The more things change ...

I hope that amongst those whose enthusiasm for Scottish independence has more than a passing resemblance to support for a football team, some will take time to consider the issues before they vote.  I won't be holding my breath.

Those who make out a reasoned case are capable of entering into reasoned argument.  Those who behave like football fans are not.  I speak as a football fan.  There is no one who will ever convince me of the superior merit of an alternative team to my own.  I was born to support my team and it never occurs to me to waver. Whether we are bottom of the league and regularly thrashed or masters of all we survey, we are who we are.  That's why I refer to my team as 'we' and, as everyone knows, 'we' are permanently in opposition to 'them'.

I can afford to be so illogical because, fortunately, my livelihood is not at stake in matters of football. In matters of politics mixed with economics the issues are, hard though it may be to accept this, more weighty.

These are some of the issues that I wish to see resolved:

1) It is claimed that Scotland needs independence in order to lay hold of the important levers by which our economy is to be directed.  It is simultaneously claimed that we shall immediately hand back all of the monetary levers and a large proportion of the fiscal levers to The Bank of England and the rest of the UK. The Governor of the Bank of England seems to have confirmed this. Question: remind me again what is the point?

2) It is claimed that a currency union is in the interests of the rest of the UK because of the way it will simplify trade. Problem: it also makes the RUK responsible for the debts of the Scottish government, banks and public institutions and gives the Scottish government a say in UK monetary and fiscal policy.  There are quite good reasons for their refusing to accept this. Please explain to me why they will do it.

3) It is claimed that we shall automatically continue as members of the European Union, despite the claims to the contrary of, amongst others, the President of the European Commission and the government of Spain.  Bad news; this has to be unanimously agreed by EU members and the Spanish have a vote.

4) It is claimed that we could be added to the existing membership of the EU without having to accept the rules normally applied to new members, such as signing up to the Euro and the Schengen free travel area and that for some reason we would be entitled to a share of the UK's current budget rebate. Problem: in return for all their concessions, we are giving the other members what, exactly?

5) It is claimed that we shall continue to enjoy a common travel area with the rest of the UK, whilst adopting a radically different immigration policy from them.  Question: exactly how do we stop them setting up border checkpoints to enforce their immigration policy?  How much would consequent delays cost us?

6) It is claimed that we shall be able to go on financing our universities by charging fees to students from the RUK, despite the fact that EU law forbids discrimination against other member states.  Right.  So we think that they will let us get away with charging the English provided we don't charge the Bulgarians?  Seriously?

That's to be going on with.  When I hear the answers to these I'll start on the rest of the questions.

An Open Letter to Sir William Wallace

Dear William,

I may call you William, mayn't I? I have known you a long time after all. Please stop turning in your graves. This is a very unhealthy habit for someone who is over seven hundred years old and already divided into four quarters. Let me reassure you that no historically knowledgeable Scot ever took seriously your so-called biography by that Australian. (Australian, William, is a modern word meaning a descendant of criminal outcasts.)

We know that you did not wear a kilt, paint your face, shoot arrows, attack stockades or meet the Queen of England. (In fact William, it was Sitting Bull, a more modern person than you, who did all of these except wear a kilt.) We also know that you were not called Braveheart; that was a turncoat French contemporary of yours.

Your name was not really Wallace either. It was le Walys. You were descended from a travelling companion of the French knight Walter Fitzallan, later known as Stewart, who arrived in Scotland in 1136. Your home at Elderslie was a quite presentable manor house and not a peat-roofed shack. You were well educated and spoke Latin as well as French, though you probably did not quote from Tacitus before battle as the Australian did.

You see, William, the problem is that the truth is rarely politically correct. History needs to be viewed through a strongly coloured glass that makes it allegorically relevant to today's political agenda. Given that you encountered a fair bit of revisionism in your own struggles, I am sure that you understand that history, first written by the winners, is then re-written by the government of the day.

William, you may have noticed that our future is now to be decided by competitive telling of fairy tales. We are going to mark the seven hundredth anniversary of Bannockburn by organising a popular vote. You probably know about Bannockburn, don't you? It was when your successor as Guardian, Robert 'Braveheart' de Brus, the French usurper of the Scottish throne and the earldom of Carrick, defeated another bunch of French-speaking invaders in 1314 near Stirling.

You may find it ridiculous, William, but nowadays it is generally believed in Scotland that Bannockburn was fought between the Scots and the English rather than between rival gangs of Frenchmen. They call your era 'The Scottish Wars of Independence' when what was really going on was a struggle to decide which Frenchman should rule what. Honestly, most folk nowadays don't seem to know that invading Frenchmen took over England in 1066 and Scotland in 1072 and then spent the next four centuries trying hold on to both. French was still the language of the London court and administration for almost a century after Bannockburn..

William, they want us to believe that your enemy was called English Edward, not Édouard de Plantagenet. They want us to believe that his army was led by barons who spoke English nigh on two hundred years before the English language evolved into anything recognisable today. They want us to believe that you and de Brus were both Scottish patriots despite neither of you being from Scottish families. Most ridiculous of all, they want us to believe that these things have even the slightest relevance to how we should govern ourselves today.

William, we are celebrating the septcentennial of this quarrel between Frenchmen by having a plebiscite to decide whether Scotland and England should get a chance to fight each other again properly, this time without French interference.

Apparently Scotland has not chosen a Conservative government for ages but has repeatedly had one imposed on them by the English. This, according to the Scots, is a bad thing. (Conservative, William, is a modern word which means the same as feudal baron.)

As it happens, England does not choose Labour governments either but has repeatedly had one imposed on them by the Scots. This is a bad thing according to the English. (Labour, William, is another modern word for feudal baron. I know, it sometimes confuses me too.) Two of the last three prime ministers (the modern word for kings) of our United Kingdom have been Scots and the third one is called Cameron, which suggests he has a mite more Scottish ancestry than you did, William.

I still don't think it's a good idea for you to be turning in your graves, but if you did feel able able to jot down a few lines (in French will do fine,) setting straight some of this modern pseudo-historical hogwash, the person you should write to is nowadays called First Minister, not Guardian, of Scotland, and he stays in Edinburgh.

Yours,

Philip

A Pilgrimage to Loos

I was late getting to Loos. Ninety odd years late. I wore my kilt for the occasion; it seemed appropriate. In fact, more than just appropriate, necessary, almost a debt of honour. I had carried the kilt in my suitcase all over France just for this one day.

The war cemetery (left) is surrounded by a high stone wall; the massed ranks of well-tended graves within representing only a few of those who died on the field of battle all around. Many still lie where they fell, their bodies never recovered from the mud of no-man’s land, which nowadays is simply flat and featureless arable countryside; fields just like any other fields. There is nothing but the memorial to tell the visitor otherwise.

Around the inside of the perimeter wall are engraved in column after column, regiment by regiment, the names of the dead. I went looking for the Highland Light Infantry. Eventually my wife called me over to a section of the wall on the side nearest the village. “They’re over here,” she said, “and there’s a lot of them.” We tried to count, but the names went on for so long that in the end we were reduced to counting one column and multiplying by the number of columns.

On the morning of the 25^th of September 1915, for all practical purposes three battalions of the Highland Light Infantry ceased to exist. Of approximately 2,000 HLI engaged on the Loos front, over 1,500 died. My grandfather, so proudly photographed in his kilt and Glengarry before he left home, went over the top with all the rest. This is his story as it was handed down to me. Other family members remember it somewhat differently, but the basic message is the same.

It was before the days of conscription, and even so as a steel worker with a reserved occupation my grandfather would not have been called up. Why was he there? Because he and a friend had just been walking down the street one day, minding their own business, when two young women called out contemptuously, “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at the front? Are you cowards or something?” In a fury of embarrassment the two of them turned round there and then and walked straight to the recruiting office.

Like so many of his comrades in arms, my grandfather’s advance towards the German trenches got no further than no-man’s land. Unlike most of them however, he was not killed outright by the bullet that struck him. Bleeding from a desperate leg wound, he dragged himself across the ruined field into the nearest shell hole and there collapsed, out of the immediate line of fire but also far from safety or medical attention.

I do not know how long he lay there. Sometime later, the shooting eased, and eventually stretcher bearers were able to make their way on to the battlefield. The first stretcher party to catch sight of my grandfather was British. Seeing the state of his wounds, they passed by and left him. It was always a family tradition to resent this, and it was not until a few years ago, when I read a book by William Sinclair of Kirkintilloch, one of the maligned stretcher bearers, that I finally understood their behaviour.

The mud at Loos was so deep that they could hardly make forward progress; if they fell off the duck boards they could drown; the struggling stretcher parties were under fire from the Germans for much of their tortuous route from the field hospital to no-man’s land. They knew they could only make a few trips under these conditions, and they had to make hard-headed decisions about which of the wounded were likely to live long enough to make it back to the hospital. There were so many corpses lying out on the field; there was no point in risking more lives to recover someone whose name would soon be just another to be added to the butcher’s bill.

Later another stretcher party passed by the shell hole in which my grandfather lay. These men were speaking German. Seeing my grandfather, a medical orderly climbed down into the shell hole and staunched further loss of blood with a tourniquet. In English he then explained, “We shall not take you prisoner. Your own side will come for you now.” From that day onwards my grandfather always said that he owed his life to the man he called “the German doctor.”

The third stretcher party to find my grandfather was another British one. They picked him up and bravely carried him back through the sea of mud along that awful route to the field hospital. He was to lose the leg, but he survived, and eventually he even returned to that back-breaking work in the steel mill.

All this took place a little more than five years before my mother was born. My life, for what it is worth, and what little good I may have been able to do for my fellow man, I owe to the humanity of an enemy; a man who looked through the fog of slaughter in that most terrible of conflicts and saw, lying in that shell hole, not an enemy soldier but a wounded man.

When I hear xenophobia expressed today, I want to take the speakers with me to Loos and show them the waste brought about by rival nationalisms. I want them to climb with me up the little tower that overlooks the cemetery, and show them my grandfather’s friends, still drawn up in the dressed ranks which they first formed a century ago. As I stood on top of that tower in my kilt, looking out over the now tranquil landscape and trying to see it with my grandfather’s eyes, a white van passed by on the road. The driver tooted his horn and waved a salute. In Loos they still remember.

My grandfather was heartbroken when war broke out again in 1939. “I thought,” he said, “we fought the last one to put an end to all this.” He died not long afterwards. He was less than fifty years old.

Grandad, I was late getting to Loos, but when I finally got there, I think that I understood.