Abbotsford House


Britishness-brainwashing with union flags in abundance. Scot was a Unionist, but one who was comfortable with ostentatious displays of Scotishness. When Scot wrote his famous lines in The Lay of the Last Minstrel:


Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d, As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,


He doesn’t wait long before telling us which ‘native land’ he’s talking about, and it’s not ‘Britain’;


George IV statue


O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child! Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, Land of the mountain and the flood, Land of my sires! what mortal hand Can e’er untie the filial band, That knits me to thy rugged strand!


You can’t really imagine a 2014 Beter Together worthy - Alastair Darling, say - either helping to create the tartan kitsch industry, or penning a love poem to Scotland.


He doesn’t wait long before telling us which ‘native land’ he’s talking about, and it’s not ‘Britain


58 February 2016


Supporters of Scot sometimes credit him with rescuing a distinct Scotish culture from the homogenising enlightenment tide. I think these claims are sometimes overdone – Burns, you think, deserves a nod, for one - but he played his part. Much of what survived was, perhaps inevitably, kitsch, but it did survive. Actually, I oſten tire of carping about haggis ‘n’ pipes ‘n’ kilts culture. There are many nations, some of them not far away, who would love to have such instantly identifiable cultural signifiers.


Scot’s Toryism, his resistance to political reform, his hatred of radicals and radicalism, his determination to


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