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Yes, yes. But give Scotland some peace to hear itself think

Neal Ascherson
Saturday 30 August 1997 23:02 BST
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I am writing about two grandmothers, both widows, who have seen the worst of the 20th century pass and now live a few miles apart in the West Highlands of Scotland.

Each lives alone, determined to stay independent as long as she can. Each tries to keep independent in mind as well as body, and not to fall victim to television's view of the world - the trap which always threatens to engulf the old and lonely.

So both, in order to outwit the box, question every visitor about the big matters of the day. This weekend, the referendum on a Scottish parliament is less than a fortnight away, so this is the anxiety which they lay before friend, relation or stranger: how should I vote, Yes or No? Television blares at them that it is all in the bag for a double Yes. But the two women instinctively detest that voice; brassy media people in Glasgow are trying to bounce them out of their right to make up their own minds.

They ask you what you think, but very soon you are hearing what they think. Their opinions are quite different. But both opinions, coming from two comfortably off women who have always avoided party-political commitments, are startling.

The first grandmother said: "We were perfectly happy to be part of the British Empire. But we don't particularly want to be a province of England." She had some doubts about a Scottish parliament, fearing especially that - in spite of proportional representation - it would be dominated by bone-headed ex-Labour councillors from Glasgow. But visiting England, she said, always exposed her to such arrogant and ignorant opinions about her country that she would come back "almost feeling like a Nat!" Here, in short, was somebody trying to reconcile the possibility of voting Yes with her own staunch royalism and her loyalty to the idea of a United Kingdom.

The second grandmother, in her nineties, said: "I don't want Scotland to lose her dignity!" Then she said something that flies in the face of received opinion. A Scottish parliament would make Scotland more English. She was therefore going to vote No.

More English? How could a parliament of its own possibly fail to make Scotland more Scottish? She explained her paradox. The bane of her life was the growth of local bureaucracy, the proliferation of "self-important little men in blue suits" who came from the cities to make a career in remote areas like this. Such people, who would inevitably dominate a Scottish parliament, brought a suburban conformism and political correctness which was made in England rather than Scotland.

They enforced on crofters in the inner Hebrides regulations on social work and "care for the environment" which had originally been designed for Godalming or Knutsford and then applied to Kilmarnock or Bathgate. In a country ruled by those blue suits, all the old ways which made Scotland Scottish would be wiped away as "inappropriate".

Utterly opposite as they seem, both opinions are about preserving a Scotland whose identity has been distinct but which is now held to be in danger of obliteration. Both women, without quite formulating the thought, assume that Scotland has some sort of right within the United Kingdom to secure that identity - in one case, by altering the terms of the Union, and in the other by rejecting a "scheme for Scotland" offered by a London government.

Neither lady would like to be called a "Nationalist". Independence seems to them a shocking idea. They love and admire the Queen, and, after living through two world wars, the flag in their hearts is the Union Jack. And yet "nationalist" with a small "n" is what they almost are.

The first grandmother might be called a liberal nationalist: she thinks a parliament might make things better if "the right sort of people" get into it. The other is a much rarer species. It's easy to call her argument perverse or eccentric, but it is neither. This is a position with a history. She is a true conservative nationalist: somebody who has come to suspect that all change, and especially reforming democratic change, is a foreign import which can only dilute the essence of her dear old nation.

Sir Walter Scott, as a Scottish Tory patriot, took much the same view. In the 1820s, the Scottish Whigs were importing every kind of legal and institutional reform from England. For Scott, this was unbearable. On one occasion he burst into tears on the Mound in Edinburgh at the thought of how changes to Scots law were sweeping away all that had given his country its special character in history, and he fought against the 1832 Reform Bill to the bitter end. He believed in the Union, all the same, in a sulky sort of way: "We had better remain in union with England, even at the risk of becoming a subordinate species of Northumberland... than remedy ourselves by even hinting the possibility of a rupture."

What Scott wanted was really an impossible, childish dream. He imagined a Union which guaranteed that nothing in Scotland would change. But the whole point of the Union with England, as its supporters argued in 1707 and the Whigs argued a century later against Walter Scott, was precisely that it did open Scotland to change. In our own times, the Scottish National Party (SNP) are more like the Whigs than like Scott. They also think that their country can develop only if it is part of a Union - except that they believe that the European Union will do the job better than the United Kingdom.

So far, the referendum campaign in Scotland has been very boring. This is because none of the Yes or No campaigners says things half as interesting as the two grandmothers. The media keep up a dull, oppressive din of applause for the Double Yes, implying that anyone with serious doubts is too stupid to recognise a lost cause when he or she sees one. The Yes, Yes campaign has achieved the amazing feat of gathering Labour, Lib Dems and SNP on one platform, but spends more energy scolding its opponents than enlightening the undecided about the new landscapes of Home Rule. The "Think Twice" No campaign tries to make Scottish flesh creep with time-worn bogeys, threatening the spectre of higher taxes, the "cesspool" of anti-English resentment which the parliament will supposedly create, and the Caledonian Desert left when all businesses have fled south. But nobody seems much impressed.

The Scottish voters have to make sense of this, and I think they will. Over the last 20 years they have been much abused as cowards ("fearties") and "90-minute patriots" for their reluctance to go decisively for devolution. But I feel more sympathy than I used to. The Scottish parliament plan is sensible enough, but the referendum campaign does not allow for opinions which don't fit into simple binary Yes/No. Many people, for instance, want a parliament but can't take seriously Labour assurances that it will strengthen the Union. Others suspect that a self-governing Scotland within the UK will change in ways they do not fancy and be led by people they do not trust - but would prefer to vote Yes than to align themselves with the Tories.

Hesitating over these choices is mature, not cowardly. Opinion polls suggest that the Scots will vote Yes, probably for both parliament and tax powers - but for their own peculiar reasons rather than those offered by campaigners. They want change. Will that make their country "less Scottish", as one of the grandmothers fears? Only on the absurd premise that Scottishness is something inhuman and changeless, a golden mask rather than a growing body. On 11 September, the Scots will take all their doubts and ironies to the polls and vote for an unrecognisable future of their very own.

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