September 12.
So Lindsay Paterson believes Scotland ''already enjoys autonomy''
(September 10). Ye Whit?! I trust Dr Paterson's book will argue rather
more transparently than does his article, whose drift has escaped
several of us out here on the mainland.
As Dr Paterson well knows, those who marched in December 1992 for a
Scottish Parliament did so because they wanted an end to the activities
of a London-appointed junta which resolutely ignores the wishes of the
people of Scotland; the marchers were not unaware ''of how much has
already been achieved''.
The key to autonomy, for nations as for individuals, is
self-awareness. This can only be achieved through education, from
nursery schools where the policemen in the picture books wear Scottish
policemen's hats and the teachers speak in the same register as the
children's families, right through to the policies pursued by the Arts
Council and our ''national'' galleries, theatres, and other cultural
institutions.
Your issue of that date demonstrates devastatingly just how far from
any such self-awareness Scotland is in the shape of Donald Dewar's
''review'' of a new book about the port of Leith by Sue Mowat.
In his second sentence Mr Dewar, for so long the scourge (well . . .)
of Scottish Nationalism in the name of all those Scots who voted Labour,
trots out that feeble old self-deprecatory nonsense about the House of
Stewart: ''What a mess the Stewarts made of the business of being
kings'', in blatant defiance of the past 15 years of Scottish historical
scholarship.
In other words, Mr Dewar makes sure his readership remembers that the
Scots have never been able to run their affairs. He also reminds Scots
who have made the not inconsiderable effort involved to learn something
about the real Scotland so effectively hidden from the Scottish people
by their marvellous current ''autonomous'' condition of just how
abjectly unselfaware Scotland is.
Most of Scotland's cultural institutions, including her universities,
are run by members of the English Oxbridge ''elite'' who failed to make
it south of the Border.
They are aided and abetted by native-born Scots who enjoy not autonomy
but an unhealthy self-contempt born of ignorance -- leading, under
appropriate conditions, to an uninformed, racist dislike of English
people in general, to the benefit of no-one at all.
Scotland is in an appalling state, and disingenuousness and haverings
around the semantics of ''autonomy'' are the last thing it needs.
Dr Jamie Reid Baxter,
European Parliament Secretariat,
Luxembourg.
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