Prickles and thorns

One of the oddest forms of contemporary masochism is our passion for surveys that reveal how ignorant and stupid we have become. Scarcely a week goes by without the publication of some poll telling us how many schoolchildren believe that Churchill was victorious at Waterloo or that Hornblower commanded at Trafalgar. The teaching of traditional history has all but disappeared, surviving in just the one area where it should have been abolished: the perpetuation of nationalist myths.

In his wise and stimulating new book, Allan Massie recounts the recent story of a Fife councillor who was banned from his local pub for abusing some English visitors on the grounds that the English had defeated the Scots at the battle of Culloden. Such an attitude is not, in my own experience, typical of Fife councillors, but it is characteristic of a certain widespread, Anglophobic, late 20th-century view of Scottish history. Distilled into a sentence or so, the version goes like this: after forcing the Scots into an unpopular union, the English defeated them militarily, destroyed them culturally, turned them into mercenaries of the empire and, in a horror comparable to the great famine in Ireland, expelled them from the Highlands and transformed their glens into sheep farms and deer forests. On top of all this, the Scots were effectively disenfranchised because, while they traditionally voted Liberal and then Labour, the more numerous English generally managed to install a Conservative or Unionist government at Westminster.

Nearly all of this is nonsense. The Scots agitated for union with the unresponsive English a century before it was achieved. Most of them (even in the Highlands) supported the Hanoverians against the Jacobites, just as a large majority of Highland migrants voluntarily left their (Scottish-owned) glens because (like countryfolk all over the British Isles) they sought a better existence in the towns or the colonies.