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I spoke last Saturday in St Andrews University, where I once studied, at the celebrations to mark its remarkable six centuries of education and thinking. We were looking at the future of nations in the 21st century.
In the light of the heavyweight contributions to that subject it seemed incredible that, given all that has happened in Scotland in the university’s history, we are now about to start a year of navel gazing. Spending a year contemplating the merits of destroying the three-century-old union of nations we live in and which has served us so well seems a monumental waste of time.
With the perspective of history and looking back at the coming year will not future students look at this debate with wonder and incredulity? They will consider the great problems facing the world and the people of Scotland: climate change, religious and nationalist extremism, pandemics, organised crime, proliferation of the likes of chemical weapons, economic migration flows, financial meltdowns and the effect of fragile and failed states. Not one of these real urgent global challenges has a single nation solution. All, if they are to be managed, need multinational, collective action.
And those future students will also ponder that Scotland is not a colony, we are not oppressed, we are not discriminated against in the UK construct, and we are not disadvantaged – indeed recent studies show that Scotland is the most prosperous part of the UK outside of the south east.
One of the participants at the celebrations said to me: ‘As a Scot living south of the border I wake to the voice of Jim Naughtie, I go to sleep watching Kirsty Wark and on Sunday I start my day with Andrew Marr. I am a proud Scot and I am surrounded at all levels down there by Scots in England who play a major part in the life of the United Kingdom’. What he deeply resented was that he would have no vote next September when the decision might make him a foreigner.
In the UK there is no linguistic differentiation and no defining cultural division the like of which motivates and energises so many other separatist movements waiting and watching our referendum campaign.
Not only that but we have for ourselves here in Scotland a legislature with serious and growing powers to make and amend laws across the whole range of domestic life. Lord Ashcroft’s huge opinion poll two weeks ago found that most Scots do not fully appreciate just how much power, and over just how many areas, the Scottish Parliament can make and change the laws of the land.
Housing (so why is there a housing crisis?). Education (and where is the genuine experimentation and thinking in this area so vital to Scotland’s future?). Health (can we be so complacent that the existing model is so good when last week it was recorded that this was the biggest year for complaints?). Transport, tourism, agriculture, local government (squeezed by the council tax freeze which benefits mainly the wealthy), universities and colleges, fishing – and more too.
And next year the parliament will get even more powers under the Calman reforms, including major powers to alter income tax (not that the existing power to lower or increase income tax by 3p in the £ has ever been contemplated). Amid the moans about Westminster contained in last week’s Swinney budget, did anyone hear that Scotland had received from the George Osborne spending review an additional £296m plus another £100m from the Barnett formula?
The real tragedy of the Yes campaign is its relentless negativity about the present UK set-up and its obsession with blaming every ill, real and imagined, on Westminster and the coalition. As if creating a separate state was the simplest, cost- and risk-free way of replacing the current people in charge.
In our United Kingdom we have evolved a template for common action in a single geographic space and our single market, our joint institutions and seamless way of living has inspired many others in the world.
So what conceivably is the dynamic for separatist change which will divert us and divide us for the next 12 months? In the context of the long history of these islands, the atomisation of Britain will deliver no solutions whatsoever for that catalogue of global threats and challenges which face us all and which must be urgently addressed.
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen was secretary general of NATO, secretary of state for defence and shadow secretary of state for Scotland
