C aum ie doon and keep the heid

G M W W em yss
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. V
Allow me to put that again. Those wholl 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 feard 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 SNPs definition are allowed to speak.
For that reason, I am very nearly inclined to leave it at that. But I shant: 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 hands
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 campaigns 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 dafties 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 countrys 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 Ecks plans and lack of plans a Yes vote should reduce Scotlands
independence, not secure it.
I might tell you that, but youve 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. Whats 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 should
absolutely 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 conventional
war from breaking out. A nuclear-free Scotland in Nato is a moral and ethical oxymoron on both sides.
Scotlands 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 youve 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 Jefferson
Davis. 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,
youd have defenestrated David Cameron (theres an English surname for you, but), right enough, and the
Tory modernisers with him. (Youd 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.) Youd
also have deprived Labour of over forty seats. Thered 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 dont 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 youve been told, and you have willed yourselves not to credit it save those
of you who actively welcome it.
I might tell you that were Better Together; but that is insufficient, and perhaps its insufficiency is
why youve willed yourselves not to credit it.
For what I must tell you is this. Leave aside the fact that all the Yes campaigns 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 mans 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 9
th
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, whateer betide, Haig bides Haig of
Bemersyde. 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. Youd 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. Its 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
G M W W em yssis an historian, and the author of the Village Tales series of novels, beginning with
2013s 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-author
of the forthcoming The Crisis: 1914; and of When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political
repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic; of 37: The year of portent; of the Bapton Books Sampler: a
literary 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 Wind
in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults), and of a
forthcoming annotated edition of Robert Louis Stevensons Kidnapped. He is a partner in Bapton Books,
a Very Small Imprint for Sound, Solid Works.