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Let us allow ourselves

to be inspired.

Let us demand roses

Maggie Craig

 

When I was a girl back in the 1960s I went on a schools' cruise to Spain and Portugal on a ship called the Dunera. Filling out a form required by the organisers, I wrote my nationality as Scottish. No, my teacher told me, you have to put British. Scottish isn't a nationality.
     That was the day the light bulb went on in my head. It hasn't gone out since. When I later read what Robert Burns wrote about the story of William Wallace 'having poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins, which will boil along them till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest', I understand quite viscerally what he meant.
     Like many Scots, including Keir Hardie, the father of the Labour Party, my siblings and I were lucky enough to have parents who filled our heads full of Scottish history, songs and legends. Our father grew up in Lanarkshire, our mother in the wilds of Aberdeenshire. It's a rich cultural heritage, one I've done my best to pass on to my own children.
     When I tell people I'm not so sure about Scottish history becoming a compulsory subject in schools, that I think it's best done in the family, I'm accused of being a naïve romantic. That doesn't happen anymore. I'm living in the past. I beg to differ. I travel a lot around Scotland and if I'm not talking to folk, I'm eavesdropping on them.
     One example out of many: a year ago at Linlithgow Palace, maw, paw and the weans. Paw was making sure the weans knew their history, that Mary, Queen of Scots had been born here, what the blue and white flag fluttering above our heads meant.
     'So,' he said, 'that's St Andrew's flag or the saltire. Can you remember the other flag Scotland has?' His wee boy thought hard. 'It's got an animal on it,' his father prompted. The small face adopted an even more ferocious look of concentration. 'Is it a vampire?' The vampire rampant. I love it. His father gently corrected him, and went on with the informal history lesson.
     Scotland can be an infuriating country to belong to. Robust self-criticism is healthy but we take it to extremes. It's as though we don't dare allow ourselves to be inspired. Well, I am, and it’s the Holyrood election results and Alex Salmond that have done it.
     I've never been a member of any political party but was brought up in the tradition of Red Clydeside. Voting Labour was an article of faith in our family. Not any more. Not for a long time. Living as I now do in rural Scotland, I tried the Liberals for a while. They always seemed like well-meaning people. They lost my vote when the sitting Westminster MP also effectively told me that Scottish wasn't a nationality. Devolution was wholly dependent on how the English electorate voted, something to be graciously granted to us by Westminster. Or not.

 

     The pundits keep telling us that despite the SNP's landslide there's no real appetite in Scotland for independence. Really? That's not what I'm hearing. I'm getting enthusiasm for the idea, a recognition that times change, and a cheerful 'Why not?'.
     Couldn't it be that Labour did so badly because they weren't even listening to Scots outside their own political bubble, because they so obviously see Holyrood as inferior to Westminster, because they've forgotten how to inspire people?
     Alex Salmond knows how to do that. When he talks about tuition fees he evokes the spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment. When, with a fine sense of history and theatre, he swooped onto the lawn at Prestonfield House, he quoted from a Corries song, the one about Scotland 'having an eye to the future and a heart to forgive'.
     He returned to that song when speaking of sectarianism in Scottish football. 'Let us be rid of those bigots and fools who will not let Scotland live and let live.' Amen to that. And why must we have football news on Reporting Scotland every night? Why not a regular slot for, say, arts news instead? I'm with Gerry Hassan both on the Scottish spring and his call for more grown-up television programmes for Scotland, reflecting our changing country back to us, in all its glorious variety.
     Of course there are terrible wrongs to right in modern Scotland, too many lives blighted by poverty, deprivation and low expectations. So for that very reason, let us not be scared to allow ourselves to be inspired. Inspiration can move mountains: and wee magic stanes.
     Back in 1922, during a previous political earthquake, a band of Red Clydeside MPs swept into Westminster. They included James Maxton, Tom Johnston and Davie Kirkwood. In his autobiography Kirkwood wrote of one of the wrongs they hoped to right, 'the grimy, sordid, diseased hideousness of a Glasgow slum,' the apologies for homes in which thousands of people then lived.
     Yet the Red Clydesiders understood about inspiration too. In 1924, Kirkwood brought forward a bill to return the Stone of Destiny to Scotland. James Maxton, Tom Johnston, Neil MacLean, Campbell Stephen and the other Clydeside Labour MPs supported it. It got to a second reading. Speaking in support of his bill, David Kirkwood described the Stone of Scone as a symbol of Scottish nationhood and spoke of the 'great spiritual, historical and sentimental bonds that bind together a race. When we seek bread and shelter for our people, we also demand roses'.
     Being Scottish has always been a nationality. We all know that. So let us raise our eyes towards the horizon, watch the sun coming up and look forward to the journey. It might be a bumpy ride but that way life won’t get boring. And let us also demand roses.

Maggie Craig is the author of seven novels, three works of non-fiction and numerous newspaper and magazine articles