The people's republic of Scotland
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Paul at Fechan
Well-Known Member
a No Thanks sign got trashed for about the 4th or 5th time outside annan again last night.... we largely describe such vandalism as what on here??
Last edited:
skywull
Well-Known Member
skywull
Well-Known Member
i hear some evil person burst a yes balloon on biggar high street as well omg this is getting serious
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gerarddwatts
Well-Known Member
I have received 2 PMS from 'gubrath'.
The first effectively reprimands me for ridiculing his misuse of two words....gu brath....which is gaelic, and is often translated as 'Scotland forever' and, apparently, become the slogan of the independence movement. Gubrath means nothing.
He quite rightly points out my user name is gerarddwatts, this also means nothing as correctly it should be gerard d watts. To my knowledge gerard d watts has never been the rallying cry for anything. I use it because it is my name and I don't like using made up names hiding my identity. I use the same name on any forum that will have me. It is not gaelic.
I accept his reprimand and apologise.
The other PM relates to the two posts garnered from the Scottish Farmer. His which relates to 4 former presidents of the NFUS who say 'Yes', and mine which relates to 6 former presidents, 9 vice presidents, and the chairman of QMS, who say 'no'.
He points out that George Lyon was investigated in 1997 for sending some sheep(6) to mart with bad feet and mastitis. I can find no evidence of a prosecution. He points out that George Lyon left farming...he became an MEP. Both posts refer to 'former farmers leaders', but it would seem that Lyon cannot have a valid opinion because his sheep had bad feet. So I bow to his research and will reduce the numbers to 5 former presidents, 9 vice presidents and the chairman of QMS.
I apologise for misleading my readers.
Nas Fhearr Comhla!!
The first effectively reprimands me for ridiculing his misuse of two words....gu brath....which is gaelic, and is often translated as 'Scotland forever' and, apparently, become the slogan of the independence movement. Gubrath means nothing.
He quite rightly points out my user name is gerarddwatts, this also means nothing as correctly it should be gerard d watts. To my knowledge gerard d watts has never been the rallying cry for anything. I use it because it is my name and I don't like using made up names hiding my identity. I use the same name on any forum that will have me. It is not gaelic.
I accept his reprimand and apologise.
The other PM relates to the two posts garnered from the Scottish Farmer. His which relates to 4 former presidents of the NFUS who say 'Yes', and mine which relates to 6 former presidents, 9 vice presidents, and the chairman of QMS, who say 'no'.
He points out that George Lyon was investigated in 1997 for sending some sheep(6) to mart with bad feet and mastitis. I can find no evidence of a prosecution. He points out that George Lyon left farming...he became an MEP. Both posts refer to 'former farmers leaders', but it would seem that Lyon cannot have a valid opinion because his sheep had bad feet. So I bow to his research and will reduce the numbers to 5 former presidents, 9 vice presidents and the chairman of QMS.
I apologise for misleading my readers.
Nas Fhearr Comhla!!
bewsher500
Well-Known Member
and is .243 the appropriate calibre to use on him?
Hmm.. possibly, with a slow expansion bullet, minimum 100 grain. There's a lot of body fat to get through.
I am thinking of the way Salmond handled the Al-Megrahi debacle...
Wow! You really do like to twist truth. What I did in our now NOT so private messages was not reprimand anyone but point out that you have contracted your name to a one word screen name and correct me for doing something similar with gu bràth. If you read my intro you'll see it I actually chose my screen name from "cabar feidh gu brath" The stag's horns forever. Which I though was appropriate for this site. As for the former farmer Mr Lyon, he eventually lost his tenancy, if I remember correctly. Barclay Forrest runs his business from London and numerous other characters in your photograph are not in the same league of farmer and landowner as the stalwarts in the Yes photo I posted. It will be really interesting to see just how many real Gaelic speakers agree with your last remark.
wivenhoe65
Well-Known Member
Hmm , registered as a member Sept 2014 , total of 7 posts , i smell a TROLL ,develop a sudden interest in deer stalking did we , or are you one of Salmonds brown shirts ?
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
An interesting perspective from an Historian:
(Apologies to yesterdays' Sunday Times for copying it, I hope they forgive me).
The battle for Britain
Voting yes to independence betrays the fighting spirit of a proud nation, argues Scotland’s leading historian
Niall Ferguson Published: 14 September 2014
Print
'The Germans feared the Scottish regiments - the devils in skirts'
When you go, will you send back
A letter from America?
Take a look up the railtrack
From Miami to Canada.
Broke off from my work the other day,
I spent the evening thinking about
All the blood that flowed away
Across the ocean to the second chance . . .
That was the Proclaimers’ Letter from America, written in 1986 — back when Scotland used to qualify for the World Cup. The manager then was a young chap named Alex Ferguson. But we were still knocked out at the group stage by West Germany and Denmark.
This Thursday, residents of the land of my birth are essentially voting on whether or not to become Denmark. Or maybe Slovakia. Or Ireland. If the result is a “yes” to independence — and if the European Union allows Scotland to join — the new country would become the 13th EU member state with a population of fewer than 6m. Note: there are about the same number of cities in China with a population larger than 6m. In American terms, Scotland would be the 22nd largest state, just ahead of Colorado, if it opted instead to join the United States.
Being a small state in Europe’s neighbourhood is certainly possible. It’s safer than it used to be. All but two of the 12 current EU members with fewer than 6m people were invaded by the Nazis or the Soviets in the Second World War.
But should this decision to go it alone be left to the 4m or so residents of Scotland who are over 16? The whole point of the Proclaimers’ song is precisely that such a huge number of Scots have over the centuries “flowed away / Across the ocean to the second chance”. My family have sent back their fair share of letters from America — from my aunt and uncle in Canada, my sister in Pennsylvania, me in Massachusetts.
And not only letters from America. Letters from the trenches of Flanders, written by my grandfather when he was a private in the Seaforth Highlanders. Letters from Burma and India, when my mother’s father was sent by the RAF to fight the Japanese. Letters from India. Letters from Australia.
The number of people outside Scotland who identify themselves as Scots is about 18m in the New World alone, including 6m in America (not counting an almost equal number of Scots-Irish, meaning descendants of Ulstermen), 5m in Canada and nearly 2m in Australia. There are Scots everywhere, from Dunedin to Nova Scotia, from Patagonia to Hong Kong (a city that was of course founded by Scotsmen). There are more people called Ferguson in Kingston, Jamaica, than in Dundee and Aberdeen put together.
To most of us overseas Scots, I think it’s fair to say, the idea of Scotland’s becoming an independent state seems like economic self-immolation. On the currency question (sterlingisation? the euro? the groat?), the oil revenues, the debt, the spending pledges, the policies of the Scottish National party simply don’t add up. If Scotland votes “yes”, it will be voting for a far nastier economic shock than roughly half of Scots seem to grasp.
And for what exactly? The “yes” campaign’s justifications strike most overseas Scots as absurd. To be a “beacon for progressive opinion”, in Alex Salmond’s words, by stopping Tory rule being imposed from the south for ever more? But Tony Blair would have won the elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005 for Labour even if the whole of Scotland had abstained. And the chances of a UK-wide Labour victory in 2015 are hardly zero.
Talking of Tony Blair, he’s just one of 11 prime ministers who can be counted as Scots (the Earl of Bute, Earl of Aberdeen, Gladstone, Rosebery, Balfour, Campbell-Bannerman, Bonar Law, Ramsay MacDonald, Douglas-Home, Blair and Brown). And the present PM’s father was Ian Donald Cameron, born at Blairmore House, Aberdeenshire. Sorry, who’s been ruling whom?
As for the claim that Scotland is some honorary Scandinavian state with an ethos more favourable to welfare than England — call it “Scandland” — that is surely nonsense. If anything, in my lifetime there has been a narrowing rather than a widening of the cultural gap between north and south Britain. The Daily Mail sells more copies in Scotland than The Herald and The Scotsman put together.
And yet, while all these negative arguments against independence are necessary, they are clearly not sufficient. Perhaps that’s not surprising. Telling a Scot, “You can’t do this. If you do it, terrible things will happen to you,” has been a losing negotiating strategy since time immemorial.
So what is the positive case for the Union? It has to be more than just “We’ll give you all the benefits with none of the costs” — which is how I interpret “devo max”.
First, the idea of a Scottish nation state is in fact profoundly un-Scottish. The greatest thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were not nationalists but cosmopolitans.
David Hume, the historian and philosopher, was always contemptuous of what he called the “vulgar motive of national antipathy”. “I am a Citizen of the World,” he wrote in 1764. Hume’s account of the consequences of Union with England could scarcely have been more positive: “Public liberty, with internal peace and order, has flourished almost without interruption: Trade and manufactures, and agriculture, have increased: The arts, and sciences, and philosophy, have been cultivated.” His only complaint was the tendency of the English to “treat with Hatred our just Pretensions to surpass & to govern them”. Fair enough.
But the best witness of all is Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics. For Smith understood the central point that the independent Scotland had been very far from a working man’s paradise. “By the Union with England,” he wrote, “the middling and inferior ranks of people in Scotland gained a compleat deliverance from the power of an aristocracy which had always before oppressed them.” Smith shrewdly pointed out the parasitical character of the Edinburgh political elite.
“There was little trade or industry in Edinburgh before the Union,” he wrote. Only “when the Scottish parliament was no longer to be assembled in it” did Edinburgh become “a city of some trade and industry”.
Those entitled to vote this week should heed Smith’s prescient warning about politicians who promise “plausible plans of reformation” that are mainly intended “for their own aggrandisement”. They should also remember that, to us overseas Scots, Smith’s vision of an entire world linked together on the basis of free markets and free trade is far more appealing than the parochial nationalism of “Scandland”.
The extent to which the Scots were and are a global people is hard to overstate. By the end of the 19th century, about three-quarters of the population of the UK lived in England, compared with a tenth in Scotland and a tenth in Ireland. But in the Empire the English accounted for barely half of colonists. Scots constituted around 23% of the British-born population in New Zealand, 21% in Canada and 15% in Australia.
To be sure, not all the emigrants went gladly. When that Anglo-Scottish odd couple Samuel Johnson and James Boswell journeyed through the Highlands and islands in 1773 they kept encountering what the former disapprovingly called an “epidemical fury of emigration”. Neither man grasped that what was really “clearing” men and women from their homes in such numbers was the combination of rack-renting landlords and a succession of dismal harvests.
Yet, unlike the Irish, most Scots did not regard venturing overseas as a punishment. In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, a wealthy nabob just back from India jokes about the “the number of Scotchmen” employed by the East India Company. It was no joke. The personnel was at the very least half Scottish. Warren Hastings himself referred to his closest advisers as his “Scotch guardians”. Even his first wife was a Scot: Mary Buchanan from Cambuslang.
Much of the explanation for this extraordinary over-representation of Scots abroad lay in their greater readiness to try their luck abroad. Economic prospects at home were just less bright than for their English counterparts. But the Scots were also better educated by universities such as Glasgow — which favoured physics over classics — for the practical business of empire-building.
And the Scots were much more ready than the English to be assimilated into indigenous societies. Among the products of countless Scottish-Indian unions was James Skinner, the son of a Scotsman and a Rajput princess, and the founder of the formidable cavalry regiment Skinner’s Horse.
“Black or white will not make much difference before [God’s] presence,” Skinner once remarked. My parents taught me just that lesson when I was a boy in Kenya. Sectarianism was once a Scottish vice; but never racism.
But the Scots did not go abroad just to make money and love. They also went to make war. And that brings me to what I believe is the clinching argument against the Scottish National party’s proposed retreat into a parochial nationalism.
This year, of all years, we should remember the heroism of our grandfather’s generation. The Scots had been slightly underrepresented in the pre-1914 army, but they were the keenest to volunteer when the First World War broke out. By December 1915, just under 27% of Scottish men aged 15-49 had volunteered — well above the UK average. In some Hebridean communities it was close to all the men.
As soon as he was old enough, my granddad John Ferguson enlisted and served in the Seaforth Highlanders. He was one of more than half a million Scots who served in the British army during the First World War. Of these, perhaps as many as a quarter lost their lives. (Grandad was one of the lucky ones, though he did get gassed and shot in the chest. His heavy wheezing is one of my earliest memories.) Only the Serbian and Turkish armies sustained such severe casualties.
You can think, as I do, that the First World War was a huge mistake. You can think that Douglas Haig wasted untold young lives with his attempts to achieve a breakthrough on the western front. What you cannot do is dispute that the Scottish regiments were the most formidable fighting force on the Allied side, because the Germans themselves admitted it. They learnt to fear the “devils in skirts”.
David Hume sang the praises of the Union, which Scottish soldiers fought for ferociously
In the Second World War, too, the Scots showed a notable fighting spirit. In the great disaster of 1940, some Scottish soldiers refused to surrender even when ordered to do so. “Not f****** likely, you yellow *******!” was the furious reaction of one member of the 51st (Highland) Division when ordered to lay down his arms by an officer of the Kensington Regiment in June 1940. Evidence like this makes me almost believe the apocryphal story about the two Highlanders watching the evacuation of the beaches at Dunkirk. “Aye, Jock,” says one to the other, “If the English surrender, it’ll be a long war.”
The point is that my grandfathers’ pride in being Scottish was inseparable from their pride in being British. Others might have a colonial cringe, an inferiority complex. We knew it was the Scots who had taken over England in 1603. And we knew we were tougher and smarter than the English. Harder working, too. Our problem, if anything, was a superiority complex.
Maybe all this just leaves today’s Scots cold. Maybe it’s a case of “Those days are past now / And in the past they must remain,” in the mawkish words of our unofficial national anthem, penned by The Corries during the first real boom in Scottish nationalism, in 1967 — in the days when Scottish football sides were still capable of winning European trophies.
Yet I find it very hard to believe that any “yes” voter would be unmoved by the archive footage I recently watched of the 51st Division marching through Saint- Valéry-en-Caux in 1944, their massed pipes and drums resounding in the streets of the town that had been the scene of the division’s surrender four years before. After D-Day, they returned as liberators.
Pride in victories like these are, for me, the essence of what it is to be both Scottish and British: to be, in essence, the most British of the British. It was a great thing to stand against the evils of National Socialism and fascism, as it was a great thing later to stand ready, as we did, to fight against Soviet Communism. Say what you like about the United Kingdom — say what you like about the Empire and the Commonwealth — its finest hour was pretty bloody fine.
True, not everyone saw it that way. In a letter sent from Whalsay in Shetland in April 1941, the Scottish nationalist Christopher Grieve — or “Hugh MacDiarmid”, as he called himself — wrote: “On balance I regard the Axis powers, tho’ more violently evil for the time being, [as] less dangerous than our own government in the long run and indistinguishable in purpose.” Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the SNP was founded in 1934. Perhaps it’s worth remembering that the SNP’s leader during the war, Douglas Young, was jailed for refusing to fight Hitler.
Of course, it is possible that Alex Salmond will succeed in turning Scotland into some version of the Irish republic in that era. There was certainly a time — before the global financial crisis, if memory serves — when Scotland was supposed to be imitating the Celtic Tiger, not to mention the Baltic Boomtowns: small, intensely focused on their own prosperity, with no more aspirations to great-power status. But is it really Scotland’s destiny to walk away from power and its responsibilities?
I don’t often quote President Barack Obama, but I need to now — not least because, if Scotland votes “yes”, my first act will be to apply for US citizenship. My country, Scotland in Great Britain in the United Kingdom, will have been condemned to death.
Last week the president gave a statement calling for decisive action to eradicate the “cancer” of Isis (also known as Islamic State). I agree with him: these murderers and their ilk pose a mortal threat to freedom, and not only in the Middle East. I also agree with him when he tells Americans: “This is not our fight alone.”
One of the hostages held by Isis was aid worker David Haines, from Perth. Last night it released a video of his apparent murder.
Scotland has its terrorists, too. Glasgow-born Aqsa Mahmood is now believed to be with Isis in Syria, from where she regularly tweets her disgusting incitements.
When Germany invaded Belgium and France in 1914 and again in 1940, it was our fight too. When the Soviet Union threatened the European continent and indeed the entire world with totalitarian rule after 1945, it was our fight too. When the Provisional IRA killed and maimed in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland, it was our fight too. And when the Taliban allowed Osama bin Laden to plan the attacks that took place 13 years ago, it was our fight too. (It was 9/11 that made me decide to accept a job at New York University.)
But would the West be able to count on Alex Salmond, who favours unilateral nuclear disarmament and envisages a Scottish army of 15,000 men? Somehow I doubt it. After all, he’s the man who in March said of President Putin that he is “more effective than the press he gets . . . he’s restored a substantial part of Russian pride, and that must be a good thing”.
As I write, I am flying from Edinburgh to Kiev, to a country that is discovering the hard way just how dangerous the world can be for a newly independent state — and Ukraine has a population more than eight times larger than Scotland. The Scottish nationalists like to pretend that they are the heirs of William Wallace. But Alex Salmond’s vision of Scotland’s future is more Bonehead than Braveheart.
In Letter from America, the Proclaimers’ mournful chorus goes thus: “Bathgate no more, Linwood no more, Methil no more, Irvine no more . . .”
But here’s an alternative ending, if — like the Proclaimers — you’re one of those Scottish residents tempted to vote “yes” this week: “Sterling no more, UK no more, Great Britain no more, Scotland no more.”
© Niall Ferguson 2014
Niall Ferguson was born in Glasgow and educated at the Glasgow Academy and Oxford University. He is the Laurence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard. This is an edited version of his Stevenson Lecture at Glasgow University last Thursday
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
An interesting perspective from an Historian:
(Apologies to yesterdays' Sunday Times for copying it, I hope they forgive me).
The battle for Britain
Voting yes to independence betrays the fighting spirit of a proud nation, argues Scotland’s leading historian
Niall Ferguson Published: 14 September 2014
'The Germans feared the Scottish regiments - the devils in skirts'
When you go, will you send back
A letter from America?
Take a look up the railtrack
From Miami to Canada.
Broke off from my work the other day,
I spent the evening thinking about
All the blood that flowed away
Across the ocean to the second chance . . .
That was the Proclaimers’ Letter from America, written in 1986 — back when Scotland used to qualify for the World Cup. The manager then was a young chap named Alex Ferguson. But we were still knocked out at the group stage by West Germany and Denmark.
This Thursday, residents of the land of my birth are essentially voting on whether or not to become Denmark. Or maybe Slovakia. Or Ireland. If the result is a “yes” to independence — and if the European Union allows Scotland to join — the new country would become the 13th EU member state with a population of fewer than 6m. Note: there are about the same number of cities in China with a population larger than 6m. In American terms, Scotland would be the 22nd largest state, just ahead of Colorado, if it opted instead to join the United States.
Being a small state in Europe’s neighbourhood is certainly possible. It’s safer than it used to be. All but two of the 12 current EU members with fewer than 6m people were invaded by the Nazis or the Soviets in the Second World War.
But should this decision to go it alone be left to the 4m or so residents of Scotland who are over 16? The whole point of the Proclaimers’ song is precisely that such a huge number of Scots have over the centuries “flowed away / Across the ocean to the second chance”. My family have sent back their fair share of letters from America — from my aunt and uncle in Canada, my sister in Pennsylvania, me in Massachusetts.
And not only letters from America. Letters from the trenches of Flanders, written by my grandfather when he was a private in the Seaforth Highlanders. Letters from Burma and India, when my mother’s father was sent by the RAF to fight the Japanese. Letters from India. Letters from Australia.
The number of people outside Scotland who identify themselves as Scots is about 18m in the New World alone, including 6m in America (not counting an almost equal number of Scots-Irish, meaning descendants of Ulstermen), 5m in Canada and nearly 2m in Australia. There are Scots everywhere, from Dunedin to Nova Scotia, from Patagonia to Hong Kong (a city that was of course founded by Scotsmen). There are more people called Ferguson in Kingston, Jamaica, than in Dundee and Aberdeen put together.
To most of us overseas Scots, I think it’s fair to say, the idea of Scotland’s becoming an independent state seems like economic self-immolation. On the currency question (sterlingisation? the euro? the groat?), the oil revenues, the debt, the spending pledges, the policies of the Scottish National party simply don’t add up. If Scotland votes “yes”, it will be voting for a far nastier economic shock than roughly half of Scots seem to grasp.
And for what exactly? The “yes” campaign’s justifications strike most overseas Scots as absurd. To be a “beacon for progressive opinion”, in Alex Salmond’s words, by stopping Tory rule being imposed from the south for ever more? But Tony Blair would have won the elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005 for Labour even if the whole of Scotland had abstained. And the chances of a UK-wide Labour victory in 2015 are hardly zero.
Talking of Tony Blair, he’s just one of 11 prime ministers who can be counted as Scots (the Earl of Bute, Earl of Aberdeen, Gladstone, Rosebery, Balfour, Campbell-Bannerman, Bonar Law, Ramsay MacDonald, Douglas-Home, Blair and Brown). And the present PM’s father was Ian Donald Cameron, born at Blairmore House, Aberdeenshire. Sorry, who’s been ruling whom?
As for the claim that Scotland is some honorary Scandinavian state with an ethos more favourable to welfare than England — call it “Scandland” — that is surely nonsense. If anything, in my lifetime there has been a narrowing rather than a widening of the cultural gap between north and south Britain. The Daily Mail sells more copies in Scotland than The Herald and The Scotsman put together.
And yet, while all these negative arguments against independence are necessary, they are clearly not sufficient. Perhaps that’s not surprising. Telling a Scot, “You can’t do this. If you do it, terrible things will happen to you,” has been a losing negotiating strategy since time immemorial.
So what is the positive case for the Union? It has to be more than just “We’ll give you all the benefits with none of the costs” — which is how I interpret “devo max”.
First, the idea of a Scottish nation state is in fact profoundly un-Scottish. The greatest thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were not nationalists but cosmopolitans.
David Hume, the historian and philosopher, was always contemptuous of what he called the “vulgar motive of national antipathy”. “I am a Citizen of the World,” he wrote in 1764. Hume’s account of the consequences of Union with England could scarcely have been more positive: “Public liberty, with internal peace and order, has flourished almost without interruption: Trade and manufactures, and agriculture, have increased: The arts, and sciences, and philosophy, have been cultivated.” His only complaint was the tendency of the English to “treat with Hatred our just Pretensions to surpass & to govern them”. Fair enough.
But the best witness of all is Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics. For Smith understood the central point that the independent Scotland had been very far from a working man’s paradise. “By the Union with England,” he wrote, “the middling and inferior ranks of people in Scotland gained a compleat deliverance from the power of an aristocracy which had always before oppressed them.” Smith shrewdly pointed out the parasitical character of the Edinburgh political elite.
“There was little trade or industry in Edinburgh before the Union,” he wrote. Only “when the Scottish parliament was no longer to be assembled in it” did Edinburgh become “a city of some trade and industry”.
Those entitled to vote this week should heed Smith’s prescient warning about politicians who promise “plausible plans of reformation” that are mainly intended “for their own aggrandisement”. They should also remember that, to us overseas Scots, Smith’s vision of an entire world linked together on the basis of free markets and free trade is far more appealing than the parochial nationalism of “Scandland”.
The extent to which the Scots were and are a global people is hard to overstate. By the end of the 19th century, about three-quarters of the population of the UK lived in England, compared with a tenth in Scotland and a tenth in Ireland. But in the Empire the English accounted for barely half of colonists. Scots constituted around 23% of the British-born population in New Zealand, 21% in Canada and 15% in Australia.
To be sure, not all the emigrants went gladly. When that Anglo-Scottish odd couple Samuel Johnson and James Boswell journeyed through the Highlands and islands in 1773 they kept encountering what the former disapprovingly called an “epidemical fury of emigration”. Neither man grasped that what was really “clearing” men and women from their homes in such numbers was the combination of rack-renting landlords and a succession of dismal harvests.
Yet, unlike the Irish, most Scots did not regard venturing overseas as a punishment. In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, a wealthy nabob just back from India jokes about the “the number of Scotchmen” employed by the East India Company. It was no joke. The personnel was at the very least half Scottish. Warren Hastings himself referred to his closest advisers as his “Scotch guardians”. Even his first wife was a Scot: Mary Buchanan from Cambuslang.
Much of the explanation for this extraordinary over-representation of Scots abroad lay in their greater readiness to try their luck abroad. Economic prospects at home were just less bright than for their English counterparts. But the Scots were also better educated by universities such as Glasgow — which favoured physics over classics — for the practical business of empire-building.
And the Scots were much more ready than the English to be assimilated into indigenous societies. Among the products of countless Scottish-Indian unions was James Skinner, the son of a Scotsman and a Rajput princess, and the founder of the formidable cavalry regiment Skinner’s Horse.
“Black or white will not make much difference before [God’s] presence,” Skinner once remarked. My parents taught me just that lesson when I was a boy in Kenya. Sectarianism was once a Scottish vice; but never racism.
But the Scots did not go abroad just to make money and love. They also went to make war. And that brings me to what I believe is the clinching argument against the Scottish National party’s proposed retreat into a parochial nationalism.
This year, of all years, we should remember the heroism of our grandfather’s generation. The Scots had been slightly underrepresented in the pre-1914 army, but they were the keenest to volunteer when the First World War broke out. By December 1915, just under 27% of Scottish men aged 15-49 had volunteered — well above the UK average. In some Hebridean communities it was close to all the men.
As soon as he was old enough, my granddad John Ferguson enlisted and served in the Seaforth Highlanders. He was one of more than half a million Scots who served in the British army during the First World War. Of these, perhaps as many as a quarter lost their lives. (Grandad was one of the lucky ones, though he did get gassed and shot in the chest. His heavy wheezing is one of my earliest memories.) Only the Serbian and Turkish armies sustained such severe casualties.
You can think, as I do, that the First World War was a huge mistake. You can think that Douglas Haig wasted untold young lives with his attempts to achieve a breakthrough on the western front. What you cannot do is dispute that the Scottish regiments were the most formidable fighting force on the Allied side, because the Germans themselves admitted it. They learnt to fear the “devils in skirts”.
David Hume sang the praises of the Union, which Scottish soldiers fought for ferociously
In the Second World War, too, the Scots showed a notable fighting spirit. In the great disaster of 1940, some Scottish soldiers refused to surrender even when ordered to do so. “Not f****** likely, you yellow *******!” was the furious reaction of one member of the 51st (Highland) Division when ordered to lay down his arms by an officer of the Kensington Regiment in June 1940. Evidence like this makes me almost believe the apocryphal story about the two Highlanders watching the evacuation of the beaches at Dunkirk. “Aye, Jock,” says one to the other, “If the English surrender, it’ll be a long war.”
The point is that my grandfathers’ pride in being Scottish was inseparable from their pride in being British. Others might have a colonial cringe, an inferiority complex. We knew it was the Scots who had taken over England in 1603. And we knew we were tougher and smarter than the English. Harder working, too. Our problem, if anything, was a superiority complex.
Maybe all this just leaves today’s Scots cold. Maybe it’s a case of “Those days are past now / And in the past they must remain,” in the mawkish words of our unofficial national anthem, penned by The Corries during the first real boom in Scottish nationalism, in 1967 — in the days when Scottish football sides were still capable of winning European trophies.
Yet I find it very hard to believe that any “yes” voter would be unmoved by the archive footage I recently watched of the 51st Division marching through Saint- Valéry-en-Caux in 1944, their massed pipes and drums resounding in the streets of the town that had been the scene of the division’s surrender four years before. After D-Day, they returned as liberators.
Pride in victories like these are, for me, the essence of what it is to be both Scottish and British: to be, in essence, the most British of the British. It was a great thing to stand against the evils of National Socialism and fascism, as it was a great thing later to stand ready, as we did, to fight against Soviet Communism. Say what you like about the United Kingdom — say what you like about the Empire and the Commonwealth — its finest hour was pretty bloody fine.
True, not everyone saw it that way. In a letter sent from Whalsay in Shetland in April 1941, the Scottish nationalist Christopher Grieve — or “Hugh MacDiarmid”, as he called himself — wrote: “On balance I regard the Axis powers, tho’ more violently evil for the time being, [as] less dangerous than our own government in the long run and indistinguishable in purpose.” Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the SNP was founded in 1934. Perhaps it’s worth remembering that the SNP’s leader during the war, Douglas Young, was jailed for refusing to fight Hitler.
Of course, it is possible that Alex Salmond will succeed in turning Scotland into some version of the Irish republic in that era. There was certainly a time — before the global financial crisis, if memory serves — when Scotland was supposed to be imitating the Celtic Tiger, not to mention the Baltic Boomtowns: small, intensely focused on their own prosperity, with no more aspirations to great-power status. But is it really Scotland’s destiny to walk away from power and its responsibilities?
I don’t often quote President Barack Obama, but I need to now — not least because, if Scotland votes “yes”, my first act will be to apply for US citizenship. My country, Scotland in Great Britain in the United Kingdom, will have been condemned to death.
Last week the president gave a statement calling for decisive action to eradicate the “cancer” of Isis (also known as Islamic State). I agree with him: these murderers and their ilk pose a mortal threat to freedom, and not only in the Middle East. I also agree with him when he tells Americans: “This is not our fight alone.”
One of the hostages held by Isis was aid worker David Haines, from Perth. Last night it released a video of his apparent murder.
Scotland has its terrorists, too. Glasgow-born Aqsa Mahmood is now believed to be with Isis in Syria, from where she regularly tweets her disgusting incitements.
When Germany invaded Belgium and France in 1914 and again in 1940, it was our fight too. When the Soviet Union threatened the European continent and indeed the entire world with totalitarian rule after 1945, it was our fight too. When the Provisional IRA killed and maimed in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland, it was our fight too. And when the Taliban allowed Osama bin Laden to plan the attacks that took place 13 years ago, it was our fight too. (It was 9/11 that made me decide to accept a job at New York University.)
But would the West be able to count on Alex Salmond, who favours unilateral nuclear disarmament and envisages a Scottish army of 15,000 men? Somehow I doubt it. After all, he’s the man who in March said of President Putin that he is “more effective than the press he gets . . . he’s restored a substantial part of Russian pride, and that must be a good thing”.
As I write, I am flying from Edinburgh to Kiev, to a country that is discovering the hard way just how dangerous the world can be for a newly independent state — and Ukraine has a population more than eight times larger than Scotland. The Scottish nationalists like to pretend that they are the heirs of William Wallace. But Alex Salmond’s vision of Scotland’s future is more Bonehead than Braveheart.
In Letter from America, the Proclaimers’ mournful chorus goes thus: “Bathgate no more, Linwood no more, Methil no more, Irvine no more . . .”
But here’s an alternative ending, if — like the Proclaimers — you’re one of those Scottish residents tempted to vote “yes” this week: “Sterling no more, UK no more, Great Britain no more, Scotland no more.”
© Niall Ferguson 2014
Niall Ferguson was born in Glasgow and educated at the Glasgow Academy and Oxford University. He is the Laurence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard. This is an edited version of his Stevenson Lecture at Glasgow University last Thursday
"What could Salmond do ?.i did think, try the same ...lol salmond miby could have done something in an independant scotland as it was camerons westminster did nothing exept talk as per...could and did are far from the same and you say the poor guys where abouts was unknown what makes you think salmond would have known, you need to try and reason your argument pal"
My argument reasoned and coherent, your argument,thoughts, spelling, and grammar not.
The question was pretty clear (or so I thought) and it is this... what resources and forces do you think Salmond could muster ?
Fancy being a Scot being held hostage and depending on wee eck to get you out?.
Always assuming anybody knows where you are in the first place.
That's kind of a requirement in any rescue
By the way...it was on the news that his whereabouts was unknown.
Unknown as in unknown by anybody
ps... as I said in my original post, it could be left up to the RoUK to try to sort out these guys after they murdered....a Scot
My argument reasoned and coherent, your argument,thoughts, spelling, and grammar not.
The question was pretty clear (or so I thought) and it is this... what resources and forces do you think Salmond could muster ?
Fancy being a Scot being held hostage and depending on wee eck to get you out?.
Always assuming anybody knows where you are in the first place.
That's kind of a requirement in any rescue
By the way...it was on the news that his whereabouts was unknown.
Unknown as in unknown by anybody
ps... as I said in my original post, it could be left up to the RoUK to try to sort out these guys after they murdered....a Scot
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I mostly stalk Roe but here's a photograph taken a few minutes ago in my hallway, if it helps.
49ERIC
Well-Known Member
The whereabouts of David Haines was not known
If it was, Cameron could have used the resources and the forces of the U.K. and sent in the SAS.
What could Salmond do ?.
Try thinking then type.[/QU
Well
a STURGEON
wivenhoe65
Well-Known Member
Its about as convincing as your arguments and your sudden appearance on a deer stalking forum - a call go out for reinforcements did it ?or did you just happen by ? google images might be good if you want to find something more more noteworthy
gerarddwatts
Well-Known Member
And I apologised!! Twice!!
Ok I'll amend it...
'4 former presidents (stalwarts), 5 former presidents, 9 vice presidents, 1 chairman of QMS(not stalwarts).'
I think the point is 2 fold.
Firstly, that for every cutnpaste on here, a contrary view can be found.
Secondly, they were all, both for and against, speaking as former farmers leaders. This they all, undeniably, were. The fact that George Lyon is now no longer a farmer, or his yows had bad feet, is irrelevant. John Cameron is no longer the biggest sheep farmer in Europe either. He still has a view, as does George. To try and rubbish opinions you disagree with is not on.
My gaelic is perfect.....all 3 words!! Actually theres a few more, but whatever.
All this is a distraction from real issues, a tactic used with great effect by the indie campaign.
skywull
Well-Known Member
"What could Salmond do ?.i did think, try the same ...lol salmond miby could have done something in an independant scotland as it was camerons westminster did nothing exept talk as per...could and did are far from the same and you say the poor guys where abouts was unknown what makes you think salmond would have known, you need to try and reason your argument pal"
My argument reasoned and coherent, your argument,thoughts, spelling, and grammar not.
The question was pretty clear (or so I thought) and it is this... what resources and forces do you think Salmond could muster ?
Fancy being a Scot being held hostage and depending on wee eck to get you out?.
Always assuming anybody knows where you are in the first place.
That's kind of a requirement in any rescue
ps if youd like to correct any grammar or spelling mistakes i'll be most greatfull ..lol
By the way...it was on the news that his whereabouts was unknown.
Unknown as in unknown by anybody
ps... as I said in my original post, it could be left up to the RoUK to try to sort out these guys after they murdered....a Scot
aw thats rite hit the auld spelling and grammar button if in doubt eh lol its obviouse you hate salmond so youd blame him if you bunnet blew aff ...my answer is salmond or anyone at presant have to leave the mustering to the uk government in am independant scotland and given time, im sure we will be able to muster as good as the next man but camerons better at bluster more than muster id say
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