Political Commentary'
The lively Scottish gnats
Patrick Cosgrave,,
Elgin — "a place of little trade," according to Dr Johnson, "and thinly inhabited" — was, last week, the site of the Scottish National Party's annual conference, not as grand or as populated an affair as those which will be organised later in the year at Blackpool by the Conservatives and the Labour Party, but better organised than the little shindig the Liberals put on for us at Southport last year. The unkind critic — I am an unkind critic, but not that unkind — would observe that, like Johnson's Elgin of yore, the conference was but thinly inhabited: numbers rose at the end of the week but the attendance at the debate in which I was interested was agreed by the stewards to be no more than 600. The curious thing that struck me about a party which is essentially revivalist in character was — and in this the Nationalists are very like the Liberals, equally revivalist in their essential appeal — the almost total absence of high calibre oratory in the principal debates: Mr Henderson, for example, declaiming Nationalist policy on oil — if it could be called a policy — was dull, hesitant and given nervously to licking his lips. Yet it would be inaccurate not to report that the conference showed more genuine enthusiasm for its leaders and their aim of full independence for Scotland than is usually to be found nowadays among the armies of the Tory and Socialist faithful assembled in Blackpool. (What, I wonder, would Dr Johnson have made of Blackpool?) I may as well try, at this point, to din into the ears of Mr Heath and Mr Wilson the fact that the Nationalists, now formidable and, according to the general opinion of Tories and Socialists whom I met, likely to become more formidable at the next election, regard proposals for a Scottish Assembly, to subsist aerily somewhere between the voter on the ground and the Westminsterites and Whitehallites in heaven, as no more than a staging post on the way to a fully independent Scotland — maybe a member of the Common Market, maybe not; maybe a member of the Commonwealth, maybe not; maybe reigned over by a sovereign of the House of Windsor, maybe a republic. I know full well that for years Mr Heath has been bent on breaking up the United Kingdom — he was certainly more than willing to do so immediately during an infamous weekend a few months ago, if that could be made the means of sustaining him in an office that would have been greatly diminished in
stature and character by the break-up. Mr Wilson is more ambiguous: his Secretary of
State, Mr William Ross, and his constitutional advisor, Lord Crowther-Hunt, can be relied upon to resist assemblies and all such like political gadgetry, but his government it was who set up the silly Crowther-Kilbrandon Commission, which came up with the even sillier idea of a Scottish Assembly of limited powers. What these various dunderheads fail to realise — as the Scottish Nationalists emphatically do not fail to realise — is that in this island there can be no halfway house
.between independence and unity. Watching the messing about of Westminster politicians
it is no wonder that the Nationalists sit back and smile and wait for better things to fall into their laps. Finally, it should be said to the I:larder-headed among the colleagues of Mr neatn or Mr Wilson that if the Scots go they will take the oil with them; and if you are prepared to set up a Scottish Assembly, you can throw all those bright prospectuses about the nineteen-eighties in the wastepaper basket.
But there is, in truth, no positive Nationalist appeal in Scotland. I have traversed the country ,,now for about ten days: it cannot, of its nature, be considered a survey in depth, but it is a survey the general conclusions of which would be agreed by man as different in character and belief as Teddy Taylor, Tory MP for Glasgow Cathcart, and Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for Mid-Lothian, both politicians with enormous electotal successes to their credit. (Mr Dalyell, indeed, has had the chairman of the Nationalists standing against him, and has brushed him aside as he would a fly.) There is, it is true, a certain amount of anti-English feeling in Scotland, much of it jocose — as was Dr Johnson's anti-Scottish feeling. "A football match," one Conservative said to me, "against Northern Ireland or Wales, is a match. Against England it's the battle of Bannockburn." What nearly everybody I spoke to, however, would agree on is the proposition that the Nationalists might as well be given a chance, since the two big parties have done so little that is good for Scotland.
And the consequences of this conviction could be tremendous. For example, Sir Alec Douglas-Home easily held Kinross and West Perthshire at the last election, almost solely by virtue of a joke comparing the number of candidates against him with the number of runners in some horse-race or other. He is not standing again; and his constituency association, instead of interviewing candidates for this glittering succession, chose instead to invite a QC to take the place of the former Prime Minister. The man may be an admirable QC: indeed, he may be an admirable human being, with the makings of a fine MP in him. But I could find no Conservative whose opinion I respected who thought he could win the seat.
I have never seen any sign in Westminster that either of the major parties is aware of the magnitude of the catastrophe that impends, a catastrophe that, I repeat, cannot be evaded by fiddle-faddle assemblies. Something that
should be attended to, for example, was t decision of the Nationalists to oppose 1 nationalisation of oil. There are substalln and influential left-wing elements in the tionalist movement (as there are rig5 wingers, flat-earthers and others) bat :I realise that it is not in their interest to offe; the major oil companies, at a time when tito companies are shaping up to a possiuct nal confrontation with Westminster. If the crn, , comes, and the Nationalists have to out, 1 Westminster in the business ofturning4. assembly into a Parliament, they are de `,1 mined that the Americans and Germarla,lai Malays and Chinese (and a few Scots) Pubill the oil out of the North Sea are not goingAp feel uneasy about the replacement of a 'Jo tant, inefficient and uncaring WestMins'I. oligarchy with a zealous local authority. da It can be seen from various asides so,:ig that I do not think much of the Scots 711) tionalists as philosophers or as a force ra good in Scotland. But I respect them for Wil in the present phase of their development, only be described as their consummate Al tics. As tacticians they are at present leal:tis the Westminster leadership standing. At t,,,P0 conference it was clear that nationalism: being defined, not in the fanatic Irish W8? the encapsulation of some historical religious ideal, but as a practical expression contempt for faraway rulers who dicl PO know how to rule and who, like the Mon II in Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes no log ogo cared whether they knew how to rule or no (Indeed, Sparkie, the delightful gibbon ift Aberdeen's tiny zoo, displays more energY0 the conduct of his affairs than successo',0 Secretaries of State for Scotland have sh° 1' in the conduct of theirs.) dA However, there is an irredeemable bran4I folksiness about Scottish Nationalism. vttp member of the faith, declaiming about:0 inadequacy of Scottish roads and '10 profligacy of the English in building their on the tiny strip of tarmac connects the Forth and Tay bridges — t'N'tt, the finest monuments I have seen to olt1 capacity of engineers to create beauty ',tact added, "In England they build mighty rot'iiii and they don't even lead to towns. To g0 the towns you have to go off the roao 11 Remarks of a like kind are certain to briaftil well-bred sneer from Whitehall or froalt,cti experts at Transport House or Central OrProti What is easily missed is the smile that Rittpli behind the apparently crude joke, the t,r.50 sophisticated sense of humour that rea'100 that the best jokes often puzzle their audi,t, is,tl rather than reduce them to laughter. '1'011 analagous to the story of the dull Eng, ot politician who observed in puzzlement`dit Lloyd George that he could not under.„5`;ist41 Baldwin. "How could you," replied the w' ti maestro, "seeing that he is one of us?"
But I see I am being drawn aside by MY
Celtic temperament into a disquisition 041 inability of the English to understand. litlitl political matter at issue is far more imPo,1110( than any such cultural analysis, even a dt analysis necessarily underlies it. The fac,teeiP the matter is that Scotland has 1' 0! neglected for generations, and the habit5it■S union, or any conviction of the neces5ol therefor, are dying. They do not die easi1Y,Af their death throes are being taken advarlt;r of by a motley band travelling under the„fi tionalist flag. Writing of the changeover Tri'00 E national to English dress — prescribed bY — in the eighteenth century Dr Johnson ;10 served that "the same poverty that iradoef! then difficult to change their clothing, hin,iji; them now from changing it again." N°,"'bP wave of nationalism is sweeping Scotlano, ter r the deep conviction that the Westminso connection no longer matters in an age W pi I Westminster politicians are the greY °tot willing victims of a greyer bureaucracy 11850 effect when any Scot can see that his cooni
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