Why Scots Should Rule Scotland. Alasdair Gray

months ago and found it a muddle of unconnected historical details and personal anecdotes with a few lucid passages and at least one piece of nonsense – Chapter Four spoke of The Protestant Scottish Conscience (or Soul) as if it was a predictable thing many people had, though even influenza takes different forms in different bodies. The only excuse was that I had dictated the pamphlet aloud instead of writing by hand. The reviewers’ kindness had been the condescension instinctively given to the art of children or half-wits.

      The pamphlet you now read is therefore not a revised version of the first. It is completely rewritten, though it retains some of the old lucid passages. I have also kept the voice of my publisher, who asked down-to-earth questions when I lost myself in too many details or rhetorical flights. The year of publication is now part of the title because the last chapter fails to bring the book quite up to date, and any version printed after 1997 will be enlarged to make it that.

      I also include a story based on bad dreams which came while brooding on the state of Scotland today. Good luck to critics who think the whole pamphlet is fiction. It may still provoke intelligent thought.

      I like most of England. I say so because the 1992 pamphlet made one English reader (who otherwise liked my writing) ask why I hated it. He either believed that only hatred can explain a Scottish wish for home rule, or that my historical account of England showed scorn of it. But I nowhere condemn or praise whole nations, and am certainly not pleased with my own.

      Some Scots hate England, of course. Their frame of mind is diagnosed by Irvine Welsh in a short story called “Eurotrash”. The narrator meets a Dutchman who denounces Britain saying:

       We Dutch went to Africa. You British oppressed us. You put us into concentration camps. It was you people who invented the concentration camp, not the Nazis. You taught them that, like you taught them genocide. You were far more effective at that with the Maoris in New Zealand than Hitler was with the Jews. I’m not condoning what the Boers are doing in South Africa. No way. Never. But you British put the hatred in their hearts, made them harsh. Oppression breeds oppression, not resolution.

      Says the narrator:

       I felt a surge of anger rise in me. I was almost tempted to go into a spiel about how I was Scottish, not British, and that the Scots were the last oppressed colony of the British Empire. I don’t really believe it, though; the Scots oppress themselves by their obsession with the English which breeds the negatives of hatred, fear, servility, contempt and dependency.

      That unhealthy state of mind will always occur while most Scottish opinion has no influence on how Scots are ruled. But it is not my state of mind.

      1

      THE GROUND OF ARGUMENT

      READERS WHO LIVE in Scotland but were born elsewhere may feel threatened by the title of this pamphlet; I must therefor explain that by Scots I mean everyone in Scotland who is able to vote. This definition excludes a multitude who live and vote abroad yet are Scottish by birth or ancestry, yet includes many who feel thoroughly English yet manage Scottish farms, hotels, businesses, industries and national institutions. It includes second or third generation half-breeds like me whose parents or parents’ parents were English, Irish, Chinese, Indian, Polish, Italian and Russian Jewish. It includes seventy-two members of parliament who mainly live and work in London and some absentee landlords who occasionally visit ancestral Scottish estates to shoot, hold family parties and vote. This book is aimed at all voters north of the Solway–Tweed boundary because, whether born here or recently arrived, it is they who should elect the government of Scotland. But they don’t.

      I argue that by being in Scotland you deserve a government as distinct from England as Portugal from Spain, Austria from Germany, Switzerland from the four nations surrounding her. My argument is not based on differences of race, religion or language but geology. Landscape is what defines the most lasting nations. The big rice-growing plain of eastern Asia explains why the Chinese nation is the largest, most peopled and most ancient. Another highly self-centred nation was made possible by successive layers of limestone, chalk and clay forming a saucer of land with Paris in the middle. The Baltic Sea explains why such close neighbours as Norway, Sweden and Denmark have different governments though similar languages and populations which, if united, would be less than two fifths of England’s.

      But no natural barrier can contain human curiosity, greed and desperation, so invasions and migrations have kept national boundaries expanding and contracting like concertinas. Roman geographers were first to map two big islands they called Britannia. They saw that, like Gaul, these were naturally divided into three parts which they named Albion, Caledonia, Hibernia. Albion was the south part of the biggest island: very woody and marshy yet offering few natural barriers to the march of the Roman legions. The tribes of Albion combined to repel the legions and were defeated. South Britain got planted over by Roman camps joined to each other by well-built roads and to Londinium, Britain’s first capital city. The biggest camps were sited in the most fertile places and at the best places to bridge the rivers. They grew to be the centres of towns which thrive to this day: Bath, York, Lincoln, Carlisle and every city whose name ends in chester or caster. The geography which helped the Roman occupation explains why the English Catholic and Protestant Churches have been officially ruled from Canterbury since AD 596; why the English state has been ruled from London since 1066, and has two ancient universities in what were market towns near the capital.

      The legions later marched into Caledonia. The Pictish tribes here also combined to repel them and were defeated, but Caledonia was hard to keep and expensive to administer. Firths, sea lochs, chains of high moorlands and mountains made north Britain like a cluster of big islands jammed together in the east and coming apart in the west. Soil which could be cultivated lay in districts cut off from each other. The natives, though defeated, had secure wildernesses from which to counterattack. As Edward Gibbon put it:

       The native Caledonians preserved their wild independence for which they were not less indebted to their poverty than their valour. Their incursions were frequently repelled and chastised, but they were never subdued. The masters of the fairest and most wealthy climates of the globe, turned with contempt from gloomy hills assailed by the winter tempest, from lakes concealed in a blue mist, and from cold and lonely heaths, over which the deer of the forest were chased by naked barbarians.

      The geography which helped to repel Rome explains why the Scottish Church, Catholic and Protestant, had no locally based archbishop or single official to command it; why Scotland had no single capital city before James VI emigrated to London in 1605, but four ancient universities in very different cathedral towns.

      Gibbon says the Romans calculated the number of legions and ships they would need to conquer Hibernia but decided conquest there would also be too much trouble. The only part of that island convenient to the British mainland was the north-east corner nearly touching Caledonia. This explains why the only part of Hibernia now belonging to mainland Britain is the north-east corner, despite seven centuries of trying to subdue the whole island by frequent doses of indiscriminate massacre. The strangest thing about Hibernia is that Christianity took root here outside the Roman enslavement system and produced a highly literate monastic culture among small tribal kingdoms. The Hibernian tribes were called Scots in those days. Caledonia belonged to the Picts, though Norwegians sometimes occupied her northern and western shores.

      It sometimes seems that every nation in Europe has had a spell of bossing others in defiance of natural boundaries, yet every empire is at last undone by the appetite for home rule and inability to rule ourselves well while bossing neighbours or foreigners. The Roman legions were returned to Italy in AD 404 because their slave-based empire was being attacked by nomadic tribes out of northern Asia. The Britons of Albion were almost immediately raided by Scots from the west, Picts from the north and German pirates from the east. Am I boring you?

      PUBLISHER: (apologetically) The reader may be wondering how this ancient history helps the argument. You began by saying Scotland’s geology – the lie of the land – made her a different nation.

      AUTHOR: