This book seeks to explain that change, how we got here, why the people became enthused, what caused the big swing to YES, how success was just denied and, most crucially of all, what will happen now.
The events in Scotland underline the ability of grassroots movements to take on political establishments in modern democracies. A new and powerful force has been mustered – modern-day knights if you will. And the international community should sit up and pay attention.
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But now to our referendum tale. Ours is but a new chapter – albeit a crucial one – in a much older story. Scotland is one of Europe’s oldest nations.
In the late twelfth century, when Balian was busy defending the Holy City, Scotland had already been united as a kingdom for 300 years, with Picts and Scots forced together under the threat of Viking incursions. Richard Coeur de Lion never did manage to win back Jerusalem, but his crusade gave William the Lion of Scotland an excellent opportunity to be released from the feudal impositions Henry II had enforced upon him and therefore Scotland. He was able to fly his Royal Standard (the Lion Rampant) with additional pride.
The next affirmation of Scottish independence was somewhat bloodier but the outcome was the same. Robert de Brus did not seal Scottish independence by the storming of Linlithgow castle in 1313, or on the field of Bannockburn in the following year on midsummer’s day, or even in the Arbroath Declaration of six years later, but at the Treaty of Northampton with England in 1328. However, Bannockburn was still one of history’s decisive battles. It both preserved and shaped the nation.
The recognition of Scottish independence at Northampton did not finish the matter, and an uneasy relationship between Scotland and England was the norm for the next 300 years – border warfare tempered by the occasional dynastic nuptial. From a Scottish perspective, for many years, union with the auld ally of France looked more likely than union with the auld enemy of England.
And when crown unity did come in 1603 it was through a Scottish king, James VI, becoming King of England. But Scotland remained an independent nation and it would be another century before the Union of the Parliaments.
When that happened, in 1707, Scotland had a collective history of statehood, stretching back for the best part of a millennium: three times the period that has elapsed since.
Scottish dissatisfaction with the government in London has ebbed and flowed since the Treaty of Union. There have been periods when support for the union was in the ascendancy. However, it is also true that every movement for radical change in Scotland, from Jacobite to Jacobin, from crofting Liberals to the early Labour movement, was overlaid with Scottish nationalism.
Even those famous Scots who are often regarded as pillars of the established order have displayed a sneaking sympathy for the nationalist cause. On the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament are inscribed the words that Walter Scott put into the mouth of Mrs Howden in Heart of Midlothian:
‘When we had a king, and a chancellor, and parliament-men o’ our ain, we could aye peeble them wi’ stanes when they werena gude bairns – But naebody’s nails can reach the length o’ Lunnon.’
The immediate aftermath of the Second World War was a high point of Britishness, which had a bearing on my own upbringing. My late mother, Mary, patriotic Scot though she was, would probably never have countenanced Scottish independence if her son had not become inveigled into the national movement. She was from a middle-class background and her views had been bolstered by the war: the Churchill pride.
My father, Robert, however, thinks rather differently. When I was a young MP, and didn’t know better, I got into a spot of family bother. I made public the contrast between my mother’s and father’s views, revealing the capital punishment remedy my dad said was appropriate for Churchill’s treatment of the miners.
‘Salmond’s father wanted to hang Churchill’ screamed the newspaper headline. I phoned Dad to apologise.
‘Did I teach you naethin?’ said Faither reprovingly. ‘Hingin was owr guid for thon man!’
The skilled working class like my father – from Robert Burns to the 1820 martyrs, and from Keir Hardie to the early trade union movement – have always been open to the great call of home rule.
James Maxton, the Clydesider MP, speaking in Glasgow in the 1920s in support of a Home Rule Bill (and for a Scottish socialist commonwealth), declared that ‘with Scottish brains and courage … we could do more in five years in a Scottish Parliament than would be produced by twenty-five or thirty years’ heart-breaking working in the British House of Commons.’
So it wasn’t a great leap of faith for my dad to move politically from Labour to SNP in the 1960s. Nor was it for the many others who followed suit in the 1970s, forcing the issue of devolution onto the UK agenda.
The failed referendum of 1979 and the election of Margaret Thatcher seemed at first to have reversed the trend, but in reality it accelerated the underlying shift towards home rule.
A great deal of Scottish identity has been preserved for 300 years through the strength of institutions – Scottish churches, Scots law, Scottish education – and now the myriad of third-sector pressure groups that interact with that institutional identity.
Ironically, Margaret Thatcher’s brand of Conservatism set about dismantling many of the key symbols of Britishness. So British Airways became BA, British Petroleum became BP, and British Rail became lots of things.
But Thatcher inadvertently managed rather more than that. A quarter of a century ago she swept into the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and, in an infamous address, exposed the crass materialism of her creed. This was too much for the elders and brethren – and far too much for a Churchill Tory like my mother, who never voted Conservative again.
Margaret Thatcher had combined her visit to the General Assembly with an equally ill-fated visit to the Scottish Cup final, where she managed to unite Dundee United and Celtic fans in an ingenious and very effective joint red card protest.
Shortly thereafter, on 16 June 1988, Hansard records a brash young SNP member from Aberdeenshire, fresh from being restored to the House after expulsion for intervening in the Budget in protest against the poll tax, taunting the Prime Minister about what he described as her ‘epistle to the Caledonians’:
Will the Prime Minister demonstrate her extensive knowledge of Scottish affairs by reminding the House of the names of the Moderator of the General Assembly, which she addressed, and the captain of Celtic, to whom she presented the cup?
Margaret Thatcher had given Scottish nationalism a new political dynamic and accelerated the long-term decline of the Conservative Party in Scotland, where it now commands a mere one-third of its popular support of the 1950s.
Other factors were undercutting support for the union. The Scottish economy had been underperforming the UK average for much of the twentieth century. The reasons were deep and complex but one key factor was the export of human capital. Often it was the best people, the people with get up and go, who got up and went.
When I was a lad, thanks to my grandfather’s grounding, I knew that Scots had invented lots of things. He proudly showed me the plaque to David Waldie, born in Linlithgow and pioneer of chloroform, on the wall of the Four Marys pub. He told me that he had worked on the discovery with James Simpson of nearby Bathgate.
I soon discovered that, even beyond Linlithgow and Bathgate, Scotland seemed to have invented just about everything worth inventing – television, telephone, tarmacadam, teleprompter, etc. – and they are just a few examples beginning with the letter ‘t’!
It took me some time further to realise that Scotland’s creative grandeur is not just down to natural ingenuity but springs from our most important invention of all: long before the Treaty of Union, Scotland legislated for compulsory universal elementary education at parish level. Indeed if we look at the list