Susan Delacourt Ottawa Bureau EDINBURGH—Scottish poet Robert Burns might have put it this way: “Now's the hour.”
Scotland is on the march toward a momentous choice: whether to sever its ties to Britain, and all the momentum is working in favour of the nationalists.
The march began in earnest this month, with a fiery speech by First Minister Alex Salmond to his Scottish National Party (SNP) convention and an official launch of the referendum campaign.
“In my heart, in my head, I think Scotland will become an independent country,” Salmond told a BBC interviewer last weekend.
Already, Scotland is closer to potential independence than it has been at any time in the past few decades, perhaps centuries.
Just four days after Canada elected a majority Conservative government last spring, Scotland's voters handed a historic — maybe fateful — landslide victory to the SNP — and with it came the licence to lead Scots toward Salmond's goal of independence.
The betting right now is that the vote will be held around June 24, 2014 — the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, when Robert the Bruce won freedom for the Scots. The poetry of that anniversary is hard to resist in a land that puts the two Roberts — the 14th-century king and the 18th-century poet — at the pinnacle of historic heroes.
“Now's the day, and now's the hour,” Burns wrote in his ballad to Bannockburn. “Liberty's in every blow! Let us do or die!”
Salmond's rhetoric has not yet soared to Burns' heights, but with every month since his victory, his Scotland-the-free cry grows in pitch.
“The days of Westminster politicians telling Scotland what to do or what to think are over,” Salmond told the convention last weekend. “The people of Scotland — the sovereign people of Scotland — are now in the driving seat.”
Scottish independence, in fact, is on two tracks. In addition to the now-inevitable referendum, the so-called Scotland Bill is working its way through the Westminster Parliament in London.
This bill is a more modest bid to sate Scottish nationalism; the next chapter in a phased devolution of powers that started in the 1990s under former prime minister Tony Blair and resulted in the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.
Independence-shy Scots may still well lean to this option, which the SNP is trying to wring for all the power Scotland can obtain. “Devo-max” is the nickname for this effort.
“There appears to be little fear of independence, although we do (still) have the Scottish cringe in the nation where we worry we're not good enough to run our own country,” says Mark Forrester, who works in the banking industry in Glasgow.
Two recent polls, for two Scottish newspapers, have shown public support for independence at record highs.
In the Scotsman this month, a poll by the Com-Res firm showed support for independence up to 49 per cent within the Scottish population — and at 39 per cent in the larger United Kingdom. In September, a TNS-BMRB poll for The Herald showed support for independence was slightly ahead of opposition to it, by 39 per cent to 38 per cent. The momentum seems unmistakable.
For Canadians not unfamiliar with independence campaigns, all this talk of Scottish sovereignty may appear to have arrived out of the blue. Scotland is inextricably tied to Canadian unity — Canada's first prime minister was Scottish-born, much of English Canada's symbols are Scots in origin and 4.5 million Canadians, according to census figures, claim some Scottish ancestry.
But Scotland also shares much with Quebec's separatist movement, which has long had friendly and social ties to the SNP. Scotland, like Quebec, has its own legal system and has had long-running demands to speak for itself on matters ranging from immigration to representation on the world stage.
In Glasgow, the country's “merchant city,” arguments for Scottish sovereignty revolve around economic matters. “We joined the union for economic factors and most of the arguments put up for why we should stay are economic — we can't afford to be separate,” says Forrester.
In Edinburgh, the political capital, independence is more a matter of the heart and history.
The Scottish National Museum, reopened in Edinburgh this past summer after a massive renovation, devotes five floors to the past, present and future of Scottish nationalism. The exhibits serve as a testament to the boast that the Scots “invented civilization.” Artifacts lay claim to Scotland's gifts to the industrialized world: the steam engine, the textile mills, the shipbuilding industry, the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell was born in Scotland), even golf.
The Scottish Parliament , called Holyrood, sits at the end of the Royal Mile, the cobbled road that stretches from Edinburgh Castle to the Queen's residence in Scotland, known as Holyroodhouse.
The contrast between the two Holyroods is profound — imposing, medieval stones and iron gates sit across the street from a sprawling, contemporary, glass-and-granite edifice, adorned in a motif of twigs and leaves.
Scotland's Parliament is deliberately what many of Britain's old institutions are not: transparent, modern and part of the land, rather than fenced off from it. The building, which was completed in 2004, is organized around the metaphor of a tree branch, rising out of the nearby rugged hills and the peak of Arthur's Seat.
In an office within, Fiona Hyslop, Scotland's cabinet secretary for culture and external affairs, spelled out the SNP's approach to independence. It sounds very much like the “maitre chez nous” (masters of our own house) arguments of Quebec's sovereigntists.
“We were elected on our record, our team approach and our vision,” Hyslop said. “But they (the voters) also knew where we wanted to go. And we were relentlessly positive.”
Hyslop, who is due to visit Canada before the end of the year, has been busy since May, talking to foreign counterparts. Her message is one of reassurance: Scotland is going through evolution, not revolution — detaching itself from British rule much in the same way that Canada did nearly 150 years ago. In essence, says Hyslop, Scotland is in the midst of a much-delayed modernization; shrugging off its 300-year-old decision to join in one nation with the British Empire.
“Perhaps it served the people of Scotland, or some people . . . to enter the union in 1707, (but) we should look at new arrangements,” she says. “Europe is changing. Europe used to be the continent of large countries, large states. Europe is no longer that. Europe is now a country of small participants. And smaller countries have come through the recession, by and large, better than larger countries.”
There's no question that the SNP government is benefiting from the sharp, political contrast between the right-tilting politics of Britain's Conservative-Liberal-Democrat coalition and the more traditionally, left-leaning politics of the Scots.
Salmond's legislative agenda is filled with policies and programs that seem designed to sharpen that difference.
Peppering his Parliament-opening speech with rebukes of the British coalition government, Salmond painted his Scotland as a kinder, gentler state. Growth, not cuts, would be the guiding economic principle, and the state would concentrate on improving employment and health prospects for Scottish citizens, especially young people.
“We have argued consistently against the deep cuts in capital spending being imposed by Westminster,” Salmond said. “Our desire to introduce . . . growth and balance is threatened by the voodoo economics of the London coalition, whose ministers lecture Scotland about our future.”
Salmond's preoccupation with young people, jobs and health reflects another division between Scotland and the rest of Britain. Average life expectancy is consistently lower in Scotland than in any other part of Britain. Scottish men can expect to live to 75.8 years of age, women, 80.4 years — that is 2.7 and 2.1 years lower, respectively, than the U.K. average, according to figures released late this month by the General Register of Scotland.
Part of this can be attributed to the relatively poorer economic conditions, but lifestyle is obviously part of the issue. The Scots' reputation as hard-drinking, heavy smoking consumers of deep-fried foods is not entirely a comic caricature. A good part of Salmond's legislative agenda has included crackdowns on lifestyle — minimum pricing for alcohol, for instance, and legislation against “offensive behaviour at football (games) and threatening communications.”
Nicola McEwen, a political scientist at the University of Edinburgh, says Scotland's independence streak has to be seen in the context of an unravelling relationship with Britain — part of a larger, global pattern of increasing distance between the governed and the government.
For modern-day Scotland, it may well have begun with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, whose efforts to crush the coal miners and impose a Scottish poll tax can still provoke ire. Included among the more political exhibits at the National Museum is an SNP poster featuring a caricature of Thatcher, her grinning mouth dripping oil:
“No wonder she's laughing. She's got Scotland's oil.”
“With devolution, we now have a distinct welfare system in Scotland, a distinct health system in Scotland, in particular, and some distinct social services,” McEwen explains.
“So the big symbolic policies of devolution are around social care and the public services — free tuition for students, free personal care for the elderly, things that are symbolically very important and highlighting the differences between Scotland and England . . . Now I don't think social security or unemployment benefits or any of these things have the emotional value that they might have had 30 years ago. But nonetheless it does help to articulate an argument that says that there's nothing to keep us there.”
Canadians will remember that in the mid-1990s, when Quebec came within a hair's-breadth of separating in the 1995 referendum, Bloc Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard argued regularly that only his province stood in opposition to the massive social spending cuts of Jean Chretien's Liberal government. The paradox repeats itself in Scotland in 2011 — those who want to leave the union are standing up for the social glue that holds it together.
Add to this the riches of the North Sea oil, which Scotland believes could finance its sovereign nation for at least the next 40 years — “It's Scotland's oil,” is a long-standing SNP slogan — and Canadians might recognize an independence streak that has Quebec's cultural force, with a heavy dose of the oil-fuelled, we-can-go-it-alone spirit that often surfaces in Alberta.
Canadian separatists have something that Scotland's nationalists do not: a Clarity Act, a chart of sorts to negotiate independence for would-be breakaway provinces.
Scotland, though, is moving to uncharted territory. Cameron's government has given indications that it's preparing to mount a fierce public-relations campaign against Scottish independence, setting up a cabinet team to steer public opinion away from the SNP's runaway momentum. But the way it stands, it may take a bit of poetry as well as PR.