Who Smashed the Union? It wasn't me

Here and elsewhere some people have attacked my position on Scotland as some sort of betrayal. I can’t really see why. I am not the one who has hollowed out the Union over many decades.

 

Others must take the responsibility for the major changes which have pretty much destroyed Scottish Unionism (once a very powerful force, and the most powerful political trend in Scotland until the 1970s).

 

I would list these changes as follows:

 

The more or less total collapse of Calvinist Christianity is Scotland’s dominant belief.

 

Britain’s decision, if such it was, to abandon its post-Reformation isolation from the Roman Catholic and statist European continent – this is doubly significant, as Scotland had always (until Union) been viewed as the Continent’s easiest back door into England, a door which was bolted and barred by Union.

 

The demolition of Scotland’s mining and manufacturing industries ( again, in my view, a consequence of the European Union, which stopped Britain from protecting its own industries against continental competition, and which inaugurated a general slide of economic power in a Southerly and easterly direction).

 

Anyone who knew pre-1970 Scotland would be astonished by the place as it is now, transformed utterly from the stern, dark, workful and (very well-educated place) it was. (The destruction of the Academies -the Scottish equivalent of Grammar Schools) came at about the same time.

 

The loss of these facts and ideas left a great gap, and Nationalism has filled it. There are interesting reasons for that, one of them being the special fury with which deindustrialisation was visited on Scotland, the other being the attractive success of several smaller European nations especially since 1989 – when the end of the Cold War meant we no longer had to huddle together for warmth.

 

By the way, before we move on from this part of the argument, I’d like to mention a curious anomaly that has never caused any trouble up till now. We’re told that the Queen would have difficulty being Queen of a separate Scotland. I’m, not sure why this should be. If you look carefully at the symbols of national authority in Scotland, such as police badges and postboxes, you’ll find they have long featured the Crown of Scotland, distinctly different from the Crown of St Edward which occupies the same places in England and Wales. What’s more, when the Queen goes to church in Crathie, she is a Calvinist Presbyterian, like the rest of the Church of Scotland. When she does so at Sandringham, she is an Anglican, who is a good deal vaguer about the doctrines of predestination and the rest on which the Scottish Kirk is admirably, if sternly clear. It would be rude to as Her Majesty *how* she copes with this shifting allegiance, but she seems to manage quite well.

 

As I was born in Malta GC, when it was part of the Empire, first came to this country as a squalling baby, and was soon afterwards carted off to a Naval married quarter in Rosyth, near Dunfermline in Fife,  my first conscious memories of these islands are very Scottish – the lovely coast of Fife, the steepled steel-grey skyline of Dunfermline itself,  the ruins of the Abbey, distant prospects of the Dollar Mountains and of what I think were then the ruins of Fordell Castle against the sunset, the glories of Edinburgh,  the thrilling cold of the winters, the milk frozen so hard on the doorstep that it had pushed its way out of the bottle, with the foil cap sitting on top, and the Scottish voices that to this day seem to speak of reassurance and quiet competence.

 

I wept when we had to leave, peering out of the sleeper at the Firth of Forth at dusk, as our southbound sleeper steamed across the great bridge which still thrills me every time I see it. There was no horrible road bridge alongside it in those days. Queensferry still *was* a ferry. I pestered my parents (who had no power over the matter, which was firmly decided by the Lords of the Admiralty) to take us back, and it took me quite a while to appreciate the different beauties of Dartmoor and the South Downs. A few years ago I was haranguing a literary festival in Edinburgh and had time to take a train across the Firth to Dunfermline and Rosyth.

 

Without a map, using a cat-like instinct I didn’t know I possessed,  I managed to find my way to the road I had left more than 50 years before, aged four, and to the small recreation ground from which you can still see the enormous cranes of Rosyth dockyard. I felt, as one does on such journey, like a ghost.

 

So I might just care about it more than a lot of English people. But so what?

 

Well, all I ask is that those who want to contest my position accept that it is genuine. I had felt increasingly furious at the scaremongering of the ‘Yes’ campaign for some months. It seemed to me to be embarrassingly similar to the sort of tripe that I recalled from the contest over Britain joining the Euro. All that was lacking was the usual letter in the FT from some Japanese car manufacturers saying that we would all be doomed if we didn’t vote ‘yes’, but that, presumably, is because there are no Japanese car factories in Scotland.

 

Now, I’m well aware ( and have written here very recently (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/09/could-alex-salmond-accidentally-liberate-england-.html ) that the option of complete independence is simply not available to Scots. I do wish people would check the archives a bit before offering me finger-wagging lectures about what I haven’t said or don’t grasp.

 

And if this is so, then surely there is a strong argument for England taking advantage of the unintended consequence of this –namely the departure from the UK of a large chunk of the pro-EU vote. If I’m right about how well England would do outside the EU, it’s possible to envisage an Act of Reunion, perhaps 50 years hence, when Scotland tires of being a province in Germany’s liberal empire, and sees who was really to blame for so many of its post-1970 woes.

 

I am also pretty sure that the Tory High Command want Scotland to leave, so as to save themselves, but also know they must never admit it.  I was struck that Mr Cameron said during his recent lachrymose and profane visit to Scotland that he put country before party.  It would be pretty much the first time he had done this, if so  - but who had accused him of doing the opposite?  Oddly enough, nobody had (unless you count me), so what voice was he seeking to still by making this declaration?

 

I was also struck by the hilarious statement by Ruth Davidson, the interesting leader of the Scottish Tories (a hopeless rump which survives at Holyrood despite having no visible purpose, a bit as if there were a small party of Unionists in the Dublin Dail). She said that her party was most unlikely to win the next election, which is perfectly true, and what I have been saying for years. But she said it to discouraging people from voting ‘Yes’ on the grounds that voting ‘No’ might expose Scotland to another Tory government.

 

I cannot think of any party leader who has ever made a virtue out of the fact that her own party is unlikely to win the next general election. But full marks for candour.

Mr McMullen asks why the political class are defending the Union if they don’t love it. My article explains this quite clearly They fear that Scottish independence threatens them personally, or their parties. In fact, with  bit more space, I would go further. They fear that a Scottish secession from England might finally upset the thought-free inertia which has kept these dead parties in being long after they ceased to have any real purpose.  A ‘Yes’ vote on Thursday could have incalculable consequences for many settled institutions.  When what seem to be settled facts turn out to be unsettled after all, even the thoughtless must think. As the Foreign office spokesman said on the day of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ‘All the isms are now wasms’.

 

I thought the comment which shone out in its clarity of understanding came from ‘Jonathan’. I know he took issue with me on some other aspects of the question but he grasps why scare stories won’t do as a counter to a desire for national self-determination.

 

What many Scots want (and, as I note and understand, what they will not get) is a goal which is so desirable that they would willingly make actual material sacrifices for it. To oppose such a cause, you must have true passions of your own, desires and beliefs for which you too might be willing to make sacrifices. The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.  

 

He wrote: ‘As an Israeli, I am baffled by the whole discussion surrounding this referendum. It seems to revolve almost exclusively around finances. I always thought that independence is about, well, being independent. If I were employing the same reasoning voters in this referendum are supposed to employ, I would have never left the spacious apartment of my parents and gone off to live on my own (in a much less nice abode).

 

Mr Hayes suggests ‘Perhaps the Hated Peter Hitchens is using his unpopularity with socialists to canvas for a no vote?’ He voices a thought which had certainly crossed my mind. My own purely material interest in the vote is centred on the fact that a ‘yes’ verdict might save the Tory Party, a result I’d hate, as an Englishman, a Cornishman and a British subject, in fact as a human being.   But such Machiavellian ploys seldom work. One thing I am sure of, that the pleadings of English conservatives will have little effect on the decisions of Scots.