Last weekend highlighted one of the major problems facing the No! campaign in the independence referendum.  It was the weekend of the SNP’s annual spring conference, and it provided separatists with a platform that unionists simply cannot match.  The Scottish National Party exists for the sole purpose of promoting independence.  It is organised to deliver that outcome, passionate about it and resourced for it.  Its leaders live for it, its foot-soldiers march for it, its Press Office is geared to it.

Inevitably, then, its annual conference is choreographed to ensure that in the full glare of the media all the forces and faces of Nationalism are marshalled to argue that we’ll never be properly grown-up till we stand alone on our own two feet, send the Americans packing, deliver Scotland from the curse of Toryism, and provide free child-care for all working mothers (Santa to pick up the tab).

The tragedy is that the No! campaign has nothing comparable.  There is no Scottish party to whom the Union matters as much as independence matters to the SNP.  Nor is there any other party as well organised at grass-roots, or able to deploy such a fanatical political infantry.  Neither Labour, Tory nor LibDem stand first and foremost for the Union.  Nor do they seem able to put their differences aside and stand together to save it.  Even in the Western Isles, the parties are reluctant to be seen working together; and where they do work together there is nothing like that critical mass of explosive enthusiasm which the crisis demands.

Too many of our pro-Union politicians are leaving themselves open to the charge that they don’t put Scotland first.  For example, all the ablest Labour MPs have spurned Holyrood in favour of Westminster.  This not only leaves a bad taste in the mouth.  It is totally illogical.  If their argument is that they can best serve Scotland from within the larger parliament, they should be queuing up not for Westminster but for Brussels.  But they’re not, because they judge that Westminster, the more local forum, is the one where the most good can be done.  If that’s the case, they should be at Holyrood, to which all the key issues affecting Scotland have been devolved.

Sadly, people like Jim Murphy, Anne Begg and Douglas Alexander have decided otherwise, leaving the SNP with a decided advantage: all their big guns can be seen and heard at Holyrood every week, clearly putting Scotland first.  By contrast, Labour’s best talents are out of sight, at Westminster, inevitably raising the question, Where does their primary loyalty lie?  If we were thinking straight, Holyrood would come first, Westminster second and Brussels third.

It is time, too, for those committed to the No! campaign to show some passion for Scottishness.  We have, for example, a National Kirk.  How many of our pro-Union politicians belong to it?  Many are Roman Catholics, of course, but even among the Protestants, many transferred their allegiance long since to the Church of England: a perfectly venerable and respectable church, but not a whit better than our own national variety.

And we have, too, our own universities, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t take pride in the fact that for centuries the city of Aberdeen had as many universities as the whole of England (two).  Today, however, the elite of our Scottish school-leavers too often opt for Oxford or Cambridge rather than for one of our own ancient universities, despite the fact that Scottish seats of learning still excel in many fields: Edinburgh, in theology, micro-biology and physics (witness the Higgs boson); Aberdeen in marine biology; Glasgow in engineering, to quote but a few examples.

Not that any of this is a reason for complacency.  At the moment only one Scottish University (Edinburgh) is listed among the top twenty-four in the UK, and that should be a matter of profound concern to both unionists and separatists.  For good or ill, modern universities are not ranked on the quality of their teaching but on their research output, and that depends entirely on being able to attract the top names in the various fields.  At the moment we’re not doing that, because we’re not prepared to pay for them, but if we’re sincere about putting Scotland first we must push more of our universities up to the top of the rankings.  That won’t come cheap, but in the long term it’s far more likely to pay for itself than is free child-care for working mothers.

But not only are our universities falling behind: the Scottishness of our curriculum is being diluted at both school and university level.  The surge of interest in independence has not bred any corresponding academic interest in Scottish subjects.  This is partly true to the collapse of the Scottish publishing industry.

A few years ago I was involved in a project to publish a collection of essays on Scottish liturgy.  The editors were both distinguished university academics, but no Scottish publisher would look at it, and when it was eventually taken on by London’s SCM Press they insisted that there be no reference to Scotland in the title (the volume eventually appeared as ‘Worship and Liturgy in Context’).

This is paralleled by the neglect of Scottish history, literature and music throughout the education system.  Even at the Free Church College we were under pressure to reduce the Scottish content of our courses for fear of discouraging applications from overseas students (presumably if you go to an American university you expect to find American courses?).

We’re used enough to the Gaidheal selling her own culture short, but has the malaise now spread to Scotland as a whole?  Here we are contemplating the biggest constitutional change in our modern history, and yet without the least idea how we got here in the first place: no idea of how, through the struggles of the church, we secured the rights of conscience; no idea of the Europe-wide influence of David Hume on philosophy, of Adam Smith on economics or James Clerk Maxwell on physics.  And as for John Knox: who did he play for?

Seven years of Nationalist government have nothing to address the problem that we’re a nation afraid to look at our own history.

There’s no reason why we can’t be both solid unionists and proud Scots at one and the same time:  ‘Cruaidh mar an fhraoch; buan mar an giuthas’ (hard as the heather, enduring as the fir).



This article first appeared in the West Highland Free Press 18 April 2014