kill for the union

The sword sang on the barren heath, The sickle in the fruitful field: The sword he sang a song of death, But could not make the sickle yield.

William Blake, ‘Gnomic Verses’ xiv.

KILL FOR THE UNION

2 3T H E D R O U T H

The debate on the Referendum for Independence has not seriously begun. Stephen Maxwell’s last gift to the country he loved so well, Arguing for Independence, lays out a clear case, with shrewd and generous cartography of Unionist assertions or replies, but the Unionists themselves have not replied, nor have they seemed to want to state their own case. The strong suspicion must exist that they hope to win by ducking any true debate. The Foreign Secretary (appropriately) looked into Edinburgh on 20 June 2013 to inform what audience was found for him that NATO, the EU etc. etc. would not want an independent Scotland, adding that he had not come to make terrifying noises. His One-of-the-Yorkshire-Blokes manner inspires the blokish rejoinder that it depends on the portion of his anatomy whence the noises emerge, but what else has the Unionist case been save terrifying noises? What Mr Hague chooses to decide NATO thinks now, or may think if we vote for Independence fifteen months hence, is as useful as what he thinks Mars thinks. The same applies to his knowledge of what the EU thinks.

Trained as he was in the Thatcher school of diplomacy, he fundamentally believes that the way to find out what foreigners are thinking is to tell them what they ought to think by shouting in English at the top of your voice. He is presumably above the argument that NATO veterans may have acquired a bitter detestation of Scotland by having had the asinine George Robertson foisted on them by Tony Blair, but what other arguments has he?

When Unionist statesmen do face apparent pressure to disgorge a raison d’etre or two, there is one insistent obbligato. Be their trimmings what they may, it rapidly becomes a hymn in praise of Death, a Liebestod in which England is apparently Tristan, Scotland Isolde, Wales when not doing duty as a princely alias can be the maidservant, Northern Ireland may be King Mark, but anyhow Death is at once the Union’s greatest accomplishment, its historical leitmotiv, its glorious future. Prime Minister Cameron at an early stage came up here to tell us that while he knew we didn’t like him, or at least wouldn’t vote for him (and give the boy credit, that’s more than Margaret Thatcher could ever learn), and he was therefore having the Unionist case made for us by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer who had plunged the UK into its greatest financial disaster ever, yet he would ask us to remember that as Beh-eh-et-ter Toge-eh-ehther (pronounced as articulated by an Old Morningside or Kelvinside sheep) we had the fourth biggest Defence in the world. Only three powers can kill more people than the UK can kill. ‘Defence’ is a pleasingly Orwellian word. 1984 had Ministries of Love for Hate, Peace for War, Plenty for Sparseness, Truth for Lies, but Defence, in real life, was a more plausibly cut coinage of these years to prettify War, once preferred to strut on the stage naked and unashamed but now required by the decencies to flourish in a top hat and nae knickers.

The conviction that human achievement is best measured by homicide is old, but not invariable. H.G. Wells (in The World Set Free etc.) pictured our common male ancestor as happiest with his club (rather than in it, as would characterise Well’s male contemporaries), hitting his prey, his rival, and his woman indiscriminately to obtain what he wished to devour. G.K. Chesterton (in The Everlasting Man) pointed out that the one thing we can actually see of the work of our ancestors (male or female) was

S U M M E R / A U T U M N 2 0 1 3 I S S U E 4 6

Owen Dudley Edwards

2 4 T H E D R O U T H

their liking for making pictures. Legends of heroes as they have come down to us made much of the great warriors, such as Hector and Achilles, but taught that it is Odysseus, the person of intellect, who survives. Gibbon, opening his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote of one of its greatest Emperors at its zenith:

Trajan was ambitious of fame; and as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their ben-efactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.

But his higher praise was reserved for Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius:

Their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great peo-ple was the sole object of the government.

This contrast interrogates the Prime Minister so unkindly as to put him 240 years behind the times, and since what lies at the heart of his opposition to dissolve the Anglo-Scottish Union is the fear of imperial British decline and fall, his antiquity can hardly be a matter for self-praise.

But Gibbon may not have all the last laughs. Christianity, his explanation of imperial Roman decline and fall, was proof of the decline of the military ideal. Its phenomenal success, (however greatly perverted and indeed militarised by its imperial converts) dedicated its votaries to worship of a God who had rejected violence and died rather than invoke it. Certainly adopting Christianity as the

state religion had been tied to a military victory of Constantine I in 312 AD, and the attempted con-scription of Heaven has continued to our own day, witness the Angels of Mons in World War I (they vary in commemoration, sometimes simply praying reprovingly against the Germans, sometimes doing their bit from cloudland more or less like Apollo shooting Greeks to start the Iliad). Even so, the whole damned war was condemned by Pope Benedict XV, who was then condemned by the belligerents for trying to take away their nice game. But nuclear warfare is less easy for Christians to justify, even on the elastic ethics with which they formerly found God on their side. The UK holds its nuclear stockpile not simply on the plea that it might come in handy, but on the understanding that if the UK receives a nuclear attack it will retaliate with nuclear weapons automatically. In other words, the possession of these weapons means that the possessor has already determined on their use if others take certain actions. This is beyond any interpretation of Christianity, however much one may try to water it with crocodile tears for justifiable wars. And whether on Christian or post-Christian grounds, independence for Scotland must reject ownership of nuclear weapons. This is no Sunday-school idealism. This is international law as declared by the UK and its master the USA. No non-nuclear power may have nuclear weapons, and if they do, they become outlaw powers such as ex-President Bush would call the axis of evil. The mere threat of such a thing has whipped up the utmost venom from US and UK against North Korea and Iran.



Therefore it must follow that Scotland cannot have nuclear weapons.

And that includes Trident. Here we are in for one of the neo-religious mysteries of modern life. Everyone knows Trident is unusable both on humane and on strategic grounds, and so far from being the UK’s independent deterrent cannot be used without US permission and participation. It eats its nominal owners out of house and home. So why maintain it? Any illusion of UK omnipotence it transmits is more moth-eaten than Hitler’s drawers. Is there some hidden agreement that the UK must retain Trident or become a fief of Saudi Arabia, not simply its armaments pimp? Mr Philip Hammond is no trustworthy witness however shining his armour (as the Prime Minister knows all too well) but when giving his Thatcherian Sermon apparently to choirs of ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh, what a lovely nuke!’ when visiting Scotland, he entered fields of a mythology with significant toxic effects on his logic. If Scotland voted for independence and if it repudiated Trident, it would take years and countless expense to get rid of it, he whined. But what has that got to do with Scotland? If the man who sells you his house has left an open urinal in your back garden, he must either remove it with no unreasonable delay, or else must see it confiscated. In such case Scotland must hand Trident over to the UN, since neither the Scottish people nor the nuclear powers permit its retention. Mr Hammond may have other disclosures to make, no less credible than his usual, such as that Trident contains the Man in the Iron Mask, or the fourth Secret of Fatima, or the Songs the Sirens Sang, or the murderer of the Red Fox at Appin. But disclose what he may, if Scotland is independent Trident is gone.

The unionist Snivels that we are not told what policies would obtain in an independent Scotland frequently high-light demands to know its Defence. But the beginning of such answer is that an independent Scotland would mean a repudiation of nuclear weapons whether called Defence in the usual lie, or Aggression or War or Murder. Therefore it will afford what is now fence-ringed for nukes. And, as they say in Northern Ireland, put that in your wee drum, and bang it.

II.

The defence of the Union, then, settles itself down into celebration of militarism whatever ancillary arguments it may camouflage itself with, on the way. And it is natural that is should be so, historically. Wales was conquered in a process of some thousand years from the Anglo-Saxon landings in post-Roman Britain until the extinction of Owain Glyndwr’s kingdom by the English Lancastrian usurpers Henry IV and V. Wales found its revenge with its half-children the Tudors but its offspring repudiated it having gained London power, from Henry VII to David Lloyd George. Henry VIII hammered its Union into place, leaving it to work out new forms of identity 250 years later in its reception of Methodism, its rediscovery of its antiquity, its prioritizing of its language, and then its nineteenth-century industrialization gave a harder cutting edge to the class struggle it shared with the rest of Britain. The Scottish and Irish Unions were the product of warfare, both created in fear of French invasion respectively from Louis XIV and from Napoleon, wartime Unions to make a warfare state. The Unions themselves were nominally peaceful affairs, bribery and other toys of peace being used instead of military coercion, but Scotland and Ireland were overshadowed militarily in 1707 as Marlborough’s armies swept from victorious bloodbath to bloodbath and in 1800 as Ireland languished in the aftermath of brutal insurrection and repression. This did not mean that a majority of either country’s population opposed the Union. They may not have, but the Scottish Parliament in 1707 and the Irish in 1800 were in any case both hopelessly unrepresentative. The English troops were needed in both cases to prevent further civil wars among the Scots and Irish themselves. And the first century of each Union needed military force to keep it in place time and again. From this perspective the undertones of war in the defence of the Union today are not particularly judicious. Paint it however you like, stapling Union and militarism together in Scots minds can open very different trains of thought from the speakers’. The usual complaint that the Anglo-Scottish Union was the product of Force and Fraud, has over-emphasised Fraud, as though honesty could be expected from eighteenth- century politicians. To ask how much the Union owed in its birth and life to Force is not an easily digestible recipe for its continued health.



The heavy-breathing, eye-popping, blood-coursing exaltation of the martial spirit is more evident in official Tory ranks, to be followed by surreptitious Labour copycats. It became temporarily toxic in the late 1950s, what with colonial repression, and Suez: the former could not be widely discussed, and the second could not be prevented from discussion, almost all of it hostile. Macmillan masterminded the Tory retreat, marching his troops backwards from the brink, in which he was followed by his chosen heir, the Earl of Home. It was indeed Home who collapsed the War Office into sub-tenancy in the Department of Defence alongside Navy and Air, to take effect on All Fool’s Day, 1964 (did Home have a better sense of humour than we have imagined?). Wilson however venal elsewhere kept the UK out of war, notably Vietnam, and so did Heath, under whom more thorough constitutional attempts were made to restore peace to Northern Ireland than in many a long year to follow. The British warfare state lurked in its fancy dress wardrobe until the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher, facing electoral danger towards the end of her first term, called it back into action. Newsweek captured the Zeitgeist she had conjured up when it captioned a front cover of the ‘task force’ steaming towards the Argentine-held Falklands ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. The Grantham cinema addict took us into Star Wars, all the more appropriately for her special relationship with the film star in the White House.

The recent decease of Lady Thatcher was followed by a preposterous funeral in which the TV audience suddenly found itself confronted by Prime Minister Cameron announcing:

Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.

This in its way was the most staggering assertion of Divine Right since Charles I. It should have been prefaced by ‘Jesus said’ but as it stood, and as he stood, it sounded like sheer blasphemous ego- centricity whether on his part or (one politely assumed he meant us to realise) his deceased predecessor under immediate celebration. She is understood to have dictated her funeral readings before finally losing whatever reason she may have still possessed. The event being over, her authorised biographer was permitted to let loose her first volume, Margaret Thatcher- the Authorised Biography, Volume I Not for Turning (Allen Lane, Penguin Books), he being Charles Moore editor of the Spectator 1984-1990, the Sunday Telegraph 1992-1995, the Daily Telegraph 1995-2003. To my great surprise, I have greatly enjoyed it. Moore insists he undertook the assignment with insistence of showing none of his text before publication to his

subject, her family or any friends, lawyers, agents, etc. This naturally falls within the old tradition:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist (Thank God), the British journalist, And seeing what the brute will do Unbrib’d, there’s no occasion to do.

Moreover his much-thanked literary agent has no doubt ensured any bribes greater than his takings for the book would have to be astronomical. But however unspeakable his profits, he has worked very hard and written very well. HE has interviewed endless persons from Grantham contemporaries onward, and he has asked questions more intelligent than one might expect from a Telegraph editor. He clearly knows where some bodies are buried: it was one of his predecessors in that editorship who fixed up Denis Thatcher’s agreeable understanding with Private Eye, the cleverest deployment of an allegedly non-partisan satirical journal in our time, and this volume carefully avoids that terrain save for one unwise admission: (p.752fn):

As the [Falklands] war progressed, the producers of Anyone for Denis, the satirical West End revue based on Private Eye’s fictitious ‘Dear Bill’ letters supposedly written by Denis, brought the show to an end.

This footnote was written to buttress the claim in the text

The Falklands War established Mrs Thatcher’s personal mastery of the political scene, and convinced people of her special gifts of leadership.

Charles Moore emerges from the book as an oddly likeable if mildly idiotic figure, and never more so, one suspects, than in his assumption people would swallow the thought that theatre producers would ring down a profitable curtain because of a sudden conviction that the Prime Minister had special gifts of leadership. ‘Winston’ as she vulgarly called Churchill, was not likely to have induced an end to affectionate caricatures of himself by show-ing his very real if hitherto unrealised ‘special gifts of leadership’. Clearly, the Thatchers felt the magic moment of war leadership was too solemn and too successful to permit stage ribaldry to continue, and pulled the rug from under the show, which could only have existed with Denis Thatcher’s agreement, as did the ‘Dear Bill’ letters.

But while the Falklands episode exhumed the British martial spirit, Charles Moore’s researches show a teenage Margaret curiously uninterested in the World War being waged around her save that she was in danger of her life, Grantham (Moore notes) bombed 21 times, 32 people killed the last



time. He frankly makes it clear that her zeal to get into Oxford as quickly as she could was in order to exempt herself from conscription. He shrewdly picks up on her speechmaking in the 1945 election (pp. 52-53):

The formulation about the frequency which Germany had caused war is almost uncannily similar to that repeatedly used by Lady Thatcher in the 1990s, although sometimes the word ‘Germany’ was replaced with ‘Continental Europe’.

Her scale of geographical interests Moore assesses from her performance in examination preparation for Geography at 15 (p.22):

The map of her future political sympathies is laid out. England and [the United States of] America understood, Scotland little studied, Ireland Terra incognita and Continental Europe not even mentioned.

That was in 1941 when most people in the UK would have looked at maps of Europe time and again. From the first she seems to have been imprisoned in generalisations and superlatives. Talking to Moore about her mother’s voluntary work she proclaimed ‘that’s the thing about the women of Britain – they do wonderful voluntary work – not like French women’. It helps us understand her almost incredible ineptitude in European diplomacy: to her such judgments were as Holy Writ, originally known to her through her father’s lay preaching. She also pronounced judgement on Holy Writ itself, telling Moore ‘There is no greater English Literature than Isaiah, the Gospels, and the Acts of the Apostles in the Authorised Version. This throws into clearer light her highly selective quotation from St Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians (iii.10) to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland: she carefully avoided the next verse which denounces ‘busy-bodies’. But her application of the Gospel is more interesting still. She once told a TV interviewer ‘You must never be like the parable of the Pharisees… because you just really know how you fall short of the ideal’. The parable has only one Pharisee and one publican, and the point is that the publican who asked for mercy and called himself a sinner was better justified than the boastful Pharisee. She was ready to call herself a Pharisee with some inadequacies; she excluded even from memory the thought of seeking mercy and calling oneself a sinner. But the supreme gift of Moore’s version of juvenile Thatcher is that she hated her headmistress at school and even corrected her Latin in public during a return visit as an adult: the headmistress was a Scot.

Thatcher’s discovery of the warfare state began in fantasy, controlled by her Scripture-reading to her own specifications in what she read, and what she learned. Charles Moore says little about her reading, and it is probable that there is little to say: he tells us of her demand for recommended books on Irish history during an Irish crisis, but there is no sign that she ever read them. His sense of humour is better than hers (it could hardly be worse) but he is apparently dead serious in foot-noting (pp.342-43) her statement in her memoirs that she read Dostoevsky’s The Possessed ‘on the recommendation of her country neighbour, the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who told her that it would give her an understanding of the Communist frame of mind’. Muggeridge had a ribald wit with a yen for practical jokes (he once had visions of inventing a miracle of divine apparition in Ireland) but even his having been the editor of Punch failed to alert either Thatcher or Moore to his probable motives: no doubt she thought Punch a simplified Economist as she took the Sun to be a journal of learned political acumen. Moore can see more blatant humour (p. 388):

In those days, the leading articles appeared on page two, opposite the famous page-three girls. On one occasion, arguing with her advisers, Mrs Thatcher alighted on two leaders in that day’s Sun which vigorously confirmed her prejudices. ‘There’, she cried, ‘what do you think of those two?’ The young aides found themselves staring at a large pair of breasts and almost suffocated with supressed laughter.

Finding agreement with her prejudices in Sun was more congenial literary exercise than trying to work out where Dostoevsky might be interpreting Marx or prophesying Lenin, and this underlines the seismic change of her premiership. Churchill, Attlee, Eden, Macmillan, Home were all patricians by public school education, Harold Wilson by his much self-advertised intellect. Callaghan, unelected premier largely begirt by needing to squeeze parliamentary majorities from Liberals or SNP, prefigured the seismic change, but carried a salty taste from his wartime naval service, as well as patrician touch in his somewhat cynical humour. It is impossible to think of any of them finding enlightenment in the Sun. Thatcher opened a new world in which the bawlings and bullyings in Sun editorials represented a vox populi of opaque wisdom: as she might say, if anyone had dared ask her, the people need a voice and Mr Murdoch gives it to them. It would never have occurred to her (as apparently it never occurred to her Sun worshipping successors in either party) that she



must have been in an almost invisible minority in reading Sun editorials, since consumers of page 3 have no interest in reading.

She does seem to have read or at least skimmed manuals of political futures, intellectual equivalents of Old Moore’s Almanac (which she would have sold across her father’s shop counter) such as F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Where the political theorists themselves were not skipping across their frontiers into science fiction, she nonetheless gave them credit for it. In her quest for understanding the future she also stated she read Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, actually about the USSR purges of the 1930s, but in her hands a possible recipe-book of What to Do with Unwanted Former Party Comrades. She certainly thought 1984 was on the same shelf as Old Moore, trumpeting when 1984 arrived ‘Orwell Got It Wrong’, as though his only claim could be that of astrologer. Ironically, she of all politicians could have given it credit for accurate diagnosis of journalism development whence he imagined or half-deduced Pornosec for the Proles. The Sun’s headline condescension (openly girding itself in the semi-literacy it presumed and preferred in its read-ers) Thatcher would have seen as truly patrician. She would have displayed herself as truly patrician by using the elocution lessons she had as a child to imagine she sounded Royal, whence her ‘We are a Grandmother’ and her annexation of the banalities with which the press festoon Royalty. Her Royal audiences were at much model study for her as were her visits to any other cosmetics expert. In the end the juxtaposition was unfortunate for her: Margaret Thatcher did nothing in her life to approach Queen Elizabeth’s massive conquests for goodwill in Ireland north and south of the Border. After the gallantry, honour and humour the real Queen gave the Republic, local journalists estimated that if Elizabeth had stood for President of the Republic (which since born before the 1949 Act she could have done), she would have been triumphantly elected. Thatcher was a minority premier to the end, even in England. She assumed perhaps correctly that her public manner of the Great Lady amusedly making friends with the Village Idiot, was her passport to Home Counties devotion: it certainly completed her electoral ruin in Scotland, Wales, and England north of The Wash.

The place of militaristic myth of Britishness was essentially English in Thatcher’s view (and in the less explicit views of her heirs). She inherited a warfare state in Northern Ireland, of course, but she knew enough of Tory folklore to know that Ireland was a graveyard in British political life: it should have been the crown making Whitelaw Prime Minister,

and she defeated Whitelaw. She accepted a war situation but had nothing at any stage to offer it but obduracy in Northern Ireland, distrust in the Republic, and chauvinism in Britain. Her obituarists tried to give her credit for the Anglo-Irish Agreement, but Reagan got her there after her lies to and about the most honest premier in Irish history, Garret FitzGerald, had ensured stalemate. Moore suggests she shared this view of FitzGerald’s honesty: that no doubt encouraged her to lie about him. More generally, Moore sums her attitude up (p.587)

She always thought of the people of Northern Ireland, even the Unionist population, as ‘they’, quite separate from ‘us’.

Unfortunately they were all too near at hand, with relatives still nearer. The Falklands, on the other hand, could be ‘us’ all the more for their convenient distance. Theoretically, that was a danger to the strategist. Practically, it was a benefit, when the strategist was political. Her notion of the military dimension in the role of a premier began in Fantasy, implying friendship with Churchill (her family had been admirers of Neville Chamberlain) for his war leadership (which at the time she hardly seemed to notice), and then Fantasy met her half-way in the Suez crisis. She supported Eden in 1956 and after, deeming him (with ultimate self-fulfilment) a great premier let down by others. She took the lesson that the UK must ‘never again get on wrong side of America in any great enterprise’, to which Moore adds another of his blunt footnotes (p.130n.):

Mrs Thatcher admired Eden much more than most post-Suez commentators. She saw him, be-cause of his record in the 1930s, as ‘the man who wanted to stand up against the foreign dictators’

thus leaving it to his readers to decide whether she saw the dictators’ crime chiefly in being foreign, dictatorship acceptable if British? She would seem to have at least seen the jacket of Eden’s memoir Facing the Dictators and presumably did not know A.J.P. bibliographical verdict on it (‘Eden did not face the Dictators: he pulled faces at them’). Whatever her closet Edenism, she knew his invocation of military heroics destroyed him, but it seems to have left her with the belief that with shrewder sponsorship the genie might emerge benevolently from its bottle.

And she needed that genie. We who have survived the rule of Thatcher automatically think of her as the Iron Lady, Not for Turning (which taken with her worshipper Norman Tebbit’s ‘on yer bike’ suggests locked steering). But Moore makes it clear that



from her unexpected defeats of Heath and then Whitelaw for the party leadership, many (perhaps most) Tories doubted her survival for more than a couple of years as Tory leader. One of her alleged arrangements of her own funeral was, perhaps inevitably, the singing of ‘To Be a Pilgrim’, and if she lacked, say, John Buchan’s devotion to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, it had its appositeness. She had nothing of Disraeli’s intellect or wit, or (above all) his penetration, but she was like him a vulnerable figure thrusting herself to the top of a very greasy pole in a party hostile to Jews in his case, female leadership in hers. At her funeral her granddaughter Amanda read from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians VI. 10-19, her voice mingling her grandmother’s heartland of Englishness with the American wonder-land sparkling on Thatcher’s horizon from her child-hood and brought from Hollywood for her personal delectation by the President of the United States performed by Ronald Reagan:

…Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

If the verses really were Thatcher’s choice, to follow the Bunyan hymn, it certainly recognised an obvious source for Bunyan’s book, whose Pilgrim survives Apollyon’s fiery darts. It captured well the Puritan pursuit of peace, so begirt with military symbols, flowing well in the surroundings of the great Anglican cathedral. But for all of its exhortation to followers and implicit claim of the subject to righteousness and salvation, it began with a real sense of Thatcher’s having found her salvation after personal struggles:

Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Thatcher, perpetually conscious of omnipresent Tory males itching for her assassination once she had got rid of Heath for them, needed some physical military victory to silence, stupefy and shatter their forces. As Charles Moore tells it, the

Falklands crisis and her lonely championship of resistance against the Argentines were perceived by her as giving her ostensible friends and intending assassins the chance to destroy her once she failed. In fact she probably saw it not as her danger so much as her opportunity. Conceiving her role in the rhetoric of her Methodist lay preacher father’s sermons and Scripture (though little concerned or even literate in Christian doctrine), she played the Falklands war as though she were Mr Standfast (we can hardly call her Mr Valiant-for-Truth), whence an unfortunate TV reporter and his viewers had his innocuous enquiry about the recapture of South Georgia answered by a bellow of ‘Just Rejoice in that News!’ We were lucky she didn’t sing it. Similarly the fate of the Belgrano, and its illegality under international law, deserved in her eyes no more concern than the wounds of Apollyon. It was neither Religious Right-wing fundamentalism nor Reagan’s neoconservative soap-opera (with script), though it warmed itself in the proximity of both. It resembled modern Chinese usage of the rhetoric and logic of Com-munism while discarding belief in its doctrines and principles. It was not consciously hypocritical: it was interested in its own mirror-image, and dictaphone playback, not in its own soul. If anything, she thought her voice was her soul.

How was she able to safeguard herself for the Biblical seven years ensured by the Falklands? Here Charles Moore, ready enough as he is to admit minor blips in Thatcher veracity, wants us to swallow her version of the major story. Try this for credibility (p.662 FN):

There is no evidence that Enders or anyone else associated with the Reagan administration had any advance knowledge of the Argentine invasion, but some close to Mrs Thatcher saw connections nonetheless. ‘It is hard not to believe that some Argentine Generals let their US coun-terpart have some inkling as to what was being planned in March,’ Hugh Thomas wrote to Mrs Thatcher later in April. ‘Surely Dr Costa Mendez must have winked, at least, at Assistant Secretary of State Enders, after the latter’s recent visit to Buenos Aires.’ Reviewing the letter with felt pen in hand, Mrs Thatcher scored no fewer than four lines under ‘Enders’.

Thomas was the formerly left-wing historian of Spain and Latin America, now neo-conservative (Thatcher worshipped at shrines of ex-Leftist intellectuals as though their apostacy conferred special clairvoyance). Thatcher’s emphasis on Endes, whom she took in dislike, was probably insurance, that if anyone asked why Americans



had not tipped the British off as to an imminent Argentine invasion it might be hinted (or winked) that Enders should have known and done so but treacherously did not. But of course the question is not whether a wink from Argentine Foreign Secretary Costa Mendez was as good as a not to a blind Thomas Enders, but what the enormous network of rival US spies had reported to their Washington masters. To believe they discovered nothing comes into the Duke of Wellington’s Jones Principle, when the man addressed him as ‘Mr Jones, I believe?’: ‘If you believe that, Sir, you will believe anything’. The Argentine junta which would invade the Falklands was headed by General Leopoldo Galtieri whose discretion and deportment were such that when Reagan rang him up to request that he abort the invasion, he was drunk. He was therefore unlikely to safeguard his military intentions to the point of impenetrability by the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, and the rest of the ‘intelligence’ beehives funded by the unfortunate US taxpayer, all desperately anxious to humiliate one another by intelligence scoops. Nor is it likely that if Reagan were ready in Thatcher’s interest to telephone Galtieri he would have failed to alter her to Argentine intentions of invasion. Both of them would have kept such personal links very secret with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as a precedent: their respective keepers, Nancy Reagan and Denis Thatcher, would have to be kept informed, but they were very discreet, especially Denis. Thatcher had seen a possible Argentine invasion of the Falklands as her means of becoming the ‘Winston’ of her time, the successful Anthony Eden, as early as 7 November 1980 when at an appropriate official committee Nicholas Ridley said Britain could not defend the Falklands, and she answered ‘We could bomb Buenos Aires, if nothing else’ (Moore, Thatcher, p.659). Her friend Ronald Reagan had been elected President of the United States three days earlier.

The Thatcher funeral commemorated much of the lady’s life, although more justifiably and more taste-fully than the proceedings in Parliament and on the BBC. So remote has Scotland become from London that few references were made to her most notable achievement, her alienation of Scotland and Wales so that devolution, thinly passed in Scotland and defeated in Wales in 1979, were triumphantly demanded by the referendums in both countries after her reign. The deification of Thatcher by Messrs Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, etc. gave no aid to their somewhat frenzied quests for British identity. By the time of the funeral, Thatcher as a cultural icon drove Scotland and England farther and farther apart, above all in the militarism she reinvented as an English fantasy. Thatcherism became a basic root of England’s Newspeak. In Scotland it was a dead dialect, part of a failed experiment. She became a Nannie to the English governing classes with all the lower social status and brutal authority the designation implied, whence government by institutionalised masochism. Scotland lay outside the Nannie culture, all the more since it provided unwanted headmistresses for future nannies. (The most famous Nannie in Scottish literature is the Newfoundland dog in Peter Pan.)



III.

Scottish identity may have strengthened itself by its repudiation of Thatcherism, but is it free from Thatchers? The lady herself seems to have felt any rival female Pilgrims were to be discouraged, and however Thatcherite England becomes, it has given birth to few new models. Firmly subordinate status was decreed in the New Labour horoscopes: ‘Blair’s babes’ were to retain their infancy. Piety may enhance a female Tory career but bereft of Ronnie and Denis they have few real safety-harbours, and the surrounding Tory males still have raw wounds to lick. Teresa May, murmur the wiseacres, but so far the shrewd money suspects Teresa May Not. But what of Scotland, where Leaderines strut the small spaces left to them by nationalist landslides? Johanne Lamont and Ruth Davidson lead hollow men whom they dominate with an aggression reminiscent of dear, dead Nannie as she ruled the Tories when politically alive and New Labour when politically dormant. Thatchers may be the last medical symptom of Scottish Unionism. Perhaps that ostentatious funeral should have closed with a well-driven stake prefacing rapid burial at a crossroads.

The question arises in another form, not without relevance to Unionist whispers. Gavin Bowd’s Fascist Scotland closes with the assurance that ‘It remains wilfully naïve [surely naïveté by definition cannot be willed?] to think there can be “nae Nazis” this side of the Cheviots’. This concludes a rag-bag of dubious deductions and malicious misreadings which suggest that whether or not Scotland produces Fascists it certainly attracts heirs to Senator Joe McCarthy. Dr Bowd begins his work with Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland in May 1941 to make contact with the Duke of Hamilton (then a Squadron-Leader in the RAF). The Duke was utterly innocent of any connection with Hess or with Nazism in general, but Hess had a half-Jewish friend, Albrecht Haushofer, whom the Duke knew (and who was later executed by the Nazis). The realities of the Hess-Haushofer-Hamilton connection or lack of it have been well laid out in Lord James Douglas-Hamilton’s Motive for a Mission, based primarily on his father’s memories and what can be deduced from Haushofer’s papers, and poems. Bowd ignores that book but cites something quoted from Lord James in a secondary work, although assuming him to be Hamilton’s grandson (which would make his grasp of historical source-material much more remote than it is). Bowd then leaps on a letter sent by Hamilton to the Times shortly after World War II broke out; it reminded Times readers that Hitler justified his aggression on

the injustice of the Versailles Treaty, but although every attempt should be made to achieve a just peace, Hitler’s actions against Jews were despicable and must never be repeated. Bowd quotes from the letter, carefully omitting its hatred of anti-Semitism, and uses it to justify linking Hamilton’s name with the Earls of Erroll and of Glasgow (who really were Fascists at one time, long before the war, although having small connection with Scotland). He captions a picture of the Duke ‘a prominent friend of Nazi Germany’, which is a lie which even a writer as slipshod as Bowd must know to be a lie. Hamilton ultimately sacrificed his life by exhaustion in fund-raising throughout the USA for the University of St Andrews, of which he was Chancellor and Bowd is now a lecturer in French. Bowd’s teaching environ-ment owes some of its creature comforts to the funds of the Duke whom he smears.

But Bowd is no better on the evidence of comic strips than on that of letters to the Times. He starts a chapter entitled ‘Tartan Treachery’:

In 1938, Tintin and his faithful companion [the dog] Snowy landed on the Black Island off Kiltoch. There they discovered two terrifying secrets: a deadly gorilla called Ranko and a coun-terfeiting operation master-minded by the sinister Dr Muller… In The Black Island, the political aims of the activities of Muller and his accomplices—--which extend across Europe, as the notebook discovered by Tintin shows – are not made explicit. However, it is not insignificant that the doctor’s chauffeur is called Ivan or that the leader of the gang is called Wronzoff. If the ape is an allusion to King Kong, Tintin’s adventure also carries the influence of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 adaptation of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), in which Richard Hannay is pursued across the Highlands by Nazi spies. In the imagination of [Tintin’s creator] Herge and others, Scotland therefore seemed rife with tartan treachery on behalf of Nazi Germany.

L’Isle Noire appeared in 1937 and was not translat-ed until 1966. Its Scottish content is limited to the island and the adjoining hamlet, remote from the rest of the country. If the names of two of the crooks are ‘not insignificant’ (and little use was made of them) then the implication must be that they are USSR agents (and certainly Tintin had been hostile to the USSR from his first appearance). The 39 Steps, correctly dated 1915, has no Nazis, uses no islands and deals with a fugitive, not with a pursuer (which Tintin and Snowy are). The film made unjustifiable plot alterations but was also Highland-based, not island-based. The Black Island’s ‘political aims’ of its villains are not made ‘explicit’ since the



crooks obviously want to make money by forged notes. Scotland is not discussed outside of the island and Kinloch, and there is not the slightest suggestion of any Scots interest in Nazi Germany, which is not mentioned.

Fascist Scotland therefore should be labelled with a health warning as deficient in reliability, justice, etc. It also bears suspicious similarities to unpublished undergraduate dissertation work available on the internet. It seeks to flesh itself out by the pursuit of Fascists with Scottish names though self-styled ‘English’ neither born nor resident in Scotland, sometimes the names themselves being adopted. It sometimes unintentionally comes up with hilarious moments, such as William Joyce (the then British Fascist and future Nazi broadcaster) instructing the Scots:

Mr Joyce said that Scotland and England had been linked together in the past and must be together in the future for the good of both. There was no value in the proposal that Scotland should be separated from England…

That seems interchangeable with the rhetoric of Mr Alistair Darling and his ‘Be-et-te-er To-ge-eh-eth-er’ is no reflection on the unfortunate Mr Darling, perpetually slandered by his nominal patrons the Government, and boycotted by the head of his own former Government. Yet as he wea-rily intones his clichés for his even wearier audience their dutiful ‘hear, hear’ may sound painfully like ‘Haw Haw’. It is all most unfair, especially since the unreliable Dr Bowd has done what he can to build missing (and frequently mythical) Fascist links with SNP in the very remote past. But we may put Dr Bowd to some more constructive use before returning him to the delights of French letters at St Andrews (that is a bad joke, and he deserves its quality). Insofar as there were links of Fascism to Scotland, however threadbare, how military were they? How much did the Scottish military mythology so carefully hus-banded by British Unionists play its part in Scottish Fascism? Professor Edward M. Spiers, co-editor with Jeremy A. Crang and Matthew J. Strickland, introduces their Saltire Society prize winning A Military History of Scotland, quoting Allan Massie’s ‘Common experience had made Scots and English alike British’ to which he adds:

This was particularly true of a military that secured (and later withdrew from) an empire, fought in two world wars and contributed through the British Army of the Rhine to the allied forces that contested the Cold War.



Can the orthodox historians do anything to rescue Gavin Bowd’s exceedingly unhistorical quest? Their work really is reliable and useful (provided you don’t seek Calgacus or Macbeth, two very odd omissions) but stay a little too orthodox. Should Bowd’s theme be not Fascist Scotland but Fascist Britain? Dr Bowd runs up another of his badly-stitched flags to link remote Scottish nationalists to Fascism, and in the haunted twilight between two world wars no doubt Scots, like very many others, momentarily wondered if Mussolini’s successes of the 1920s had lessons for other countries to learn. Winston Churchill had such thoughts. One answer flows naturally form the common British military f rustration that resulted from the War to end Wars and what 1066 and All That savagely cross-headed ‘THE PEACE TO END PEACE’. World War I was Britain’s first experience of a war that had to be sold to the public for recruitment instead of being directed by wholly unrepresentative politicians or opened under conscription. The wild propaganda oversale in supposed war aims and in alleged enemy atrocities meant that so many who had managed to survive returned or grew up in subordination to states which had deceived, killed, wounded, widowed, orphaned and beggared them. Compared to the USA with its racist lynchings fuelled by Southern demagogues and the revived Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, Britain was lucky, in the mildness of its proto-Fascist response.

Fascism derived from war, in its training and in the climate of disillusion it needed to breathe. Transition from soldiery to thuggery took different forms. Sometimes militarism exploited Fascism, as in Spain, where Franco ignored the small real Fascist groups with mildly dotty idealistic leaders such as Jose Antonio the chivalrous intellectual son of Primo de Rivera, dictator under Alfonso XIII. The Republic shot Jose Antonio, receiving his approval at court-martial for his execution on the grounds that he would have done the same for them, but they were not to touch his sister who was guiltless of complicity in any subversion he might have undertaken. (They followed his instructions.) Franco took over a large, ideologically vague body, the Falange, Fascistoid more than Fascist, and used it to consolidate his power, but he himself was in fact an old-fashioned imperial soldier, trained in hard wars in Morocco, aristocratic in cultural sympathy but not in binding linkage, devoutly Catholic but as ready to exploit Catholicism to his purposes as he was to milk the Falange, or the clericalist Right-wing party, the CEDA, or Mussolini, or Hitler. His primary obsession was not even Communism, though he would make much of the Communist element in the Republic, which

increased the longer the Civil War lasted. Above all else he hated and feared Freemasonry, which he saw as the root of Spain’s misfortunes. The rebel generals did not need to be Fascist in order to murder the civilians and prisoners they killed; a military education has bred such toughness from time immemorial. Franco’s supporters in Scotland were very seldom Fascists, although Dr Bowd happily wallows in them, needing to fill his book somehow. They did privately spout bellyfuls of anti-Semitism, but so did many other British and Irish who didn’t give two hoots about Franco, if they did not actually dislike him.

There is a certain parallel with Franco’s political identity in the most dangerous features of the UK political landscape in 1914, which would have greatly resented being likened to Catholics how-ever military: the Military History, unlike Bowd, ably explores Scottish implications of the Ulster rebels ready to conspire with leading army officers against Parliament in the course of their own armed revolt. These were not premature Fascists, and did not need to be, having got what they wanted in 1914 and paying an appalling price for it at the Somme in Summer 1916, the survivors ruthlessly forgetting the many Irish Catholics who died there alongside them. Their Orange leaders were akin to Freema-sons. But they derived from the military ideal, both in their allies still in the army and in their own love of flaunting their former military ranks, their Ulster leader Captain James Craig setting the pattern for Ulster government style. Craig was Scots-educated, and the Ulster Protestant rebels found their chief ally in the Tory leader from Glasgow industry Andrew Bonar Law, fanatical about Protestant Ulster. Fascism proved attractive to at least one of the Ulster leaders, who followed his political destiny into English politics, the seventh Marquess of Londonderry, a pro-Nazi Secretary of State for Air 1931-35, having done his bit in the Horse Guards in World War I as well as in the pre-war Unionist rebellion. Dr Bowd ignores Ulster Unionism, although usually preoccupied with Fascists, pro-Fascists, or friends of friends of Fascism among persons of Scots descent, the nearest he gets to Lord Londonderry being the Tory MP for South Midlothian and Peeblesshire, Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay, the only MP interned during World War II. A little investigation of the Orange Order in Scotland might have been relevant to Scottish Fascism, and indeed to the anti-Catholic agitation under John Cormack and others which could be termed Fascistoid and on which he skims Dr Tom Gallagher’s researches. But Orangemen are Unionists, and witch-hunting Scottish Nationalism seems more profitable to Dr



Bowd than annoying its Unionist critics.

The trouble about this is that Unionists hypnotise themselves with images of Miles Scotus Gloriosus as innumerable Jocks obligingly get themselves carved or blown to pieces, theirs not to reason why. But there was always a janizary element in this, like Christian children conscripted into Turkish armies, the conscription being more economic than parliamentary in origin. The conscriptors always latter themselves that the conscripted, once having been informed what, who, and where they are (the last sometimes omitted for security), brightly fall into line and hurl themselves on the guns with hoots of joy. Dr Ian S. Wood with his usual formidable range of sources and unimpeach-able analysis provides ‘Internal Policing and Public Order, c. 1900-94’ for A Military History of Scotland and concentrates his readers’ minds on an unexpected but very relevant text, General Hermann von Eichorn’s instructions on political education ‘to all units serving under him’ in 1909:

The young soldier’s mind is like a piece of clay on which every sort of impression can be made. Many of course have already been infected by Social Democracy before they were called; but they are young, their sickness is superficial and their service with the colours must work like a healing spring and wash the sickness out of their system.

Dr Wood is too polite to say so, but this clearly appears in view of its relevance to the armies under the Kaiser’s uncle Edward VII and still more those under his first cousin George V. The contempt in which so many British officers held the intellect of their subordinates was a natural breeding ground for Fascism both among rulers and, in reaction to them, and as trained by them, the ruled. Therefore the rulers genuinely believed the true Scot must above all else be willing cannon-fodder. When Douglas (now Lord) Hurd wrote his popular thriller Scotch on the Rocks he climaxed and concluded with the suicide of the secret nationalist army com-mander colonel Douglas Cameron: The notion of a symbol of Scottish militarism destroying himself as Scotland achieves independence was in its way shrewd enough, however factually unreal. Above all his book trumpeted the Unionist obsession with Scottish violence. Hurd was one of the more rational Thatcherites, but his mind could not live comfortably with the idea of Scottish nationalism as non-violent. It is as though he felt it would be too unpatriotic of the Scottish nationalists, and from the Unionist viewpoint no doubt he was right. Ian Wood has some gallant but very chilling quotations from very senior officers expressing frank collegial admiration for IRA opposite numbers (rural but not urban, urban clearly too ‘political’ for military stomachs). But earlier he pointed out what few officers could understand, and still less could the Hurds and Thatchers behind them;

Making the case for [conscription], certainly in Scotland, ran against the grain of a still strong anti-militarism within the working class.

It is that tradition whence Scottish nationalism stems. And that struggle between militarism and its enemies is pivotal to the independence debate. Non-violence is not a weapon of Scottish nationalism: it lies at its heart.


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