Letter from Edinburgh: What it really means to be Scottish. I’ve been love-bombed. Finally! It must have been brought on by the increasing support for the Yes campaign in the opinion polls as the independence referendum approaches. “Worrying times,” wrote my English friend. “We don’t want you to go.” I find all of this concerned talk about the Scots “going” very touching but also perplexing. I’d like to take this opportunity to reassure every lovelorn English person that if we vote to become independent, we won’t be “going” anywhere. We’ll still be here. All we are voting for is the right to elect our own governments, raise all of our own taxes and spend them as we decide – just like any normal country.
Another misconception is that we are all doomed to ethnic turmoil if Scots vote Yes. I read his words and looked out of my window into the peaceful cobbled streets of Edinburgh, where I now live, and wondered how such a renowned historian could get it so wrong. It is impossible to judge the mood in Scotland from afar. A small disclaimer here. Better Together vs the truth. Like thousands of other Scots over the weekend, I received an extra dose of referendum propaganda with my Sunday papers. It came in the form of a glossy little booklet containing, apparently, “the facts [I needed]” to fully appreciate both the “benefits of staying in the UK” and the “risks of independence”. Bits of it were pretty convincing. A Yes vote may well put some Scottish defence jobs, particularly those dependent on UK government contracts, at risk.
Without radical immigration or pensions reform, an independent Scotland could struggle to cope with burgeoning demographic pressures. Yet, for some reason, the authors of the booklet - Better Together - decided to swamp sensible arguments such as these under a welter of misinformation. For instance, it’s true that goods in Ireland are more expensive than they are in Britain. The further into the booklet I went, the more spurious the assertions became.
But the nonsense didn’t stop there. How Scottish trade unions are shifting in favour of independence. In 1968, Mick McGahey, president of the National Union of Mineworkers in Scotland, attacked nationalism, an increasingly prominent force in Scottish politics, as a bourgeois deviation from the class struggle: “[The Scots are] entitled to decide the form and power of their own institutions,” he said at a specially convened trade union conference on devolution. “But Scottish workers have more in common with London dockers, Durham miners and Sheffield engineers than they have ever had with Scottish barons and landlord traitors.” The belief, expressed here by McGahey, that working class interests are indivisible across the United Kingdom was deeply embedded in the British organised labour movement throughout the 20th Century, and no more so than between the late-1940s and mid-1970s when Britain was at its most identifiably social democratic.
The STUC has a long history of support for devolution. At the same time, there is little doubt Labour’s sway over the unions has weakened. Reviewed: On Edinburgh and Glasgow by Robert Crawford. On Glasgow and Edinburgh Robert CrawfordHarvard University Press, 320pp, £20 Duality is the great theme of Scotland’s history and Scottish literature. Running from Walter Scott and James Hogg to Alasdair Gray, via Robert Louis Stevenson and Hugh MacDiarmid, Scotland’s sense of itself has always been double-sided. So perhaps it is not surprising that the rivalry between her greatest cities is but another example of the “Caledonian antisyzygy”, first identified by G Gregory Smith in the early 20th century.
Robert Crawford is that rarest breed of Scotsman: one who professes to love Edinburgh and Glasgow equally. Edinburgh and Glasgow have never been friends. Crawford, professor of modern Scottish literature at St Andrews, is also a poet and he has produced a walking guide to Scotland’s greatest cities that will delight any literaryminded tourist. What a pair they are. In its own golden Victorian age, Glasgow considered itself not Scotland’s second city but the second city of the Empire. Where does Scottish Labour stand on Trident? One of the most effective criticisms supporters of the Union make of the SNP is that it offers only a vague or incomplete picture of what an independent Scotland would actually look like.
Take as an example the party's defence policy. It is still far from clear exactly how many troops a Scottish Defence Force would have, how it would be structured and what kind of budget it would be run on. By refusing to provide absolute clarity on this issue, the nationalists are helping to fuel a widespread sense of unease at the prospect of radical constitutional change and, consequently, diminishing the likelihood of the independence referendum returning a majority Yes vote in 2014. Unionist politicians know how serious a problem this is for the SNP. As Alistair Darling has done recently, they will try to use it as a way of promoting the idea that secession amounts to a dangerous and reckless leap into the unknown. Two things account for Lamont's vow of silence. Cameron's state of the union flop.