The last days of the Tartan Raj

Andrew Neil says the English should stop worrying about the invading Jocks: the northern grip on the nation’s politics, media and business is being irrevocably weakened by the dumbing down of the Scottish education system

They gathered to praise Robin Cook in the forbidding Presbyterian aisles of Edinburgh’s St Giles’ Cathedral last Friday but the mourners — dominated by the good and the great of Scotland — should also have had heavy hearts for another reason: the setting of the sun on the Scottish Raj, which over the past three decades produced such a substantial tartan tinge into the upper echelons of British life.

Of the six Scots who were the real heavy-hitters in the modern Labour ascendancy —John Smith, Donald Dewar, George Robertson, Derry Irvine, Robin Cook and Gordon Brown — three are now dead, two have quit, and only the Chancellor remains. True, when Tony Blair (a Scot-lite himself) finally turns to making his fortune on the international speaking circuit, the subsequent Brown administration will be liberally sprinkled with Scots; but the recent extraordinary proliferation of Scots in the top posts throughout British public life — in business, the media, quangos but above all in national politics — is coming to an end.

For more than a decade English Establishment-types have been quietly moaning into their gin and tonics (or not so quietly in the case of Jeremy Paxman, unofficial head prefect of English Nationalists, who coined the phrase ‘Scottish Raj’ in a fit of pique) about how Scots have grabbed too many of the top London jobs which they thought were their birthright. They can stop complaining and relax; the plum posts are coming their way again.

Nor will they have to worry about being upstaged by overachieving Jocks in the future. As the current generation of high-flying London Scots peters out, they will not be replaced by more of the same for the simple but fundamental reason that the remarkably rigorous and meritocratic post-war Scottish education system which produced the Scottish Raj, and equipped it to take on and outperform the English elite, is no more.