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Scotland, May 1999
“There’s an end to an auld sang,” remarked the Earl of Seafield, Scotland’s Lord Chancellor, as the Scottish parliament voted itself out of existence in 1707, thereby writing himself into the quotation books and out of history.

The amount of money England has to spend in bribes for this decision was derisory. The provost of Wigton pocketed £100; Lord Banff sold his country for the princely sum of £11 2s. Perhaps even more shaming was the fact that so many members didn’t even bother to turn up and vote at all. However you look at it, Scotland’s last parliament dissolved and the nation given away loch, stock and herring barrel without a shot being fired.

Most independence movements are made cohesive by a common people drawn together by ancestry, a shared language, a religion and a defined land. Scotland has none of these. The first problem of where Scotland actually is has bothered everyone since the Romans, who built two walls because they got the first one wrong – the Hadrian and the Antonine (after which, incidentally, I’m named). Most of the north of England as far south as Yorkshire has been disputed Scots territory, the Isle of Man was Scots, but parts of Galloway were English and the northwest and the isles, Viking. The western isles and part of the mainland were Irish.

Nobody knows what the original people of Scotland were – cold is probably the best informed guess, and wet. They were, in the comforting phrase of anthropologists, absorbed by the Picts – a Celtic people who probably made their way from Spain, though nobody could possible fathom why. We know little more about them, not even what they called themselves. Pictae was Tacitus’s name for them: painted people. Whether this meant tattooed or looking like Quentin Crisp, again nobody knows. (If you’re looking for an archeological subject to study, the Picts are a good bet; anyone with a beard and a purple windcheater can be an expert.) They lived somewhere called Alba.

The Scots were northern Irish and had a country on the west coast called Dalriada. They absorbed the Picts and were eventually sent back to Ireland by Cromwell where they became foreigners and British. In between times, there had been various migrations of Norsemen and Anglo-Normans (Normans, of course, were originally Norsemen) with various degrees of violence and absorption.

Robert the Bruce was more Norman than he was Scots, and William Wallace’s surname means that he was Welsh (who in turn claim to be the original English). So I hope that’s all clear.

The Scots Nats rather sidestep the question of who is and isn’t a Scot by saying anyone who lives in Scotland can be. Unless one lives in an awful lot of it, that is, as people with estates are to be deemed absentee foreigners. People with Scots antecedents are more difficult. There are 90 million of them worldwide. There are more Macdonalds in the New World than there are people in Scotland. (Trevor McDonald and Naomi Campbell, though, are not thought to be applying for citizenship.)

Scotland started as a place of superstitious animists and pantheists, much as it is today. But the Irish brought Columba, who converted the Picts to Celtic Catholicism prior to absorption. This was in turn absorbed by Roman Catholicism. Then half the country signed the covenant and became Protestant Presbyterian.

As for language, the hideously bereft Gaelic, with a vocabulary that makes the Sun sound verbose, never was Scotland’s national language; it was spoken by the Irish. The closest thing to a national tongue is the pidgin Lallans, or Lowland Scots, which is what Burns wrote his poetry in and is the most pyrotechnically expressive, lively, intuitive and humorous language in the world.

Accent is what most immediately identifies a Scot but it’s more of a class distinction. Upper-class Scots tend to sound English, and Aberdonians don’t sound like anything human at all.

Perhaps Scots are best defined by what they’re not. They’re not English. The country has for most of its alleged existence been held together by competing and contradictory rifts and violent hatreds – not just the Highland-Lowland or interclan rivalry of romance but deep divisions between east and west, Catholic and Protestant, Viking liberals (only in Scotland is not a contradiction) and central belt communists. One need hardly mention Rangers and Celtic. Scots haven’t ever been united under a king. Barely one died in his bed before the Act of Union. They have two flags – the lion rampant and the saltire – but no national anthem.

What all Scots have in common is history, or rather a hotly argued current mythology. For a small country of 5 million people at the far end of a European cul-de-sac, Scotland has been plagued and adorned by more events than is polite, almost all of them fabricated in the 19th century. Tartan was invented by two snobbish Poles, the Sobriski-Stewarts. The noble Highlands and it’s castles were invented by the German Prince Albert. The clans and Highland dress were cobbed together by Sir Walter Scott for another German, King George. Whiskey is made in sherry barrels and is Irish and never was Scotland’s national drink; that was brandy.

Scotland’s martial glory was invented by the English after they thrashed us for the umpteenth time to get the Scots to fight their colonial wars. Ossian, Scotland’s Homer, is a fake. Scots meanness was actually invented by a Scot, the comedian Harry Lauder; before him, Highland hospitality was a universally used phrase meaning generosity. Bagpipes come from Asia, and haggis from sheep.

But for all that, there is incontrovertibly a place called Scotland and a people who think they are Scots. Perhaps the fact that none of it is real and is based for the most part on fantasy shouldn’t matter. Perhaps, in a very modern way, Scotland is the first virtual country, a collective chat room where you can exchange lies, wistful thinking and boast.

The harsh and simple answer to why Scotland voted to be absorbed in 1707 is because it was bankrupt, stony broke. The one constant in Scots history is lack of funds. England had cash and trade but precious little glamour or imagination. Scotland had myths and legends and painted people; in exchange for money it gave the Sassenachs romance. And who can say that wasn’t a fair swap? The site allocated for the new Scottish parliament looks like a bomb has hit it, which, all things considered at the moment, is rather appropriate. Until it is finished in 2002, the born-again parliamentarians will have to sit in the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland up on the Mound with a coldly disapproving John Knox looking on. Because of him, the new parliament will be dry, not even a dram to welcome it in: “Hea’s tea us, wha’s like us? Damn few seem to care…”

I’ve come to Edinburgh to report on a capital eager to get to grips with its new democratic responsibilities. I expect to find a politically savvy, educated city, animatedly debating devolution on street corners and in bars. I’ve come to observe a populace itching to get off its knees and shake a constitutional leg after so long with its hand out.

Some hope. There’s nothing. Auld Reekie can’t even summon up the energy to be apathetic about this election. There are no posters, no billboards, no vans with loudspeakers. I’ve seen church council elections that have elicited more enthusiasm. The sense of being fundamentally, deeply underwhelmed is, even by Edinburgh’s purse-sphinctered standards, almost spooky.

In the south Edinburgh headquarters of the Scottish National party, Margo MacDonald is sitting under the treaty of Arbroath, giving a press briefing to 300 hacks. She’s trying to engender some heat over private funding for the Royal Infirmary by rubbing two disenchanted members of Unison together. This is not a vote-winning issue, and we all know it. Where is the Braveheart stuff that’s going to send the proud people to the ballot box shouting “Albanaich! Freedom!”?

MacDonald herself is inspiring, a sort of Caledonian Mo Mowlam – the type of woman who has been all that’s stood between the Celts and maudlin communal suicide. Isn’t she depressed that this campaign has got off to such a slow start? Where’s the broad rhetoric, the grand sweep of history, the heathery horizons? For 50 years the SNP has been blowing relentless romantic pibrochs into the electorate’s ear. But now, when nationhood is merely an election and a referendum away, it’s gone coy and parochial about small change and hip operations.

“No, no, it’s quite the reverse,” she says. The dull campaign shows that this is a serious, grown-up election about real issues – and the infirmary is important. (Oh, I know. I was born there.)

“We’ve got to stop thinking like a big country and start thinking like a small one,” she adds emphatically. A barber shop quartet of party workers echo that thought. “Aye, 10 million legs good, 100 million legs bad!” Then she spoils it by adding: “The real issue in this election is going to be the war.”

The war? “Aye.” Well, I’m sorry, but if you get out of the Union and out of Nato then who’s going to give a hoot what Scotland thinks about Kosovo or anything else? How big’s the Scottish air force gonna be?

“We’ve got to be more like Denmark, or Sweden, or Finland. Finland’s done really well. Or Ireland. Look at Ireland.” And that’s supposed to be a winning alternative, is it? Finland, a nation of drunk Captain Birds Eyes – or Ireland, the Big Issue seller of Europe with added clapped-out rock-star tax avoiders. Why does Scotland have to take a leaf out of Drogheda’s or Tuupovarra’s book? Why can’t Scotland be, well, like Scotland?

Fed up, I go off in search of a kilt. I always like to have a kilt around the house. I never wear them, of course, but – like a fire extinguisher and a cross-head screwdriver – I feel better knowing I’ve got one.

Buying a kilt is hysterically good fun. Nobody would ever ask you what your family’s name was or where you came from if you wanted to buy a Guernsey fisherman’s sweater or if you really throw a lasso before selling you a pair of cowboy boots.

The lady at Kinloch Anderson tells me there’s a kilt war going on. Despite the disdain for tartan shown by the SNP, Scots are buying kilts by – well, by the yard. Caledonian pride is stepping out without knickers.

A young designer from a kilt shop on the Royal Mile is making modern kilts for the club-going generation (not that Edinburgh has any clubs worth mentioning). You could, if the mood took you, sport a plastic see-through one, which would stop all those questions about what you wear underneath. Or you could try a camouflaged one, or something denim.

Looking both ways, he produces from a locked storeroom the most incendiarily offensive garment ever made. I can hardly believe my eyes. Oh, the horror: a kilt made entirely out of Union Jacks. If this doesn’t sting Edinburgh into a home rule frenzy then nothing will.

I put the ghastly thing on and stand underneath the castle on the Esplanade. After the third American wifey has asked to have her photograph taken with me, I’m on the edge of losing my nerve completely. Then a numpty, walkie-talkie jobsworth in a parka sidles up and tells me to shove off.
“It’s not me, you understand, sir; they’re watching you.” He nods ominously towards the granite crenellations. “You’ll have to go.”

It seems that there are some things that even here, at the heart of the city of reason, protected by a castle, are simply too dangerous – that overrule freedom of expression, freedom of the press and even freedom of tourism – and a Union Jack kilt is one of them.

So back to the election trail with Dr Ian McKee, the hopeful SNP candidate for Edinburgh Central, a nice, well-meaning general practitioner and a political virgin on his first election campaign. You can tell he’s a beginner because he canvasses council flats from the bottom up. Old hands know to take the lift to the top and walk down. But there’s something else odd about him. I can’t place his accent. Then it drops. He sounds just like me! He’s that rarest of mythological beasts, an English Scots Nat.

We traipse up the council flats behind the hole in the ground that would be a parliament, retrieving the leaflets left by the Scottish Socialist party from letter boxes. (“Decriminalise cannabis now” – a pipe dream, pal.) I point out kindly that this is quite possibly illegal. He grins. It’s obviously the most radical political act of his decent life.

These blocks are the oldest municipal housing in Edinburgh and, although they are stark, staring hideous, they’re also neat and clean and the lift smells of lift. Even though Edinburgh has done its damnedest to become a truly cool, contemporary, Channel 4 city, its Midlothian heard is not in it. It can’t work up an indecent head of urban decay. It may have turned Leith into Godalming-on-the-Water, and the city fathers may have dotted the place with the most horrendously brutal civic architecture this side of the Warsaw Pact; but this only highlights the stunning beauty of the place.

True, getting Trainspotting as a tourist brochure was a stroke of luck. The Japanese tours can go on Irvine Welsh heritage walks and watch the junkies queue up for their traditional Highland methadone at the quaint chemist on the Royal Mile – which is positioned, like a symbolic postscript, opposite the Museum of Childhood. Yet Edinburgh is still the most perfect city in Europe. Bracketed by braid hills and the Salisbury crags, the waters of Leith and the great volcanic fist of the castle rock, it looks like nothing so much as a city designed by enlightened angels. Naturally, and by tradition, this means it’s always been loathed and despised by the rest of Scotland.

Edinburgh is the least Scots place. That Morningside accent sounds like a Swede trying to talk Surrey. The vestigial snobbery and probity of Edinburgh have always made it look enviously south rather than patriotically north. With its Hanoverian street names and its lawyers, judges and civil servants it is also the least likely place in which to find hot nationalism.

That was always Glasgow’s department, with its antediluvian unionism, its poly-Trot lecturers and its internecine tribalism. But a friend in Glasgow says they’re even less interested in the elections there. “Oh we’re forty miles away; it’s Edinburgh’s thing. All your smiley, interlocking circles of power where they manicure their nails on each other’s backs.”

Indeed, Edinburgh is a small incestuous town, where everyone who matters swings together like the pleats of a kilt, presenting a uniform pattern. If you’re stitched into the warp and the weft you can see this as an efficient network of reasonable folk who get things done. If you’re out of it, you probably think it’s a self-perpetuating oligarchy of self-righteous social climbers.

Try as I might to be even-handed about Edinburgh, I can’t. My commitment to this place doesn’t stop with bawling entrance at the Royal Infirmary. This is where I come from. This place is home, if anywhere is, and I love it with a deep passion. If, against all the best advice, this country and this city do take the high road to independence, then I’ll be first in the queue for my passport, because, right or wrong, this is who I am. I’ll never be anything else.

But I’m also a defensive Scot in the sense of being an expat. I walk around like a tourist, aware that there are only a handful of Edinburgh numbers in my phone book. I’m neither the warp nor the weft. It may be home, but like the 90 million Scots of the diaspora, to me home is somewhere you leave.

Looking at a supplement on Great Scots, which this newspaper recently produced for its Scottish readers, it was sobering to count quite how many of them took the one-way ticket to greatness – people who defined themselves not principally as Scottish but by their talents as engineers, poets, soldiers and artists. The list is impressive, perhaps unmatchable. But the fact that is needed to be made at all is indicative of the schizophrenia that blights Scotland: the sense that we think we’re superior but feel inferior. It’s no coincidence that Jekyll and Hyde was from Edinburgh.

I remember a man from my childhood who, if you mentioned anything, would suck his teeth and say: “Aye, we invented that. Rubber tyres? Television? Modern economics? The rifle? Aye, we invented that. Dental floss, daytime television, pop tarts, coloured tile grout, puking – aye, we invented that…” The whole world owed a debt not just to Scotland but to him personally, and he was waiting in his lambswool tartan slippers (aye, we invented those) for it to start paying up. Even at an innocently young age, I recognised that he was very, very Scots.

At the front parlour end of the Royal Mile – the other end from the hole that would be parliament – is the new Museum of Scotland. The blood runs cold at the very mention of a new museum in Scotland. Museums are Scotland’s cancer; Edinburgh has terminal museum-tumours. There are museums for absolutely everything – whiskey, tartan, sharp metal things, ghosts, the police, weaving, murder. There are probably museums devoted to spitting, facial hair, cobblestones, belly-button fluff and giving directions in a very slow voice. Scotland doesn’t have a history; it has tea towels.

But the Museum of Scotland is something of a revelation. For a start, the building is the first thing erected in this city since the war that can hold its pediment up next to its classical surroundings. Inside is even more of a revelation. I know what a Scots museum looks like. It’s a lot of rickety mannequins with dusty plaids and stick-on red hair looking like they’re facing terminal constipation. A tinny tape of Bill Paterson usually intones “but then something far worse happened…” The new Museum of Scotland is not a Scots museum. True, the bloody treaty of Arbroath is graffitied on the wall as part of the fallout from Braveheart. This treaty, with its passing mention of freedom, has become Scotland’s mission statement. But I don’t see a single kilt and there are no quaichs down the ages. It’s a very un-Scottish view of Scottish history.

The exhibition starts at the beginning, right at the very beginning with the oldest thing in the world: a 3-million-year-old-rock. It’s Scots. (Ancient geology is rather the coming thing; beside the absent parliament there is a very transient Blairish dome tent-thing that’s going to be a museum of geology. The poster outside strangely fails to mention the treaty of Arbroath. But it does, with vaunting hubris, claim Scotland is the father of geology. Rocks? Aye, we invented them – and gravel and wee stains and dirt.)

Back in the Museum of Scotland, the top floor is given over to an exhibition of things that people have donated to represent the future. Alex Salmond, with the innate cunning and subtlety that makes you want to entrust your future to him, has given a picture of Mel Gibson. Tony Blair has donated his electric guitar – at least, while it’s in a glass case, he can’t play it – and Sean Connery, this year’s prince over the water, offers a milk bottle to remind us of his humble origins. Within it is a message. Of course, it’s the treaty of Arbroath. There’s also a smart-looking restaurant where the warp and weft of Edinburgh’s pleats hang together in the evening. It has a great illuminated view of the castle. But they switch this off at 12. “You’ll have had your view then, sir.”

A lot of the city is romantically lit at night, but the one building that conspicuously doesn’t glow with civic pride is the Greyfriars church, where a far more important document than the complaint of Arbroath was signed. It was here that Montrose and Argyll signed the covenant, which did more to Scotland than any other piece of paper. But Hollywood hasn’t made a film of that yet. The museum’s press officer tells me that a lot of people consider this place to be far more important and symbolic building for Scotland than the parliament, and he’s probably right. Given the choice, Scots wants to know where they’ve come from rather than where they’re going. Why, I ask, is everyone so uninterested in the election? “Oh well, they want a parliament, they just don’t terribly care who’s in it.”

Jamie Byng, the young, enviable talented and well-connected boss of Canongate Publishers, tells me: “We wanted the parliament because we didn’t want to be taken for granted. But the politics of devolution are very introverted, inward-looking. This is a city that has international connections and expectations; it’s looking out to the rest of the world.”

Perhaps there’s a truth there. For all the Scots Nats’ touchy-feely expressions of good neighbourliness with England as equal but separate bestest mates, they make independence sound like Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal opting out for the knit-your-own Good Life. However you spin it, devolution and possibly independence is cutting yourself off, not joining in.

With her exclamatory trip round the world’s bonsai countries, perhaps Margo MacDonald is right that the grubby little Balkan war is going to be the decisive issue in this election, but not in the way she means. It’s an example of what unchecked small-time introverted nationalism leads to; and the image of the Scots as Serbs in skirts is just too plausible to be funny.

What you vote for in elections is not more freedom and more democracy but more politicians. It’s Scotland’s politicians that have sold the Scots short, sold them cheap and sold them out. It’s the politicians who led the nation agin the world in romantic lost causes. Aye, we invented them too.

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