The perils of managing a dual identity
Nigel Williams, 19 December 2013
Scotland is being asked whether its people wish to remain part of the UK. After the next election, the people of Britain are due, parliament-permitting, to be asked whether they wish to remain part of the European Union. The symmetry has been noted before. In one case Britain is the conglomerate, draining the Scots of their identity; in the other, it is the distinctive feature that needs protection from an excess of European harmonisation. Voters will be asked whether they wish to be Scottish and British, British and European. They will have a variety of motives for responding.
If the decisions were just about the economy, the Scots may wish to know before they vote how much of the national debt would remain with them; whether they would need a new currency and whether existing trade agreements would apply. Resources like oil and gas reserves, supply contracts and armed forces will all become subjects of haggling.
Politically, decisions about whether to be a small country or a large one look very different depending on whether a voter agrees with the party presently in power. Someone wishing to see greater protection for employees may be willing to put up with restrictions on VAT rates in order to preserve the bulwarks of the Working Time Directive and Social Chapter. For a party with opposite views, European law becomes an unwelcome brake on their own freedom of action. The timescales required to join and leave international treaties make it surprising indeed to suppose that Scots would choose on the basis of one party’s childcare policy.
The question of identity runs deeper and can have many more layers. If people wished, then further divisions could be manfactured, between Islands, Highlands and Lowlands, between Edinburgh and Glasgow, even between different football teams in a single city. At some point, a level of sharing and co-operation is inevitable. One precise level, somewhere between the individual and the whole of humanity, is unlikely to suit everybody perfectly and for ever. Agreements, after all, have to include other parties, with subtly different wishes. The skill of balancing multiple identities makes it possible to work with a variety of institutions.
A couple of statistics this year have brought home the difficulty of maintaining a dual identity. ‘Them’ and ‘us’ is an easier attitude the more tightly ‘us’ is defined. In the 2012 release of ‘Race in the Criminal Justice System‘, Mixed race respondents (‘dual heritage’ is a more sympathetic term) are victims at least 25 per cent more often than the next highest ethnic grouping and generally double the average rate.
These are not specifically racially motivated crimes but a consistent difference on that scale cries out for an explanation. The obvious one is that they are suffering the antagonisms of both races to which they belong. It would take more detailed investigation to discover how close that hypothesis is to the truth.
In October, Stonewall released their own crime report, ‘Homophobic hate crime, the Gay British Crime Survey 2013.’ . It contains a startling line:
‘Almost one in ten (9 per cent) bisexual men reported gay men being the perpetrator of a hate crime or incident.’
This report is inevitably far less methodologically robust than the Crime Survey of England and Wales. It is self-selected rather than randomised, so its findings relate to the people in the survey rather than the whole population. A small sample may mean that 9 per cent is just one man in eleven respondents. Nevertheless, it is a positive report that someone with a dual sexual identity may attract antagonism from both gay and straight aggressors.
Of course how other people define us is different from how we see ourselves. It would be sad if being non-white or non-black were more important to us than being black or white or being not-straight were more defining than being gay. The Scottish referendum could head towards the point where, regardless of the economics or the spread of political power, they are being asked whether being not-British is more important than being Scots. Perversely, being not-British would be a harder stance to maintain after leaving. As Scottish and British, they can enjoy Hogmanay while knowing that the rest of the country is returning to work.