The early months of this year brought two illuminatingextremes. One jammed us back in the kailyard, theother globalized us into the core universe ofinternational pop culture. Both were hilarious.

In January we learned that the kailyard theme hadbeen re-animated last summer by the British ForeignOffice. A Russian student’s application to study inScotland was rejected on the grounds that she mightnot understand the language. Perhaps they thoughtshe’d be taking instruction from Tom Leonard, IrvineWelsh or Edwin Morgan’s Loch Ness monster. Amongthe reasons given for her rejection was one whichsaid, not quite grammatically: ‘You cannot satisfactorilyexplain why you have chosen to attend an Englishcourse in Scotland rather than your other options ofOxford or Cambridge, where you should face lessdifficulty understanding a regional accent.’ Braveheart,John Swinney and Jack McConnell gathered theirbrows. Edward II thought again, smirked and jaupedin his tomb, and the Foreign Office blamed the BritishEmbassy in Moscow (The Guardian, 9 January 2004.)

The auld prejudice, the ancient snobbery, culturalapartheid – no internationalizing here. TheAmbassador to Moscow belongs to the old schoolwhich tells a Scot crossing a border, in the formula ofpublic toilets once furnished by Twyford of the CliffeVale Potteries, ‘Please adjust your language beforeleaving’. He might have been an Afrikaner, imposinghis taal on the barbarous accents of Xhosa or Zulu.For kailyard read kraal. It was always more than just amatter of being understood. A language from NorthBritain classified you as belonging, in Henry ThomasBuckle’s opinion, to ‘a badly fed, badly housed, andnot over cleanly people’ (Henry Thomas Buckle, OnScotland and the Scottish Intellect, ed. H.J. Hanham(Chicago and London,1970), p. 394.) Not the right sortof company for a nice Russian lassie. Far be it for theAmbassador to Moscow to expose her to the Scot: notonly incomprehensible, but also tight-fisted, brutish,maudlin, canny, repressed, volatile, alcoholic, dourlyreligious, a muddled barbarian worth exhibiting as oneof the world’s ethnic sideshows set to music by thepibrochs James Kennaway describes as ‘damp,penetrating and sad like a mist’. (James Kennaway,Tunes of Glory (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 30.)

That was January. But a volcanic internationalistriposte was coming and the kailyard was about to rockto the twentieth century’s most globalizing culturalEsperanto. March brought news that they’re all shookup in the village of Lonmay near Aberdeen. In hisbook, The Presley Prophecy – still to be published –Allan Morrison says he has traced the King’s ancestryback more than 250 years, using local records and thefiles of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. Morrison

says that on 27 August 1713, eight generations beforeElvis’s birth in 1935, his ancestor, Andrew Presley,married Elspeth Leg in Lonmay. Their son, also calledAndrew, became a blacksmith and was the firstPresley to leave Scotland, emigrating to America in1745 (‘Scottish hail a new King and await the fandeluge’, The New Zealand Herald, 29 March 2004).After innumerable begats, behold Elvis. So the King isours as we’ve really known since Andy Stewarttransposed Donald’s proud abrogation of trousers toGraceland over 40 years ago.

After that ‘The Bogie Man’ and ‘Batman in Scotland’were bound to come. There is surely nothing moreinstructive in recent literature than Alfred’s comment tothe Caped Crusader at the end of Batman: theScottish Connection, Chapter Five, ‘Castle of Doom’:‘You may have seen Scotland from angles no one elseever has, sir, but I enjoyed it immensely!’ (Alan Grantand Frank Quitely, Batman: Scottish Connection (DCComics, New York, 1998)).

So, what are the angles? Perhaps they are suggestedby the extremes of devolution and globalization, buzzwords of the last decade and still with us.

England’s letting go of Empire was a kind ofstaggered, grumpy devolution. Before G. W. Bush hi-jacked it, Tony Blair’s Westminster did make it possibleeven for Scotland to devolve into a partial reversal ofthe Union which inaugurated the United Kingdom.Most Scottish nobles supported the Act of Union madelaw on 1 May 1707, but in the tower of St Giles’sChurch in Edinburgh a sardonic carilloner struck hisbells into a wedding tune with an ironic title: ‘WhyShould I Be So Sad on My Wedding Day?’ (JohnPurser, Scotland’s Music (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 155.)

Auspices of divorce already. Scotland kept its ownlegal and educational systems and its lacklustreChurch but finally lost the nationhood which had nearlydied at Flodden and become increasingly tenuoussince the Union of the Crowns. In Smollett’s HumphryClinker (1771), the prickly Scotsman, Lismahago, is athis most factious when Matthew Bramblecongratulates him on the ‘flourishing state of hiscountry’ as a consequence of Union. Lismahago willhave none of it. The Scots have been disposessedand demoralized:

‘They lost the independency of their state, the greatestprop of national spirit; they lost their parliament, andtheir courts of justice were subjected to the revisionand supremacy of an English tribunal.’(Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker(New York, 1929), p. 335.)

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The Kailyard, the Kraal and theFilth of History

Marshall Walker

‘We’re bought and sold for English gold’, snaps Burns,castigating the Scottish commissioners as ‘a parcel ofrogues in a nation!’ (Robert Burns, ‘Such a parcel ofrogues in a nation’, in James Kinsley (ed.), Burns:Poems and Songs (London, 1969), pp. 511-12.) LikeLismahago he rejects the argument that ‘the boastedadvantages which my Country reaps from a certainUnion’ could ‘counterbalance the annihilation of herIndependance, & even her very Name!’, but for manythe Act of Union was to Scotland as the birth of Christto Christendom or Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Stationto the Soviet Union and world communism. BeforeUnion all was primitive, feudal and superstitious,Scotland ‘the rudest of all the European nations’. AfterUnion all was auroral promise and progress witheighteenth-century Enlightenment bringing civilizationto a society of extreme backwardness, notably inpolitics, agriculture and, notoriously, religion. Unionmeant money.

Sir Walter Scott’s Bailie Nicol Jarviedefends the Union in terms of itseconomic advantage to Glasgow:

‘Now, since St. Mungo catchedherrings in the Clyde, what wasever like to gar us [cause us to]flourish like the sugar and tobacccotrade? Will onybody tell me that,and grumble at a treaty thatopened us a road west-awa’[westward] yonder?’ (Rob Roy1818, Chapter 27.)

The globalized prosperity ofeighteenth-century Glasgow sugar,tobacco and cotton merchantsmade them exemplary illustrationsof England’s success in colonizingScotland by economics and pullingus into its swelling imperial refrain,though the novelist Alan Sharp hasanother angle that might havesuggested an ongoing mission toAlfred and his boss from GothamCity:

The Scots ... made a very interesting deal with theEnglish. A sane deal. It had a lot of problems to it butthe alternative was to have these bastards come uphere and kick your arse every 25 years.

(Tom Shields, ‘Chasing Hemingway on a gallopinghorse’, The Herald, 5 September 1992, p. 13.)

However our merchants may have benefited, Unionrelegated Scotland to the shallow end of the hierarchypool in terms of the class system that structuredEnglish, now British, social values. The Scot mademoney, or not, said his grim prayers, tholed theClearances, or lit out for Canada. Whoever, possiblywherever, he was, he was psychically programmed totouch his forelock – resignedly, derisively, sometimessubserviently – facing Westminster, his constitutionalMecca. He might resist the programming asvigorously as Lord Macdonald’s tenants of the Braeson Skye fought the Scottish landowning aristocracy’sabuse of its power, but, at some level, he knew it wasin him, the ultimate reference point of power. And hedid resist, for there had to be a reaction.

James Anthony Froude, the friendand biographer of Carlyle,travelled to South Africa in the1870s to gather information andrepresent the views of theSecretary for the Colonies, LordCarnarvon. Froude was anadvocate for reconciliationbetween the Dutch states and theBritish colonies and for justice forthe native peoples. Five yearsafter his return he gave a lecturein Edinburgh in which he referredto the British authorities’imprisonment of the Zulu chief,Cetewayo, for refusing to disbandhis army. Froude told hisEdinburgh audience:

‘A friend of mine lately visitedCetewayo in his prison at CapeTown, and asked him if he did notregret having disobeyed [thecommand]. Cetewayo replied thathad he known all that wouldhappen he would have given thesame reply. A brave man might

know that he would be beaten, but he would still fight,rather than submit like a coward. His people all felt ashe did. I think you in Scotland ought to have somesympathy with Cetewayo and his Zulus.’(James Anthony Froude, Two Lectures on South

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Africa, 1880, in Olive Schreiner, The Story of anAfrican Farm edited by Patricia O’Neill (BroadviewLiterary Texts, Toronto, 2003), p. 296.0.)

Perhaps Froude was thinking of Cetawayo as Wallace,as we might think of both Wallace and Mandela. Theimperial purposes of the kingdom were not served byrespect for the kraal or for the kailyard, so theurbanised kailyard became the Fourth World of east-end Glasgow’s excluded and disadvantaged. See KayCarmichael, ‘Living in the Fourth World’, The Listener,17 November 1977, pp. 630-31.1 – and the urbanisedkraal became Soweto. We’d had our Wallace andMandela would be otherwise engaged, but we didhave a spirit which slowly gathered momentum andbrought us, at last, our own parliament, our own FirstMinister and, most recently, our own Poet of Scotland.Eventually Cetewayo’s people would achieve a similarsuccess against even greater odds. What was thisspirit?

There’s no denying Scotland’s collaboration in its ownocclusion or the contributions made by opportunisticScots to the building of empire. We affirmed our own,our native land – especially on Burns Nicht andHogmanay – and trekked south; we capitulated to theBBC, Oxbridge and Standard English. What are ourfeelings today when we read The Glasgow Herald forWednesday 9 May 1945, printed a few hours after theofficial cessation of hostilities with Germany? It reportsVE celebrations in Moscow, salutes war efforts by theUSA, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, brieflymentions involvement by the C-in-C ScottishCommand in surrender proceedings in Norway andallocates a short column to Scottish DFCs. Sixtythousand people cheer Mr Churchill giving the victorysign from the balcony of the Ministry of Health buildingin Whitehall. The King’s ‘Broadcast to Nation andEmpire’ begins with God, Empire and London:

‘Today we give thanks to God for a great deliverance.Speaking from our Empire’s oldest capital city, war-battered but never for one moment daunted ordismayed – speaking from London, I ask you to joinwith me in that act of thanksgiving.’(‘The Task to Which Honour Now Binds Us’, TheGlasgow Herald, 9 May 1945, p. 2.2)

About a sixth of page 4 announces that there will be a‘Scottish Festival of Thanksgiving’ in the Usher Hall,and describes ‘Glasgow’s Crowded Scenes of Revelry’during which:

‘A sailor of the Royal Netherlands Navy burlesquedHitler from the top of the Duke of Wellington statue inExchange Square. An admiring crowd applauded hisbuffoonery. It was equally responsive when theDutchman, changing his mood from gay to serious,made a short speech in broken English, and thanked“the Scots for the brave part they had played in theliberation of his country”.’(Ibid., p. 4.3.)

That’s the best recognition we get. Equal space istaken by an advertisement by Lewis’s department

store for ‘Feminine Fantasies’:

‘An exceptionally lovely collection of Model Millinery,designed for June Weddings – Summer Garden Fetes– and all those important occasions on which you mustlook your best.’

The hats are Alps with encrustations of seaweed andgrapes glued to the slopes. Just the headgear for aPartick girl wanting to look her best for the returningboy friend. After Mr Churchill’s official broadcastmessage the end of the war in Europe is sounded bythe buglers of the Scots Guards. The rest is allLondon and Buckingham Palace.

Can this be a newspaper from Scotland’s biggest city– even, as they used to call it, in their language, thesecond city of Empire? Is this what you hope to readat the end of a war from which your husband, yourfather, your wife, your son, your lover may or may notcome home to Tobermory, Stornoway or Peebles?Reading this, on the morning of 9 May 1945 wouldn’tyou have felt stung? Might you have asked, likeMichael Moore, ‘Dude, Where is My Country?’

As proclaimed by Craig and Charlie Reid in 1988, on anational scale we were a split personality, a tawdryantisyzygy. We fought, when they asked us, weboasted then we cowered. We were ‘Cap in Hand’and baffled God.

We slept with the enemy. As Capercaille puts it, ‘Ourcountry was wearing the Emperor’s clothes’. FredericLindsay reminds us:

‘In the building of the empire which replaced the onemuddled away with the American War ofIndependence, the Scots had played adisproportionate share. A quick conversion to theAnglican Church got them into the Indian Civil Service;they were missionaries in Africa and the traders whofollowed them; they instigated war with China indefence of the opium trade and sent the profits hometo Dumfriesshire.’(Frederic Lindsay, ‘A Union that Corrupts’, Scotland onSunday, 29 March 1992, p. 17.4.)

Given the long incubation of parliamentary Union, thedecisiveness of the Act and its long-term colonialeffects it is reasonable to be surprised that assimilationdidn’t reduce Scotland to a barely distinguishableprovince of the London-dominated confederation. Theparadox of Scotland since 1707 is that it never lost itsdistinctiveness; despite what the poet Sydney GoodsirSmith calls ‘the Union’s faithless peace’ (SydneyGoodsir Smith, ‘Agin Black Spats’, Collected Poems1941-1975 (London, 1975), p. 47.5). It persisted inbeing a quasi-nation, a country on the cusp. Thehistorian R. L. Mackie’s classic A Short History ofScotland (1930; revised 1962) ends with theobservation that ‘after two and a half centuries ofpolitical union, and after perhaps ten centuries ofsouthern influence, Scotland still preserves a nationalidentity which may be difficult to define but is none theless real’ (R.L. Mackie, A Short History of Scotland, ed.

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Gordon Donaldson (Edinburgh and London, 1962), p.301.6).

In ‘England Your England’ George Orwell emphasisesthe importance of national identity: ‘One cannot seethe modern world as it is unless one recognizes theoverwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty’(George Orwell, ‘England Your England’, in The OxfordAnthology of English Literature, vol. ii, edited by FrankKermode and John Hollander et al (OUP, New York,London and Toronto, 1973), p. 2141.7). But how didwe preserve an identity to be loyal to? Was it becauseof our languages, or our sense of history? Was it ourinexplicable genius for innovation in science,engineering, medicine and whisky galore? (‘Yourwhisky has made you original’, wrote Byron to JamesHogg, 24 March 1814). Was it Burns and Scott,Stevenson and Barrie, Rennie Mackintosh and HarryLauder? Was it Tammy Troot and the McFlannels, OorWullie and Wee MacGreegor, Connery, Taggart andBilly Connolly? Was it our landscapes and climate –forces not to be underestimated: Orwell went to Jura toclear his mind of leftist sanctimony and Torysentimentality before writing 1984. Or was it ourreligions which bound us in a profound if unspokensense that we are intransigently different from thepeople whose kings, queens and governments hadhammered us, seduced us, condescended to us,exploited our land, our labour and our oil? Was it ourtraditions? But what are our traditions?

One theme on which Scottish literary history offers aseries of variations is the folk, the lot of commonpeople. Maybe this is a clue to the spirit we’re tryingto define. A strong sense of underlying equality is partof the idiom. Expressed as ‘the sons of Adam’, theidea of a common humanity beyond hierarchicalaccident or political manoeuvring is mythologicallyfanciful, but the Scottish expression that we are all‘Jock Tamson’s bairns’ asserts equality in terms of animaginable family. The equalizing reality of a commonend is the basis of Charles Murray’s poem, ‘A GreenYule’:

‘Dibble them doon, the laird, the loon, Plant/boyKing an’ the cadgin caird, hawking tinker

The lady fine beside the queyn, girlA’ in the same kirkyaird.

The warst, the best, they a’ get rest;Ane ’neath a headstane braw,

Wi’ deep-cut text; while ower the nextThe wavin’ grass is a’.

Mighty o’ name, unknown to fame,Slippit aneth the sod;

Greatest an’ least alike face east,Waitin’ the trump o’ God.’

As one of Jock Tamson’s bairns, Mary Brodie tellsWalter Leslie in Robert Louis Stevenson and W. E.Henley’s play, ‘Deacon Brodie’ (1880), ‘It is for everyman to concern himself in the common weal’ (RobertLouis Stevenson,Plays, TusitalaEdition, 35 vols(London, 1923-24), XXIV, p. 7.8),and there’s a mainvein of humanesympathy thatcomes up throughSir DavidLyndsay’s ‘Johnthe Commonweill’,in ‘Ane PleasantSatyre of theThree Estaitis’(1540) to theegalitarian strainespecially evidenttowards the end ofthe eighteenthcentury even if itdoesn’t always rise to the measure of what HughMacDiarmid calls ‘the fearless radical spirit of the trueScotland’ (Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘The Burns Cult’, in AlanRiach (ed.), Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Prose(Manchester, 1992), p. 105.9). The Presbyterian idealof the Scottish Reformation was powered by ademocratic impulse even if the ideal was sometimesobscured by less attractive items on the politicalagenda. Scottish writers were precociously in advanceof political radicals in works which refrain on thecommon good and the worth of the individual. TheUlsterman, Francis Hutcheson, a Scot by adoptionthrough his 17-year tenure of the chair of moralphilosophy at Glasgow University, anticipated by somefour decades Jeremy Bentham’s equation of moralright with ‘the greatest happiness of the greatestnumber’. The democratic refrain can be heard inDavid Hume, Adam Smith and Henry Mackenzie andin the poetry of Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns. It canbe heard in Robert Louis Stevenson’s repudiation ofEdinburgh New Town gentility and sustained contemptfor the bourgeoisie. It is most forthrightly expressed inpolitical terms by Hugh MacDiarmid who says in hisautobiographical memoir Lucky Poet (1943):

‘The working-class policy ought to be to break up theEmpire to avert war and enable the workers to triumphin every country and colony. Scottish separation ispart of the process of England’s Imperial disintegrationand is a help towards the ultimate triumph of theworkers of the world.’(Hugh MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, ed. Alan Riach

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(Manchester, 1994), p. 14.)

An argument in favour of a democratic or egalitarianline in Scottish literature might seem balked by themassive presence of Sir Walter Scott, or compelled tolook in him for the exception that could prove the rule.Scott is, certainly, an ambiguous figure like JamesHogg, John Galt, Thomas Carlyle and John Davidson.All were politically conservative men. Scott was a Toryand a Unionist. Hogg allied himself with writersassociated with the aggressively ConservativeBlackwood’s Magazine. Galt attacked ‘the heresies ofliberty and equality’ (John Galt, Cursory Reflections ofPolitical and Commercial Topics as Connected with theRegent’s Accession to the Royal Authority (London,1812), p. iv.1). The arch-dominie Carlyle vilifiedreformists, feared anarchy as much as Matthew Arnolddid, and denounced liberal views of human rights(particularly for Negroes in ‘Shooting Niagara: AndAfter?’ [1867]). ‘Democracy’, he writes in Chartism(1839), ‘is, by the nature of it, a self-cancellingbusiness; and gives in the long run a net result of zero’(Chapter 6). Similarly, John Davidson, that proud,tragic man, denounces socialism in the Epilogue to hisplay, ‘Mammon and His Message’ (1908): ‘Socialism isthe decadence of Feudalism; that is to say, it is lessthan nothing. At its very utmost it is only a bad smell;rejoicing in itself very much at present as bad smellsare wont to do’ (John Davidson, A Selection of HisPoems, ed. with an Introduction by Maurice Lindsay,with a Preface by T.S. Eliot and an essay by HughMacDiarmid (London, 1961), p. 34.2).

But there was another side to each of theseambiguously constituted writers. Scott’s aristocraticpredilections are offset by his interest in the Scottishoral tradition and by the respect he feels for theindependence of ordinary Scottish folk. Hogg’ssuspicion of reformism is balanced by sympathy forthe common people terrorized by sado-masochistictheology. Galt’s novels attest his unsentimental lovefor the small Scottish town, its burghers and peasants.If men could never be equal for the hero-worshippingCarlyle his mistrust of the masses coexists with apassionate concern for the plight of the commonpeople. Socialism may be a bad smell to JohnDavidson but there is no mistaking his humanitariananger about the life to which his Cockney thirty-bob-a-week clerk is condemned, stoically ‘a-scheming how tocount ten bob a pound’:

‘It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf;It’s playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;It’s walking on a string across a gulfWith millstones fore-and-aft about your neck;But the thing is daily done by many and many a one;And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.’(John Davidson, ‘Thirty Bob a Week’, in The Poems ofJohn Davidson, ed. Andrew Turnbull, 2 vols (Edinburghand London, 1973), I, p. 65.3).

Even Davidson’s ‘Nietzschean Mammon and hisMessage’ (1908) proposes a world:

‘Where men are great and conscious of the greatness

–The very meanest intimately sureThat he himself is the whole universeBecome intelligent and capable.’(Davidson, A Selection of His Poems, p. 180.4.)

We can move on through Scottish writers noticingMargaret Oliphant’s impatience with pretension in heranalyses of provincial life in both England andScotland and her illumination of the inequitouscondition of women; James (B. V.) Thomson’sDantesque (and Eliotesque) vision of the greatcapitalist city as an alienating dystopia in The City ofDreadful Night (1874); George MacDonald’scompassion for the sufferings of the poor, his concern‘for the good of the community’ in Phantastes (1858)and his abhorrence of the evil city of Bulika’sperversions of true community in Lilith (1895); J. M.Barrie’s definition of the oldest Scottish university inCourage, his Rectorial Address to the students of StAndrews in 1922:

‘Mighty are the Universities of Scotland, and they willprevail. But even in your highest exultations neverforget that they are not four, but five. The greatest ofthem is the poor, proud homes you come out of, whichsaid so long ago: “There shall be education in thisland.” She, not St Andrews, is the oldest University inScotland, and all the others are her whelps.’(J.M. Barrie, Courage: The Rectorial AddressDelivered At St Andrews University, 3 May 1922(London, 1922).5.)

Other symptoms of the democratic strain include thesocialism of Lewis Grassic Gibbon in a ‘world rollingfast to a hell of riches’ (Sunset Song [1932], Chapter2); ‘the dispensation of the poor’ in the mind of SorleyMacLean (‘The Cuillin’/‘An Cuilithionn’, Part VI) (SorleyMacLean/Somhairle MacGill-Eain, From Wood toRidge/O Choille gu Bearradh, Collected Poems inGaelic and English (Manchester, 1989), p. 107.6) andhis redefinition of Calvary in terms of ‘a foul-smellingbackland in Glasgow’ and ‘a room in Edinburgh,/aroom of poverty and pain’ (‘Calvary’/’Calbharaigh’ Ibid.,p. 35.7); Bill Bryden’s sympathy for a moderate shop-steward in his ‘Red Clydeside’ play, Willie Rough(1972); the 7:84 Theatre Company’s attack oncapitalist exploitation of Scotland in John McGrath’s‘The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil’(1974); the ‘copies of the Daily Worker ... dove ofpeace ... poster of Paul Robeson’ which a pregnantwoman thinks she had better hide when a socialworker calls to check her suitability for a housingwaiting list in Jackie Kay’s poem, ‘Chapter 3: TheWaiting Lists’ (Jackie Kay, ‘Chapter 3: The WaitingLists’, Dream State: the New Scottish Poets, ed.Daniel O’Rourke (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 135-7.8). Ademocratic manifesto is implicit in the Scots of RobertGarioch and in Ian Hamilton Finlay, Tom Leonard andJim Kelman’s use of Glasgow patois to cut through tothe real lives of ordinary people and in doing so toprotest, as Gaelic could never quite do, against thebending of a country’s mind by ‘a police régime of thesignifier’, to co-opt a phrase of Edward Said’s (EdwardSaid, Musical Elaborations (London, 1991), p. 56.9),

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that is, by theundemocraticauthority of alanguage whoseinsidious andossifying‘correctness’derives from thebullying power ofa remoteparliament and achimerical throne.

In the poem called‘Good Style’Leonard puns onthe title phrase inits Scottish usagefor ‘vigorously orwith flair’ and itsimplication ofpoetic decorum.Setting out a poem in a phonetic rendering of thelanguage of the people can make it difficult for theoutsider. Leonard turns this into a jocoserious gestureof defiance towards imagined objections bysupercilious guardians of ‘received’ or ‘standard’English. Ridicule can knock down what anger leavesstanding:

Tom Leonard: ‘Good Style’.

‘helluva hard tay read theez init hell of a hard to read these isn’t itstull stillif yi canny unnirston thim jiss clear aff then if you can’t understand them just clear off thengawn go onget tay fuck ootma road get to fuck out of my road

ahmaz goodiz thi lota yiz so ah um I’m as good as the lot of you so I amah no whit ahm dayn I know what I’m doingtellnyi telling youjiss try enny a yir fly patir wi me just try any of your fly patter with mestick thi bootnyi good style stick the boot in you good styleso ah wullso I will’(Tom Leonard, Intimate Voices: Selected Work 1965-1983 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1984), p. 14.0.)

In case the patois has made his point inaccessible tosignificant readers, Leonard dreams accommodatinglyin English:

‘Scotland has become an independent social republic.At last.

Eh?You pinch yourself.Jesus Christ. You’ve slept in again.’

(Tom Leonard, Reports from the Present: SelectedWork 1982-94 (London, 1995), p. 16.1.)

It’s okay to wake up now, Tom. Perhaps, with yourhelp, we’ve found our spirit. Kailyard and kraal –they’re on the move.

If you had been globalized into residence on theantipodal margin of the world and you’d picked up TheNew Zealand Herald on 3 July 1999, you’d have readthis:

‘Scotland makes royal faces burn

The royal family was subjected to an embarrassingmoment during the opening of Scotland’s newParliament, enduring an emotional rendition of a songthat mocks royalty. As the Queen, the Duke ofEdinburgh and Prince Charles sat stony-faced in frontof the 129-member body, Scottish folk singer SheenaWellington performed Robert Burns’s socialist anthem,‘A Man’s A Man for A’ That’.

The song, which marked the highlight of the openingceremony and was chosen by the organisers insteadof Britain’s national anthem, ‘God Save the Queen’,hails the nobility of honest poverty and pokes fun atthe titles and trappings of nobility.

One verse goes:

Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,Wha struts, and stares, an a’ that,

Though hundreds worship at his word,He’s but a coof for a’ that.

Another verse says that ‘men of independent mindslook and laugh’at the titles oflords, princesand knights.

To members ofBritain’snobility, thesong was aslap in the faceto the royalfamily.

‘By choosingthis song andrejecting thenationalanthem, theyare flaunting asort ofseparatism in a Parliament which is supposed topreserve the United Kingdom’, the Earl of Lauderdalesaid before the celebration.

In an emotional twist, all 129 new members of theScottish Parliament loudly joined in for the last verse,which proclaims that a day will come when ‘over all theearth’ men will become brothers.

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Donald Dewar, Scotland’s First Minister, added in anensuing speech: ‘At the heart of the song is a veryScottish conviction that honesty and simple dignity arepriceless virtues, not imparted by rank or birth orprivilege but part of the soul.’(David Luhnow, ‘Scotland makes royal faces burn’,The New Zealand Herald, 3 July 1999.)

Was this kilted, Brigadoon sentimentality or anexpression of our true religion, our cultural spirit, theinstinctive credo pushing through the liars, murderersand traitors that made what Norman MacCaig calledour ‘filthy history’? (Norman MacCaig interviewed byMarshall Walker, Seven Poets, ed. Christopher Carrell(Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, 1981), p. 38.3). Was thisMacDiarmid’s ‘radical spirit’ of the true Scotland, whichhas burned through English hauteur, clan faction,Calvinism and Jacobitism, economic depression,political bickering, complacent paranoia and culturalintimidation to bring us to this quasi-resuscitatednation? Is this now the point from which, rememberingOrwell, we may begin anew to construct a nationalidentity to be loyal to? There’s a lot of work to bedone: the composer James Macmillan recently read ofa Celtic fan slaughtered in a Glasgow street:

‘As the knives went in I wondered if he called for hismum, his gran, his girlfriend. Did his eyes grow blackwith terror, despair, resignation? Were his tormentors’faces radiant and engorged with an expression I hadseen before, 33 years ago in Cumnock.’(James MacMillan, ‘Silence of the lambs’, TheGuardian Review, 28 February 2004, p. 35.4.)

‘Devolved, let us be robust enough to eradicate thissqualor from our filthy history and to give and takeglobalization. Let’s make the village of Lonmay theGraceland of the North. Let’s fill our colleges withRussian students. Will we be mature enough toprevent the rise of the kind of xenophobic “littleScotland” mentality James Macmillan fears?’(Phil Miller, ‘You’ve lost the place, poet tells “lapsedScot” MacMillan’, The Herald, 15 August 2002, pp. 1-2.5.)

We’ve been working on it. Our First Poet has provedthat an artist can be both resolutely Scottish andinternationalist – if not interplanetary – in outlook andappetite. There’s not much complacency around whenPeter Mullan helps Ken Loach to tell it like it grimly isin My Name Is Joe (1988). Maybe we should begrateful that Sergio Leone never made Once Upon aTime in Glasgow. Capercaillie’s music, rooted in thesongs of our earth, moves outward, fusing traditionallilts with pop idioms and, in ‘Beautiful Wasteland’(1997), North African chant. And how about Runrig?The Cauld Blast Orchestra recorded what should havebeen a hit called ‘Tango for a Drowning Man’ (1994).Bill Forsyth’s lyrically anti-urban Local Hero (1983)internationalises the lone red phone box and provesthat a Texas oilman is no match for the magic of anapparently idyllic Scottish village, but also pokes fun atthe greedy materialism simmering beneath the Scotspictorial surfaces. In Director Lone Scherfig’s WilburWants to Kill Himself (2003), the multiple tones of

Glasgow angst are modulated by a Dane.

And parked outside a supermarket in Tauranga, NewZealand, on Easter Monday was a gold Subaru. Thenumber-plate read: ‘The Beautiful Isle of Mull’.

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