Northern Lights may dazzle the SNP, but our future lies South

S CRIBBLED in the margin of a very old Latin grammar, in a distant Continental monastery and in venerable Gaelic, run these words of a 9th-century scholar: ‘Bitter is the wind tonight, loosening the white tresses of the ocean – I fear not the fierce warriors of Norway, coursing on the sea…’

And they came wryly to my mind the other day as Nicola Sturgeon hosted the Arctic Circle Forum in Edinburgh – 350 government ministers, academics, policy makers and business leaders from those Scandic realms where they shoot their own dinner and are big on blankets and candles.

The First Minister enthused of our old and historic ties to Norway, to Iceland and the general local manor of Noggin the Nog, and proclaimed our continuing links to be ‘mutually beneficial’.

‘The north of Scotland is actually closer to the Arctic than it is to London,’ she gurgled. ‘While our principal focus will always be within the British Isles and Europe, increasingly, given the challenges we face of climate change, transportation and tourism, it makes sense for Scotland also to look north and collaborate with our Arctic neighbours as well.

‘Nations in the Arctic account for five of the top 11 countries in the UN Human Development Index. Not only that, but they are high achieving when it comes to social provision and economic innovation and growth…

‘We will continue to work with international partners, particularly our northern friends, to tackle the shared social and economic challenges we face.’

Our friends from the North then duly and at great length debated inclusive economies, global warming, transport links and sustainable forests. No doubt the half-time smorgasbord was a picture and one would love to think proceedings ended with a group hygge.

This was actually the home leg of last year’s Arctic Forum gig, when Miss Sturgeon jetted to Reykjavik, toting in her hand luggage none other than my own MP, Angus MacNeil, who managed to stammer a few apposite remarks in his best-memorised Icelandic.

And Miss Sturgeon further announced, on that handsacross-the-sea initiative, that she and Derek Mackay had somehow dug up £1million from the back of Scotland’s sofa for some token climatechange wheeze.

HER discovery – surprisingly late in life, one would think – that Shetland and other Highland chunks are nearer the Arctic than to SW1 would be engaging for an S1 geography class. (If with dangerous implications; Shetlanders might get the ruler out and discover they are closer to Norway than Edinburgh.)

It is not, though, of obvious relevance to the real world. Here on Lewis, I myself belong to a large island east of Canada but I would not look to Justin Trudeau to address the mounting complexities of Stornoway parking, or send in the Mounties to protect us from Sabbath shopping.

And what Miss Sturgeon ought to remember from her own Irvine schooldays is Scandinavian interest in our own little land was not, historically, benign.

I have to hold my hands up here: as a consequence of sustained Norse interest in the Outer Hebrides, my own DNA is about 95 per cent horned helmet. I am indubitably descended from friendly local skull-splitters. The word in Scottish Gaelic for the Vikings – na Lochlannaich, ‘the Loch Lurkers’ – doesn’t exactly suggest these people were the Waltons. The very sound of the word is pregnant with cunning, predation and rape.

In 795, the Vikings sacked Iona, then the one beacon of civilisation in western Europe. They attacked it again in 806. In 825 they killed the abbot.

What lingers in Hebridean consciousness isn’t so much the bloodshed as the bloodlust. Norse chroniclers of the era exult of their version of ‘social provision and economic growth’ as if they were scripting Game of Thrones on acid.

One Norse monarch is hailed joyously as a ‘destroyer of Scots’, after whose visits the Hebrides ‘ran with blood’.

There were later interventions by these Scandic entrepeneurs. As late as 1718, King Charles XII of Sweden was in serious talks with the Jacobites about invasion of Britain and overthrow of George I and his government.

These days are past now, as Nationalists like to sing, and in the past they must remain. But the SNP has long been in love with all things Nordic. In the 1960s they were vaunting the success of ‘socially democratic’ policies in Sweden, a term they actually used.

The sorrows of the Hillman car factory at Linwood were darkly contrasted with the glories of Saab and Volvo. Billy Wolfe, who then led the Nationalists, even visited Finland, happily vaunting the achievements of what was then little more than a cringing vassal of the Soviet Union.

THEy were at it again in the 1990s, talking up the ‘Nordic Model’ for a future, independent Scotland, and what passes for the Party’s intellectuals – as Mike Russell, Andrew Wilson and the late Stephen Maxwell could attest, the SNP has always been horrid to its clever men – have never let it go.

There are two simple explanations. In the late 1960s, the SNP hated being thought in the least nativist or narrow, and wanted some sort of international touchy-feelyness.

But its abhorrence of the Bomb ruled out America, our own sectarian tensions made amity with Ireland tricky, and mainstream Europe was not an option for a party which – as late as 1983 – abominated the Common Market.

The gentle snowy lands of cinnamon buns, Hans Christian Andersen and ‘Skol!’ were another matter. And there was a certain endearing inversion too. Scotland, looked at one way, is the northernmost, chilly, boggy and rain-lashed bit at the top of the British Isles.

Looked at another, it is the warmest, most fertile, most accessible, most southerly and indeed the second-largest realm in Scandinavia.

Sadly for such fur-rugged, pinewood-scented dreaming, Scotland by popular vote three autumns ago remains very much part of the United Kingdom, and only this summer deprived Nicola Sturgeon of 22 MSPs when it became evident there is a large part of ‘No’ she struggles to understand.

We remain in one polity with England, Wales and Northern Ireland and they account for four-fifths of all the goods and services we export.

The Irish, almost as interlocked with the British economy, grasp that fully, which is why the complexities of Brexit and its implications are the ongoing and utter priority of its government and because her Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, deals in reality.

By contrast in Scotland, we have a governing party still in 90-minute anyone-but-England delusion – commanded by a First Minister who doesn’t.