Down with North Britain
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
I returned a few days ago from a visit to my native land during which Scotland was suddenly very newsworthy, especially to the inhabitants. There was, for example, the disaster at Monte- video in which the chairman of Celtic rebuked his own players, while most of the people I talked to were in favour of dropping Mr George Brown on Buenos Aires by parachute.
But the real event was the Hamilton election. It would be going too far to say, as the French duke said to Louis XVI, 'Nay, sire, it is a re- volution'; but Mrs Ewing's triumph, so widely welcomed—even by supporters of the defeated candidates—shows up the astonishing constipa- tion of the two 'dominant' parties. Mrs Ewing, I am told, was an extremely attractive and effective candidate. The Unionist candidate was a young man who may be all right when he is older. The Labour candidate, whose name I have already forgotten,* was a miners' official who was given the nomination as a piece of trade union patronage in what was assumed to be a trade union rotten borough. There seems to be a conscious breaking away from the general domination of Scottish life by genuine Englishmen and bogus Scotchmen.
It will be said (it has been said) that many of the Scottish grievances are sentimental. They are. But sentimental grievances, as we should have learned in this modern world, are ex- tremely powerful. The Conservative party, or the Unionist party, or the Tory party as run from London, is psychologically unsuited to deal with these sentimental grievances.
The Scottish aristocracy and the Scottish upper middle class have for a long time re- vealed their Scottish patriotism by wearing often bogus tartans at Highland Games, usually as bogus as the tartans; the middle class by shout- ing 'feet' at international rugger matches at Murrayfield. In Ireland, people of this type were known as West Britons: these were and are North Britons.
The leadership of the Conservative party con- sists not only of noblemen of really ancient pedigree (there are far more noblemen of really ancient pedigree in Scotland than there are in England: pace Miss Nancy Mitford); but there are also a great many people who did well out of armaments in the First World War and out of whisky in the Second World War. Above all, none of them gives a plausible impression of even conceiving the possibility of preferring the interests of Scotland to the interests of Britain.
It was a Scottish poet who wrote the best poem about London, but he did not accept London as his capital as, in practice, so many eminent Scots have done. (As a resident of Cambridge, I realise I am myself open to a tu quoque, which I accept as just.) This feeling of being betrayed by their natural, or unnatural, leaders has grown in Scotland as the brief period of economic expansion came to an end, except possibly for Edinburgh, in 1919. When the second greatest Glasgow poet, Robert W. Service, came back to his native city after fifty years in the Klondyke and elsewhere, he said that no city he knew had changed less in that It was Wilson, as it happens.—Editor. time. This represented stagnation. A great archi- tectural journal last year wanted Glasgow pre- served as the most magnificent Victorian city in Britain. But a great many people in Glasgow don't want it preserved as a Victorian city, physically or spiritually.
On the economic arguments for more Scot- tish control of Scottish business, there is a great deal more to be said than is normally said by the tradition-bound bankers and economists of Scotland. It is true that more money is spent per head on social services in Scotland than is spent in England. But a great deal of Scottish money is spent in support of extravagances (as Mr Ludovic Kennedy has pointed out) which may appeal to Mr Julian Amery in Brighton but have no great appeal to the people of Skye, Dumfries, or even Edinburgh.
The British Empire was supported by the Scots as long as it paid them. That gloomy pipe tune, 'The Barren Rocks of Aden,' sounded tolerable when Aden was a necessary way station to India, which was candidly described in my school geography book before the First World War as 'the brightest jewel in the Crown,' followed by a complacent statement of how well the Scots did out of this jewel. Sentimental pas- sion for empire was never very strong. There is none now. There is also no empire, a point more clearly seen from Glasgow than from Brighton.
The Scottish Nationalist movement has its lunatic fringe. I met last week a zealous Nationalist who insisted that not only must the English yoke be thrown off, but Edinburgh and all of the Lothians and Berwickshire must be pushed into England because they were 'Anglo- Saxon.' There are good arguments for having far more control of Scottish affairs really exer- cised in Edinburgh. Nonsense about being really governed in a Scottish way from Saint Andrew's House in Edinburgh is even less plausible than the pre-1922 argument for Ireland's being governed from Dublin Castle. There are many things in Scotland which the English would do well to imitate if they could. For instance, the very superior legal system. But the point is that many things have been forced on the Scots which may be good for them, but are forced on them with a remarkable lack of tact. Mr Ted Heath, for example, dismissed the Scottish Nationalists as 'flower people': presumably he knows better now. Earlier he had expressed de- light in being in Glasgow, a centre of 'soccer.' This game is unknown in Scotland. The game of football, usually called 'fitba,' is played.
Scotland is not prepared to be broken up into Ulsters, as is suggested by the Honourable Quintin Hogg. Nor is the explanation given me by a Labour man, that the Orangemen were ordered to vote for the Scottish Nationalist, to dish the Labour party, very plausible. In fact, the time has arrived for a really great debate as to what the future of Scotland should be. I have no enthusiasm for the appearance of Scotland between Saudi Arabia and Senegal at the United Nations. I have no great enthusiasm for establishing a customs barrier between Scot- land and South Britain. But I have a great deal of enthusiasm for encouraging the renewal of courage and hope. The English have a great deal to learn, but on the other hand, as I frequently tell the Scotch, the Irish, and the Welsh, the English are much cleverer than they are—once they decide what is the clever thing to do. I make two sug- gestions: that the Honourable Quintin Hogg be told to shut up; and that Mr Edward Heath get some competent expert on this strange country which he visits, it seems to me, with no more real comprehension than Mr Podsnap. As for the Scottish Labour party, it is remark- ably sterile of leaders who might really think of the legacy of Keir Hardie instead of being content to be Mr Wilson's poodle.
But the best comment on Hamilton and the best comment on the disarray of the Scottish establishment is provided in the gossip column of a rival paper to the SPECTATOR, a column edited by somebody using the initials PHs. The minister of Saint Columba's, Pont Street, wel- comes Mrs Ewing's victory very tepidly and thinks the Scotch should settle for influence at Westminster. This is a confusion of inflitence and power which I am surprised to find in a Scot and a Presbyterian. Some of the others are simple or nauseating or both. One London Scot kindly tells us that Scotland is not viable since all the able Scots have left the country. Another who seems to belong to the school of Scots (and their English friends) who think the country begins at Perth, announces that it is a musical comedy affair. Another takes up the hollow old Edinburgh joke that the Scots teally run Eng- land anyway. This was not true even when the 'heids o' departments' were all assumed to be Scots. All most of these bureaucrats did was to 'respectfully homologate' the orders of their English superiors.
I have been wondering who these Scottish rulers of England are. The only first-class poli- tician who is a member for any Scottish con- stituency is Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Mr Jo Grimond might be if he had a more secure poli- tical base. I have been reflecting on the people who have made the news in politics and finance and business in the last ten days or so. There are Messrs Wilson, Brown, Callaghan, Cross- man, Macleod (who sits for an English con- stituency), Foot, Jenkins, O'Brien. There it Mr Weinstock; there was Sir Paul Chambers. Sir Isaac Wolfson, who has just given a great gift to Cambridge, is a Glasgow man by birth and education who is far more generous to England and Israel than to his native country. I rriay have missed one or two Scots, but they cannot have been very prominent. I have also missed 'the choir invisible' of Scottish Nobel prizemen.
Scottish conceit was irritating enough when it had some justification. It is maddening now, and the people of Scotland are aware of this. Douglas Hyde, in one of his early tracts for the Gaelic League, saw its object as the saving of 'our Ancient Irish Nation' from 'sinking into a West Britain.' For a great many Scots of the type consulted by PHS, being North Britons is superior to being a Scotchman or a Scot- man. Indeed, to be a North Briton living South Britain Britain is the real culmination of thc About a century ago, Walter Bagehot s.t:J that Adam Smith's view of human history v-1' that it consisted of the progress of man fall' the state of barbarism to the state of being - Scotchman. Smith exaggerated a little bit. 1311: what he or Mr Hume would have thought these drab figures in London I refuse to sta%:' It is known that Dr Smith could use bad lan- guage on occasion.
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