In 1974 Gordon Brown was Rector of Edinburgh University, elected after a
campaign that featured the “Brown Sugars” — girls sporting miniskirts and
T-shirts emblazoned “Gordon for Me”.
I was a first-year student, and remember him as a striking figure with long
black hair and trenchcoat, surrounded by acolytes. He was intense and
ambitious, but he also lived with Princess Margarita of Romania, threw
celebrated parties and enjoyed an almost glamorous reputation.
As editor of Student, besides filling the pages with bare flesh, his
great scoop was to catch the university lying about its investments in
apartheid South Africa. He used the rectorship — traditionally a ceremonial
post — to flay a fusty university establishment. When Sir Michael Swann, the
principal, sought to stop him chairing meetings of the University Court, the
Duke of Edinburgh, the university’s chancellor, intervened: Princess
Margarita was the Duke’s goddaughter.
While the young firebrand was shaking up Edinburgh, another movement was
shaking up Scotland. Buoyed by the discovery of North Sea oil, the Scottish
Nationalist Party won 11 Westminster seats that October, and forced Harold
Wilson’s weak and panicky Labour Government to concede a referendum on
devolution in 1979 that only narrowly failed.
Three decades on, Mr Brown will shortly become my prime minister, not rector,
and the SNP is surging again. A poll for The Times this week
suggested that the party was heading for a victory in the Scottish
Parliament elections on May 3, paving the way for a referendum on
independence by 2010. But today it is Mr Brown who represents an unpopular
Establishment in distant London, Mr Brown who looks out of step with
Scottish public opinion, and Mr Brown who faces the prospect — albeit remote
— of finding himself prime minister of a foreign country. How the wheel has
turned.
Back in the 1970s Edinburgh was an austere place that even the Bay City
Rollers struggled to enliven. Pubs shut at 10pm and never opened on Sundays.
Staid life assurance companies pottered along in genteel Charlotte Square.
The economy was wretched. The city felt cut off from the world. It was an
uncomfortable place to be an English student. The Scottish nationalism of
those days was angry, confrontational and fiercely antiEnglish, as summed up
by the SNP slogan: “It’s Scotland’s oil”.
The theatrical sensation of 1974 was John McGrath’s play The Cheviot,
the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, which charted the exploitation of
Scotland from the 19th-century Highland clearances to the plundering of
North Sea oil. English students were resented, and regularly told that we
were taking Scottish students’ places.
Today, behind its immutable granite face, Edinburgh is a city transformed. It
is cosmopolitan and fun. Dismal bars and corner shops selling that
peculiarly disgusting Scottish invention, the bridie, have been replaced by
fancy pubs and classy alfresco restaurants. The Grassmarket, Seventies
refuge of down-and-outs, is now hip. The breweries, whose sickly smell
blanketed the city, have gone. You hear foreign accents everywhere, and can
fly directly to Europe and America without changing in London.
Edinburgh has become Europe’s fifth biggest financial centre, employing
135,000 people. The Royal Bank of Scotland is a world top-ten bank with a
market capitalisation larger than Coca-Cola. Elegant New Town houses sell
for a million or two.
Gavin Don, a Scot who returned from London to set up a corporate finance
business in 1994, says that as an Edinburgh student in the 1970s he used to
play Porsche-spotting. “You could go a whole year and not see one. Now they
are two a penny. Bentleys are pretty commonplace, and Rolls-Royces are not
unheard of.” There is a cultural revival, too. The Scottish executive is
pouring money into the arts. The bestselling authors Iain Rankin, Iain
Banks, Alexander McCall Smith, Irvine Welsh and J.K. Rowling all live in or
near the city. Its once-proud publishing industry is booming again.
Where Edinburgh leads, the rest of Scotland is slowly following. The country
still has pockets of intense poverty, but its unemployment rate has fallen
below the UK average, its per capita GDP is higher than most English
regions, and two decades of steady population decline have been reversed.
As self-confidence has risen so the nature of Scottish nationalism has
changed. It is more positive, less Anglophobic. It emphasises future
potential, not past grievances. It asks merely for Scotland to be liberated
so it can prosper within the European Union like a dozen other countries as
small or smaller. Indeed, the EU allows Scotland to break away from England
without condemning itself to isolation on Europe’s northern fringe.
Alex Salmond, the SNP’s wily leader, is still demanding the repatriation of
North Sea oil revenues and the removal of nuclear missiles from the Clyde.
But as he seeks to portray his party as mainstream, not extreme, he
emphasises a desire for cooperation not confrontation with Westminster, and
avoids overt England-bashing. He says an independent Scotland would keep the
Queen and the pound.
In St Andrew Square I asked a dozen Scots to sum up the English in one word.
The answers were not flattering — “pompous”, “egotistical”, “smug”,
“arrogant”, “loud”, “pig-headed”. But they were given with smiles, and for
all the tales of Scots backing Trinidad and Tobago against England in the
football World Cup their antipathy to sassenachs appears more muted. Indeed,
Flower of Scotland, the unofficial national anthem, which was
written for The Corries in 1967 and celebrates England’s defeat at
Bannockburn, seems a little out of tune with the times. “People are a tad
embarrassed by it,” one veteran Scottish journalist said.
What has undoubtedly weakened, however, is the Scots’ sense of Britishness.
Three hundred years after the Act of Union England and Scotland no longer
have a common enemy in France. The British Empire, on which Scotland’s
19th-century prosperity was built, has gone. Memories of Scottish soldiers
fighting alongside the English in two world wars have faded. Scottish
industries such as shipbuilding and coal that depended on London subsidies
have been privatised or closed. Margaret Thatcher’s use of socialist
Scotland as a test-bed for hated policies such as the poll tax fuelled
Scottish disenchantment with Westminster.
A recent British Social Attitudes Survey found four fifths of Scots consider
themselves Scottish first and British second. The Scottish Saltire, flown
only by a few wild-eyed radicals in the 1970s, is everywhere in Edinburgh,
and the Union Jack has largely disappeared. It does fly outside The
Scotsman newspaper — but only at the insistence of Andrew Neil, its
former editor-in-chief.
At the same time the much-derided Scottish Parliament, which the Scot George
Robertson, a former Defence Secretary, said would kill separatism “stone
dead”, appears merely to have fostered a sense of Scottishness. It receives
more coverage than Westminster in the Scottish media and The Times
poll this week showed 52 per cent of Scots want it to have more power, only
7 per cent less.
The other great change since the 1970s is England’s attitude to Scottish
independence. Polls suggest that an idea unthinkable then is today quite
popular.
Many English resent Scots receiving £1,500 more per capita in public spending
each year, and that the Government requires the support of Scottish MPs to
ram through controversial legislation such as university top-up fees and
foundation hospitals that do not apply north of the border. They are
offended by Scotland’s perceived Anglophobia. The English have yet to back Roger
Federer against Andy Murray, but my equally unscientific survey of a dozen
English colleagues produced adjectives about the Scots just as unflattering
— “difficult”, “chippy”, “aggressive”, “ungrateful”, “angry”, “brooding”.
Few minded if Scotland broke away. As the Saltire flies in Scotland, so the
flag of St George has become increasingly common in England. It is as if the
Union Jack, like the UK, is breaking down into its constituent parts.
All this leaves Mr Brown in a hole. As a Scot preparing to move into No 10 he
needs to reassure the English, and has delivered no fewer than ten speeches
or statements on the importance of Britishness since late 2004. He opposes
further devolution. The Raith Rovers fan even cited Paul Gascoigne’s goal
against Scotland in Euro 96 as a favourite football moment.
But the more Mr Brown champions Britishness, the more out of touch he looks in
Scotland — and the more he fuels his compatriots’ disaffection with Labour
before next month’s elections.
Scots dislike Tony Blair, whom they consider neo-Thatcherite. They hate his
war in Iraq. Today’s equivalent of The Cheviot, the Stag and the
Black, Black Oil is The Black Watch, which tells of Scottish
soldiers going to fight a pointless war foisted on them by an English Prime
Minister. Mr Brown is widely seen in Scotland as the Iraq war’s paymaster.
In Edinburgh in the Seventies, Mr Brown wrote his doctoral thesis on how
Labour established itself as the alternative to the Conservatives in
Scotland in the early 20th century. Its battle now is to prevent itself
being usurped by the SNP.
The stakes are enormous. Were Scotland to gain independence Labour — shorn of
its 39 Scottish MPs — would never win power in England again.
Nationalists head for power
–– A Populus poll for The Times this week put the SNP ahead
of Labour in both the first-past-the-post and proportional-representation
sections
–– The Nationalists are on track to win 50 seats in the 129-seat Scottish
Parliament, seven more than Labour. The Lib Dems would have 18 MSPs, the
Conservatives 17 and the Greens one
–– A majority of Scots (52 per cent) are in favour of more devolved powers for
their Parliament. Just over one in four (27 per cent) backed full
independence
–– On the constituency or first-past-the-post vote, the SNP is on 38 per cent;
Labour 28; Lib Dems 15; Tories 14; others 6 In the proportional
representation section, the SNP is on 35 per cent; Labour 30; Lib Dems 14;
Tories 14
Source: www.populuslimited.com
