardly surprising when people get frustrated. Legal documents for example are in Spanish – courts use Spanish – sometimes police force suspects to answer in Spanish. There is a lot more of the jackboot in this than happens in Scotland.
The same or different?
While I have moved towards seeing more the similarities between the two struggles for independence, the papers today are speaking of the differences.
While London makes a pact, Madrid threatens.
The shocking reality at the moment is that every day brings another threat from the politicians of Madrid and the PP. They are terrified of democracy, terrified of the possibility of losing one of the richest parts of the Spanish nation, terrified of losing control. So there are threats of violence, of retribution and a constant stream of negative comments about Catalans – that they are greedy, subversive, selfish, trouble-makers. While all that Catalans want is a referendum to see if the majority want to be an independent state, Madrid responds as if this were a declaration of war.
I don’t think Scotland and the Scottish are hated and feared by the English as the Catalans are by Madrid and in the end I think this may make the difference in what happens next here.
