Political commentary

The best laid schemes o' „ •

Ferdinand Mount

Edinburgh On a grimy wall in Tobago Place there is a big poster of an elderly man pushing a girl in a wheelchair with the slogan ARTHRITIS CRIPPLES. Next to it, there is another big poster depicting a second elderly man who appears to be the victim of a stroke, for his face is lopsided, suffused and contorted with pain and he seems to be leaning upon some kind of surgical crutch. Behind this unfortunate sufferer, in the same redand-black lettering as the arthritis poster, it says 'Your Future You Decide YES'. Squeezed into the middle prong of the E in YES are the words 'For a Stronger Scotland,' scarcely decipherable, as though the claim had to be made but was so implausible that it was best writ as small as possible.

Even if you are looking out for it, you may not recognise at first glance that this piece of smudge and gibberish represents the Prime Minister at the microphone and that it is meant to be the spearhead of the campaign to persuade the Scots to vote themselves an Assembly. Something seems sadly out of kilter. The whole enterprise is, if not crippled, at least distinctly a-gley. Far from effortlessly carrying home the Assembly on his broad shoulders, the Prime Minister is hobbling on black ice. His great Glasgow speech was tepidly received by a thin audience. Labour councillors in the big cities are refusing to lift a finger. The party organisation is said to be afflicted by acute apathy. The Cabinet Ministers who trail up here to say their piece seem shopworn and irrelevant. The rhetorical tussle which has been drawing crowds all over Scotland is between two Labour renegades, Jim Siliars, the founder of the breakaway Scottish Labour Party, for the Yeses and the indefatigable. No-man. Tam Dalyell, who for month after month down in Westminster has been battering away against first the Scotland and Wales Bill and then the Scotland Bill from his seat just behind the Prime Minister's right ear. And most ominous of all, the polls now claim that opinion has turned sharply against Labour in Scotland as it already has in England. Mr Callaghan will need all the legendary loyalty of Labour votes, on Clydeside to pull this coup off.

Beyond this general unpopularity, there is a particular seediness about Labour's Yes compaign, a kind of bare-faced slovenly indifference to principle; and the perception of this has begun to soak through into the consciousness of many Scots. It is not such much that the Labour Party has swung full circle back to Keir Hardie's support for Home Rule. The trouble is that Mr Callaghan seems to expect people' to forget overnight the Party's stony oppos ition to devolution over the preceding thirty years. 'In the history of the Labour Party', the Prime Minister intoned on* a bleak Monday night in Sauchiehall Street, 'the River of Devolution, sometimes deviating in its course, sometimes sluggish and hardly moving, sometimes shallow in its hold, but in recent years becoming deeper, gathering pace and power as it nears the sea'.

Chuck it Jim! Everyone knows that what happened was that Winnie Ewing captured Hamilton for the Scotnats and Mr Callaghan, then Home Secretary, panicked — not for the first or the last time — and persuaded Harold Wilson to set up a Royal Commission. The Scotnats continued to win seats and the Labour Party (and the Tory Party) continued to run scared. To dignify this process as 'keeping faith with Scotland' — as the Prime Minister does is, ah let us be temperate, somewhat less than persuasive.

This corruption of purpose is exposed daily. The Labour Party refuses to make common cause with the other Yes campaigners. Helen Liddell, the redoubtable secretary of the Scottish Labour Party, says she will not 'sully her hands with cranks and extremists.' She doesn't mean the Ecology Party or Gays Say Yes; she means the Scottish National Party. But if the cause is a truly noble and sincerely undertaken one, then a little sullying is of the essence. The lesson of the referendum on the Common Market was not just that public opinion is likely to be moved by the spectacle of the leaders of the Great Parties all urging the same course. What impressed people was the spectacle of Mr Heath and Mr Jenkins sharing the same physical platform.

In the meantime, the Tories have, if only by default, occupied the high ground. Those inconvenient pledges in Perth to a directly elected Assembly are long forgotten, and here we have Lord Home in the students union at Edinburgh University asserting that 'a "No" vote need not imply any disloyalty to the principle of devolution.' Now you see why one is so proud of being descended from generations of border cattle rustlers; one develops a certain nimbleness. But here among stained glass and panelling and Southern voices (Edinburgh is in fashion with the English public schools) this latest and most illustrious convert to the Noes is a catch to be Welcomed.

The Labour Party tried, with a certain desperation, to fiddle the election broadcasts by insisting that the ordinary allo cation of party politicals should continue; which would entail three Yes broadcasts (Labour, Liberal and SNP) to one No (the Conservatives). The majestic quashing of this manoeuvre by Lord Ross in the Court of Session as unfair 'by any stretch of imagination' was more potent propaganda for the Noes. On Tuesday afternoon in the Commons, Mr Callaghan refused to accept the referee's verdict, although the BBC had already decided to follow the IBA and abandon the idea of any special referendum broadcasts at all. Once again, the Prime Minister's worst side is showing — meanspirited, devious and peevish. When Tammany Jim is in this mood, he makes the late Mayor Daley look positively Corinthian.

Now the Cabinet unashamedly lets it be known that if the Yeses win a majority, but do not attract the stipulated 40 per cent of the electorate even after knocking off the allowance for dead men, Mr Callaghan will ask Parliament to disregard the 40 per cent rule and to bring the Assembly into operation all the same.

What happens is that if, say, the Yeses win by 35-25 per cent with 40 per cent staying home — a not unlikely event — the Secretary of State for Scotland is required by law to bring forward an order to repeal the whole Scotland Act. Mr Callaghan would than ask his supporters to vote against this government order, and if the order is defeated, then the Assembly automatically comes into operation. The last memorable use of this topsy-turvy carryon was ten years ago when Mr Callaghan as Home Secretary instructed Labour MPs to vote against the recommendations of the impartial Boundary Commission — which would have redrawn the constituencies for the next election, somewhat to Labour's disadvantage. Nor is it the case that 'they all do it.' The Labour Party under Attlee and Gaitskell never broke the rules. Nor do the Tories — well, not usually. Would Mr Callaghan mind going down to history as the author of the two greatest gerrymanders of modern British politics — or, as the Boundary Commission fiddle was dubbed, 'Callamanders'? Not much. These are what we fans call professional fouls. The Callamander does not change its spots.

But would he get away with it? The Tories have no fear that they might alienate the Scots by denying them an Assembly; Mrs Thatcher is convinced that the desire for constitutional change has to be proved 'up to the hilt.' Some Labour rebels say that the Prime Minister would never get it through; to which Ministers retort that they might feel differently if the survival of a Labour government depended on it. But does it? Would the Scotnat MPs want to bring the Government down, even if there was no Assembly? In the atmosphere of disappointment and recrimination, they might be voting for their own extinction. Is it not conceivable that, whatever happens, Mr Donald Stewart and his colleagues might find some excuse — they would probably call it 'carrying on the fight for Scotland' — for allowing Mr Callaghan to stagger on until October? If that is so, then why shouldn't Mr Eric Heffer and the rest of the Glorious 43 Labour MPs who scotched the first Assembly Bill finally kill it off? Yet a majority, however skimpy, is a powerful argument. And if the Yeses do manage even a slender majority, the Parliamentary arithmetic indicates that Mr Callaghan has at least a sporting chance of doing likewise.

As we ferret after these implications down into their parliamentary burrows, we ought not to lose sight of the most remarkable thing, viz, that there should be any question of the Noes winning at all. After all, on the Peter Jay view of democracy (and he is not alone), if you think of yourself as Scottish and you are offered a means of expressing that identity, then your instinct must be to say yes, yes I will, yes. The offer of an Assembly is surely a wooing more thoughtful and sensitive to Scottish amour-propre than the motorways and bridges and new towns with which the English taxpayer has larded central Scotland.

And yet as referendum day approaches, uncertainty and scepticism seem to intensify. The Don't Knows grow. The concrete objections loom larger: the fear that the Assembly would be dominated by wild Glaswegians, the fear of even more bureaucracy — and Edinburgh is already stuffed with giant new government offices, bulging out from behind every crag and Pinnacle — and the fear that the SNP would manage to use the Assembly as a lever to gain total independence. With typical tact lessness Mr Douglas Henderson, the Nationalist MP for East Aberdeenshire, has been talking about a 'Phase Two' Scotland Act to give the Assembly more power. And, as we all know by now, Phase Twos have a way of being followed by Phase Threes.

But these directly specifiable fears may reflect a vaguer, less easily formulated uncertainty about how far the Scottish identity really can be or needs to be expressed in separate political institutions. Call this craven, as Hugh MacDiarmid did and Jim Sillars does.

'When was anything born in Scotland, last Risks taken or triumphs won?

What MacDiarmid called 'the parrot cry' of Englishmen extolling the benefits conferred on Scotland by the Union must be irritating. But it does not follow that the hope of Scotland hearing 'its am n voice speak' depends on political separation.

The Union may not have 'caused' the Scottish Enlightenment, but nor did it prevent Hume or Adam Smith or Scott from finding their own voices. Nor were their ambitions mean or provincial. Edinburgh was to be the new Athens; the castle was the Acropolis, the Firth of Forth the Aegean and Mount Lycabettus was seen in Calton Hill, perched on a windbitten flank of which is the Royal High School, as grand and draughty and Greek a temple as you could wish for and now being converted at a cost of £3.75 million into a splendid home for the Assembly. Craigleith stone may not be Pentelic marble, and the climate in midFebruary is scarcely Attic, but there is no finer townscape in Europe and none more drenched in national individuality nor less colonial in feeling. Yet all this was conceived and built within a century of Culloden.

And if twentieth-century Scottish 'culture' was until recently a sentimental hotchpotch of tartan, haggis and Harry Lauder, it was not and will not be rescued by politicians; indeed, politicians are more likely to egg on the commercialisation and the touristification, as the experience of many small new nations has shown. And will the new myths be any more appealing than the old? Will the Scots be any more spiritually self-confident for being told that Macbeth was an outstandingly able administrator, first-rate in committee or that Mary Queen of Scots expressed a keen interest in local government reform? There is a lot to be said for sticking with old grievances and new subsidies. A No vote might demonstrate a more genuine selfconfidence than any Scotnat ever dreamed of.