Will auld acquaintance be forgot as Scots go it alone?

The Times (London, UK) ^ | March 31, 2007 | Martin Fletcher

[GMMAC]

Will auld acquaintance be forgot as Scots go it alone?
30 years ago Gordon Brown was the toast of student radicals in Edinburgh. Now he is seen as part of the Establishment — and out of touch with the Scotland’s new direction.

Martin Fletcher
timesonline.co.uk
March 31, 2007

In 1974 Gordon Brown was Rector of Edinburgh University, elected after a campaign that featured the “Brown Sugars” — girls sporting miniskirts and T-shirts emblazoned “Gordon for Me”.

I was a first-year student, and remember him as a striking figure with long black hair and trenchcoat, surrounded by acolytes. He was intense and ambitious, but he also lived with Princess Margarita of Romania, threw celebrated parties and enjoyed an almost glamorous reputation.

As editor of Student, besides filling the pages with bare flesh, his great scoop was to catch the university lying about its investments in apartheid South Africa. He used the rectorship — traditionally a ceremonial post — to flay a fusty university establishment. When Sir Michael Swann, the principal, sought to stop him chairing meetings of the University Court, the Duke of Edinburgh, the university’s chancellor, intervened: Princess Margarita was the Duke’s goddaughter.

While the young firebrand was shaking up Edinburgh, another movement was shaking up Scotland. Buoyed by the discovery of North Sea oil, the Scottish Nationalist Party won 11 Westminster seats that October, and forced Harold Wilson’s weak and panicky Labour Government to concede a referendum on devolution in 1979 that only narrowly failed.

Three decades on, Mr Brown will shortly become my prime minister, not rector, and the SNP is surging again. A poll for The Times this week suggested that the party was heading for a victory in the Scottish Parliament elections on May 3, paving the way for a referendum on independence by 2010. But today it is Mr Brown who represents an unpopular Establishment in distant London, Mr Brown who looks out of step with Scottish public opinion, and Mr Brown who faces the prospect — albeit remote — of finding himself prime minister of a foreign country. How the wheel has turned.

Back in the 1970s Edinburgh was an austere place that even the Bay City Rollers struggled to enliven. Pubs shut at 10pm and never opened on Sundays. Staid life assurance companies pottered along in genteel Charlotte Square. The economy was wretched. The city felt cut off from the world. It was an uncomfortable place to be an English student. The Scottish nationalism of those days was angry, confrontational and fiercely antiEnglish, as summed up by the SNP slogan: “It’s Scotland’s oil”.

The theatrical sensation of 1974 was John McGrath’s play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, which charted the exploitation of Scotland from the 19th-century Highland clearances to the plundering of North Sea oil. English students were resented, and regularly told that we were taking Scottish students’ places.

Today, behind its immutable granite face, Edinburgh is a city transformed. It is cosmopolitan and fun. Dismal bars and corner shops selling that peculiarly disgusting Scottish invention, the bridie, have been replaced by fancy pubs and classy alfresco restaurants. The Grassmarket, Seventies refuge of down-and-outs, is now hip. The breweries, whose sickly smell blanketed the city, have gone. You hear foreign accents everywhere, and can fly directly to Europe and America without changing in London.

Edinburgh has become Europe’s fifth biggest financial centre, employing 135,000 people. The Royal Bank of Scotland is a world top-ten bank with a market capitalisation larger than Coca-Cola. Elegant New Town houses sell for a million or two.

Gavin Don, a Scot who returned from London to set up a corporate finance business in 1994, says that as an Edinburgh student in the 1970s he used to play Porsche-spotting. “You could go a whole year and not see one. Now they are two a penny. Bentleys are pretty commonplace, and Rolls-Royces are not unheard of.” There is a cultural revival, too. The Scottish executive is pouring money into the arts. The bestselling authors Iain Rankin, Iain Banks, Alexander McCall Smith, Irvine Welsh and J.K. Rowling all live in or near the city. Its once-proud publishing industry is booming again.

Where Edinburgh leads, the rest of Scotland is slowly following. The country still has pockets of intense poverty, but its unemployment rate has fallen below the UK average, its per capita GDP is higher than most English regions, and two decades of steady population decline have been reversed.

As self-confidence has risen so the nature of Scottish nationalism has changed. It is more positive, less Anglophobic. It emphasises future potential, not past grievances. It asks merely for Scotland to be liberated so it can prosper within the European Union like a dozen other countries as small or smaller. Indeed, the EU allows Scotland to break away from England without condemning itself to isolation on Europe’s northern fringe.

Alex Salmond, the SNP’s wily leader, is still demanding the repatriation of North Sea oil revenues and the removal of nuclear missiles from the Clyde. But as he seeks to portray his party as mainstream, not extreme, he emphasises a desire for cooperation not confrontation with Westminster, and avoids overt England-bashing. He says an independent Scotland would keep the Queen and the pound.

In St Andrew Square I asked a dozen Scots to sum up the English in one word. The answers were not flattering — “pompous”, “egotistical”, “smug”, “arrogant”, “loud”, “pig-headed”. But they were given with smiles, and for all the tales of Scots backing Trinidad and Tobago against England in the football World Cup their antipathy to sassenachs appears more muted. Indeed, Flower of Scotland, the unofficial national anthem, which was written for The Corries in 1967 and celebrates England’s defeat at Bannockburn, seems a little out of tune with the times. “People are a tad embarrassed by it,” one veteran Scottish journalist said.

What has undoubtedly weakened, however, is the Scots’ sense of Britishness. Three hundred years after the Act of Union England and Scotland no longer have a common enemy in France. The British Empire, on which Scotland’s 19th-century prosperity was built, has gone. Memories of Scottish soldiers fighting alongside the English in two world wars have faded. Scottish industries such as shipbuilding and coal that depended on London subsidies have been privatised or closed. Margaret Thatcher’s use of socialist Scotland as a test-bed for hated policies such as the poll tax fuelled Scottish disenchantment with Westminster.

A recent British Social Attitudes Survey found four fifths of Scots consider themselves Scottish first and British second. The Scottish Saltire, flown only by a few wild-eyed radicals in the 1970s, is everywhere in Edinburgh, and the Union Jack has largely disappeared. It does fly outside The Scotsman newspaper — but only at the insistence of Andrew Neil, its former editor-in-chief.

At the same time the much-derided Scottish Parliament, which the Scot George Robertson, a former Defence Secretary, said would kill separatism “stone dead”, appears merely to have fostered a sense of Scottishness. It receives more coverage than Westminster in the Scottish media and The Times poll this week showed 52 per cent of Scots want it to have more power, only 7 per cent less.

The other great change since the 1970s is England’s attitude to Scottish independence. Polls suggest that an idea unthinkable then is today quite popular.

Many English resent Scots receiving £1,500 more per capita in public spending each year, and that the Government requires the support of Scottish MPs to ram through controversial legislation such as university top-up fees and foundation hospitals that do not apply north of the border. They are offended by Scotland’s perceived Anglophobia. The English have yet to back Roger Federer against Andy Murray, but my equally unscientific survey of a dozen English colleagues produced adjectives about the Scots just as unflattering — “difficult”, “chippy”, “aggressive”, “ungrateful”, “angry”, “brooding”.

Few minded if Scotland broke away. As the Saltire flies in Scotland, so the flag of St George has become increasingly common in England. It is as if the Union Jack, like the UK, is breaking down into its constituent parts.

All this leaves Mr Brown in a hole. As a Scot preparing to move into No 10 he needs to reassure the English, and has delivered no fewer than ten speeches or statements on the importance of Britishness since late 2004. He opposes further devolution. The Raith Rovers fan even cited Paul Gascoigne’s goal against Scotland in Euro 96 as a favourite football moment.

But the more Mr Brown champions Britishness, the more out of touch he looks in Scotland — and the more he fuels his compatriots’ disaffection with Labour before next month’s elections.

Scots dislike Tony Blair, whom they consider neo-Thatcherite. They hate his war in Iraq. Today’s equivalent of The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil is The Black Watch, which tells of Scottish soldiers going to fight a pointless war foisted on them by an English Prime Minister. Mr Brown is widely seen in Scotland as the Iraq war’s paymaster.

In Edinburgh in the Seventies, Mr Brown wrote his doctoral thesis on how Labour established itself as the alternative to the Conservatives in Scotland in the early 20th century. Its battle now is to prevent itself being usurped by the SNP.

The stakes are enormous. Were Scotland to gain independence Labour — shorn of its 39 Scottish MPs — would never win power in England again.

Nationalists head for power

–– A Populus poll for The Times this week put the SNP ahead of Labour in both the first-past-the-post and proportional-representation sections

–– The Nationalists are on track to win 50 seats in the 129-seat Scottish Parliament, seven more than Labour. The Lib Dems would have 18 MSPs, the Conservatives 17 and the Greens one

–– A majority of Scots (52 per cent) are in favour of more devolved powers for their Parliament. Just over one in four (27 per cent) backed full independence

–– On the constituency or first-past-the-post vote, the SNP is on 38 per cent; Labour 28; Lib Dems 15; Tories 14; others 6 In the proportional representation section, the SNP is on 35 per cent; Labour 30; Lib Dems 14; Tories 14

Source: www.populuslimited.com

[Candor7]

You will never understand what it is to be Scottish.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Hardly. It comprises a great deal of my work:

http://www.grahamhighlanders.com (The band I founded)

And thats me on the right, the gentleman on the left is His Grace, James Graham, Duke of Montrose, 8th hereditary Chief of Clan Graham, and member of the House of Lords.He thinks I know what it is to be Scottish, so whats your problem anyway? Do you think that you know more about me than His Grace, perchance?

Beware of your racial slurs my man, and your statements about what I am, for they are purely in your imagination.

Keep it up and you will no longer be here.

[Oberon]

And the English make good ales. I like English ales.

I can forgive the English all their sins of kitchen and dining table, as long as I have access to the products of English brewing.

You can keep your sour pilseners and bready bocks; top fermentation is where it's at. The English got it right with porter, I think, and if I can come by a good IPA or an Imperial Stout along the way, so much the better!

To be fair, though, I like Belgian brews nearly as well as the English, and there's no flies on the Irish products either.

[Candor7]

A lot of the small Northern Scottish towns have their own bridie shops, with their own special recipes. They are one of my favorite foods. You can get cheap ones at the grocery, and heat 'em in a microwave. They are really tastey and filling.

[Oberon]

I’m half-tempted to travel there and try them. My wife is an Atchison, and I’m told she still has family in Scotland.

[Vicomte13]

That looks quite a bit like a steak-and-kidney pie, without the plate. Hmmmm. It might actually be good. There is a lot of peasant fare that people turn their noses up at which is actually very savory.

And with lamb or mutton? That makes it sound even better.
Next time I am in the UK, I will seek out a lamb bridie.

However “HP sauce”? Is this the fingernail in the pie?

[fanfan]

You’re a fine looking man Candor.

[Brit_Guy]

“”Britain fought for two years against tyranny alone””

A wee bit late to this one but have very much enjoyed reading this entertaining exchange. However, I’m going to wade in at the assertion that him saying ‘Britain stood alone’ between 1939-41 is a statement of monsterous misrepresentation. After all that is one of Churchills stock laments of history. When referencing Britain in that period it is phrase of the inclusiveness. The idea of ‘The British’ in the 30s and 40s is of course the Commonwealth and Empire. The pink bits on the map. Which sadly indeed were largely holding off Hitler on their own until Peral Harbour persuaded the Americans that sitting on the sidelines wasn’t going to work.

Had he said ‘England stood alone’ you would be right to get high and mighty on the linguistic point. But it seems to be you, not him, who is confusing ‘British’ and ‘English’ throughout the thread.

Carry on the pair of you..... :)

[Churchillspirit]

Why are you so rude?

[GMMAC]

"You’re a fine looking man Candor."

Aye, that he is with his typical of the Highland Scots' dark good looks but ...
... you'll note his knees aren't showing.

Just let me don my own splendid Jacobite apparel & I'll gladly go him knees to knees - LOL!

[Vicomte13]

I am curious about this:

Were the Americans able to trade freely with India and British Africa during this period, or was “the Empire” largely closed to American trade without heavy tarriffs, restrictions, etc.? Do you know?

[fanfan]

I want to sell the tickets, OK?

;-D

[GMMAC]

"rude" ???

Try outraged by such a churlish slight to all non-Britsh Allied Military members who nobly served freedom's cause from 1939 until America eventually entered WW2 in late 1941.

Given - beyond in Europe - Canada, Australia & numerous other nations had Troops who laid down their lives in hellholes like Hong Kong, insisting upon due respect for their sacrifices is light years away from being "rude"?

[Brit_Guy]

“Were the Americans able to trade freely with India and British Africa during this period, or was “the Empire” largely closed to American trade without heavy tarriffs, restrictions, etc.? Do you know?”

During which period? 1939-41? There was next to no trade, much less tarrifs! It was a case of the USA sending over guns, food and fuel on a lend/lease basis and us finding anyone over 18 to use them! The UK was practically bankrupt by that point.

[Candor7]

You got that right. My knees are shot from having to jump in and out of foxholes, and then kick starting Norton motorcycles. I will not enter a knee comnpetition with anyone!( LOL)

You win by default!

[Brit_Guy]

Please name the countries that still had a functioning governement that were not either members of the British Empire or Commonwealth who were at War with Hitler between 1939 and 41?

Between 1939-41 The Australians, Canadians, Hong Kong, Indians, New Zealanders would all recognise themselves as loyal to the British crown at state level if not at the level of the individual soldier. There is no massive slur in describing the Commonwealth Allies as British - any more than calling a modern day Scot or Welsh ‘British’. ‘Commonwealth’ would have been a better word than ‘British’, but I am sure no slur was intended, and this whole side debate is a big red herring on the two of you having a very entertaining argument about Scotishness. Which I was enjoying!

[Candor7]

You’re a fine looking man Candor.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

My mother thinks so too, but few others.

LOL

[Churchillspirit]

How many pub lunches have you eaten in Britain?

Forget the "sandwiches behind the bar" most pubs serve a good shepherd's pie; ploughman's lunch (cheeses with fresh bread and optional pickled onions). Many of them offer a carvery - a choice of cooked meats carved to order with a selection of salads. Some will also serve fish and chips - and a good soup is almost always available.

[Churchillspirit]

What tartan are you wearing in that photo?

It is neither Montrose nor Menteith.

[Candor7]

Well if you want bridies you don't have to travel further than your nearest Highland Games , or you can make your own

Traditional Scottish Recipes - Forfar Bridies

These are said to have been made by a travelling food seller, Maggie Bridie of Glamis (in the days when the county of Angus was called Forfarshire). They were mentioned by J M Barrie (author of Peter Pan) who was born in Kirriemuir in that county. The original recipe used suet but since that is not always to everyone's taste, you can use butter or margarine.

Ingredients (for six bridies):

1½ lbs (700g) boneless, lean rump steak. Lean minced beef can also be used.

2 oz (2 rounded tablespoons) suet or butter or margarine

1 (or 2) onion, chopped finely

1 teaspoon dry mustard powder

Quarter cup rich beef stock ( you can used canned)

Salt and pepper to taste

1½ lbs flaky pastry (home made or from a pastry mix packet)

Method:

Remove any fat or gristle from the meat and beat with a meat bat or rolling pin. Cut into half-inch (1cm) pieces and place in a medium bowl. Add the salt/pepper, mustard, chopped onion, suet (or butter/margarine) and stock and mix well.

Prepare the pastry and divide the pastry and meat mixture into six equal portions. Roll each pastry portion into a circle about six inches in diameter and about quarter of an inch thick and place a portion of the mixture in the centre. Leave an edge of pastry showing all round. Brush the outer edge of half the pastry circle with water and fold over. Crimp the edges together well. The crimped edges should be at the top of each bridie. Make a small slit in the top (to let out any steam). Brush a 12 inch square (or equivalent area) baking tray with oil and place the bridies in this, ensuring that they are not touching.

Place in a pre-heated oven at 450F/230C/gas mark 8 for 15 minutes then reduce the temperature to 350F/180C/gas mark 4 and cook for another 45/55 minutes. They should be golden brown and if they are getting too dark, cover with greaseproof paper (vegetable parchment).

Or you can order your own, just heat and serve:

http://www.scottishfoodoverseas.com/forfar-bridies.html

[Churchillspirit]

You may have some valid points but name calling is not encouraged here. You have been preaching to the newb as you call him about etiquette on Free Republic. You need to follow it yourself.