Scotland is a peculiar place with strong and strange prejudices, as we are all discovering during the referendum on independence. They see things differently there.
I travelled north five years ago to give a lecture on terrorism to the Scottish Police College, magnificently accommodated at Tulliallan Castle in Kincardine-on-Forth, built from prize money by Admiral Lord Keith – at one time Nelson’s boss and the man who formally issued the orders sending Napoleon into exile on St Helena.
The policemen who hosted me were impressive: educated, on the ball, fit. In uniform, they were immaculately turned out – always a quick route to a guardsman’s heart. They were charming and hospitable. But when discussing terrorism there was too much emphasis on ‘diversity’ and ‘community cohesion’ for my taste.
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Otherwise lively and interesting men and women with strong views on life’s rich tapestry became relentlessly on-message when discussing race, religion and immigration – the three key issues involved in dealing with Islamist terror.
Tulliallan came across as a very PC and very provincial institution. Ian Rankin’s detective, John Rebus, who is despatched to Tulliallan for ‘retraining’ in the 2001 novel Resurrection Men, came to the same judgment a few years earlier.
In contrast, the senior Metropolitan coppers I have known and worked with (some of them Scotsmen, though like the other 800,000 Scots who live south of the border without a vote in the referendum) cherish no illusions about the nature of law and order and criminality. If the Scots do plump for independence their security elite is going to have to lift its game in quick time – national as opposed to regional security is a much less forgiving environment.
After my lecture I was taken to a local pub in the shadow of the Forth Bridge where we drank ‘heavy’, the strong local beer, followed by whisky chasers.
Along with my professional credentials, I had been introduced as a prospective independent parliamentary candidate at the then imminent general election; and so the conversation turned to politics. The clear message was not the expected anti-Thatcher rant, but rather “Most of us would never under any circumstances vote for an English public schoolboy”. Oxford University, one of the world’s greatest seats of learning, didn’t seem too popular either.
I was astonished at the anti-English prejudice that seemed to run so deep among my hosts. It was courteously done so I didn’t feel uncomfortable, but there was something irrational about it that I found disturbing. Let’s hope in an independent Scotland they can master and subdue this antipathy – it doesn’t bode well for cross-border security.
Many Englishmen have seen this powerful Anglophobia filling their television screens for the last fortnight or so. Even if the vote is ‘No’ on Thursday, it’s hard to see that the English will tolerate the 59 Scots MPs at Westminster having a vote in future on purely English issues; or be particularly chuffed at a shared royal family.
As with so many contemporary political issues, the referendum campaign has exposed once again David Cameron’s poor judgment. Being prime minister is no doubt a difficult job and the pace of modern media life may have made the task near impossible. Nevertheless, like the hapless hero in an end-of-pier pantomime Cameron and his advisers seem repeatedly to have been surprised by events that others have easily foreseen through common sense.
And one wonders about Cameron’s character. His description in a speech in Edinburgh of the political party he has the honour to lead, and whose MPs are the mechanism that makes him prime minister, as the “effing Tories” was astonishing. In the PR trade where Cameron had his only proper job it’s called “Doing a Ratner” after Gerald Ratner’s speech in 1991 describing his jewellery company’s products as “total crap”.
In the end, I am left with the feeling, that regardless of the outcome, the whole referendum affair has been an unnecessary indulgence – the same feeling that many observers had during the Abdication Crisis of 1936 that so absorbed the energies of the UK’s political establishment - at a time when they should have been concentrating on other, far more urgent and dangerous issues.
