Daniel Hannan@DanielJHannan
I’m a Whig not a Tory; and I’m English by neither birth nor ancestry. Some of my forebears were Irish, most were Scots. I can’t help noticing that Scottish separatists also play the anti-colonial card which, if anything, is even more ludicrous than Irish nationalists doing so. For Scots were the greatest empire-builders of all, governing colonies, managing estates and mission schools, planting tea, founding banks, dealing in jute, rubber and opium.
Above all, Scots served as soldiers. In the 1750s, the new Highland regiments drove the French from Canada. During the American Revolution, plaid-draped troops were so fierce that Thomas Jefferson had to be made to take a specific attack on Scotland out of the Declaration of Independence. The image of the kilted Highlander became the icon of empire.
The SNP notion that Scotland was somehow annexed by England is beyond idiotic. Contemporaries saw it the other way around. When James VI rode south to claim his second throne in 1603, many Englishmen moaned that they were being invaded by swarms of lairds, come in search of new titles and sinecures.
There were similar objections to the Act of Union in 1707, blamed for making England responsible for Scotland’s debts. Indeed, the notion of a union between the two kingdoms was first put forward in 1520 by a Lowlands theologian, the unfortunately named John Major, as a way to ensure that Scotland would not be dominated by her larger neighbour.
Of course, facts these days give precedence to feelings – and no feeling is stronger than the indignation of imagined victimhood. Hence the bizarre sight of the boldest, most inventive and most influential nation on Earth reimagining itself as someone else’s vassal.
