A final plea to the Scots

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/15/a-final-plea-to-the-scots

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It’s a sad thought that if the vote goes the wrong way, by this time next week I shall be an alien, or on the way to being one. I may have been born in England, but three of my four grandparents were Scottish; I went to school in Glasgow, among other places; I am also, I’m told, the great-granddaughter of the last person to be tried for heresy by the Church of Scotland. (He wasn’t much of a heretic. He’d just, as a scholar, become interested by the way texts in Latin and Hebrew had come together to form the Bible: heresy to the true believers, who were certain God had dictated every comma.) I was rector of St Andrews University and never felt I was in a foreign country – plenty of English students, including the future king and his bride, were only too delighted to learn what Scotland had to offer .

I don’t suppose I need to worry that we’ll start going to war with each other again, which is what I fear if the EU breaks up. But the attempt to work out which bits of British culture are Scottish and which English would be tiresome, as would the trouble of deciding which bits of British institutions, like the BBC and the NHS, would continue to operate in Scotland.

Scotland needn’t be on its own to assert its character and priorities; it already has Scottish law, Scottish banknotes and a huge place in the consciousness of the whole island – so please, Scots in Scotland, help the rest of us stay together.

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