`The name of my native land is not North Britain whatever may be the name of yours'
Robert Louis Stevenson
At the British general election, Scotland invited the last handful of its Tory MPs to consider alternative careers. That, you might have thought, was that. The only party opposed to constitutional reform had been shown the door. The argument was over. This blithe thought forgot that Tories are a tenacious bunch, the sort who won't take Yes to home rule for an answer. Not content with stirring up apathy ahead of the referendum on September 11th, they have been planting sophistical questions, some of them good ones. The best goes like this: Tony Blair's Labour Party says the devolution of power from London to Edinburgh will hold the Union together; the Scottish National Party, meanwhile, believes that a limited sort of Scottish parliament will be the first step towards independence. They can't both be right. Yet both, otherwise bitter antagonists, are campaigning together to secure a "double Yes" in the two-question referendum. Who's fooling whom?
To get any sort of handle on this you have to remember that Scotland's politics is not England's politics. It is one simple reason why there is even an argument over home rule. England's is a three-party system in which only two parties matter. Ours is a quaternate affair, with the added, piquant twist that the least popular of the four factions (the Conservative Party) has been running the country for most of the last 18 years.
Labour, with 46 per cent of the general election vote, dominates politics, both at local and parliamentary level. The SNP, supported by a quarter of Scots, is its only serious rival. But there are twists within twists. The first-past-the-post system means that the Nationalist vote, spread evenly across the country, earns only half a dozen of Scotland's 72 Westminster seats. Equally, a respectable portion of Labour voters - a third, according to some polls - say they are quite content with the idea of independence. This is what psephologists mean by "volatile".
Hence the Tory question. The home rule argument is not really about whether an Edinburgh parliament should be able to vary income tax rates by 3p in the pound, up or down, but about Scotland's future, if any, within the United Kingdom. The general election result was a hefty hint that the Tory-defined status quo won't do. So which will it be: autonomy partial or autonomy absolute?
This, above all, explains the willingness of Labour and the SNP to co-operate. Even Blair, who can't quite grasp why Scots are so truculent, accepts the need for reform. But since he has not summoned the nerve to offer a federal system to the entire United Kingdom, his people are co-operating with the Nationalists to create a forum in which the final proposition - Union or independence? - will be tested.
Labour doesn't put it that way, of course. To hear it told, a double vote for an Edinburgh parliament with limited taxation powers will end the argument. The federalist Liberal Democrats accept this as a decent second best, not least since the plans include a version of the proportional representation they would dearly love to see introduced in the rest of the UK. Only the Tories and the SNP - another unholy, unspoken alliance - regard home rule as the key to independence.
Conservatives say it merely to frighten the horses, of course, in a last effort to kill the idea of reform. The Nationalists, a few dissidents who regard "limited autonomy'` as a sucker punch aside, say it because they believe it. And the Nationalists are right.
How so? First, regional government is fine if you happen to be a region. Nations that have survived 300 years of incorporation by a larger neighbour with their identity intact will chafe at limits, and sooner rather than later, given the chance. This is not the place to enumerate the facts of Scottish nationhood, of course. But let us just say that there has not been a parliament born that has not grown to occupy the available space in civic life.
Secondly, the counterweights to nationalism are less solid than they once were. The idea of Britishness is dying by the year, particularly among young Scots who identify Britain and its institutions with England, as the English themselves do. The "North Britons" are scarcer now. The idea that a dual nationality is possible or desirable finds fewer adherents. Besides, Scots are altogether less hostile to the European project than their southern neighbours. Independence will only demonstrate a psychological fact.
Then there is the nature of the British state. Had Westminster the stomach for real federalism, Britain might - just - be held together. But devolution throws up all sorts of constitutional anomalies, not least those involving the powers of Scottish MPs in the Commons over England's domestic affairs when English MPs no longer have a say in Scotland's domestic business.
That is one formula for tension. Another is money. The Edinburgh parliament's taxation powers will, if used, supply only a tiny part of its income. The rest - £12 billion or so - will be provided by block grant from London out of general UK taxation. Some English MPs, who believe Scotland to be subsidised as it is, are already quibbling. They are liable to become rancorous if home rule proves to be an economic success for the Scots. Then what? Cut London funding? Rancour breeds rancour.
Besides, the fact that Scotland (mostly) votes Labour at a time when Labour happens to be in power in London points to no general rule. What happens if, or when, the Tories win back power in England, and hence in Westminster, while failing to take control in Edinburgh?
It is fair to say a majority of Scots despised Margaret Thatcher and regarded John Major with contempt. They, beyond doubt, had not the faintest idea what we were on about. So could little William Hague really work happily with a Scottish parliament, Labour-led but with a sizeable SNP contingent, and would the Scots give him the chance? I'm offering odds.
None of these conflicts is inevitable but several of them are more than likely. This writer will vote for Labour's scheme come September 11th content in the knowledge that something, sooner or later, will have to give.
In the inevitable failure of home rule lie the seeds of Scotland's future success. It is the long road round, but it is a road.
At the last, in any case, neither party politics nor constitutional theory count for much. Three centuries ago Scotland was bribed and bullied into an "incorporating Union". Given the choice between economic extinction and annexation, her aristocracy - the people Robert Burns called "a parcel o' rogues" - took London's gold and prospered. At the last sitting of the Edinburgh parliament it was observed that an "auld sang" had ended.
Yet the song continued, subterranean in the language and the culture. It endured as what R.L. Stevenson called "an accent of the mind". It endured as a sense of place and self. It endured in law, religion, education, art. A simple thought: if a people cannot be assimilated, what are they if not independent? Still, we're not home yet. And there are rogues on every side, even now.
Ian Bell is a columnist with The Scotsman, holder of the 1996 Orwell Prize for Political Journalism, and Scotland's Journalist of the Year. He is also the author of Dreams of Exile, a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson.
