Proud Nation

For centuries the Scots have been forced to be proud of their disadvantages --they have so many of them. There is their climate, whose rains make stone walls sweat with cold damp, and whose glinting sunlight fleetingly transforms forbidding rocks into some of the world's loveliest scenery. There are the English, who keep trying to treat Scotland as a conquered province instead of a proud nation. There is the grudging Scottish soil, whose bleak austerity breeds, by sheer force of survival, hardy sheep bearing wool that makes the world's finest tweeds. There is the Scottish economy, founded on ships and coal and heavy machinery, which, when depression hit, crashed with the thundering completeness of a toppling crane.

But last week Scots were perky. For Scotland is enjoying a prosperity so bounteous that the canny Scots regard it almost with suspicion. Dollarwise, Scots boast that Scotland, with a population (5,000,000) smaller than London's, has been practically supporting England since the war. If Scotland were not tied to the English economy, they suggest, it could have been reveling in dollar prosperity all during the postwar years of austerity.

Boom on the Clyde. Industrial production is at an alltime high, up 10% in the past two years alone. From John o'Groat's to the Mull of Galloway, unemployment is almost unknown. Glasgow, whose Clyde-side shipyards make it the world's biggest builder of ships, is booming. More important, through energetic promotion Scots have succeeded in diversifying their industry against a new time of trouble; in the past five years, 500 firms have established new factories or made major expansions in Scotland. Where, before, its prosperity was almost wholly dependent on shipyards, foundries and blast furnaces, Scotland now makes 90% of Britain's sewing machines, a third of all Britain's watches and clocks, typewriters, office machines and carpets. "Today, everything is made in Scotland," was the theme of this fall's Scottish Industries Exhibition. In the past three years, money in circulation has more than quadrupled.

Scots at first tested their new prosperity as cautiously as thin ice. They had been prosperous before. In the late 19th century, coal and iron built Glasgow into Britain's second largest city (a rank now contested by Birmingham), and Scots flocked down from their hill farms until a third of the whole population lived within 20 miles of Glasgow. When depression came in the 1930s, heavy industry closed down, and one of every three working Scots was unemployed. A group of Scottish businessmen resolved it should never happen again, and formed the Scottish Development Council to launch "industrial estates." On these they built factories, furnished power and water, built homes for workers, and invited manufacturers to move in. Some 360 have, making products from plastics to electronics, from pharmaceuticals to refrigerators.

Put to the test, diversification proved sound. When Britain's industrial production sagged in a 1952 recession, Scotland's dropped a trifling 1%.

Luring the Dollars. Scotch whisky has long been the chief dollar-earner for Britain (though now rivaled by English automobiles). Scottish woolens, cardigans and tweeds are thriving. The little cashmere-sweater town of Hawick, with a working population of only 3,500, earned some $10 million in foreign currency last year --almost $3,000 per worker. To keep the dollars rolling in, the Scottish Council makes continuing surveys of foreign markets, puts out a monthly magazine listing export opportunities, and peppers Scottish exporters with useful tips, such as: "The president of the Canadian Association of Purchasing Agents is a Scot!" The council has lured 22 U.S. and two Canadian firms to Scotland, ranging from watchmakers (U.S. Time Corp. and Westclox) through electric razors (Sunbeam) and business machines (I.B.M., National Cash Register), with such success that $3 out of every $4 invested in industry in the British Isles since the war has been invested in Scotland.

Prosperity has brought a problem strange to Scotland--the need for more manpower. Over the years, Scotland's greatest export has always been Scotsmen. There are four Scots abroad for every one in Scotland. Its white-collar class fled from its dour hills and sooty cities, and as the warmth died from the great Glasgow furnaces, its best working manpower drained away to other lands. Today that wasting loss of the nation's best blood has been stanched.

Hardest hit by emigration were the Highlands, that rocky, storm-lashed and lovely country of glens, burns and lochs which makes up more than half of Scotland's land area. Only 300,000 stubborn crofters are left, and the men are mostly old. There are not enough able-bodied men to attract industry, and not enough industry to keep able-bodied men there. But dozens of dams and power stations are being built or planned (Scotland's prewar generating capacity has been increased fivefold), forests are being reseeded and replanted, abandoned farms reclaimed from the encroaching bracken. John Hobbs, a Canadian who made a fortune in whisky, has set out to woo the Highland crofter from his sheep and show him how to make more money with cattle, demonstrating with a 16,000-acre ranch of his own, complete from cowboys to roundups.

The Foreign English. In both Highlands assistance and Lowlands development, British government money has contributed a massive share. But to the Scots, the government in London is still "the English government" and the Englishman a foreigner. Their finances and their fate are inextricably bound up with England, but, if only as a point of pub honor, Scots hate to admit it. They profess grave doubt that their 1707 union with England is a good thing. They bristle at small slights. It rankles that some English ministries call their Scotland representatives "Regional Controllers," that the Festival of Britain brochures chopped off Scotland at the Tweed, that the English refuse to admit that Queen Elizabeth is only Elizabeth I in Scotland and coronation posters trace her lineage from the first Queen Elizabeth --"meaning she's directly descended exclusively from a virgin queen, I suppose," said one Scot scornfully. "No mention of Mary, Queen of Scots, in her lineage."

Scotland has more real autonomy than most foreign observers bother to understand, who think the Border only another kind of Mason-Dixon line. Scotland has full control of its own school system (rated better than England's), its own established church (Presbyterian) and its own legal system, which is based more on Roman law than on English Common Law. Marriage, divorce, drinking and traffic regulations are made in Scotland. Scottish banks issue their own currency, which is interchangeable with English pounds.

Partner, Not Pauper. Like the U.S. Southerner's maledictions on the "damyan-kees," a Scot's abuse of the Sassenachs is often more of an emotional outlet than a political platform. But the emotion was real enough for a Royal Commission to report last July on a two-year study of the recent "deterioration" of relations. The commissioners recommended further "devolution" by letting Scotsmen administer government agencies in Scotland for Scotland, and summarized: "There should be full understanding and recognition . . . that Scotland is a nation, and voluntarily entered into union with England as a partner and not as a dependency."

With that, Scotland will be content. Like the first mate in the whaling story, all Scotland asks of England is "plain seevility, an' that of the commonest, God-damndest kind."

After all, Scotland is no longer a poor relation.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.