Caumie doon and keep the heid

GMW Wemyss

ery soon, members of the British electorate who are resident in Scotland shall vote – and only they

shall vote – on the fate of the entire United Kingdom as a political entity.VAllow me to put that again. Those who’ll vote, or who are at any rate eligible to vote, in the

Referendum are not the set of persons in the United Kingdom we might define as ‘all the Scots’. They are

not all Scots, either: residence is the sole criterion as amongst eligible voters. And they are eligible voters by

virtue of being British and happening to reside in Scotland.

The Scots diaspora is not limited to Scots outwith the territorial UK, after all: there are many Scots, by

descent and by place of birth, who reside elsewhere than in Scotland, and have no vote in the

Referendum. The Referendum is called to determine the fate of the entire polity of the United Kingdom;

yet only Britons resident in Scotland are allowed to vote in it.

No other nation in the world, no other nation in history, should have been thus generous; and it was

granted by a Prime Minister with a (C) after his name in Hansard.

Because it is a British question which is being decided by a small subset of the British electorate, every

Briton has a right – and, I conceive, a duty – to speak out, and not to be cowed or fear’d by those who

hurl idiot abuse. Had I not a drop of Scots blood in my veins, had I not the faintest link to Scotland, I

should do so and have the absolute right to do so.

I refuse the false assertion that only ‘Scots’ – by the SNP’s definition – are allowed to speak.

For that reason, I am very nearly inclined to leave it at that. But I shan’t: not because I feel obliged to

flourish any other credential than our shared Britishness, but because I have always been grateful and glad

– not proud: I, after all, had nothing to do with it, it is a stroke of fortune and grace – I have always been

humbly thankful that I am a Briton who rejoices in having Scots ancestry, Scots connexions, and a Scots

place of birth. I am English in part, Cornish a bit, Welsh and Anglo-Welsh in measure, Anglo-Irish … and

Scots. I dwell, as one line of my fathers before me have long dwelt, in the West Country of England. Yet

was I born in Renfrewshire, not far from Houston; and my people by affinity, by blood, and by

landholdings are as Scots as they are anything else. I share blood and history and genes with them:

Wemyss and Duff – and of course Stuart and Bruce and back to the House of Dunkeld; Henderson and

Gunn; Craufurd; Chattanach and Macintosh and Shaw and Ay; and Clan Donald.

And I am not eligible – Scots as I am in large measure, born in Scotland, and British – to vote in the

Referendum. Some unchurched Man of Kent with no least feeling for Alba or her history, who, being

employed by a quango or the state, stretches his pounds – which we all of us give him for not a hand’s

turn of honest work – by living in Scotland to take advantage of the economic bawbies of the (keep your

hair on) Barnett Formula, is eligible to vote in the Referendum. And his decision, not mine, shall help

determine the fate and future of all Britons, including the Scots even if Scotland secedes.

And so it is after all relevant that I am in no small measure Scots by blood and am Scots by birth: for it

seems to me a desperately sad thing, and a shameful, that a handful of Britons out of all the British, many

of them not in the least Scots themselves save by chance residence at an accidental moment, should be able

to make me and many another Scot aliens in the land of our birth.

I, like a great a number of other Scots not presently resident in Scotland, and all the rest of the British

who are so materially and closely affected by this question, have not a vote. But I have a voice.

And I raise that voice to reason with those in Scotland and voting, who are thinking to vote ‘Yes’.

I might tell you that a ‘Yes’ vote should give you the opposite of independence. There shall be no

currency union: the rest of the UK, who so wish to preserve the Union and you in it, should not, that

Union broken and they affronted and spurned, wear it for a minute: least of all in light of the truly wicked

abuse to which perhaps only a few, but they the loudest, on the ‘Yes’ side have stooped. Nor should an

independent Scotland have the reserves to run a currency board monetary system after the manner of

Hong Kong. Nor could Scotland, independent, manage in the short and intermediate term a new

currency without austerity and cuts that should make Margaret Thatcher look like James Maxton in

retrospect. That all of the ‘Yes’ campaign’s addled eggs are in the one basket – of North Sea oil – is bad

enough; that their further answer when pressed is to speak wildly of fracking makes the matter the more

plain: not only are they economically irresponsible, but also, so far as their revenue hopes rely on

petroleum production and fracking, their fantasies of a Green Scotland are a daftie’s rant. We have seen

already in the past few days the run on the pound and the preparations for capital flight from Scotland

that the mere prospect of a ‘Yes’ vote has caused. That leaves sterlingisation: using the pound outwith a

currency union. Using another country’s siller with no say in its minting. Yet a country which uses a

currency whose central bank it has no influence upon, and which will not act as a lender of last resort, is

shackled: it is far less free than is a nation of states sharing a common currency, a common Treasury, a

common legislature, a common monetary policy, and a common central bank. Economically, as the

matter stands and under Wee Eck’s plans – and lack of plans – a ‘Yes’ vote should reduce Scotland’s

independence, not secure it.

I might tell you that, but you’ve been told, and you have willed yourselves not to credit it.

I might tell you that a ‘Yes’ vote should give you the opposite of independence in yet a further sense.

The plans for an independent, SNP-designed Scotland are that it remain, at least for now, in Nato, that it

have its own Forces, and that at the same time it be nuclear-free. As we look out at the world in this

instant, it is hard to see that this is the time to tear apart HM Forces and diminish Nato; yet that is what

this should result in. A new, separate Kinrick of Scots, the MoD of which has a budget of just over half

that of the Metropolitan Police in London, is no access of strength to Nato for all that the Scottish soldier

is, historically, the greatest fighting man in the annals of history. What’s more, of course, Nato expects its

member states to spend 2 per cent. on defence, at minimum: something an independent Scotland, with its

credit, currency, and monetary difficulties, should be hard-pressed to do, and which to do shouldabsolutely annul the possibility of keeping the Nats’ promises of a social paradise in which everything is free

(not that economic reality should permit that in any event whatever). More than that, however, is this:

that Nato is, ultimately, organised around the nuclear deterrent, as a means of keeping even conventionalwar from breaking out. A nuclear-free Scotland in Nato is a moral and ethical oxymoron on both sides.

Scotland’s proudest traditions and greatest glories, alongside her battle honours, are in science, aye, and

economics, but specially in ethics and moral philosophy. I am an historian, not a moral philosopher, but I

tell you honestly that to renounce housing nuclear weapons whilst relying ultimately on their protection

in the hands of an ally is neither independence in any meaningful sense, nor is it moral. Morally and

ethically, it is equivalent to denouncing drug-peddling and whoremongering whilst living off the earnings

of the pusher and the pimp; and unless Scotland has wholly lost her old moral compass, the dominie and

the minister should say the same.

I might tell you that, but you’ve been told, and you have willed yourselves not to credit it.

I might tell you that a ‘Yes’ vote should result, in the UK you should then have left and in the

Scotland you should then have created, in the precise contrary of all you hope for or which Wee Eck has

promised you. I mind me of another group of Anglo-Celts once, who were feared that they had become a

junior partner in an enterprise, a union, which they had been very much the most prominent founders of,

and who sought to secede from it, under a saltire banner, all for to preserve – as they thought – their

institutions and preferred politics and way of life from an increasingly distant and to them alien central

government. They were, of course, the Confederate States of America. And the irony was – and the moral

is – that so long as they remained in their Union, they had an effective veto over the changes they feared;

and so soon as they seceded, they lost that veto and the constitution could be and was changed as they had

feared, without reference to them. A ‘Yes’ vote is not the way of Madiba; it is the way of JeffersonDavis. As a matter of economics, a (notionally) independent Scotland should, soon or late, be forced into

such austerities as should defy belief, and be forced by the iron laws of economics – as that auld Fifer

Adam Smith should have attested – into erecting as its natural party of government a centre-right party

under whatever name, animated by Classical Liberalism. And in the remaining United Kingdom? Aye,

you’d have defenestrated David Cameron (there’s an English surname for you, but), right enough, and the

Tory modernisers with him. (You’d not have ‘saved’ NHS Scotland, for that is already wholly in the

hands of Holyrood under the present system of devolution: dismiss that canard from your minds.) You’d

also have deprived Labour of over forty seats. There’d be no way to resist a Boundary Commission which

sorted the constituencies in the remaining UK into fairer shapes and sizes; and the permanent Tory

majority which should soon enough emerge on your border should be led by a new and altered Tory

Party, enfolding Ukip, animated by a new nationalism to match your own in opposition to your own,

and stiffened by a new Scots diaspora of those who have been abused by you for months for having the

temerity to vote ‘No’. The bad blood should linger for generations; and if any of you contemplating a

‘Yes’ vote imagines that, if all the dire economic and social predictions come true, you can rejoin the

Union and all be forgiven, I urge you – this is the advantage of living outwith Scotland: I know my

neighbours’ minds – I implore, I beseech you that you disabuse yourselves of that notion. You cannot

expect, if you don’t like what you see after taking a peek at a new Darien, a warm welcome: not now, after

months of abuse which you should in this event have followed by a rejection of the Union you should

afterward seek to rejoin on equal terms.

I might tell you that, but you’ve been told, and you have willed yourselves not to credit it – save those

of you who actively welcome it.

I might tell you that we’re ‘Better Together’; but that is insufficient, and perhaps its insufficiency is

why you’ve willed yourselves not to credit it.

For what I must tell you is this. Leave aside the fact that all the ‘Yes’ campaign’s promises, and its

vision for the future paradise – so far as it has one and has been willing to tell you what it is before you

make a leap in the dark –, are objectively false and an obvious fraud. The future in the event of a ‘Yes’ vote

is indeed a fearful one; but I do not wish that you take counsel of these legitimate fears of the inevitable

consequences. Nor do I tell you that truth which, by becoming a slogan, has lost all meaning, that we are

‘Better Together’, true though it be.

The fact is, we are ourselves only together.

Britain is not Britain without the Scots, and Scotland. Scotland is not Scotland without the rest of

Britain.

Wear your kilts with pride, aye: and recall that the kilt of today was derived from the plaids of old by a

Lancashire Quaker.

It was Dundas’ Army and Dundas’ Navy broke Bonaparte. The Scots Greys at Waterloo were

brigaded with The Royal Dragoons and the Inniskilling Dragoons: the Union Brigade. The engineers

who designed the Forth Bridge were a Yorkshireman and a man from Frome, in my own near country;

half England was rebuilt by Tam Telford of Eskdale. The Stevensons built lighthouses in Scotland; and

they gave all the English-speaking world the great Teller of Tales, Robert Louis Stevenson. Sir JM Barrie

was born in Kirriemuir; he lived and wrote and died in London. Dr Johnson began, half-humorously, as a

growler at Scots and Scotland; no one ever wrote more luminously of the noumenon of Iona and the Isles.

The MacDonald sisters married Englishmen, and if one of them gave us Stanley Baldwin, another at least

gave us Kipling. Sir Walter Scott – aye, and Burns – insisted they were British and Scots alike. And Scott

of the Antarctic was born in Devon.

That ‘English Tory toff’ who is now the target of your detestation in Downing Street is Davie

Cameron of that clan of Lochiel: a Cameron, a Geddes, and a Duff, whose father was born at Huntly, at

Blairmore House. That man’s predecessor as PM was of course a son of the manse, from Fife; his, an

Edinburgh lad.

There is hardly a battle honour in any Scottish regiment, current or historical, not won in an action in

which the Scots soldier – from the Northwest Frontier to Libya, Kandahar to the green hills of Tyrol –

was not fighting beside the Irish, the Welsh, the English, and, at the best of times and in the keenest and

most glorious of battles, the Gurkha soldier. There is no modern Scottish battle honour not earnt in

blood in the cause of freedom and the liberation of peoples: alongside the Welsh and the English and the

Irish and, at the sharpest end, the Gurkha, in wars which were waged by and could only be won by the

United Kingdom.

I am one of innumerable Britons of Scots ancestry, and rejoicing in it, who lives outwith Scotland.

There are innumerable Scots dwelling inwith Scotland, and Scots-by-choice with no known Scots

ancestry, whose blood is not Scots only but derives from all parts of the United Kingdom. Would you

separate us from our families and our ancestral homes?

The Labour Party is the joint creation of the Welsh and English working men and women, and such

Scots luminaries as Maxton and Keir Hardie. Would you split it in twain?

HM the Queen is HM the Queen because she is a descendant of the House of Stuart, and of that

subset of descendants of that House – which reaches back through the Bruce and William the Lion to

Kenneth son of Alpin (and, even on the Scots side, to the House of Wessex) – who can bear themselves as

members of the Kirk of Scotland. Would you sunder her realms?

This is the very centenary of the Great War. Seventy-five years since, we fought the Hitler War. In

June next comes the bicentenary of Waterloo. It is two hundred years and fifty-five since Minden. It is a

hundred and thirty years and four since Kandahar, where the Gunners and the 9th Lancers and the

predecessors of the KRRC stood beside the Gordons. Suffolk and Lancashire, Yorkshire and Hants and

Wales, wear the Minden Rose alongside the Borderers. At Waterloo, Oxfordshire and Glasgow served

shoulder to shoulder, and Wales and Sussex and Norfolk and Notts beside the Argylls as then they were.

At Delville Wood, the Eastern Division and the Scottish Division mixed their blood forever, the Black

Watch and the Seaforths and the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders with the Ox and Bucks and the

Somerset Light Infantry, the Suffolks and the Royal West Kents. The Northumbrian Division and the

Highland Division were bonded in blood at Arras, at the Scarpe: and, whate’er betide, Haig bides Haig ofBemersyde. At Alamein, Kent and Sussex and Cheshire fought and bled, died and triumphed, beside the

Highland Division. They sleep side by side; they shall never grow old. Would you separate them now?

Would you pluck their laurels and plough their poppies under? Would you break faith with them who

sleep?

And for what cause?

I am not here to set spark to the heather. I am not minded to boil a plant. But consider, my fellow

Scots, my fellow Britons, that peat does not drop from the empty creel; and the man does not reap in the

Autumn who did not sow in March. Believe me, I beg you, that the promises, political and economic,

which are being made to you, as a bone is thrown to quiet a dog, are not of independence: for they should

leave Scotland in a worse state than ever she can know in the Union, and more dependent than before:

upon the IMF, upon a Treasury and Bank of England over which she has no say and whose enmity she

has earnt, upon allies to defend her who do not trust her, and unable even by swingeing austerities to

achieve a tithe of the social paradise promised by men who wish you to forget the auld grannies’ wisdom

that you maun look in your purse before you please yourself. ‘Independence’ has a fine ring to it, but

what you are being promised is independence in name only, and a greater dependence far in fact than the

worst of what you now imagine. Honey is sweet, but none licks it from a briar. The fiddler must aye be

paid at last, and a ‘thank you’ does not pay him. You’d exchange not one dependency for another – a dun

hornless cow for a hornless dun cow – but rather should sell yourselves into a true bondage. I and

thousands like me, who live outwith Scotland but who rejoice in being Scots, whose childhood and

youthful Simmertides and Yuils were spent in Elgin and Turriff and Aviemore, shall be made strangers

and aliens, and you to us, and the bitterness of it shall mean that no longer should we be in the midst of

our kindred: where we should be welcomed in a language we know and receive hospitality and love that

we should not trade for a ton of gold. No longer could we say, ‘High mountains with lovely slopes, folk

there who are always kind: light is my step when I go bounding to see them, and I will willingly remain

there for a long while’; and you, come amongst us, should be eyed with suspicion and resentment, not so

much because of your choice but owing to the way in which the ‘Yes’ campaign has conducted itself. It’s a

bad cause wants such means.

And for this: this trumpery, false promise: would you forfeit influence and good will, set your

neighbours against you, sever ties of family and blood, tear down old, shared glories, sever regimental

histories and alliances, rip battle honours from the colours, diminish Scotland as well as Britain as a whole,

sunder ancient and familial ties: Lochaber no more?

Take tent of what you do, I implore you. Gang cannily. Remain with your kindred in the greatest of

united nations. For it is not that we are better together; it is not that we should all of us be worse if we

part; it is that we are truly ourselves only whilst we are who are, Britons alike and together and as one.

O

GMW Wemyss is an historian, and the author of the Village Tales series of novels, beginning with2013’s Cross and Poppy. Its sequel, Evensong, is due out shortly. He is also the author of Sensible Places:essays on place, time, and countryside; and of The Confidence of the House: May 1940. He is the co-authorof the forthcoming The Crisis: 1914; and of When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and politicalrepercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic; of ’37: The year of portent; of the Bapton Books Sampler: aliterary chrestomathy; and of The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays & Observations. He is also the co-editor and co-annotator of The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated; and of The Annotated Windin the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults), and of aforthcoming annotated edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. He is a partner in Bapton Books,a Very Small Imprint for Sound, Solid Works.