God knows, the Scots have every right to be fed up with the English. But their big problem is their own sense of victimhood
FOR much of the month past, I have been driving, walking and wading across the Scottish Highlands, scene of most of the happiest holidays of my life. I love Edinburgh and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. I once wrote a pretty bad but enthusiastic biography of Montrose, the Scottish royalists’ great general in the 17th-century civil war. I am English to the core, but Scotland has a deep place in my heart.
Thus, I feel more apprehension than most of my countrymen about the outcome of next month’s independence referendum.
Even though polls suggest that a majority of Scots will say ‘No Thanks’; even though, should nationalist leader Alex Salmond get his way, he can detach only eight per cent of this island’s inhabitants, albeit a larger portion of its natural beauty, the wounds of such a divorce would cut deeper into the United Kingdom than mere numbers indicate.
These last weeks, the argument has become feverish — and jittery — with a poll for the Scottish Daily Mail yesterday showing that the ‘No’ campaign’s lead had been cut by eight points (now 53 per cent to 47 per cent) since the first TV debate three weeks ago.
Meanwhile, the Edinburgh Festival has been powerfully independence-flavoured. Ever more posters for both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns colour streets and fields.
In Monday’s BBC TV debate, Salmond performed notably better than Alistair Darling, chief barker for the Unionists. Amazing uncertainty persists about the outcome, because so many Scots are still making up their minds.
A thoughtful acquaintance said to me in Angus this week: ‘For my own sake, I should vote No. But should I vote Yes, for the sake of my children and grandchildren? I’m nae sure.’
He recognises that an independent Scotland would face a bleak and uncertain short-term future. But he agonises about whether, half a century hence, a separate nation might regain a self-respect and significance in the eyes of the world, which today many of its people feel they have lost.
Before embarking on a recital of why I hope Scots will vote No on September 18, let us acknowledge some real reasons for them to feel disaffected, 307 years after the abolition of their parliament.
The English should plead guilty to historic insensitivity to Scottish pride; to a readiness reflexively to make Caledonians do like us.
A distinguished historian, Michael Fry, argues that from late-Victorian times onwards, Scotland has been increasingly ‘suffocated by the imposition of British norms’. Far too many Westminster governments have treated it as a mere region, rather than as a nation.
TWO centuries ago the novelist Sir Walter Scott, himself a passionate Unionist, warned a British government: ‘ If you unscotch us, you will find us damned mischievous Englishmen.’ Four centuries of a shared crown have left the Scots perplexed about their own identity, and what they should do about who they think they are.
The Scottish people have become far more socialistic than their English counterparts. Especially in the Central Belt, many voters want high-tax, highpublic spending governance. If this is their choice, however rash we believe it to be, why should they not make it?
From an English viewpoint, nationalism has poisoned relations between the two nations, as Salmond and his followers blame every Scottish misfortune on injustices inflicted by London, while many southerners are sick of seeing a disproportionate share of taxes diverted north, with scant thanks from their neighbours.
Though Labour’s Alistair Darling heads the No campaign, Salmond has focused his attack on the Tories, who are widely loathed by his compatriots.
One of their most cherished myths is that Thatcher, rather than historical forces, was responsible for the country’s late 20thcentury de-industrialisation. ‘That woman tried to destroy Scotland,’ rosemary Brown, an elderly Scot, asserted last week.
Alex Salmond, a cheeky chappy out of old-time musical hall, is an impressively fluent peddler of nonsense. This week he casually attributed to English misgovernment a claim that disabled people have borne the brunt of alleged NHS cuts; the spread of food banks; and a supposed threat to privatise the Health Service.
He says: ‘ If we are better together, why are we not better together already?’
Yet Salmond is standard-bearer for a party which has built its following on often imagined past grievances rather than realistic hopes. He fosters a Scotland which long ago lost its 19thcentury stature as a crucible of industry, entrepreneurship and intellectual achievement, becoming instead a dependency culture with one of the largest public sector payrolls in Europe.
Two centuries ago, coal, steel, energy and genius built hundreds of fortunes and made the names of Scottish soldiers, engineers, writers and traders ring around the world.
Did you know that the Dundee marmalade industry was invented by Janet Keiller, wife of a merchant who bought a cargo of bitter Seville oranges from a Spanish ship in 1797?
Dundee’s jute weavers employed 30,000 people. The Glasgow area produced one-fifth of all Britain’s steel, half its ships’ engine horsepower, one-third of locomotives and most of its sewing machines.
Scotland spawned such great manufacturing, trading and shipping names as Coats, Jardine Matheson and Cunard.
The historian Michael Fry noted in a recent study of its 19th- century triumphs that ‘Scotland has never again found better ideals’, but after 1918, ‘the nation began to insulate itself from global progress’.
To me, the hole at the heart of
the Darling-Salmond debates, and indeed of the whole campaign, has been lack of discussion about how an independent Scotland would earn its living. Instead, there has been merely argument about its currency, and how public money should be spent.
Salmond promises an end of English- imposed austerity; postponement of a rise in the pensionable age; more cash for the NHS; repeal of the Tory ‘Bedroom Tax’; an increased winter fuel allowance for pensioners.
He offers a much clearer vision of what an independent Scotland will not be — cleansed of British nuclear weapons, for instance — than of how it will pay its bills.
The Nationalists have waged a dirty campaign, fraught with deceits. Sir Peter Housden, Scotland’s top civil servant, stands accused of allowing the Edinburgh government machine to become an arm of the Yes lobby, with its website, press advertising and a mass of literature produced at taxpayers’ expense.
There has been intimidation and blackmail of Scottish business to say ‘Yes’, or at least to keep silence, on pain of losing government contracts.
The Scottish CBI was obliged to withdraw its early declaration of opposition to independence. Many prominent Scottish figures have found it prudent to stifle any expression of dissent from the bullying Nationalists.
Nowhere, beyond talking up Scotland’s oil as if the reserves rivalled Saudi Arabia’s, has Salmond explained how he would fund his promised socialist paradise. An avowed statist, he shows scant interest in distasteful capitalist profitmaking activity.
Salmond repeatedly asserted in Monday’s TV debate ‘we are a rich nation’. This is true by comparison with, say, Poland — but not with England.
The Treasury believes that in its first year, an independent Scotland would be obliged to take on £7.5 billion of additional debt — £1,400 for every man, woman and child.
Ireland’s example has always been a beacon to Scottish nationalists. Yet if the modern Irish state has achieved maturity, its transition from poverty required several generations after independence in 1922.
DUBLIN governments squandered much of their early energies on gesture politics: getting rid of the British naval presence and breaking up big landholdings.
An independent Scotland would do likewise, though its Highland wildernesses have no prospect of viability save as playgrounds for rich fieldsportsmen who provide irreplaceable employment.
Ireland achieved economic liftoff in the 1980s only thanks to huge cash injections from the Eu, such as would not be available to Scotland.
Many of the prominent Scots who favour independence, such as Sir Sean Connery, choose not to live and pay tax in the land of their birth. There is little reason to suppose a Salmond government could halt a chronic skills drain, especially if it raises personal taxes. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, is probably right when he says that entering the euro would be an independent Scotland’s ‘ least bad’ currency option, since it could not credibly continue using the pound.
But if Salmond adopted that option, Scotland would be caught in the same trap as Greece or Spain, harnessed to European austerity policies heedless of the wishes of the Edinburgh parliament.
The entire ‘Yes’ campaign has been about Salmond, Salmond, Salmond, because scarcely another Nationalist MSP rises above parish council standard.
Darling is a limp- wristed advocate for the union, but he made a telling point this week when he declared that his own priority is to secure what is best for Scottish people, while Salmond’s is to create an independent state, heedless of the huge risks.
Most economists believe that Scotland’s future would be bleak as a socialistic little state at the geographical extremity of Europe. Most of its financial services industry would migrate south: it was Walter Scott, again, who wrote ruefully in 1831 that ‘london licks the butter off our bread, by opening a better market for ambition’.
This would remain as true today, and in an independent Scotland, as it did in Scott’s time. Perhaps even more crucially, oil is a shrinking asset, which renders absurd Salmond’s comparisons of his country with Norway. If the Noes prevail on September 18, the Scottish parliament will almost certainly gain increased taxing and spending powers anyway.
That may be no bad thing. At present, the Nationalists can promise their followers the moon without being asked to contribute a penny piece to the cost of getting there.
Over the next generation, if Scottish governments are forced to account to voters for the cost of — for instance — excusing students from tuition fees, minds could be concentrated wonderfully. The Nationalists could become obliged to pursue fiscally responsible policies, as today they are not.
Democracy can only function where fulfilment of expensive promises imposes on voters real cash costs.
If Scotland votes for independence on Thursday fortnight, some English people might be tempted to mutter ‘good riddance’. They would be wrong. Apart, both our countries would be diminished by more than the separation of five million people from the other fifty-five.
The French, for instance, have always enthused about a UK break-up, because they believe — probably rightly — that England alone would cut a lesser figure on the world stage.
EQUALLY disturbing is the prospect that the Westminster government, whose energies should be fixed on the huge issues facing our nation — the economy, education, Europe — would be almost paralysed through the years ahead by battles about the terms of Scottish separation: the kilted tail would wag the dog.
last week Gus O’Donnell, Tony Blair’s former Cabinet secretary, foolishly accused the Cameron government of adopting a ‘head in the sand’ attitude, by refusing to plan ahead for possible Scottish separation.
As a former civil servant, O’Donnell should have kept his mouth shut. And as a supposedly intelligent man, he should recognise that such advance planning in Whitehall would feed panic and allegations of defeatism against the Westminster government.
Alex Salmond proclaimed this week that a fortnight from Thursday, ‘we can take Scottish affairs back into Scottish hands . . . We can create a fairer society . . .This is our time and our moment’.
The second-worst outcome of this referendum would be a narrow win for the Noes. Salmond would seize upon this as a mandate to start an immediate campaign for a new vote to get the result he wants.
I am optimistic enough to believe that the Noes will secure a clear majority. Such an outcome should lay to rest for a generation the spectre of a break-up of the UK.
Salmond is not a bad man, merely a fantasist. He refuses to accept that a resurgence of Scotland’s historic genius demands not a breach with Westminster, but instead a new mindset from its own people.
The English should offer Scots our enthusiastic support to break free from the victim culture they have embraced for so long. The union needs to go forward in a spirit of real partnership, rather than of Scottish subjection.
What, however, the English must not be blackmailed or bludgeoned into doing, amid inevitable bitterness after a No vote, is writing open cheques to fund a wildly extravagant Socialist vision. If the Scots want this, they must pay for it themselves.
It is time for them to address the harsh realities of the 21st century, in place of the tartan fairytale with which Alex Salmond has beguiled too many for too long.