A NEW STORY FOR SCOTLAND
A guest article from regular correspondent Mary MacCallum Sullivan. Mary lives in Argyll.
Scotland small? Our multiform, infinite Scotland small?’(MacDiarmid, H)
Gerry Hassan, in his ‘New Story for Scotland‘ (National, Sun 14 Jan, 24), calls for a new narrative that can be recognised and taken up across the many and diverse voices of our one Scotland.
MacDiarmid’s rhetorical question highlights the geological and topographical distinctiveness of the land, whereby islanders such as the Shetlanders or the Hebrideans feel themselves to be equally distant from London or Edinburgh, divided as they are by sea, by mountain, and by what is often a 19th century transport infrastructure. It won’t do to minimise the range of difference between all our multiform stereotypes – the sturdy stoicism of the islander, the superior Edinburgh intelligentsia or the tenemental Glaswegian. We betray our varied origins, from the ancient lineages of Irish Celts, Vikings and Picts to the horizon-opening, glorious diversity of our newer Scots.
Recognising our differences, it is worth reminding ourselves that Scotland has been, astonishingly, a sovereign nation since 843. It remains so, since the Articles of the 1707 Union between Scotland and England limit the power of the UK parliament; the United Kingdom parliament remains subject to the sovereign power of the Treaty’s signatories, the sovereign realms of Scotland and England.
It has been habitual in some sectors to pour scorn on any supposed distinctiveness – a more collectivist tendency, or even a kind of moral superiority – sometimes claimed for the Scots. Various polls and surveys have been unable to elicit any real substance to such claims. But one claim to Scottish distinctiveness is valid: the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, which sets ‘the people’ over and above any claimed ‘divine’ right of kings (see the anointing of Charles 3rd of England in 2023). The Declaration enshrines the distinctive power of the Scottish people to remove their monarch: to ‘take steps to drive him out as the enemy and the subverter of his own rights and ours and install another’.
Scotland remained, through its highly-coloured history of conflict between monarchs, barons, magnates, and clerics, a ‘coherent political community, held together by common interests… and a freshly renewed national identity’ (Lynch, 1992: 133). The Convention of the Estates, where representatives of the ‘Thrie Estates’ – the nobles, the clerics, and, importantly, the Royal Burghs – came together on matters of national importance, demonstrated the resilience afforded by the recognition of these different centres of power.
It has been argued that the 16th century Scottish Reformation was Scotland’s revolution, whereby the right of monarchs and their nominees over the religious ‘formation’ of the country was denied – a kind of democracy of the congregations, a robust equality (albeit male-dominated) in the established Presbyterian church. And that the Edinburgh Enlightenment of the later 18th century at least contributed to the celebrated republican Constitution of the USA that placed ‘we, the people’ at the apex of national governance.
New ideas can only grow out of old ideas; we have to revisit and reframe for our time the old, the time-tested and consensus-supported truths and values.
Alastair McIntosh speaks of a threefold act: re-membering, re-visioning and re-claiming, and of ‘the work of cultural psychotherapy’. (Freud’s own description of the work of therapy is ‘remembering, repeating and working though’.) It is indeed therapeutic work to go back and explore memories, buried as a means of protection against the reminder of the trauma that is the heritage of the Scottish peoples’ experience. To re-member entails the re-telling, the re-framing of forgotten and suppressed truths, reshaped with the understanding that hindsight brings.
We have many times rehearsed the stories of trauma and suffering, but the work of re-visioning requires us also to find and take what we conceive to be the principles from old, shared and lived wisdom that have survived and been honed through experience, and re-shape those to be applicable and constructive as a means of creating a sustainable life and society for now.
And then we may re-claim our agency, our sovereignty, as an imagined community with a set of ‘founding principles’ that meet with the assent of the majority amongst us; we will be aware that we exist in interdependence with the minority amongst us, and with our neighbours in the world, and will aim for competence and ‘standing’ as we negotiate new treaties and new relationships.
Scotland’s cultural history provides material out of which we may fashion a new polity:
- A constitution that honours the spirit of the Declaration of Arbroath
- The Reformation’s ‘universal education’, that will qualify each and every citizen to be a valued member of the ‘Community of the Realm’
- Adam Smith’s ‘sympathy’ as a principle of mutual recognition
- David Hume’s scepticism in dialogue with Thomas Reid’s Commonsense philosophy as a principle for public debate
Amongst newer thinking that must bring new insight to old ideas, foregrounding the language of ‘respect and recognition’, might be:
- Recognition and respect for women, for their difference, for their as-yet- unrealised potentiality, and for a fundamental principle of ‘care’ to be recognised as a matter of public policy, essential for the health and well-being of all
- Understanding of human development and the need for the universal provision of a healthy and facilitating environment for children as they grow to full maturity
- Economic policies that restrict the reach of the market economy by expanding our ability to meet our needs outside it, by recognising community ownership of wealth and resources
- The urgency of the climate emergency that requires recognition of the utter dependence of the human on the entirety and interconnectedness of the natural world, and the implications for how we must respect and foreground the order of nature.
It takes another national poet to summarise and distil the core wisdom: Robert Burns’s ‘to see oursels as ithers see us’ transposed Adam Smith’s psychological insight into common wisdom, while his ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’ expresses Scotland’s claimed ‘democratic intellect’.
And, if we are thinking about systems of government, let’s not neglect Edwin Morgan’s injunction to the new Scottish parliamentarians:
What do the people want of the place? They want it to be filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its architecture.
A nest of fearties is what they do not want.
A symposium of procrastinators is what they do not want.
A phalanx of forelock-tuggers is what they do not want.
And perhaps above all the droopy mantra of ‘it wizny me’ is what they do not want.
…
We give you our consent to govern, don’t pocket it and ride away.
We give you our deepest dearest wish to govern well, don’t say we have no mandate to be so bold.
We give you this great building, don’t let your work and hope be other than great when you enter and begin.
New stories for Scotland are re-membered and re-visioned by our poets, but we have to complete the work of re-claiming and re-building that new Scotland. Let’s begin!
Mary MacCallum Sullivan
MY COMMENTS
Another extremely well written contribution from Mary. It is a piece that set me thinking about the rich tapestry of our past and how the advice and statements of the past still are very relevant today. Many thanks Mary for this.
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YOURS FOR SCOTLAND 
“What do the people want of the place? They want it to be filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its architecture.
A nest of fearties is what they do not want.
A symposium of procrastinators is what they do not want.
A phalanx of forelock-tuggers is what they do not want.
And perhaps above all the droopy mantra of ‘it wizny me’ is what they do not want.
…
We give you our consent to govern, don’t pocket it and ride away.
We give you our deepest dearest wish to govern well, don’t say we have no mandate to be so bold.
We give you this great building, don’t let your work and hope be other than great when you enter and begin.”
The (mainly) fraudsters cowering in the Scottish Parliament need to be reminded of the expectations of the Scottish people so eloquently described in Edwyn Morgan’s wise words.
Maybe Salvo could send a copy to each and every one of the MSPs?
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Indeed we should.
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I’m afraid the giving this to MSP’s or MP’s would be a total waste of time, money, and effort.
By their actions and inactions they constantly prove they don’t care what we the people want or don’t want.
What they want is to keep their salaries and benefits.
I sincerely hope the end of this now corrupt SNP group of scheisters is not long for this world.
My worry is what will we be left with which will be fit for Government. Certainly not the English clowns who would like to keep the Golden Goose which is Scotland.
What a depressing thought.
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“I’m afraid the giving this to MSP’s or MP’s would be a total waste of time, money, and effort.”
Well you may be correct in that they would not respond but they need to be given the message of how we feel.
They need to be put under the spotlight, feet held to the fire, metaphorically booted up the backside with a steal toecap, whatever.
It’s called democracy in action: the Community of the Realm do not approve.
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It is far from democracy in action. Horse water drink springs to mind. There are none so blind as those who will not see. When I was a kid I got a mag called “look and learn”. Our politicians do neither as my experience with the Scottish Currency Group proved.
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You are entitled to your view but in my opinion if they are not informed how you feel about their actions and inactions that will simply be interpreted as approval of their (inept) performance.
I am not ready to accede to this assumption.
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I truly wish you luck with that. I am not assuming . Talking from personal experience I’m afraid.
I wish you well in your endeavours.
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The assumption I was referring to was that held by the politicians sitting in the Holyrood parliament.
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What a brilliant positive article to read first thing in the morning.
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Polling that would put a number to a claimed differential between the collective psyche of the Scots and other self defining groups in the British isles is indeed sparse to nonexistent. There are however two useful proxy metrics.
In 2015, voters resident in Scotland opted Remain by a 24% margin of victory. Voters resident in England opted Leave by a 7% margin of victory. As these vectors are directly opposed, we can derive a 31% differential.
Some academics have interrogated Brexit voting data to attempt to derive preferences expressed by specific indigenous (autochthonous) groups. For example, Professor of Geography, Danny Dorling (Oxford University) maintains that the majority of autochthonous Welsh voted Remain while the headline vote for people resident in Wales gave a 4% margin of victory for Leave.
The validity of this type of mathematical manipulation is uncertain at best. Local, environmental factors may play a part.
Applying this method of mathematical manipulation to the Brexit vote in Scotland we can derive a margin of victory for Remain amongst autochthonous Scots of 28%. The projected margin of difference between autochthonous Scots and English would be circa 35.5% (health warning applies).
Polling on support for the monarchy in the latter years of the reign of Elizabeth II was remarkably consistent.
Excluding don’t knows, in the UK, the monarchy enjoyed a net support of 50% (ie. 75% approve / 25% disapprove). For residents of Scotland, net approval was 14%. This in itself is a stark differential.
Applying Prof. Dorling’s theoretical methods we can derive figures of approval for the monarchy on an autochthonous basis. For autochthonous Scots the monarchy of Queen Elizabeth II enjoyed a net approval of 7%, for autochthonous English the monarchy enjoyed a net approval of 51%. This differential of 44% is a gaping chasm, greater than even that of Brexit.
Turning to the concept of the “imagined community”, I would concur while employing the terms, “we are who we tell ourselves we are” and “folk memory”.
What if there were “hardwired”, genetic differences between the populations of the different nations in the British isles?
The standard answer to this question is that there are little to no discernible differences between the DNA sequences of the Scottish / Celtic population and that of the English population. This is true up to a point (eg. there are subtle differences in Welsh and English DNA) and is informative in that it confirms the hypothesis that recurrent waves of “invasion” into England were matters of cultural assimilation (acculturation) rather than wholesale replacement of populations.
This rejection of “hardwired” genetic differences fails to consider the relatively new development of Epigenetics.
Scientific discovery begins with observation. The notion that genetics begins and ends with DNA is as dogmatic as proposing that particle physics ends with the proton, electron and neutron.
Since the code of DNA was “cracked” in the 1950’s, scientific observations of certain behaviours have suggested a secondary means of transmitting genetic code beyond DNA.
Epigenetics was defined as a term in 2008 as “stably heritable phenotype resulting from changes in a chromosome without alterations in the DNA sequence”.
Inherited memory exhibited experimentally though behaviour has been observed in worms and mice. In one key study, mice were exposed to a specific odour while being subjected to trauma. When the offspring of the original mice down to the second generation were exposed to the specific odour, they too exhibited behaviour associated with trauma. The key here is “trauma”. It can be reasonably speculated that relatively benign experiences are unlikely to result in inherited memory.
Taking the hypothesis of inherited memory through trauma we can turn to the historical record to see if there are any traumatic events which apply only to the English or Scottish population which would result in genetic difference through Epigenetics.
If the “invasions” of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and later Vikings were really exercises in acculturation, then they may be presumed to be non-traumatic.
This cannot be said for the Norman invasion in 1066. Resistance to Norman overlordship was met with a scorched earth policy such as “The Harrying of the North” considered by some historians to be genocide. Survivors of destruction, slaughter and famine were ripped from the relatively egalitarian hierarchy of AngloSaxon society and subjected to Norman serfdom.
If any experience could induce an Epigenetic response, 1066 and the years that followed qualify.
That there are differences between the Scottish and English psyche seems self-evident, at least to me.
Denial of differences between ethnic groups (or the inverse; the invention of “racial” division) is a feature of political dogma, whether Marxist, unionist, nationalist or fascist.
Epigenetics is an embryonic discipline. Inherited memory has been observed in crude form in third generation mice. Whether subtle inherited memory encoded genetically persists in the human brain with our complex capacity for communication, substantially beyond two generations is yet to be determined.
In any case, perhaps a genetically encoded memory of trauma that persists for a few generations is sufficient to initiate an indelible folk memory.
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All very interesting thank you
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Great article from Mary, inspired and inspiring. I have long noted the contrast in the behaviour of our represenratives in Holyrood compared with how Edwin Morgan suggested they should. while I recognise that it may be futile (I was there at the attempt to deliver the Stirling directive last year!), I like the idea of sending a copy ol Morgans poem to all MSPs and would be happy to contribute to such an enerprise, should a body like Salvo be prepared to organise that.
Hpowever, I would like it to be done with Maximum Publicity, in Scotland, the wider UK and Internationally, though I recognise that may pose problems. We need to get as many people as possible to understand how a majority of people in Scotland feel about the anti-democratic way we are governed at present both by Holyrood and Westminster.
Is there any way we can take legal action against the current Scottish Government, particularly the SNP as the largest party represented in that ‘crowd of fearties’ for failing to do what is manifestly their raison d’etre according to their slogan ‘Stronger for Scotland’ and the reason for the party’s basic foundation as first and foremost seeking Independence for our Nation.
Time they did ‘as it says on the Tin’! Can we sue them for misrepresentation?
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A well written article and a sound basis for debate. Each day I become more convinced that I should put my faith in an organisation of my fellow Scots rather than the Political Class who are so easily seduced by pensions and perks.
Those who took us to the edge of Independence in 2014 were hardworking activists. We have the talent and drive but more importantly we are not for sale like those the treacherous SNP.
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@vivianoblivian7 As neither a worm, mouse,geneticist or metaphysicist, and without any knowledge or notion of the existence of the term Epigenetics, on several occasions in recent years I’ve found myself forwarding an argument for the possibility, at least, of such a phenomenon. I feel sure that I can’t be the only one to have entertained the thought.
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‘We give you our consent to govern, don’t pocket it and ride away.
We give you our deepest dearest wish to govern well, don’t say we have no mandate to be so bold’
A very considered and thought-provoking article and one that we should digest and incorporate into a new way forward from the political process and political parties that have failed us so badly.
Note the first word of both statements – ‘We’, an affirmation of our people’s sovereignty, and it is the people of Scotland that ‘give you our consent to govern.” However, what has the administrative body of Westminster in Scotland done with our permission to govern on our behalf?
One of the prime functions, and possibly the most important function, of any governing body is to protect the people they serve. However, as long as our elected representatives bow the knee to a foreign monarch and meekly accept that we are not sovereign by kow-towing to Westminster Parliamentary Sovereignty they cannot protect the people of Scotland from the ravages of poverty and the plunder of our resources, or from the deliberate policy of the continuing impoverishment of our people that has been taking place even before this toxic Treaty was signed.
The 45 MPs that Scotland were co-opted into the English Parliament of 486 English MPs and 27 Welsh MPs fulfilled the prophecy of Daniel Defoe when he said ‘“The Scots will be allowed to send to Westminster, a handful of men who will make no weight whatever. They will be allowed to sit there for form’s sake to be laughed at.” That laughing still goes on today as we see our elected representatives repeatedly ignored, despite the frequent mandates given them by the people of Scotland.
Those 45 MPs from Scotland that were co-opted into the Second English Parliament of Queen Anne, was just 1 MP more than Cornwall had in that parliament.
Our continuing sovereignty as the people of Scotland was also ignored by the Westminster Administration in Scotland based at Holyrood when it provided a perfunctory response to the Stirling Directive. That superficial response, denied the existence of our sovereignty as Holyrood continues to defer to their superior body at Westminster.
Finally, ‘don’t say we have no mandate to be so bold’, but that is exactly what is taking place when that ‘nest of fearties’, repeatedly ignore the instructions of our people. With no sign or even a hint that our rights as sovereign people will be upheld by our elected representatives, then it is long past the time that the people themselves become ‘the vehicle for independence’.
As the route being taken by Salvo / Liberation cannot be taken by any political party, then that is where my hopes and hopes for my children and grandchildren, as well as my country, now lie.
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Thanks to Mary for an excellent, thought-provoking piece. The reference to Alastair McIntosh (‘re-membering’ etc) falls at the first hurdle. Amnesia has long been a potent force in politics. I would imagine that its existence would be harder to prove under epigenetic ‘rules’.
Why, for instance, would any individual ‘with the Gaelic’ consider voting for a London political party, given that City-State’s historical predilection for its destruction by way of ethnic cleansing and other means? Perhaps our political masters have reached the conclusion that amnesia can be engineered. No. Without wishing to diminish or compare the seriousness of the subject matter, you work hard at it as the Jews have done with the Holocaust.
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CaptainBungle, you pose an interesting question in regard of ‘the Gaelic’. Perhaps your theory may hold true for those who are genetically endowed in ‘the Gaelic’ and the legacy from the clearances still holds firm in their psyche. Those who have been drawn to the language through the prism of academia I fear may not share the true spirit of the Gael and vote accordingly.
Your reference to the Holocaust is quite apposite, not just do Scots need to ‘work hard at it’ but in the spirit of the Gael and free speech, *weaponise the clearances*.
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an absorbing article which all should read. The only missing but essential element is the stewardship of our land. From that stewardship everything else flows.
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Far too long Derek
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Sorry Iain,
I’d just love to see a Scottish new bill of rights on day 1 of independence that would tie in nicely and reflect Mary’s piece. That would determine economic policy of an independent Scotland. That old American 432 page report would certainly help.
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To quote another American during another spat of the USA’s political soul searching…
” Follow the Money “
It is obvious that Scotland provides a vast and unfortunately growing amount of resources to our colonial master and yet ALL the politicians who were elected under a ” FREE SCOTLAND ” banner have simply folded into the floor…. and writing to them in my case pointing out the glaring inequalities in D & G has achieved ….nothing….
I do not know enough about other countries history on how they have achieved their various rights but I have witnessed how some of these countries profit from the resources produced in them. I cannot say the same for the appererant wealth that Scotland has …. as it simply flows South.
The obsession on profering different forms of political solutions is not going to openly flow into the hearts & minds of the majority of Scots… but… demonstrating where the money goes to and how unfairly it is spent will generate a more widespread take up of the case for Scotland to break from this economic legalised robbery.
Two issues that I state to those colonial appeasers who I unfortunately must work with are the £10 Billion pounds that is being spent on some roadworks called ” The Lower Thames Crossing “… and the £2.5 Billion that is intended for a 2.5 mile tunnel by-passing ” Stonehenge “….. these two issues which the bbc news….. in its wisdom never seem to have time to report on… usually provoke a look of shock on the recipients faces especially when they have to contend with potholes or travel delays due to the many pathetic infrastructure failures that Scotland… an Oil wealth rich country …. suffers from.
So my reply to this and the other excellent articles that I read is to use the Money argument to seed thoughts on each Scots living standards whether they be for or agin our freedom.
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