Scotland: Independence

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, for many Englishmen, Scotland is a land of mists and mysteries, and I am an Englishman. I confess to being something of a genealogical nut and yet in 40-odd years of clambering up my family tree I have found not a single drop of Scottish blood.

Perhaps the trolls and social-media Stalinists would claim that this gives me no right even to participate in this debate, and that I fail the McTebbit test, or whatever passes as an appropriate test of my loyalties north of the border. So let me be clear: I support two teams—England when it is playing Scotland, and Scotland when it is playing Germany, France, Italy, or almost any other country.

The world of books has always been of some importance, so perhaps I should use that as a starting point. The first book I ever remember reading was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, as a boy, by torchlight beneath the covers. Even on a cold winter’s night in Hertfordshire I could walk on warm sands with Jim Hawkins and his famous Scottish creator. The Scots, as we have heard, have always been renowned for their literary imagination, with Barrie, Burns, Conan Doyle and Kenneth Grahame—an endless, illustrious list given by the noble Lord, Lord Birt. Of course, as many have mentioned, there is Walter Scott.

I prepared for this debate by reading for the very first time that classic novel of the north, Rob Roy. That would tell me something about the Scottish spirit, I thought. It is a rather long book, so it came as something of a surprise to discover that I was more than half way through it and still had not set foot in Scotland. Dare I admit it—parts of the dialect were a bit challenging. As I am sure all noble Lords will know, it is set in the years immediately after the Act of Union. It is a novel of national pride, cultural aspiration and, most of all, reconciliation One of its heroes is Baillie Jarvie, a man who—I am using Scott’s words,

“although a keen Scotchman, and abundantly zealous for the honour of his country, was disposed to think liberally of the sister kingdom”.

I think Baillie Jarvie was saying that we are better together. He scolds the foul-tempered Andrew Fairservice thus—although I will not attempt the accent:

“Whisht, sir!—Whisht!—it’s ill-scraped tongues like your’s that make mischief atween neighbourhoods and nations. There’s naething sae gude on this side o’ time but it might hae been better, and that may be said o’ the Union”.

That may still be said of the union, and even more so of ill scraped tongues.

My noble and learned friend Lord Wallace, and several others, referred to a nation punching above its weight. I prefer to think of it as a nation singing above its scale. Scotland has certainly done that. There are so many great inventors, industrialists, engineers, academics, surgeons, artists, and just plain good exceptionally hospitable people. We have already heard stories of great Scotsmen and women in so many areas—in business, science, education and military valour—which I will not repeat.

However, let me turn to one area of great national pride and cultural interest—that of sport. It is a stunning matter of fact that Scottish athletes who made up 10% of Great Britain’s team at the Olympics hauled in 20% of our medals. Who will ever forget the pride of the entire country at that extraordinary achievement? Could that have been achieved by Scotland on its own in isolation? I doubt it. Look at the English premiership these past few years—the finest football league in the world and run by, yes, Scots. I am sorry, but it is the shocking truth: Alex Ferguson, Kenny Dalgleish, David Moyes, Paul Lambert, Steve Kean, Owen Coyle, Alex McLeish, and on, and on, and on—Scotsmen to a man and in every lilting post-match syllable. Has that smacked of arrogance in the English? Arrogance is usually administered with a firmer hand than that. If my old friend Francis Urquhart had ever heard of the drive for independence, I suspect that he would have concluded that the demand for it came from south of the border, not the north.

Those Scots are everywhere, even here in Westminster. As my noble friend Lord Forsyth pointed out so passionately earlier, take out those with Scottish roots from the list of Prime Ministers these past 100 years—the Campbell-Bannermans, the Douglas-Homes, the Browns and the Blairs, the Macmillans and the MacDonalds and all the rest, and you are left with a remarkably short list. Take out a couple of Welshmen who crept in there as well and the list is shorter still. So have we English lost out? No, all of us have gained.

There is a golden thread, a mixture of sentiment and common interest, that has bound our peoples together that makes us stronger, not weaker, and that has made this union one of the most adaptable and successful ever devised by man. Do I take all this for granted? Of course I do at times, I am English. Was I taught too little at school about Scottish history? Absolutely I was. Do I wish this union of ours to continue? Most certainly, and with all my heart.

Even as an Englishman it is impossible to walk the fields of Culloden without feeling the power of its history. You cannot read the pages of Rob Roy or listen to the songs of old Scotland, even with a dull English ear, without being taken up by the romance of Scottish culture. Walk through the streets of Edinburgh in August, as I do, and you will see heads held high—just as they are bent low when walking those same streets in January. I defy you to sail the seas of the west coast in the company of Para Handy without laughing with every blow of the puffer’s bilge.

I have not an ounce of Scottish marrow in my bones. I represent a party that would gain mightily and overnight if Scotland disappeared and took all of its Labour MPs with it. The rest of us would move on. Yet we—the English, the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish—are more than friends, we are family. If Scotland were to decide to quit, to leave us and go its own way, it would be the greatest sadness of my political life. May that day never come.