How I had my Nationality Stolen

“Being born in a stable does not make one a horse.”

- Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

(I mentioned in a previous blog post that this would be a story for another day. Here it is).

I’ll start this piece by getting the awkward part right out in the open. My name is Rob, and I wasn’t born in Scotland.

The story is simple enough. My dad took a job in England a few years before I came along, so that’s where my siblings and I were all born. The family moved back to Scotland when I was 13, so I spent my teens in Edinburgh, but my accent is a bit confused even now.

This is common. People are a lot more mobile today than they were 60 years ago or more, and prepared to go where the work is - which, in UK terms, often means London. The Scots are also legendary travellers - wherever you go in the world, you’re bound to run across one. It’s estimated that there are as many Scots living outside Scotland as there are living in it - and the majority of those live in England.

The key word in that last sentence, though, is the word ‘estimated’. We don’t know how many Scots live outside Scotland, because nobody knows how many Scots there are altogether. As we all know, Scotland is not a sovereign state. There is, as yet, no such thing as Scottish nationality. There is no passport - no way to determine who is Scottish and who is not.

In the absence of such a symbol, surrogate means are used to determine Scottishness for the purpose of official statistics - specifically, where you were born, and where you live. These are obviously flawed, but statisticians don’t have any better ones to use instead. There are many people who were born in Scotland, or live in Scotland, but who don’t identify as Scottish. One example would be Tony Blair (who was born in Edinburgh, but would prefer you didn’t mention it).

Another flaw is that if, like me, you weren’t born in Scotland, then should you move out of the country (as I did in 2003), you will no longer be counted as Scottish in any official statistics. My dad was a Scotsman born and bred, I had identified as Scottish my entire life, and I had lived in Scotland for 17 years, but as far as the government was concerned, my nationality was deleted the moment I crossed the border. I did get to say I was Scottish in the last census, but apart from that, the authorities regard me as Welsh.

You could argue that this doesn’t make a great deal of material difference. I’m in the same position as any other Scot who left the country to live elsewhere. None of us get to vote in Scotland any more, no matter where we were born. And confused though my accent might be, it’s present enough for most people to recognise me as Scottish. But identity is important to people. If you were born and grew up in one place, and with parents who also came from that place, you’ve probably never doubted yours, and good luck to you. But not everyone is that fortunate, and to be trapped in an ethnic limbo can be really unpleasant.

The problem is that other people will try to force their own opinions about your identity onto you.  Growing up, I was told by more people than I could count that I couldn’t be Scottish because I wasn’t born there. What’s truly heartbreaking is that my sons, both of whom identify as Scottish, have been told the same by their peers at school (and, shamefully, occasionally by staff as well). I have no idea why anyone would think they had the right to tell someone else who they are, especially based on something as arbitrary as where their parents happened to be when they emerged from the birth canal, but a surprising number of people are prepared to do exactly that.

What always strikes me as ridiculous is that it only really applies to Britain. My uncle was born in Quetta, which is now in Pakistan. Nobody would seriously argue that this makes him Pakistani - obviously there may be a tinge of racism about this, given that he is a white man, but even so. Likewise, nobody argues that Bruce Willis is German, Emma Watson French, or Keanu Reeves Lebanese. Some people would tell me (and have) that being born in England makes me English, but would be happy to accept me as Scottish, had I been born to Scots parents in Hong Kong, or Malawi, or in fact anywhere except another part of the UK.

I’m not angling for sympathy. My point is that this has always happened, and will continue to happen, until Scottish nationality exists. I believe in an independent Scotland for many reasons, but one of the most important is that I would like my children and I to have a nationality that can’t simply be erased at someone’s whim. I want us, and doubtless millions of others like us, to be able to hold up our Scottish passports and say ‘It doesn’t matter where I was born, and I don’t care what you think. I am a Scottish citizen, and you can’t take that away from me.’

Years ago, I read a very sad letter in a newspaper. The writer, a man who had moved to Scotland from England 30 years previously, said he wanted independence so that he could hold a passport and legitimately call himself a Scotsman, despite his Brummie accent. I think about him quite often. You can become American, German, or Japanese. You can even become British. But you can’t yet become Scottish in a way that isn’t open to question. Only independence can solve this problem - and this is why no form of devolution will ever be enough.