Wombat Diet

When I lived in Scotland in the 1980s it was divided between a middle class Tory minority who needed Westminster to protect the country from their Labour-voting, working class compatriots–a large majority. And the Scottish National Party (SNP), which favoured independence, was nowhere.

As an outsider I could enjoy the jokes of the English and Scottish about each other. Without a doubt however, there was a serious historical chip on the shoulder on one side and not the other. I met more than few who said It’s all the fault of the English too often (meaning everything, including the weather), who personally demonstrated the truth of the PG Wodhouse thesis that it is not difficult to tell the difference between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine, and who reserved a particular burning hatred for Mrs. Thatcher.

I voted, as an interested taxpayer at least, for Scottish independence when offered the opportunity to do so. There’s nothing like self-government to stimulate political maturity, though it may take a generation or two to blossom. Shortly afterwards I left the UK.

How times change. Today the Scottish National Party, running a minority devolved government, has published a white paper on Scottish independence. The Tories and Labour are united in opposition and on the back foot, favouring more devolved power, but opposing independence. This seems to have been achieved by a very clever charm offensive by the SNP. I watched the leader, Alex Salmond, on TV tonight being unreasonably reasonable. Not of a whiff of fire or brimstone. Now he just wants to have a “national conversation” about independence. This is surely already causing some lost sleep in 10 Downing Street and in many high echelons where Scots are disproportionately represented, like the BBC.

Westminster miscalculated by offering the Scots limited devolution if by doing so they thought it would keep them quiet. Salmond knows that every extra accretion of power will further excite the disenfranchised English who are increasingly aggrieved that Scots members of parliament vote in Westminster on legislation affecting the English — the so-called West Lothian question.

The withdrawal of Irish MPs from Westminster contributed immensely to the sorry polarization of politics afterwards on both islands. Any kind of divorce from Scotland now would have adverse consequences on both sides of Hadrian’s Wall, and people are wringing their hands about this.

Given that

• nationalist Scots would greatly like to emulate Ireland’s independence, economic success and political influence in the European Union
• the Unionist majority in Northern Ireland are mostly immigrants of Scottish descent
• the Scots and Irish are happy to lose to each other at rugby but not at all to the English
• the Irish invented whiskey and the Scots took to it and perfected it, and both are fond of a drop
• Gaelic and Scots Gaelic are the same after a few drinks (or if you are English)

it would appear that a union of Ireland and Scotland could be a useful new political dispensation that would relieve the English of much of their burdens of taxation and of administering and policing divided communities. The united Republics could join the Commonwealth and later include the rest of the old UK after a new constitutional settlement in which the monarchy, the established church and House of Lords are packed off to the US.

Sixty years ago today India was partitioned by Mountbatten, who died later at the hands of the IRA in Ireland, another country partitioned by the British. If the Irish and Scots can get together perhaps India and Pakistan could be persuaded to put aside old differences and field a single cricket team.

Tags: Britain, Politics