Introduction

Social and political change over the last forty years has altered the role national identity plays in Scottish politics, particularly when Scottishness is measured against Britishness over the same period. This chapter continues to explore how language is used to represent Scotland within the electoral discourse contained in the manifestos of devolved Scottish politics. The previous chapter introduced for the first time a measurement for national identity similar to other policy preferences measurable on a left-right spectrum. With the increasing emphasis on Scottish national identity, it is legitimate to ask what these ideological interpretations of Scotland look like. How do the different parties construct Scotland in their discourse? For example, it has been asserted that Labour and the SNP have been successful, at least in recent times, in linking in the public mind centre-left social democratic values with Scottish national identity to the extent that right-wing Conservatism has often been associated with Englishness. As such, the Scottish Conservatives find themselves ideologically isolated in Scotland (McCrone 2001). Here we examine how the four major parties of Scotland draw on any civic and non-civic sources in their conceptions of the Scottish nation and Scottish national identity. The analysis will explore statements from the manifestos in more detail to investigate the character of these discursive constructions of Scotland and Scottish national identity. In particular, we will look at the linguistic phenomenon of the metaphorical personification of the nation and its banal discursive manifestations.