Let's say goodbye to Britain

Sir Alastair Dunnett is one of the most senior figures of the post-war Scottish establishment. He was editor of 'The Scotsman' from 1956-1972. A staunch devolutionist from the 1960s onwards, here he recants, declaring for full-blown Scottish independence

If, as seems likely, John Major will shortly set out on his pre- election pilgrimage into the English constituencies, he will no doubt declare his loyalty to the United Kingdom, and the disasters that would follow if its concept were ever to be abandoned. He will preach abiding loyalty to this fallacy, but of course it is not a United Kingdom. It is a disunited kingdom, and it is falling apart with every month that passes.

I used to believe in Britain; in a United Kingdom that is a united kingdom. This is very far from being what we have now. It's "Anglo-this, Anglo- that" all the way. Nobody but the Scots ever uses the word British. If you ever hear anyone else talk of Britain he is either a politician who has to watch out for the votes, or a businessman who has to mollify the workers in his Scottish branch factory. Or he is a Scot, for we use the word doggedly in the belief that our neighbours will catch on. We are the only ones who are trying to make the British idea work. No Englishman in his right mind ever refers to Britain when the word England will do, and the average Englishman thinks that somewhere along the line in his nation's long and not ignoble history they took over Scotland as some sort of subject province.

In a way this is what it has turned out to be. The Act of Union is nearly 300 years old. It was a masterpiece of bribery and corruption. It was intended to set up a joint parliament of England and Scotland, but in no time at all it had become an incorporating union, with Westminster continuing as the English Parliament plus a proportion of elected Scots representatives who didn't get very far unless they appeared to endorse specifically, and implicitly, the centralising theories that hold that body together. The name of Scotland has also largely disappeared. This is an inexplicable thing to have happened to a country that was a nation longer than most; that was the basis of our present monarchy; where there were first spoken in all history words about freedom, democracy, independence, equality, the rights of people, and the dignity of Man made in the image of God and other matters of interest and importance to the human race; which is a founder member of Great Britain and a mother country of the Commonwealth; and which in its time has made, out of all proportion to its size and population, significant contributions to all the sciences, all the arts, all the philosophies, most of the sports, many of the innovations, and even a few of the decencies. Despite this, outside of Scotland and in the rest of the world, there is no Britain whatsoever.

"I am quite unable to account for this," Neil Gunn, our writer, once said. "I know that it exists as part of that age-long, and now nearly successful, drive to annihilate all vestiges of the Celt. Any effort on the part of any section - such as Ireland or Wales or Scotland - of the Celtic fringe to form itself into a nation is not merely opposed but bitterly resented, as if it were something in the nature of a betrayal of human progress."

This is the stage of thought that has now been reached by many Scots, it seems. This is what we have to come to. Dr Samuel Johnson, no great friend of the Scots, on his tour of the Hebrides had seen this danger and told one of the MacDonald chiefs: "Your sons will be tamed into insignificance by an English education."

In explanation of Samuel Johnson it has to be said that he came armed with his intellectual apparatus to denigrate and denounce any aspects of independent Scottish culture and styles. After all, he came from the metropolis of London still trembling with the terror they had lately endured when the men of the '45 Rising had nearly marched in on them and taken over.

As I travel around the world I hear no ready animosity expressed about Scotland in any of the countries of Europe, nor elsewhere. Nothing in the long sacrifice of our pioneering generations seems to have stored up ill will or given us the name of unreliable or dishonest. And it may well be that with all these Scots already in place about the world we could establish a fifth column of goodwill here at home to carry the flag, and give a new meaning to the name of the Commonwealth.

I have to assert the idea that on sheer grounds of efficiency something of this sort must be attempted soon. Britain is a badly run place, needing the decks cleared, and as I have said almost any system would be better than the one we have now. It has to be recognised that sentiments like this are popularly described, and dismissed, as nationalism. I occasionally meet a Scot who will tell me that nationalism is dangerous, leading to wars and strife and the deterioration of good relations between people, while he is himself an internationalist. When a man like that tells me he is an internationalist, I know he is searching for an excuse for having done nothing for Scotland. These internationalists might do well to have a close look at the international situation that exists on their own border. Almost the only Scottish problem is England.

The English are truly a remarkable people. They are the supreme nationalists and their nationalism is of the most dangerous character because they do not come to it by any intellectual nor patriotic conclusion. It is already there, instinctively, in their bloodstream. Everything that is English is right and anything else is a foreign aberration, one of God's blunders, to be treated with amused tolerance or implacable hostility. Fate deals with them in a kindly way. If there is any luck going they have it. They have put about the notion that they are the masters of compromise. But if anything ever comes up that they have decided is their right, they will not yield. One of the great attitudes of mind, which has prevented Scotland for 1,000 years from being utterly engulfed by their flood is this: that the Scots are the only people in the world who have never underrated the English. In any proper system of government in the small British Islands, they would be natural and friendly allies and we could do great things together. But when the Act of Union comes at last to be rewritten, it will have to be a cautious and safeguarded partnership, for they take their own world with them wherever they go and their own set of rules which they want others to adhere to, no matter what has gone before.

This must have greatly puzzled Edward Heath, who, in the first, abortive attempt to enter the Common market, was supported by The Scotsman, which pushed hard for a European presence in the EEC, campaigning to have Britain in at the time the Treaty of Rome was being written. When Britain eventually decided to join, they thought the rules should be changed to accommodate them, although the thing was already a going concern. Heath also, in discussion with some of us, formulated the ideal of a separate legislative and parliamentary assembly for Scotland which his party adopted and then mutilated. Edward Heath seems to have sulked out of British politics, but his considerable contribution as our only major constitutional reformer of the 20th century is still to be assessed.

My paper, The Scotsman, was the first to promote devolution - which all Scottish papers have since taken up. We urged that we should go into Europe at the time of the Treaty of Rome, and help to shape it. Instead, the UK backed away and when, at last, the British wanted in, they wanted the rules altered to suit them, whereas the thing was by this time a going concern. And the Tories are still at it, trying for late changes. For myself I have now gone far beyond the modest devolution case, and am for independence or nothing.

For the present, we want clear of England. The English have stirred up animosity for themselves everywhere. They have offended and oppressed most of the countries of the world and especially those of Europe. Their enemies are now closing in. The Spanish fishing menace is one of the most recent; the beef threat is another. Germany and France are both out to clobber them. Even Ireland, whose memories go back far beyond Cromwell to the more recent Black and Tans. Bruton and company will turn and show their teeth one day soon. The sooner we get away from them and into independence the better.

We should be agreeing, as is repeatedly said at the dispatch box and elsewhere, that the economy is growing, the unemployment figures are coming down, the export trade is increasing, the inflation figures are being held, and all the rest. The preposterous aspect is that the Tories take all the credit for these achievements. The opposite is the case. They are all the triumphant results of increasing efforts by modest entrepreneurs, in spite of higher taxes, VAT, and the quangos the Government has lumbered them with.

The path to independence is straight ahead. With a likely Labour government in office after the general election, some sort of parliament or assembly should be soon in place. This is only the first step on the road to "the break-up of the United Kingdom". That is the intention. It will break up, and high time too. There will be opposition squeaks and lamentations that Scotland in independence will find disaster and bankruptcy. This has long since been repudiated. Eminent accountants, academics, and economics realists, of whom we have more than our fair share, have proved that, far from being a subsidised nation within the UK, Scotland more than pays her way.

It is a tribute to the resilience of the Scottish economy that - after 16 years of Tory destruction, and even with the effect of discretionary public expenditure, such as defence and other unidentified spending, in favour of the south of England - Scotland is still able to generate a budget surplus relative to the UK as a whole.

Independent Scotland will be welcomed among the small nations of Europe, many of them recently created and all of them prosperous. The Republic of Ireland is booming, and is able by its taxation attractions to bring foreign investment in to the country. They have two score or more of foreign embassies in Dublin, so enhancing its capital status.

In our case the Treaty of Union of 1707 will have long since been laid aside. But there will no doubt be a sentiment that a diplomatic arrangement with our large neighbour might be a good idea, although on equal terms this time. There might even be justification for the setting up of a partnership to share convenient services and facilities. In the past we have been dragged in to imperial adventures without having any sort of say in the decision-making. This role is at an end. We shall go in to whatever it is on Scottish terms, and strictly for the convenience of Scotland and her people. Once England and Westminster have grasped that they are no longer our bosses, much good might come of such an arrangement.