When did the Scottish Unionists give up on Scotland?

I managed to attend a bit of 'Tedfest' at Glasgow University this weekend. 

TedFest was a day of celebration for retiring Professor of Scottish history Ted Cowan, whose career has seen him inspire students and historians around the world. At close of day, Ted summed up the days papers presented by a broad range of academics and covering topics as diverse as, Ken Simpson's 'Flyte Club: The Scottish Tradition of Verbal Assault' through to Jenny Wormald's, 'If only the English hadn't been there, a solution to Ireland, 1603-1607.


When he was discussing Richard Finlay's,  'English Party Politics and the Union of 1707', Ted paused and said, "I've always wondered when the Scottish unionists stopped believing in Scotland?" 


This struck a chord with me. At what point did the Scottish Unionists give up on Scotland? Each of the Unionist parties at one time or another through all of their histories have backed 'Home Rule' - Independence lite...so why today are they so vehemently opposed to the normalcy of a small country wishing to end a bankrupt union and revert to being in charge of it's own affairs. What happened in the past 100 years that let our fellow Scots decide that Scotland wasn't worth the effort?


Matt O'Neill's poem below, maybe goes part of the way to answering the question. 

"The Unionists" by Matt O'Neill

Are you the man ah'm lookin' for - the proud, unconquered Scot?
The man who hauds his heid up high regaredless o' his lot?
D' ye believe in "Wha daur mess wi' me?" The Declaration o' Arbroath?
If ye'r country wis in danger, wid ye rise tae swear that Oath?

Does ye'r heart fair swell wi' pride when the piper fill the bag,
or when ye see the Saltire or the Lion Rampant flag?
Dae ye raide a glass in honour tae oor heroes o' the past
who fought tae win oor liberty an' defend it tae the last?

If ye answer "Aye" tae aw these things, ye might jist be the man -
but dae ye know abbot oor history since the Union began?
There's maybe things ye dinnae know that should be brought tae mind;
some pointed facts - the battleaxe - tae cut the ties that bind.

For the past three-hundred years we've aw been subject tae the south;
cosseted an' humoured, tricked along by slight o' mouth.
Noo we're Anglicised, institutionalised, absorbed intae their state -
did ye never wonder why that is? Did we really earn this fate?

The truth is aye, it's aw oor fault, we did it tae oorsel's.
We didnae pay attention while the fly-men wove their spells.
We've lost oor independence, oor honour an' oor pride,
by handin' power tae Unionists who court the ither side.

For centuries the English tried tae drive us tae defeat;
they won some an' they lost some - but they never had us beat.
Then the Union took oor rights away, wi' the help o' traitor -Scots,
an' the Unionists have held us since while London calls the shots.

For years oor Scottish history wis "discouraged" in oor schools -
a policy o' dumbin'-doon tae turn us intae fools.
The teachers taught o' Hastings, King John n' Runnymeade,
while oor weak-kneed Scottish Unionists thought no' tae intercede.

When Thatcher harried Scotland, her war went unopposed;
oor Unionists, they aw stood back while industry wis closed.
They muttered fae the shadows, but widnae brave the light,
their jobs were too important tae be riskin' in a fight.

How can they be proud Scots when England tells them how tae act?
Ye cannae serve two masters - it's a plain an' simple fact.
Oor parliament in Holyrood wis wrung fae them through fear -
the fear that we wid break away - wi' Independence near.

When the Unionists rule in Holyrood, they're no' concerned wi' you;
they make it nae mair than a branch o' the Westminster HQ.
Aye, it's business there as usual - busy arguin' the toss -
but when somethin' major comes along, they check it wi' the boss.

The lies they've spread, the fear they've bred, tae keep the Union hail;
like border guards an' passports - lies that still prevail.
They lie, come Independence, we'll be livin' hand-tae-mouth,
an' oor kin will be like foreigners if they're livin' in the south.

They'll smile at ye sincerely, they'll gie ye'r haun a shake,
they'll warn that Independence could be Scotland's big mistake.
But jist remember how they think, the surest antidote -
it's England before Scotland, an' themsel's that they promote.

There's nae end tae their treachery, nae end tae their lies,
nae end tae the depths they'll stoop tae keep their Union ties.
They'll sell themsel's for coppers, an' their nation cheaper still,
they'll infect ye wi' their cowardice an' shackle ye'r free-will.

So when next time ye go tae vote, remember who tae blame,
the Unionists are waitin' for ye, confident ye're tame.
Remember that ye're jist a pawn in their bogus bon accord;
so become the proudest Scotsman - an' put them tae the sword!

Historic Scotland set lasers to stun.

The New York Times today carries the following story about Scottish expertise helping to preserve one of America's famous iconic landmarks, and scene of my favourite Hitchcock fillums, 'North by Northwest', Mount Rushmore.

Naturally I thought I'd put it here, so that passing strangers might get a chance to read it, because if the Hootsman does cover the story, it'll be portrayed as some form of anti-SNP story... 


Enjoy.


 EDINBURGH — Come April a small team of experts from the Glasgow School of Art and the government heritage entity Historic Scotland will fly to South Dakota at the behest of an organization called CyArk and the United States National Park Service. They will make laser scans and computer models of Mount Rushmore.

Aside from the wee bit of Scottish blood in three of the four enshrined presidents (Lincoln’s the odd man out, in case you’re wondering), there is of course nothing whatsoever Scottish about this most all-American of sites. But cultural expertise transcends national borders. The Scottish team of four or five will spend a few days setting up and moving around their various scanners to capture all of Mount Rushmore’s nooks and crannies, collecting billions of bits of digital information, which will then be brought back here, to be crunched and sorted out by computer.

What results should be the most complete and precise three-dimensional models ever of the site, millions of times more detailed and accurate than the best photographs or films, precise down to the tiniest fraction of a millimeter. 

In an era of computer animation, with gamers navigating virtual universes at the click of a mouse, making laser scans of old monuments may not sound special, but the Scottish team has achieved some unprecedented levels of sophistication with their models. Through scanning, the experts can conjure up what objects looked like ages ago, in effect turning the clock back on ancient sites. They can simulate the effects of climate change, urban encroachment or other natural or man-made disasters on those same sites, peering into the future. 

Given a proposal for a new building in a city like Edinburgh, they can also create virtual realities, almost microscopically accurate, so viewers might see what the building looks like from all angles in the place where it’s intended to go, including the shadows it might cast at different times of day. 

The technology isn’t brand new or unique to Scotland, but the Glasgow team is on its cultural front line. Douglas Pritchard, a Canadian-born architect by training, is the wizard behind the Digital Design Studio at the art school. He heads the Scottish laser expedition with David Mitchell, director of Historic Scotland’s Technical Conservation Group. Describing how fast laser modeling has progressed and how far it might soon go, Mr. Pritchard said, “We’re no longer a million miles from the ‘Star Trek’ holodeck.”
He was perfectly serious. 

The cultural implications of the technology are big, as are the political ones for Scotland, which, via the country’s culture minister, Michael Russell, has latched on to the laser team’s work.
It was about three years ago that Mr. Pritchard’s art school group began surveying a swath of the center of Glasgow, along the River Clyde, creating 3-D digital representations of some 1,400 buildings and dozens of streetscapes. They caught the attention of Mr. Mitchell, who enlisted Mr. Pritchard to scan a decaying iron bridge in Dundee, which was nearly impossible to survey with much accuracy except by laser. 

The bridge project led to scans of Stirling Castle and Rosslyn Chapel, the 15th-century Gothic fancy to which “The Da Vinci Code” has lately brought swarms of conspiracy-minded tourists. One of them was a man who tried one day to take a sledgehammer to the so-called Apprentice Pillar, convinced that the Holy Grail was hidden inside it. 

No harm done, but the event illustrated, as Mr. Mitchell noted, why scans are necessary. “Remember Windsor?” he asked, referring to the fire in 1992 that burned parts of the British royal castle. “If restorers had had laser scans back then, they could have rebuilt everything to within three millimeters of accuracy, but instead they had to rely on conjecture from photographs.” He noted the more recent case of the Buddhas in Afghanistan that the Taliban blew up in 2001. 

The basic principle behind the laser technology is simple: A box, with a laser inside, sits on a tripod; as the box slowly rotates 360 degrees, the laser, moving up and down, bounces its beam off whatever is solid in front of it. In so doing, it registers some 50,000 points in space every second. Traditional surveyors might produce a couple of hundred measurements a day, prone to subjectivity and human error. Lasers collect millions of measurements per hour. A scanner can even identify certain materials, determining whether something is, say, made of glass or stone. 

Aerial lasers and a hand-held version operate the same way. Combined, they can bring to life as 3-D images entire cities or a mountainside, like Mount Rushmore’s. 

This spring, at a digital-documentation conference in Glasgow, Mr. Russell met with Ben Kacyra, the American engineer and inventor of the scanner. Partly because of what had happened to the Buddhas in Afghanistan, Mr. Kacyra had established the nonprofit CyArk to compile scans of 500 Unesco World Heritage sites around the globe. 

The Scottish crew was signed up to scan for CyArk five Scottish World Heritage sites (the Old and New Towns of Edinburgh; Neolithic Orkney; the island of St. Kilda; New Lanark; and the Antonine Wall, an ancient Roman ruin) as well as five other sites. Having been already in touch with the Park Service about Mount Rushmore, CyArk enlisted the team to start there. 

What are the big cultural implications? For starters, Mr. Pritchard talked about “a new kind of empowerment.” He was referring to the prospect of using virtual-reality models to allow the public to judge all sorts of proposed urban plans. The drawings and computer simulations long cooked up by developers and architects will be replaced by more detailed, easier-to-comprehend, more objective views, in essence democratizing knowledge. 

The benefits of storing and distributing state-of-the-art views of the world’s most precious cultural sites at low cost (the annual budget for the Scottish team is under a half-million dollars) are obvious. 

By way of example Mr. Pritchard showed off on his laptop a ruined Victorian monument, Paisley Fountain. It was returned in virtual guise to its original lacquered green sheen, thanks to some paint scraping taken by Scottish restorers. When combined with the laser scans, the scrapings proved what the surface of the fountain first looked like. Nobody had imagined it to have been so shiny. “But,” as Mr. Pritchard said, “technology doesn’t lie.”

Then he clicked on a virtual model of a Maori canoe, bought in pieces not long ago by the National Museum of Scotland and never assembled. Laser scans proved it never could be: the pieces turned out not to belong together. 

The demonstration pointed toward some bright, gleaming, globalized frontier of cultural information-sharing and progress, albeit curiously backward-glancing. In London at the moment there happens to be an exhibition of paintings by the German-born British artist Frank Auerbach from the 1950s and early ’60s, marvelous pictures that show the city rebuilding as if from scratch after the war. 

Back then, death and destruction held out for midcentury Modernists the prospect of a new urbanism, a fresh start born of loss and industrial advances. 

That was half a century ago. 

The new cutting edge of laser technology offers instead a means to preserve and restore whole cities exactly as they once were. It promises a world kept as if in amber. 

A virtual past that never dies.



Set to Stun