Quiet dignity of an RAF veteran and an elegy for a land of hope and glory

LAST week I interviewed a man who reminded me a lot of my grandfather. Arthur Reid, 96, is a Scotsman who joined the RAF when he was barely out of his teens. My grandfather, Fred Brocklebank, was an Englishman who did the same thing.

Soon they were bouncing Arthur Reid around air bases all over the United Kingdom. RAF Lossiemouth one minute, Foulsham in Norfolk the next, then off to Wales …

They did the same thing with my grandfather. That is how a Yorkshireman came to be stationed at RAF Leuchars in Fife and chatting up a couple of sisters one night at a dance in nearby St Andrews. That is how my father’s side of the family came about.

And they put signal officer Arthur Reid up in rickety planes that the Germans shot at. Sometimes he wondered if he would make it back to Blighty alive. He and my grandfather had that in common too.

I did not discuss politics or national identity with Mr Reid. The occasion was his first time in a plane of any kind since June 2, 1945, when he flew his last mission for the RAF – and the aircraft in which he returned to skies now peaceful and blue was a gloriously restored Spitfire.

But the scene I witnessed that day was quintessentially British. On the arm of the flying suit the Scottish RAF veteran wore was the Union Flag. It was there on the arm of his English pilot Matt Jones too. Although at least half a century must have separated them in age, the two had a terrific rapport. They looked like compatriots to me.

Later Mr Reid recalled lying on his back in a field of grass in Wales as the skies filled with British aircraft flying south to France for D-Day. I don’t suppose he or any of the men overhead were obsessing overmuch about their own constituent nation of the Union that day. When my grandfather talked about serving his country, the place he had in mind was Great Britain. I doubt if there was a single airman in the RAF who felt any differently.

How extraordinary, then, that men such as Mr Reid should live long enough to see the idea of Britishness so grievously undermined.

Days after his Spitfire flight, thousands gathered at Glasgow Green for BBC Scotland’s Proms in the Park, which links up via satellite to the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall.

The idea is to dip in and out of the London concert, doing our own thing when the orchestra down south is playing the stuff that doesn’t work for us up here – you know, big ‘English’ crowd-pleasers such as Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia.

The fact that neither piece of music is about England changes nothing. They celebrate Britishness and the only members of the Union who can still do that unapologetically, it seems, are the English.

Tartanised

Indeed, so accustomed are we to our opt-out culture where Scots must exist on a tartanised diet appropriate to our special case status, the idea of thousands of us gathering to belt out a full-throated Rule Britannia in the year 2017 is almost unimaginable.

The most potent symbol of our opt-out culture, of course, is the Scottish parliament, which sprang from the devolution referendum 20 years ago this week. You will remember it was supposed to shore up the Union by killing Scottish nationalism stone dead.

Well, 20 years on, the politics of national grievance is in even more robust health than it was in 1997. The ‘othering’ of those across the Border – voting in ‘immoral’ governments the Scots would not thole, dragging us out of Europe against our will – is seducing many more than the New Labour architects of devolution imagined too. The well-being of the notion of Britishness, on the other hand, is precarious at best. For the instinct to dilute it is now woven into the fabric of our politics. Why would the BBC so

obviously not subject Scots in a public park to Land of Hope and Glory? Because British patriotism in a country that has its own parliament, now governed by separatists, is a political matter. Only expressions of Scottish patriotism may pass as non-political today. Thus the British Broadcasting Corporation alienates both viewers and itself from its very name.

It was under a Unionist First Minister, Jack McConnell, that the Scottish parliament did its first real muscleflexing, introducing a smoking ban in public places from March 2006, a year ahead of similar legislation in England and Wales.

But, under SNP First Ministers, the whole point of flexing parliamentary muscles is to do it out of kilter with Westminster. The name of the game is posting as many reminders as possible that we do things differently up here because, after all, we are a different people with a different cultural identity – and if you don’t believe us just ask the BBC.

Thus, inevitably, Scotland must have different, better and more moral renewable energy targets than England. And, naturally, if Westminster sets a target of 2040 for ending the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles, Scotland’s target must be much earlier because that is better and more moral and, more to the point, how the game is played.

Which brings us to the decision now facing Nicola Sturgeon and her government on whether to create an even bigger gulf between what the English pay in income tax and what we more politically principled Scots do.

Will the First Minister worry that workers in one part of Britain are taking home more than those in another part of Britain for doing exactly the same job? Of course not. The more discrepancies she can inject into this hoary old construct we call Britain, the sooner it can be dismantled.

It is, if you think about it, a remarkable conceit. Not only are our extra taxes used to run departments such as education and transport more poorly than south of the Border, they also contribute to the erosion of the very national identity that we voted in a referendum to maintain.

In paying that little extra, we fund the tarmac on a road the SNP is building for its own purposes.

Only in military remembrances and in sport, it seems to me, do we still encounter the same unproblematic Britishness that survived well into my childhood in the 1970s.

Prowess

Once an Olympiad, most of us manage to celebrate the sporting prowess of the place named on our passports if it finishes high enough up the medal table. Every so often a British golfer negotiates himself or herself into the lead in a major and it feels good whether they are from Aberdeen or Aberystwyth.

And once every 70 years or so we have a British male tennis player good enough to win Wimbledon. By the time Andy Murray won it for the first time in 2013, I had spent much of my adult life watching the place my grandfather had fought for being undermined by smug men like the then First Minister Alex Salmond, sitting there in the Royal Box, reaching into his wife Moira’s handbag…

So when he pulled out a Saltire, photo-bombed the Prime Minister with it and tried to turn one of the most magical moments in British sport into a nauseatingly parochial Scottish one, I had no doubt that losing the referendum the following year was the destiny he richly deserved.

But, if we really do have a sense of the history of events so recent that men such as Arthur Reid are still around to tell the tale, then Britishness deserves much more attention than we give it.