This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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By not taking the knee at the Euros, Scotland exposes its national myth

By:   []

Date: 2021-09

England is made up of 56 million people, most of whom have broadly progressive views. Most think the income gap between rich and poor is too high, hope for serious action to prevent climate breakdown and are broadly opposed to racism as they understand it.

And when a small group of them kneel on the turf of Wembley stadium this weekend to assert that Black lives matter, a majority of the 56 million will support them in doing so, whatever the right-wing media tells you.

But countries aren’t just the individuals who reside in them. They are the organisations and power structures that hold these people together and exclude ‘others’ at their borders. They have governments with social security programmes and military-industrial complexes, health services and armed police, taxation systems and prison systems.

Those things can operate only because we collectively grant them a social licence to do so, because they are expressions of communities we imagine into existence. And the acts of collective imagination which make these communities solid enough to build vast institutions on their backs don’t just happen by magic.

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When my daughter was born in January, she didn’t know she is Scottish. That is something she will come to learn – that she will be taught – by whom?

The theorist Benedict Anderson famously argued that it is the media – print capitalism, as he called it – which first convened modern nations.

TV nations – footy and the Royal Family

In December next year, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will try to ignore its hundredth birthday. While it likes to pretend it’s existed forever, the current version of the UK was created when Ireland became independent in 1922. Two months earlier, the main institution that convenes the UK, the BBC, will have celebrated its hundredth birthday: it was founded in October 1922, as the British Broadcasting Company.

The timing isn’t a coincidence. John Reith, the Scottish Unionist who founded the Beeb, once said that its purpose was to ensure that the chimes of Big Ben, “the clock which beats the time over the Houses of Parliament, in the centre of the Empire,” should be “heard echoing in the loneliest cottage in the land”.

And if modern national myths are stories told on our tellies and radios, then there are two shows that act as the primary pillars holding up the country; two series that consistently attract by far the biggest audiences: the royal soap opera and international sporting fixtures.

I probably really learned that I was Scottish from stories of Kings and Jacobite pretenders of old, from standing at Murrayfield rugby stadium, and from those three matches in the 1998 football world cup, the last time Scotland’s men performed on the world stage, before they came home too soon, and stayed here for a generation.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/not-taking-knee-euros-scotland-exposes-its-national-myth/
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