In 2014 the Saltire Society invited journalist, critic and writer Allan Massie and the novelist William McIlvanney to put the case for and against Scottish Independence. Massie took on the case against. We remain proud of this discussion which demonstrated that responsible and courteous debate is possible and indeed essential in circumstances of strong feeling. Here we look back at Allan Massie’s piece. You can read William McIlvanney’s here.
‘Nevertheless’
Allan Massie
In his History of Scottish Literature the poet and critic Maurice Lindsay once wrote that after The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark’s novels belonged to English rather than Scottish literature. I remember saying that we didn’t have so many good novelists that we could spare her. This was a somewhat frivolous response, but then I thought Lindsay’s judgement frivolous itself. Neither of Muriel Spark’s parents was Scottish, but she was born and brought up in Edinburgh, and described herself as being ‘Scottish by formation’. The Border Ballads were, by her account, the chief literary influence on her work. So, even though none but an occasional scene in any of her later novels was set in Scotland, and there were few Scottish characters, the tone always seemed to me Scottish. “Nevertheless” was, she said, a very Scottish word, and what she called the “nevertheless principle” informed her writing. A story recounted by Moray McLaren in a little book about the Scottish character makes the point. Young minister at a church social: ‘Miss Jeannie Macpherson will now sing “The Flowers of the Forest”.’ Voice from the back: ‘Jeannie Macpherson’s a whure.’ Short pause, then young minister: ‘Nevertheless Miss Jeannie Macpherson will now sing “The Flowers of the Forest”.
The other day I was asked in a radio interview if I thought of myself as a Scottish or British novelist. “Both”, I replied, adding that “nevertheless I’m also an English one because the language I write in is English.” That I do so is the consequence of a number of historical accidents or events which, taken together, prevented Scots, as Edwin Muir observed, from becoming a language suitable for all purposes, and ensured that English, not Scots, is the language of public discourse here. The Reformation, which made Scotland a Presbyterian or Calvinist country, and did so much to form the character, ethos, and intellectual attitudes of later generations of Scots, brought us the Bible in an English, not Scots, translation. The Kirk’s metrical psalms and paraphrases were sung in English, not Scots and it is reported that John Knox, described by the historian Gordon Donaldson as “the greatest angliciser in our history”, himself acquired, or perhaps cultivated, an English accent. Then the Union of the Crowns saw James VI remove to England, and gradually the old Court Scots withered. David Hume, Adam Smith and the other luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment schooled themselves to write a correct English, removing Scotticisms from their prose. So today though we may some of us speak Scots — a much thinner or more diluted Scots that that of William Dunbar and Robert Henryson — and though novelists may employ Scots in dialogue, Scottish literature is part of the literature of the English-speaking peoples just as Irish, Australian and indeed American literatures are. Unlike many nationalist movements, Scottish nationalism today has not been provoked by discrimination against a people’s language or by the dominance of a foreign one. The arguments for Scottish independence are made in English.
Some may resent this and in objection raise the question of Gaelic. This was indeed the language of the Highlands and Western Isles till recent times. Yet Gaelic has been in retreat for centuries – James IV was the last King of Scots who could speak it, and the people of Lowland Scotland rarely had either knowledge of the language or sympathy for it. When Dr Johnson and James Boswell made their Journey to the Western Isles, the society and way of life they encountered were almost as foreign to the Ayrshireman and Edinburgh lawyer as they were to the Englishman. The pretence that Scotland today is a bilingual nation is an exercise in fantasy.
I was brought up in rural Aberdeenshire where the Doric was still in daily use, a tongue as incomprehensible to Glaswegians as to Londoners. For 30 years now I have lived in the Borders where Scots is still spoken, in a different fashion in different towns and valleys. Yet even Borderers may need to have recourse to the glossary fully to understand the dialogue in the Waverley novels. Our local newspapers are written in English and the business of public administration is conducted in English. What we call Scots today is often more a matter of accent than of vocabulary or grammatical peculiarities.
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We are made what we are partly by heredity and partly by circumstance and experience. Our identity is not fixed at birth. It is something into which we insensibly grow, also something we construct for ourselves. Natural abilities, whatever their source, may determine the course one’s life takes. If I am what I am and not what I might have been, this may be because I am more at home with words than with cattle, better able to judge the quality of a sentence than of an Aberdeen Angus bull.
My heredity is as thoroughly Scots as, well, anyone’s. My eight great-grandparents were all born in Aberdeenshire or Banffshire. Most of the ancestors I know of were farmers and farmers’ wives. There are a few village dominies and ministers of the Kirk somewhere in the family tree. On both sides they adhered to the Free Kirk after the Disruption of 1843. My mother’s grandfather was said to be active in the Liberal interest. They all seem to have cared for education, for their daughters as well as sons, and in the late 19th century the girls learned to play the piano and to paint. Nevertheless my mother was denied a university education because her father thought Edinburgh’s famous Atholl Crescent School of Domestic Science more suitable for a girl likely to marry a farmer.
My paternal grandfather died young, leaving a widow with four children under the age of ten. My father was the youngest, an intelligent boy who nevertheless left school in his early teens. He worked on farms, clerked for some months in the office of an uncle who was a lawyer in Aberdeen, decided this wasn’t the life for him, and, aged 19, went to Malaya as a rubber planter. He spent 30 years in the East, four of them in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. There were a lot of Scots in Malaya, many from the north-east, and I once asked him if they had thought of themselves as British or Scottish. “British” was the reply, “except on St Andrew’s Night”. Later he farmed in England and when he retired and returned to Scotland, deplored what he saw as the decline of self-reliance here. He had no time for Socialism and admired Margaret Thatcher. To his mind her values were those of the Aberdeenshire of his youth. Methodism (though she was no longer a Methodist) and Presbyterianism (though he was no longer a church-goer) had much in common.
The paradox of Presbyterianism is that it combined a commitment to social values, the parish elders being responsible for moral discipline and what we now call social care, with a recognition of the essential loneliness of the individual face-to-face with his Maker, and with the encouragement of self-improvement, material as well as spiritual. A favourite text for a sermon was the parable of the talents. This may be interpreted as meaning that you have a duty to make the most of whatever abilities you have been blessed with. More crudely however, it may be read as the Word of God in accordance with Thatcherism. Certainly in the Aberdeenshire of my youth, the judgement “he’s done well for himself” was an expression of approval, even if the approval might sometimes be grudging.
Because my father returned to Malaya after the war, I went to boarding school. Glenalmond (then known as Trinity College, Glenalmond) was a 19th century Episcopalian foundation. The Episcopal Church was often called the English Church, but I knew that it had been the Jacobite Church and was therefore authentically Scottish. Indeed, since the Jacobites had opposed the Treaty of Union, you might say that in the 18th century it had been Scotland’s nationalist church, though not the national one. Be that as it may, Glenalmond was a Scottish school which was also undeniably British. Most of the boys — no girls then — were Scots, perhaps nine in every ten, and of those who weren’t, more were Irish than English. However, we sat the Oxford and Cambridge Board examinations ( A Levels rather than Scottish Highers) and most of the masters were English, almost all Oxford or Cambridge graduates. It was assumed that if you were clever enough you would go to one of these universities, and indeed even boys intending to practise at the Scottish Bar usually did so. Accordingly I went to Cambridge.
The town itself and the countryside were foreign to me, very English, quite unlike anything I had ever known, but the university was British, just as London, as the capital of the United Kingdom and the centre of what was left of the Empire, was British rather than English. I read History and the dons who taught me most were an Austrian refugee from Hitler, a Liverpool Irishman and an Old Etonian with the name of one of the great reiving clans of the Scottish Borders. My friends had mostly been educated at English public schools, but very few of them had two English parents. Several of them were Scots, and others had names more commonly found in Scotland than England. Most would however have made no distinction between England and Britain. But then even Stevenson quite often wrote “England” when the context makes it clear he was speaking of Britain. He described himself in a letter to JM Barrie as “Scotch, sir, very Scotch”, but — like Barrie or the equally Scotch John Buchan — was at ease in London and the English countryside. Scots have been comfortable with a dual identity: Scots, nevertheless British, British, nevertheless Scots. Sometimes one is uppermost, sometimes the other. Many have found this agreeable flexibility enriching.
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Whether we are nationalists or unionists, we have all been formed by the experience of three centuries of the United Kingdom. Alex Salmond is as much a product of the British experience as Gordon Brown or Alistair Darling. One may react against this, the others may not. Nevertheless Salmond’s insistence that what he calls “the social union” would survive the dissolution of political union testifies to the existence and strength of a British identity.
It would be surprising if this wasn’t the case. It is easy for an Englishman to suppose that the Treaty of Union did not disturb the continuity of English constitutional history — even though the Treaty formally ended the individual life of the parliaments of both England and Scotland. The inheritance of the Crown was fixed according to the English Act of Settlement of 1701, and the two Houses of the English Parliament (Lords and Commons) continued as before with the addition only of Scottish members, while the Scottish Parliament disappeared. The ministers of the Crown were still appointed by the monarch in the same way, and, after the abolition of the Scottish Privy Council, there was no distinct Scottish government. The Royal Navy was not affected by the Treaty, and Scottish regiments were already fighting alongside English ones, under an English commander, in the wars against France. So an Englishman, then or later, might reasonably assume that England had indeed swallowed up Scotland.
Such an assumption was however, and always would be, mistaken. Inasmuch as the Union was an incorporating one, the incorporation was incomplete. Scotland retained its national institutions: its Law and legal system, its Church, its universities. In domestic matters it remained largely self-governing, administration being in the hands of city and burgh councils and of the parish authorities in rural districts. Though government would extend the scope of its activities over the centuries, Scotland remained distinct, Scottish administration Scottish. So, for example, when a National Health Service was created by the Labour government after the Second World War, responsibility for its form and management in Scotland was entrusted to a department of the Scottish Office in Edinburgh, not to the Ministry of Health in London. The NHS is a great and popular British institution: nevertheless even before the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, NHS Scotland was not exactly the same as NHS England and Wales.
Strong-willed Secretaries of State for Scotland like Willie Ross in Harold Wilson’s Labour governments actually often prevented Scottish business from being brought before the Cabinet. What was done in Scotland in areas of government entrusted (or devolved) to the Scottish Office was no concern of English ministers. Administrative devolution long preceded political devolution. Though the future Labour leader John Smith disapprovingly called this “a recipe for mandarin government”, the system was generally acceptable so long as the party forming the government of the UK had adequate, even if not majority, support in Scotland. It became unacceptable only when a Conservative government with rapidly diminishing support in Scotland pursued policies which met with the disapproval of a majority of the Scottish electorate. Political devolution followed. A parliament was established in Edinburgh, even though its architect, Donald Dewar, admitted that there was nothing he could do as First Minister of Scotland that he couldn’t already do as Secretary of State. I opposed this at the time. I now think I was wrong because I was flying in the face of the General Will. Nevertheless the argument that the creation of a parliament would stimulate, rather than appease, nationalist discontent may have been proved good. I say “may” because denial of devolution might have proved even more stimulating.
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There are times when we are all nationalists, and not merely on sporting occasions and, especially, when we play matches against the “auld enemy”. Unionists at Murrayfield for a Calcutta Cup match will sing “Flower of Scotland” as wholeheartedly as any Nationalist – even though the lyric is embarrassingly banal. As Colin Kidd has written, Unionism has often been nationalist too, Sir Walter Scott’s defence of the Scottish banks’ entitlement to issue their own notes being an example. “If you unScotch us”, he warned London, “you will find us damned mischievous Englishmen”. As advocate-depute, and therefore a government officer, Duncan Forbes of Culloden challenged the Crown’s decision to send accused Jacobites out of Scotland for trial. He declared this to be illegal, being a breach of the Treaty of Union and an infringement of the liberties of Scots Law reserved by the Treaty. When the government, alarmed by the Porteous Riots of 1737, brought in a bill which would have deprived the city of Edinburgh of certain privileges, Forbes, though the principal law officer of the Crown in Scotland, nevertheless opposed his own government’s bill in the House of Commons. Yet he never seems to have wavered in his view that the Union was beneficial to Scotland, even while being resolute in the defence of Scotland’s interests whenever they seemed to be ignored or threatened.
A good example of the nationalist Unionist was Walter Elliot, one of the most effective and creative of Secretaries of State for Scotland. Proud of his Borders ancestry, it amused him when he heard Americans or Indians speaking of their struggle for independence and of their feuds with the English. “I suppose”, he said, “the English have hanged more Elliots, certainly more Borderers, than the total of all people killed in the American War of Independence”. This was a happy thought, and Elliot was so deeply versed in the political traditions of Scotland that he was credited by Dr George Davie with coining the phrase “the democratic intellect”. He liked to say that Scotland was “a microcosm of Europe” as England had never been, and to tell his English friends that a Scotsman had painted the banner under which Joan of Arc had led the French resistance to English domination.
Nevertheless he was a Unionist. Why?
Scottish Unionism is rooted in the idea that though, politically, the Union may have taken an English form, being largely a continuation of English constitutional development, culturally the United Kingdom is to a great extent a Scottish creation. Even before the Treaty, the Bank of England, whereby the means to finance the wars against Louis XIV’s France were devised, was the brainchild of William Paterson from Greenock. The move away from Mercantilism to Free Trade was inspired by Adam Smith whom William Pitt introduced to his Cabinet as “the master of us all”. Thomas Carlyle, the Chelsea resident formed and rooted in Ecclefechan, was the greatest moral force in early Victorian England. In 1855 George Eliot wrote that: “there is hardly a superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle’s writings; there has hardly been an English book written for the last ten or 12 years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived.”
Scots science and, particularly, medicine led the way, partly because Edinburgh and Glasgow were modern universities long before Oxford and Cambridge woke from medieval slumber. Glasgow powered the Industrial Revolution, building the ships that made imperial expansion possible. London publishing and journalism were dominated by Scots, creators of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Dictionary of National Biography, and the Oxford English Dictionary. The first editor of the OED was James Murray, a tailor‘s son from the little village of Denholm in Roxburghshire , whose first book was The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland. In the 20th century John Reith created the BBC and formed its ethos. The Labour Party was made in Scotland, and, as recently as the 1980s, it was the good sense and commitment to moderation of Scottish Labour politicians such as John Smith, Gordon Brown, Donald Dewar, Robin Cook and John Reid which enabled the Party to survive the defections and dissensions of the Thatcher years and made its return to Government in 1997 possible.
One could go on at great length illustrating the part played by Scots in the making and development of the United Kingdom and the Idea of Britain, from James Thomson’s “Rule, Britannia!” by way of the Waverley novels, Hume’s and Macaulay’s Histories of England — even Scott’s version, arguably his invention, of the myth of “Merrie England” in Ivanhoe. One could point to the influence of Scots architects, engineers and gardeners, of Scots academics and economists. One could dwell on the part played by Scots in the development and administration of the British Empire and the prominent part played by Scots in the twentieth century’s two terrible World Wars. However I have, I hope, said enough on this subject, and can now turn to consider two questions, related to both our history and our present condition.
The first is: how did we resist incorporation? One answer has already been given: that the Treaty enabled us to keep our distinctive national institutions, and that, even as the State extended its sphere of activity so remarkably in the 20th century, these retained their identity and independence. Scottish pride and individuality are also evident in post-Union institutions: our national galleries, academies and professional bodies, our national orchestra, theatre, opera and Arts Council (now known, somewhat absurdly, as “Creative Scotland”). The Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) is allied to the (British) TUC, but independent of it. Likewise the three UK political parties all had their own distinct, formally independent Scottish wings, even while the only parliament in the mainland of the UK was in London. The Scottish parties have always held their own Conferences. And what is commonly known as the Tory Party has never, since the 19th century, simply styled itself “the Conservative Party” as it does in England, but has been the “Unionist Party” and subsequently the “Conservative and Unionist party”.
It is not however only institutions which have preserved, and indeed strengthened the idea of Scottish distinctiveness, of Scotland within Britain and Scottishness marching comfortably in step with Britishness. Intellectually, emotionally also, the impetus was given by Sir Walter Scott. His novels, especially the six or seven masterpieces set in Scotland between the late 17th century and his own time, not only restored to us a sense, and understanding, of our own often troubled and divided history, but also taught the English that Scotland was different. Edward Waverley is a young Englishman utterly ignorant of Scotland when he comes north as an Army officer. He has romantic notions, falls in with the Jacobites, realises he is on the wrong side, but eventually marries a Scottish girl, daughter of a Jacobite laird. The novel offers a picture of Scotland but may also be read as being about the making of Britain.
Yet while Scott helped to make the Union acceptable, he also checked the 18th century process of assimilation — after Scott there was no more talk of North Britain. He provided us with a distinct identity — Scotland within Britain — when he stage-managed George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822. It was the first time a reigning monarch had been in Scotland since Charles II was crowned at Scone in 1651. Scott now decked Edinburgh in tartan — even the fat king wore the kilt. Some of Scott’s friends deplored this “Celtification” of Scotland. Even his devoted son-in-law and biographer John Gibson Lockhart thought it absurd, a “hallucination”; the real traditions of Scotland — by which he meant the Lowlands — were being submerged and identified with those of a people who “had always constituted a small and always unimportant part of the Scottish population”. Historically Lockhart was right, and modern Scots who deplore tartanry — the Bonnie Prince Charlie, shortbread tin and whisky label image of Scotland — are right too. Nevertheless they are also wrong. Walter Scott waved his magician’s wand and created what he sensed was necessary: a form of national identity which would satisfy his compatriots by presenting them with an image of Scotland of which they could feel proud, but which was distinctly different from anything English. At the same time it was to be an image which would impress the English and, more importantly, impress on them the realisation that the political Union was a partnership between two nations with different traditions which were nevertheless joined harmoniously together. And it worked. “Highlandism”’ the historian Tom Devine has written, “answered the emotional need for a distinctive Scottish identity without in any way compromising the Union. The tartan cult is also reminder that Britishness is a part of Scottishness”, for without political union it is improbable that Lowland Scots would have consented to adopt Highland dress as their national garb, a mark of national identity.
Which brings me to my second question, one immediately relevant to our immediate concerns.
Why, given that we successfully resisted incorporation and maintained, or constructed, a distinct and satisfying national identity, do we find ourselves about to vote in a referendum in which we are asked to agree, or disagree, with the proposition that Scotland should be an independent country? To put it another way: why has political nationalism which was of negligible importance when I was young, 50 or 60 years ago, so negligible that the SNP did not win even one seat in a General Election till 1970, gained so much support that the nationalist party now forms the devolved Scottish government and has been able to bring on this referendum?
One answer has been often given, persuasively. Some of the bonds of Union have been loosened. The World Wars are two, three generations distant. Significantly the RAF’s defeat of the Luftwaffe in 1940 which rendered a German invasion impossible was given the name of the Battle of Britain even though most of it was fought over the fields of England rather than Scotland. In 1940 we really were all in it together. Both wars were a British experience, stimulating British patriotism. Not surprisingly that memory has faded. The Empire had been our great collective adventure in which Scots had played so prominent and profitable a part. Its dissolution, however welcome to liberal opinion, however inevitable indeed, did more than loosen one of these bonds; it severed it. With the loss of Empire, the United Kingdom was no longer a Great Power, and many Scots came to regard attempts by the British government to act as if this was not the case with scepticism, disapproval, even contempt, the Iraq War being a case in point. The SNP has opposed foreign adventures and has won, rather than losing, support by doing so.
Then British membership of the European Union has weakened one of the original arguments for the Treaty of Union itself: that political union would enable Scotland to enjoy the benefits of economic union by creating a Free Trade area in which Scots merchants and traders would not suffer from discrimination against them. Scott, in Rob Roy, has his Glasgow merchant Bailie Nicol Jarvie says, “Now, since St Mungo catched herrings in the Clyde, what was ever like to gar us flourish like the sugar and tobacco trade, will anybody tell me that, and grumble at the treaty that opened us a way west-awa’ yonder?” Within a generation of the signing of the Treaty there were indeed few who still grumbled, but when membership of the EU offered the same security and opportunity, and when Jim Sillars persuaded the SNP to change tack and campaign under the slogan “Scotland in Europe”, the fear of economic isolation receded, and, with it, the fear of the consequences of independence, a fear already allayed by the riches of North Sea oil.
These are conventional, widely accepted reasons for the rise of Nationalism. Others might be added. The lingering resentment of Thatcherism came so close to destroying the Scottish Tories that the UK Conservative Party is now regarded by many as English rather than British. The City of London’s domination of the British economy and the character of market capitalism offend our social democratic self-image, even though the Scottish banks, notably RBS, were themselves predatory examples of what is called “casino capitalism”, admired and praised by Scottish nationalists before the Crash.
Yet there is a psychological reason for the disaffection and the desire of so many to dissolve the Union. It is not that Scotland is becoming more different from England, but that many of the marks of our difference are disappearing. The institutions which resisted incorporation are either weaker than they were, or have been, almost insensibly, subject to assimilation. The Church of Scotland is not what it was; its role in the national life is diminished. Scotland, like England and Wales — and like most countries in western Europe – is now a secular society. We no longer look to the churches for moral guidance. Our universities are less distinctively Scottish than they were, in staff, the student body, and in the sources they must tap for research. Our towns and cities have lost their distinctive character. We shop in the same supermarkets and malls as our southern neighbours. A Scottish High Street is little different from an English one; Scottish-owned department stores have almost all disappeared. We mostly listen to the same music and watch the same films and TV programmes. Children playing football in the park are as likely to be wearing replica Manchester United, Arsenal or Chelsea strips as ones which proclaim their support for Rangers or Celtic, Hibs, Hearts or Aberdeen. Immigration, from England and elsewhere, is changing the composition of our population, though not yet to the same extent as in parts of England. Taken together however, these developments make it clear that there is not only a global economy, but, increasingly, a global culture.
One response to this process of assimilation is denial, to continue to insist in the face of the facts that we are indeed still utterly different. Consequently Scotland should be independent. Others who recognise what is happening may nevertheless seek to arrest the process by dissolving the Union and establishing an independent Scottish state. I doubt if doing so would have the desired result. Political independence would scarcely check the process of assimilation. To this extent, Alex Salmond’s social union would indeed survive.
The other response is to accept that we do indeed live in a global, inter-connected culture. Many of the young do so eagerly. For those who have been called the Facebook generation, national boundaries are likely to seem irrelevant, even meaningless. They spend hours trawling the web, communicating with friends all over the world. Nationality is only one part of their identity, perhaps one of diminishing importance.
Ultimately, in this referendum, we will most of us be guided by how we feel rather than by what is presented as argument. There is nothing to be ashamed of in this. It is natural. Our greatest philosopher David Hume wrote that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”. By “passions” Hume meant what we should now call feelings or sentiments: whether, in this instance, you feel Scottish only, or Scottish and British; whether you fear that, in our global culture, Scottishness is too weak a thing to survive without the bulwark of an independent Scottish state, or whether you feel that it does not require this, being sufficiently robust to thrive, adapting itself to the changing world. It is, for me, a matter of self-confidence. If you feel the lack of that, you will vote for independence. If you feel confident of Scotland’s ability to remain Scottish and prosper in the Union, you will agree that we are indeed Better Together and vote “no”. The Unionist says, I am Scottish. Nevertheless I am also British, and value the Union with England, “our sister and ally”, as Scott called her.
