MARGO!
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Owen Dudley Edwards
I A sun which was Scotland’s glory has gone down.
Of her courage, her charm, her volume, her comedy, her tragedy, too much will already have been said by those incapable of understanding them, too little by those capable. She was inimitable with that slightly grim smile and firm but laughing eyes as she scanned the immediate horizon for peace or war. She delighted her audiences right on to the end, her last appearances in public time and again unequalled by her fellow-participants. As a symbol of independence she was on her own. Her many other crusades for the Scottish people and the human race proved fascinating combinations of electricity and hurricane. Of my own agreement with her on many, notably independence, comment would be egregious: of our greatest disagreement, her quest to legitimise assisted suicide, I am more passionately convinced than ever: I would have not wished one single day of her wit and wisdom to be denied to the country and the world she served so well. She was independently for Independence, and you know where you stood with her, whether or not you agreed with her standing. And her integrity prompts the question of how many other participants in this debate can claim a comparable independence. Let us take Dr X, preset and articulating on Defence and its prospects, its necessities and its no-go areas, how independent is this particular witness so respectfully quoted as authoritative such that bowing down we must adore him? Does he speak for himself, or for the London government, or for the USA, CIA, DIA,
DDT? Mr Kevin McKenna, exceptional among Referendum commentators for Margovian magisterial magic, enquired in his Observer column on 6 April how an independent Scotland would arm itself in counter-espionage, self-rebaptised as ‘Intelligence’ (a 1984-style job description if ever there was one). He delicately reminded an Independent Scotland of the danger of Intelligencesharing with its former UK masters, or of their American grandmasters. But even if an Independent Scotland does not choose to hire spies formerly in use for the subversion of its own architects, it cannot assume that only prospective enemies within will provide applicants for its best spy jobs. It would be easier, of course, from London’s viewpoint if Scottish nationalism had been violent rather than anti-violent. The Irish precedent in 1922 involved Michael Collins rehiring UK intelligence agents who had in fact been his double agents, and when de Valera came to power in 1932 he replaced those with his former treble agents. But however distasteful to MI5, MI6 and 007 the non-violence of the Scots may be (witness the dreams of Douglas Hurd, for one, in his Scotch on the Rocks), Scotland before and after September 18 still faces undercover persons among the pundits, the bureaucrats and the think-tanks. The Irish worried that a civil service continuum would erode real independence, and avoided it by insisting on Gaelic proficiency throughout its bureaucracy (The former UK bureaucracy had never gone sufficiently native). Compulsion did not revive the
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Irish language, but at least it meant that covert loyalties were sufficiently diversified. Not for the last time, we will wish that the integrity of Margo could infect her whole country. In the 1970s we used to speculate which of us might be moles or rats for UK, US or USSR intelligence. You could never imagine Margo as agent for anything but Scotland.
‘doggerel’ and was paid goodness knows how much by the French purchasers of the grand old Scots publishers Chambers for writing it in introducing their Dictionary, an infinitely more illustrious artefact than Mr Paxman himself. But there is a serious danger that critics (not necessarily enemies) of the Independence cause, may recoil from the thought of a perpetual Salmond. They may be so far mistaken that if Scotland votes ‘YES’ Mr Salmond may thank us all very prettily, and then announce his retirement. But it is an excellent idea to drive it home that YES means Scotland, and need not be Scotland with Salmond. Arguably the most impressive YES campaigner left in the field is Patrick Harvie, leader of the Greens, perhaps the MSP who worked closest with Margo in her last months. Scotland needs the ideas of Jim Sillars, not all of them essential for adoption, but certainly opening a good agenda for serious, positive thought. Independence must mean escape from the banalities, sycophancies and chauvinisms of Westminster, but it cannot afford to assume that with them gone, we are happy ever after. And in any case Mr Salmond may agree with more of Mr Sillars’ agenda than either of them may want to admit. It is hard, for instance, to see YES voters denying his antepenultimate dogma:
Margo’s death has necessarily been followed by the usual political obituaries from old antagonists carefully coupling what they took to be their own integrity with hers (‘while I could never accept her insistence that the earth was round, I respected her as much as any conscientious Flat-earther could’). These sentiments sounded much less perfunctory and more genuine than usually seems the case, for it was very hard to dislike Margo, and very easy to succumb to her endless appeals to good humour. Her lifetime’s devotion to Scottish independence brought with it a variety of controversies in and out of the Scottish National Party. That her journalist colleagues fastened on her difference with current SNP leadership was predictable, and presumably we could hardly expect them to recall that her first resignation from the party was in protest against its expulsion of Alex Salmond in 1982. But the media obsession with the recent past to the exclusion of earlier history is quite useful to the ‘YES’ cause in the Referendum whose near-century-long gestation dominated her whole career. She made people understand what it meant to believe that an Independent Scotland would be fun. She is no longer there to show that, though we must remember it and her. Her death followed the publication of her husband Jim Sillars’s In Place of Fear II – A Socialist Programme for an Independent Scotland whose last words are a fine tribute to her aid in its creation. The book is of outstanding importance by its very existence. It lives to declare that an independent Scotland could (and it insists, should) take a very different political direction from the majority opinion within the SNP. Alex Salmond has been so successful as a party and national leader that it is all too easy for Independence to be taken as his perpetuation. The Salmond control of the party, which perhaps may represent the truly representative character of his leadership, makes him the envy of the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. That Alex Salmond is superior to his London counterparts gives little cause for Scots to weep, however much it reduced a BBC household god, Jeremy Paxman, to liken him to Robert Mugabe on the ground that both of them had overall majorities. Alex Salmond would doubtless welcome such idiocy from the man who called Burns’s poetry
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The point of independence is that it means change, big change, and one of the big changes is that we start to refocus our relationship with others, where our influence will come from soft power – aiding people instead of killing them. Such assertion is endangered by the ease by which it may be embraced but with lip service only. Mr Sillars means it. And Mr Salmond means it too.
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II. Jim Sillars’s In Place of Fear II likes to think it is hard-hitting, and, its hard hits at Alex Salmond will be of immense value to the YES cause (and thus to Salmond also). But apart from the logical charms of these forms of dissenting YES, a little like concurrence from the Supreme Court Judges for differing reasons, there is a piety in the book, not only (though now more than ever) for Margo. Jim Sillars started his political life as Labour MP for South Ayrshire and author of an intensely anti-nationalist tract Don’t Butcher Scotland’s Future, a book-title now extremely rare although Sillars might justifiably have used it once again for his present volume (pro-nationalist , with reservations), but the verb is unlikely to be well-received by Scottish nationalists however modern. We may doubt whether many Scots in the aftermath of Culloden would have joined the English in singing: Some talk of Alexander And some of Hercules Of Hector and Lysander, And such great men as these But of all the world’s great heroes There’s none that can compare To the gallant Duke of Cumberland And the British Grenadier. Even the Hanoverian English had substituted a tow-row-row-row-row-row-row-row-row-row-row for the Gallant Duke of Cumberland by the end of the eighteenth century. In fairness to those English, it was Glasgow which gave the Butcher an Honorary Degree, and St Andrews which made him its Chancellor: we the Scotch were nothing if not Enlightened, and the preceding Chancellor had died fighting sword in hand for the True King, so the Butcher, however butch, was good to help mend a St. Andrews fence. Anyhow St Andrews may have made up for it by awarding a degree of M.D. some years later to Jean-Paul Marat, who would then establish his own reign of terror. Marat seems to have earned it more scholastically than the Butcher. The piety of In Place of Fear II derives from Sillars’s apprenticeship in Labour when the great shadow of Aneurin Bevan still enchanted British Socialism before Harold Wilson adopted and befouled it. (See the savage chapter ‘The Mantle of Nye’ in Paul Foot’s The Politics of Harold Wilson (1968).) Bevan’s own chief literary work was In Place of Fear (1952) which sought to rally Socialism to the defence and maintenance of the National Health Service he had established so effectively. Sillars is triumphantly accurate in its invocation. Scottish nationalism can
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certainly trace itself back to the days of Wallace and Bruce, electrifyingly establishing its own ideology in the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, but today the Referendum seems likely to gain its ultimate outcome in the determination of Scottish Socialists to keep the Welfare State and its National Health alive and well in Scotland. The cause of Scottish independence is British Socialism’s survival capsule. To leave it at the mercy of Bevan’s British pseudo-heirs today is to see it drown in an ocean of tears Captain Hook’s crocodile might well envy. And that crocodile knew when its clock was ticking. That Captain Hook is an Old Etonian is irrelevant here: for such education as Mr David Cameron has assimilated, let us be truly thankful. But we do need to ask ourselves for whom the clock ticks. J.M. Barrie was in some ways -- which? -- more of a Scottish nationalist than we may imagine. His adopted children did not form a dynasty. But other literary giants were sent from Scotland to educate England, what the Scottish Enlightenment meant by being British. So when Mr Alexander Linklater tells readers of the Observer on 30 March 2014 that in the Referendum campaigns ‘The argument about Scottish culture is not being had’, he deserves more than enquiry as to whether he means ‘had’ in the financial or in the Noel Coward usage. His grandfather was one of Scotland’s finest novelists in the twentieth century (Eric Linklater’s Juan in America is surely the wisest Scottish perception of the USA between James Bryce and Denis Brogan, and the best novel on the USA by a foreigner up to its time); Eric’s widow Marjorie proved herself among the most courageous members of the SNP when in spite of them it Gaderene-swined out of the Constitutional conventions that would eventuate in the Scottish Parliament: their son Magnus, Alexander’s father, I believe to have been the finest editor of the Scotsman in my 45 years of knowing it, and may well be the foremost crusader against Independence in the runup to the Referendum. Although Eric Linklater’s fictions played hilariously with themes of ancestry and posterity, we should not expect Alexander to hear from afar Ancestral voices prophesying what? (for the family was greatly divided on the political future of Scotland, Eric above all charming his way around the spectrum but with a Scotland always fascinating and funny however self contradictory in successive stages). So Alexander’s faint surprise that ‘There was curiously enough, more cultural expression during devolution’ should not surprise us, regardless of the crisis of Scottish cultural identity having spanned the twentieth century, with his grandfather’s Magnus Merriman (1934) surely the best introduction to the subject anyone could find. Alexander invites greater censure for telling us that
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Ian Rankin isn’t touching the subject of The Referendum despite Rankin’s formidable contributions to it in his last two Rebus novels, as noted in this journal. But although unfortunate in his example (as Sherlock Holmes remarked of Watson’s prediction of banality in what proved to be the case of the teetotaller who finished his meals by hurling his false teeth at his wife), Alexander Linklater is in general both accurate and perceptive. Culture seems to be the missing element in the current debate. The late, great Stephen Maxwell characteristically regretted, when revising his invaluable Arguing for Independence to be published after his death, that culture was his weakest section.
above today’s David Starkey, whose mode of scholarly discourse is the intellectual equivalent of a baby soiling its diaper and throwing the result into the public’s face. Tam Dalyell’s case has in fact been vindicated by the Independence Referendum -that devolution would take the Scots far nearer breakaway. But it took more than logic to fulfil: Douglas-Home’s treachery however intended, Thatcher’s abrasively dictatorial rule of a country where fewer and fewer Scots could be found to vote for her, her congratulatory dinners celebrating ten years of refusal of that devolution for which a Scots majority had voted, Michael Forsyth’s latter-day despotism, declaring that each fresh rejection of her government mean that Scotland needed more Thatcherism and not less, the polarising of Scottish politics into Calvinist antitheses, Thatcher’s own perfect symbolism of condescension, contempt, greed, blood-thirst, snobbery and Pharoah-like hardness of heart driving every self-respecting Scot into a yearning to get as far from her as possible – yes Alexander, we were a culture war.
Alexander Linklater has the family genius for helping us to see more clearly if not always as Linklaters see them. Culture should have been the pivot of current debate, and it isn’t, but in fact this is because it was. The cultural battleground was far darker and bloodier in 1979, partly because the deepest divisions were staked out then. Alexander’s quotation from Billy Connolly – ‘recently asked about the referendum, he replied that he had more in common with a welder from Liverpool than a Highlands crofter’ – is an old friend to the survivors of ’79: Billy Connolly was saying it then, and plagiarising it from the anti-devolutionist Labour luminaries such as Eric Heffer. Our changing culture is shown by his now stealing it from himself. The Big Yin as he was, he was not one of the Giants of those days who sought to hold the pass against devolution, yap against it as he might. The Tories, en route to their emasculation by Thatcher, had little to contribute, apart from the double-dealing of Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s promise of greater devolution if only Scotland would reject the Callaghan government’s offering (did he delude the Scots, or was he bullied into submission by Thatcher – or did he simply not know what he was talking about?). But Tam Dalyell, the great No-man of 1979, was as always a tower of integrity, and if Robin Cook was too Machiavellian on devolution to reveal the integrity that would ultimately make him resign from the War-Criminal cabinet of Tony Blair, and Norman Buchan too-expectorant against Edinburgh to let anyone work out his views on the Labour party’s proposal for Scotland, and the great author for children Alan Campbell McLean radiated such detestation of devolution that it was hardly possible to get near him when it was mentioned --- they were Giants and whether foes or friends it was a privilege to know then. Even the absurd Hugh Trevor-Roper likening anti-devolution Labour MPs to the Tories voting against Munich forty years earlier – even he and his fox hunts could reach heights light years
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Inevitably the Abominable No-men, Lilluputians in the footsteps of the Dalyells, Buchans, Cooks and Campbell McLeans of yesteryear, prove themselves little more than cheap editions of ’79 and ’97 Unionism. In ’97 the wretched Sir Bruce Patullo (King, Emperor, and God of the Bank of Scotland) prophesied doom from the summer sun to the solar system if the Scots voted ‘YES’ and they replied by confronting his with a disaster he had forgotten to prophesy – the possibility of a run on the bank. (Thanks to the Walt Disney Studios, we all knew how to start a run on the bank, as effected in Mary Poppins.) Sir Bruce suddenly found retirement beckon more rapidly than any other sign in the sun or the moon or the stars. When the actual vote did take place in 1997 and two ancient financial vultures were interviewed saying that since the Scots had voted yes almost to three-quarters of those voting, financial ruin awaited us, the TV interviewer artlessly (or heartlessly) asked why didn’t they say this before the vote, receiving a port-lined shriek ‘Argh you out of yough mind? Do you know what happened to Bghuce Patullo?’ This last wisdom has apparently eluded the financial thugs currently attempting to ambush the YES vote, but the Royal Bank of Scotland, for one, is ill-advised to ignore the shrieks of joy at its hint that in the event of a YES-vote, it will cross the border and swindle somewhere else. It has disgraced Scotland long enough.
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III. ‘Scottish culture is not defined by the technocratic trade-offs between market and state that are contemporary politics’ concludes Alexander Linklater. The definition is all too accurate for the UK, and, rather against the probable intention of its definer, it applies a strong and vital reason for Scotland voting YES. Scotland wants politics of community service. And the widely-polled contempt for politicians by the UK electorate suggests that England might like to break out of the Linklater definition too, but for want of sufficient humility remains caught in the post-imperial mirage with some sodden souls stretching out to UKIP. But if innocent observers take the impulse requiring the Referendum on Scotland leaving the UK with that requiring the Referendum on the UK leaving Europe (dragging Scotland with it, however contrary its voting, into the latest Cave of Adullam), it is purely the likeness of positive to negative, inclusionist to exclusionist, hope to fear, substance to shadow, internationalist to chauvinist. Scottish culture demands a multi-dimensional politics. ‘Scottish culture is borderless’ continues the Linklater definition, perfectly correct, but requiring UK borders even less than Scotland’s. ‘The British dream is not a confining state, it is a creative and commercial opportunity’ he goes on, and no doubt many a slave trader or Black-and-Tan might agree with him. We do not need to be sure our dream is not someone else’s nightmare. ‘Saying no to separation should mean saying yes to a different constitutional settlement for the UK as a whole’: true enough, and we know that in all logical probability that would be Scotland’s deeper imprisonment in the cold, clammy dark of a UK now driven by its xenophobes out of the European Union. ‘The status quo is not an option. Enhancement and ratification of the powers of Holyrood would allow Scotland to get on with being itself and, with no contradiction at all, to reap the creative potential of a Britishness, which was ours historically and is ours still to make’, he ends brightly. He led up to this by chatting about Scottish films he has liked, and someone was bound to seek the ultimate destiny of Holyrood in Hollywood. But, to employ a cinema cliché of yester-year, let’s get out, this is where we came in.
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Professor Robert Crawford, of St Andrews, addresses himself to the question in his Bannockburns – Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination, 1314-2014 (dedicated to the memory of Gavin Wallace, ‘a friend to writers’ and a very good friend to this journal). It is not the equal of his Scotland’s Books (nothing could be) but well ahead of his amusing and postprandial exhalation on EdinburghGlasgow rivalry, or of his The Bard, whose emotions on Burns outrun its evidence. To Professor Crawford, ‘British culture’ is a Scottish literary enterprise. Indeed, the latest Linklater might seem to agree, informing us that ‘Almost every great Scottish writer has struggled with, or been inspired by, their dual identity. Boswell thrived on his Johnson, Burns wrote poetry to Britain as well as Scotland, Scott gave the name Waverley to the fluctuating loyalties of Jacobite fervour and Georgian settlement (aka Culloden), Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde universalised the split psyche’. The tale may be none the worse in being variations on a very old theme, if a little British imperialist (they do know how to split psyches in Vienna too). And as Christopher Harvie pointed out long ago, the Boswells and Scotts, Stevensons and Conan Doyles, Barries and Buchans, re-invented England with the usual Scottish Enlightenment conviction that England was too important to be defined by the English, just as British imperialism owes so much of its virtue and vice to Scotland. But where Professor Crawford triumphs is by pointing out that the British culture thus hymned is almost entirely one-sided. England might provide the raw meat whence Boswell could construct Johnson, or Scott resurrect Robin Hood (Dr Jekyll and Sherlock Holmes are too obviously products of Edinburgh medicine for their Englishness to be more than elegant tailoring) but where are the English contributions to literary Britishness? Scott named Waverley for an English anticipation of Dr Watson through whose eyes English readers paying their price could discover Scotland in relative safety, Scotland fluctuating the Englishman’s loyalties according to the tale’s necessities. But can English literature offer more than the occasional Scottish walk-on part, bereft of the bagpipes and kilts of Harry Lauder?
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History can be different (possible movie-title). Many a respectable don has written his credentials as British historian without allowing Scotland to trouble his eye and ear while few Scots can write their country’s history without an English input (one way or another). But Britain as an idea has been winning some English attention, and it is now advanced beyond what might termed the Musichall or Trevor-Roper stage. That is to say English historians have now shown themselves capable of taking the Scottish stage of their researches seriously, rather than vulgarly point-scoring as though they would suffocate for want of sycophantic titters. Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 established its authority on publication in 1992 when it was warmly welcomed by an impressive chain of differing critics, notably Tom Nairn. Today it holds its own fortified by fresh editions and a new introduction in 2009 entitled ‘Britons Re-visited’ (which sounds a little like what Hengist might have said to Horsa, as they sharpened their blades for grass-cutting), and now increases her arguments old and new by Acts of Union and Disunion. Like its predecessors and like the work of her husband David Cannadine, it charms in style as it challenges in content, holding to the methods of their old Mentor, J.H. Plumb, and his inspirer George Macaulay Trevelyan (whose biography was written by Cannadine) fathered by Sir George Otto Trevelyan, biographer and nephew of the great Thomas Babington Macaulay, all of them distrusted by historians who cannot write as well. It is not an ideological genealogy – arguably Plumb raised by the most constructive doubts about the Whig visions dreamed by the Trevelyans and Macaulay in immortalising the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 and its sequels – and Linda Colley, for one, has more to learn about Macaulay. But all of them knew that history must be written if it is to be read, and too few of their colleagues attend to what that means. In the infamous ‘debate’ in the house of Lords a few weeks ago, vociferated on one side only since the YES ranks do not glorify themselves by peerages, former Secretary of State for Scotland Ian (now Lord) Lang proclaimed in words broadcast and heard by listeners but denied as having been spoken (denial being by Michael (now Lord) Forsyth) and erased from the printed record, (presumably by Lord Lang himself), that if Scotland voted YES it would dishonour the British soldiers (presumably including Irish soldiers) who were killed in service in World War I. Their lordships were wise to think better of it., although unwise to demonstrate so clearly their anxiety to falsify the truth in best 1984 style. Professor Crawford doesn’t ask (save possibly by its implication) whether those Scots who died at
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Bannockburn might feel insulted if they knew the Scottish parliament would abolish (or at least adjourn) itself under the Union of 1707. But his book most eloquently demonstrates the creative and responsive Scottish literary sentiment rejoicing in Independence. The present-day confusion, deliberate and otherwise, as to the meaning of ‘Britain’, offers a text for further elucidation apparently avoided in Bannockburns: from G.K. Chesterton’s poems in The Flying Inn (1914): The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which But the wild rose above him when they found him in the ditch. God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier. Recalling the sexual preferences which Edward II shared with much of present-day Brighton, Chesterton may have written more profoundly and prophetically than he knew. But the words evidently inspired another poet, more than a decade later, when Hugh MacDiarmid wrote A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle reminding us amongst much else that drunken Scots and English in ditches see different and unUnionised flora. Chesterton’s poem may be more Scottish as well as English nationalist than we imagine, with its theme of mad topography (shared with several other poems in the same chapter), surely inspired by Tam O’Shanter’s progress alongside a succession of grisly landmarks . MacDiarmid for one would have seen this all the more in his poem’s contextualisation in the aftermath of a Burn’s supper. But Chesterton began: Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road. A reeling road, a rolling road, t hat rambles around the shire, And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire; A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
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These carry their immortality more flamboyantly than the lines on Bannockburn and Brighton, and theirs is surely correct, that roads were made by drunks necessitating subsequent official authorization, a process before the great road-makers making roads straight so that they and their inhabitants could be trampled by Roman legions. But the verse begins with the oxymoron of English drunkard preceding Roman strider, a half-millennium before the advent of even the smallest Hengists and little Horsas. Why? It looks as though Chesterton was uneasy with the thought of his descent from the ancient Britons, and thus, like so many of his fellow-English, played three-card tricks with England and Britain (and Scotland). When the Britons do receive a verse in the The Flying Inn, its ring is ominous:
of decision and action if not quite so far from the field of future battle. The Unionists as politicians in general, with jobs to retain and pensions to secure, play the British card for all it is worth, deaf to gentlemanly usage as defined by Nancy Mitford sixty years ago telling her readers that the upperclass word was ‘English’; and its graceless non-upper class synonym ‘British’. Only thus it is now realised, can the Unionist claim to Scotland have any hopes of keeping his grip on Scotland. The ruling class can no longer hope to rule by proclaiming rule as their right. But the reality of Britishness is that of the historical victim, captured so well in A.E. Housman’s ‘The Welsh Marches’, ending
The Druids waved their golden knives And danced around the Oak When they had sacrificed a man; But though the learned search and scan No single person can Entirely see the joke. It is unfair. The Druids and their congregations would be the victims of the rest of us, of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, of the Picts and Scots and Irish, of the Norse and Danes and Normans, and we won’t even grant them the right of having been the drunkard whose sore and blistered feet made the roads. We forget that the first poems to have survived from Edinburgh and Glasgow were in Welsh, the work of Aneurin and Taliesin. The Rt. Hon Danny Alexander, PC, MP, Liberal Democrat coalitionist, Big Four-man with Cameron, Osborne and Clegg, present parliamentary representative of Invernessshire until 2015 but how much longer than that?, appeals to as many identities as he can presumably in hopes that at least some of them will prolong his term of parliamentary office: ‘I’m a Highlander, I’m a Scot, I’m a Brit, I’m a European too and all those identities can sit comfortably within one United Kingdom’. It has the authority of the ancient pantheist: I am the batsman and the bat, The bowler and the ball The umpire, the pavilion cat, The roller pitch, and stumps and all. Naturally as these identities compete within us we would like to think they surface above all as authoritative umpire, century-winning batsman or at least bat, hat-trick bowler or at least ball, whereas one is at best the pavilion cat, tolerated, perhaps indulged but hardly obeyed beyond the remit of one’s real masters, themselves best shown by one’s residence in the Thames Valley rather than one’s constituency picturesque but remote from the scene
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When shall I be dead and rid Of the wrong my father did? How long, how long, till spade and hearse Put to sleep my mother’s curse? We could try to answer that by saluting the very English Housman showing an English poet could lay claim to Britishness by altruistically identifying it with an alien Welshness of ancestry, as indeed another English poet was to do so well two centuries before him when Thomas Gray wrote the horrific Welsh curse on English conquest, ‘The Bard’. But these are exceptions, as Arthur Hugh Clough’s ‘The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich’ showed that an English poet could show what it meant to be Scots. But how many other English admitted multi-cultural hearts or heads were the Boswels and even Burnses, Scotts and Carlyles, Stevensons and Conan Doyles, Barries and Buchans made their Scottishness capable of Britishness, not to speak of those English whose pollution by Welsh blood (like Shakespeare) or Scots (like Macaulay) might suddenly exhibit an anger violently opposing the somewhat bland Anglocentrism otherwise radiating from their comforting verse and prose. But thanks to Robert Crawford and others, we can now state confidently that the TV pundits were never more wrong in imagining the Independence debate to be chiefly one of economics. Economics are a mildly foolish game of rival prophets with which politicians fool themselves by thinking they are impressing a public who have seen all too much of the folly of economic prophesies , chirruping occasional guests and utterly missing the mortal storm that would throw a world into depression. What is actually happening, although not necessarily being articulated, are culture wars.
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IV The Union of Scotland and England was caused by the War of the Spanish Succession to ensure the new King of Spain would not be Louis XIV’s grandson, eventuating in unprecedented slaughter in the defeats of France at Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet, &c, and the new King of France being Louis XIV’s grandson. The Union itself was realised by the heavy corruption and bribery characteristic of all eighteenth-century political transactions including the Union of Britain and Ireland at the other end of the century, but historians have now shown that Burns’s thesis shared by the SNP was a ‘myth’ which (says David Torrance) the said historians ‘busted’. What this means (to historians if not to Torrance) is that many of those bribed to abolish the Scottish Parliament were in favour of doing so anyway in 1707, if not necessarily in, (say) 1702, or of retaining the Union in (say) 1712. Some historians doubted whether the politicians were intimidated by the war-lord John Churchill Duke of Marlborough being determined to ensure that France did not enable the exiled Stuart King, James, son of the ousted James VII and II, to land in Scotland claiming succession to the Scottish throne especially when his half-sister Queen Anne would die, since if the French captured Scotland, England would be caught in a pincer-hold. Such historians find few Scottish allusions to Marlborough in what correspondence of the time may have survived. Nevertheless, the Scots knew where he was and what he wanted, and what he might do if threatened by a likely French invasion of Scotland, and they would seem to have known it a great deal more sharply than the said modern historians. Many could remember the first Union, imposed by Cromwell after conquest. Accordingly I wonder if the fight over Scottish Independence should be named the war of Scottish Obsession, mainly because it pin-points one of the main features, that part of the struggle lies in Yes-folk repudiating the image of them hitherto sold to the world. It also turns on the Yes-folk passionately insisting on conserving National Health, Welfare, free education which were jewels in the Crown of the very Unionist Labour party but now are at risk. It turns on a Scotland supposedly once consecrated to war and its preparation now rejecting the nuclear weapons planted on its soil and in its waters. Today they do not listen to Marlborough. Forty years ago Tom Nairn saw as the most urgent necessity for Scottish culture that it repudiate the kitsch that was slowly smothering it. With it, the Scots needed to show that they deny the image
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obligingly fastened onto them by writers and artists alert for the profits to be made by racism, the readily identifiable alleged characteristics of a people, to be served up with the maximum contempt and ridicule. President George W. Bush showed his proficiency in this sort of thing when in meaning to compliment Gordon Brown he said the UK Prime Minister was ‘not a dour Scot’, it being uncertain whether he meant that more of a compliment in the denial of Scottishness or the denial of dourness. Gordon Brown at this time was not in denial of his Scottishness, unlike his predecessor, but he was desperately trying to drown it in Britishness. As to the dourness, this is clearly vital to the kitsch from which we must declare our independence. Our culture wars have laughter as the best weapon available. The problem is, that commentators all too often have no sense of humour, and after intoxication with the rhetoric of the Thatcher state infect themselves with her permanent condition of humourlessness. She did not know what a joke was, as she demonstrated effectively when resurrected at a post-Thatcher party conference and innocently agreed to proclaim ‘The Mummy has returned!’ She was delighted by the obvious hilarity with which this was greeted, taking it for expression of a rare English demonstrativeness reserved for national icons. David Torrance, for instance, has clearly no idea of what humour is: When the actor Ray Winstone joked on Have I Got News For You that Scotland’s main exports were ‘oil, whisky, tartan and tramps’, it prompted around 100 complaints. Humour and the independence debate seemed not to mix. (p273) What on earth was funny about that? An audience which switched on the programme in quest of humour had every reason to object. The first three experts are quite correctly listed, and everyone knows it (coupled with the fact that the exporting of oil is regrettably not carried out under Scotland’s direction). And as for the fourth, we do not export tramps. Why should we? They produce real jokes, and often tell them well. They are usually courageous, stoical, kindly, compassionate and forgiving. They are more admirable than many of the politicians we do export, and certainly more dignified. Walter Scott’s first great poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, has as its hero-narrator whose sublime moment is his passionate refusal to be exported. Humour and the independence debate mix perfectly well, provided David Torrance isn’t the cook.
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He also quotes an enormous number of people with footnotes to ‘interview’ with some date attached and nothing else. We are to take these quotations from vaguely identified persons as being contributory to the truth while keeping his witnesses as anonymous as rape victims (which surely he does not mean to suggest, however brutal his questioning). And Mr Torrance is far from reliable. He has grown careless. He seems to want to be fair enough, and serves neutrality in a ham-handed prose. He may have heard Alex Salmond’s judgment on Torrance’s attempt at a Salmond biography (‘I had no idea that my life was so dull’). Which may account for a bitchiness inspiring his comments on the First Minister here, but he is kind enough about Nicola Sturgeon whose remarkable gifts he can sometimes perceive. (This accords fully with Salmond strategy, but Mr Torrance’s innocence is proof against any hope of understanding the ideology and intellect of the First Minister.) But his reliability on known historical facts is at great fault. He does realise that Ireland may be relevant and has been unwisely sidelined in the Independence debate itself. Its financial history, for instance, makes nonsense of the lies, superstitions and negations from the NO-men on Scotland’s possible future relations to the pound sterling (in which Ireland lived for 55 years after the leaving the Union with Britain, neutral for five years of Britain’s war). But his allusions to Irish history are ominous for his claims to accuracy: There is general agreement that the UK comprises four ‘Home Nations’ – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – three of which have specified layers of government and therefore distinct political traditions, (p36) Unless this is a Torrance joke, appropriately oxymoronical, it is senseless. Northern Ireland’s ‘distinctive political traditions’ are the cause, not the product, of its ‘specific layers’, and it fought for thirty years because it saw itself as two nations, not one, each nation holding ‘specific’ convictions on its ‘Home Nation’ which one put in the Republic of Ireland, the other in the island of Britain. He does in fact tell us that (Danny Alexander called them ‘the four constituent nations of the UK’, Nick Clegg ‘the family of nations that is the UK.’) But anyone resorting to Messrs Alexander and Clegg for reliable definitions deserves what they get. The ‘Irish Question’ dominated UK politics between 1886 and 1922. (Give or take the Boer War, World War I, etc.)
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Three different Home Rule Bills failed to clear both Houses of Parliament… The Third Home Rule Bill became Law in 1914 but was formally consigned to limbo for the duration of the war. The virtual certainty of its passage brought about the gun-running to Ulster and the Tory-backed declaration of intent for armed revolt and civil war among the Ulster Protestants.) …only after the First World War, when pressure for devolution had hardened into a desire for fully independence, did matter come to a head. (Army Mutiny and gun-landing in 1914, with tens of thousands drilled to oppose an Act of Parliament by armed force do not constitute ‘matters’ at a ‘head’? What does?) Finally, in 1920 the Government of Ireland Act created two ‘Home Rule’ Parliaments in Northern and Southern Ireland, a scheme that failed to satisfy majority Nationalist opinion. The result was a war of Independence… (p41) (The Government of Ireland Act (1920) was passed to end a war of Independence which had been going on for a year.) And when, for example, the legendary Irish nationalist Eamon de Valera stood in the presidential election of 1959, he simultaneously held a referendum to change Ireland’s voting system, fully expecting his popularity to carry the day. Voters, however, had other ideas, re-electing de Valera but rejecting his new voting system. De Valera and his party had been defeated in 1948, were re-elected as a minority government in 1951, were defeated in 1954, and won re-election in 1957. He hoped to abolish Proportional Representation, but as a hard political realist had no expectation that he would. I have written a biography of him, and was a witness of the 1959 campaign. If David Torrance does these things in a green tree, what shall he have done in the dry? His forest of telling quotations in The Battle for Britain from unnamed sidekicks, ad-men, intimate strangers, gofers, shadows and cavemen is meaningless this side of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, for which there have been worse awards. Mr Torrance, is for one a knowing look to announce a hitherto undervalued profundity, and no mountain gives birth to whiter mice, e.g.
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…rarely acknowledged were two inconvenient truths. First, the greatest Scottish contribution to global culture – The Scottish Enlightenment – had occurred under the Union, while a post-1979 renaissance in writing, poetry and song had taken place in the 1980s and 1990s, without even a devolved parliament for support. (p,197) For that matter Burns, Scott, Byron, Carlyle, Stevenson &c `&c all the way to Hugh MacDiarmid and beyond, had happened under the Union, and so had Bonnie Prince Charlie. The Enlightenment certainly owed something to Scots conviction that since they were yoked to the barbarians south of the Humber, they had better educate them, writing in English since the English were too barbarous and bigoted to read Scots, and making money from the books to be published in London. As for the post-1979 renaissance, the one in early twentieth century Ireland with Shaw, Yeats, Synge, Joyce & Co. took place for the most part before a single vote had been canvassed, promised and stolen in an Irish legislature. It is quite true that 1779, 1879, 1979, fall between 1707 and 2104: most people favour more interesting conversations. Nevertheless Mr Torrance seems to have sensed that the economic minuets ultimately go nowhere save that Be-eh-et-terToge-eh-ther calls the First Minister a liar and some YES-person calls Be-ehet-terToge-eh-ther another. His attempt to open up culture is somewhat limited, but he keeps his hand in for the Man Booker Prize by two late chapters on the fate of Scotland with a YES vote, and with a NO vote, which seem to eventuate in Michael Gove becoming Prime Minister and Jenny Marra First Minister irrespective of which way Scotland voted. This really invites the attention of Man Booker judges: Michael Gove has become increasingly fictional in recent years and it is about time that mentions of him in the media be preceded by assurances that he has no reference to any living person. No doubt he can give us a sequel in which Mr Gove and (if she exists) Ms Marra collaborate on a biography of Mr Torrance. Before taking formal leave of his real-life readers, Mr Torrance’s ‘Culture and National Identity’ chapter noted Alasdair Gray’s division of ‘English people living in Scotland into two groups, those who took up temporary jobs (mainly in the arts) in order to advance their careers in London were called ‘colonists’ while those staying long term were categorised as ‘settlers’’ (p195). Professor Linda Colley’s Acts of Union and Disunion also raises an eyebrow in that direction in a somewhat perfunctory glance at Scotland. Her Britons had made a good though not invulnerable case for arguing that Great
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Britain had become unified before final Catholic Emancipation in 1829 by its anti-Catholicism and Euroscepticism, but her unease in considering the role of the Irish in Britain as well as Ireland overshadowed her argument, and this present slight work makes a somewhat cautious tour of the outlying properties. Since she is one of the brightest historians she will always be worth reading, e.g. (p93) But important too has been, not so much a rise in Scottish nationalism, as the emergence of a different kind of Scottish nationalism. When visiting Scotland in the past few years I have been struck by how many Scots complain about feeling ‘colonised’ by the English and/or London. In historical fact, Scotland has never been a colony. It was never conquered, or forced to submit to waves of alien settlers as Ireland was. But historical facts are not the point here. Nationalist movements always rewrite history. To claim that Scotland is a colony is to assert that it is imprisoned within the United Kingdom. It is a way of arguing that Britishness is no longer a useful vehicle – an older form of Scottish national expression – but rather an encumbrance and an oppression. We will have to see which mode of Scottish consciousness triumphs on 18 September. We will indeed, though it seems a little unnecessary for Professor Colley to have left the recess of Princeton in order to tell us that. Her sources are in their way as frustrating as Mr Torrance’s tabulation of his. Who are these Scots who feel ‘colonised’, how long ago and how recently have these visits to Scotland been made, are her acquaintances drawn from the arts like Alasdair Gray’s? From her instructions to them about Scottish history we have to assume they are not Scottish historians, otherwise she might be in danger of augmenting Scottish resentment of the English herself. As a youthful historian hired at Aberdeen in 1966 and Edinburgh in 1968 I had no sense of being colonised, rather of being very kindly treated by both English and Scots settlers. But I did feel a little like a Greek mercenary stationed in a Roman imperial outpost. Such settlers as I met were very devoted guardians of the native flock, and were deeply conscious of the moral necessaity to train young native historians, some of whom head our profession in Scotland today. But some of the colonists were less evangelical and frankly resented Scots being Scots. This was part of a postwar expansion of academics, Oxbridge colonising with its B-team, and the B-team resenting they had not received or were unlikely to receive the jobs kept in Oxbridge for it’s A-team. Scotland had in fact allowed itself in the late nineteenth century to seek such instructors as Oxbridge deigned to
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send it, with consequent prioritisation of the Scottish university structure to take its place as an acceptable imperial outlet. It reached the swindle of Glasgow’s Snell postgraduate fellowship at Oxford being made a financial basis for an Oxford undergraduate degree, since Glasgow was not accepted by Oxford as a university. If the Scots had taken the Oxbridge non-recognition of their universities as an obvious barrier to the acceptance of Oxbridge graduates for Scottish university jobs, the bluff would no doubt have been called. But colonisation must have judicious measurement of scruple, and pretentiousness can carry off some of the most ethically questionable contrivances or, as Al Capone put it, ‘it’s a sweet racket if you can keep the boys in line’. This takes us a little far from Dr Colley’s theses, but her bright ideas about nationalist movements rewriting history might raise a returning eyebrow as to what is the history that is being rewritten, and how far it is connected with who gets what jobs. Anyhow, that structure hardly applies today. Scots, above all Scottish university graduates, may still be underused, but the universities hire far beyond the confines of our archipelago. Meanwhile, for all Dr Colley’s wisdom in seeing this change in kind suffered by Scottish nationalism, she has apparently struck survivals of the old. We should hope she will gain new Scottish friends if she wants to keep her Scottish researches up to date. And perhaps Dr Colley’s dilemma between the novelty she sees and the antiquity she hears, in her discovery of Scottish nationalism has its lessons for the rest of us. Robert Crawford’s Bannockburns admirably explodes any assumption that the quest for independence is independent of culture. This may not be the equal of his Scotland’s Books, but it can stand proudly in its company, where some of his lesser works have blushes to hide in such a juxtaposition. Professor Crawford does excellent work in reminding us how deep the non-royal hero and the slightly tarnished hero-king hold their place in Scottish consciousness. William Wallace as we know him is in part dependent on posthumous myth-making from Blind Harry’s The Wallace to the self-indulgent Australian movie Braveheart. Dr Crawford works to such eloquent purpose and with such comprehensive intent that it is hard to see why he makes so little of Sydney Goodsir-Smith’s theatre masterpiece The Wallace, whose impact on Scottish Festival goers through creation and revival in the later twentieth century must have been forceful and lasting. If it lacked the cinema trickery and landscape mastery of Braveheart, it carried a poetic wisdom entirely its own. Wallace’s story has the modern resonance far beyond Goodsir Smith’s time, with its cult of the good servant of
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his country never seeking the crown but making its holders earn their title to it. Wallace is appropriately a bardic elaboration of a heroic but half-obliterated legend because from Harry to Goodsir Smith Wallace did a bard’s work of keeping his patron king (or First Minister) up to the simple patriotic ideals by shaking off the corruption with which the invader infects his victims. After Robert Crawford all doubts about the cultural core of Scottish nationalism in quest of Independence should be swept away. We are new: but it is our strength that we are also old. This is not to immunise Crawford from questions. He wastes our time in allusion to Dr Gavin Bowd’s dishonest and inaccurate foolishness on Fascism. But on his moment there is none better, as when he defines modern Scottish political nationalism as ‘about self-respect’. There is still work to be done on the culture taking us to Independence. It is nice to know how much Alex Salmond likes William Wallace, but the most obvious counterpoint for him in history may well be Benjamin Disraeli, if not Lloyd George. All of them armed themselves and worsted their enemies with first-class humour. To put it another way, just as the marvellous achievement of the Attlee government in building the welfare state has its best hope of preservation by the nationalist Scots, we may well find that the historical and literary part of our British heritage has much to tell us however little its creators try to make it do so. England had no Walter Scott with whom to strengthen the Union on the English side with Scots’ interest in the cultural wealth of the English past reciprocated for Scotland by a like wizard. In fact it has always been most likely that the final blow to the Union would be English.