The Ancient Kingdom
By D. W. BROGAN
THE South British reader, confronted with a phrase like 'Mrs. McLumpha's Mortification,' might recoil in horror, dreading exposure to Caledonian pawky comedy. He will not, spontan- eously, realise that the phrase is more likely to be seen on a japanned deed box in the office of a Writer to the Signet than on the stage. And if he does not know the special Scots meaning of 'mortification,' he is equally unlikely to know what is meant by 'the General Register of Sasines,' 'the Register of Hornings,"the Register of Entails,' or 'the Register of English and Irish Judgments.' He will not, indeed, find most of these strange
archival collections explained in Sir David Milne's book,* although he will find them listed with many other odd-sounding offices, officers, areas and functions. (One of the, to me, most attractive titles is provided by the Stationery Office pam- phlet, 'The Glenlatterach Scheme of the Laich O'Moray Water Board.') Names like these will convey to the Southron that Scotland is, or, at any rate, has been, a foreign country, and so will the list of Lords Advocate. Some were great men like Duncan Forbes (of Culloden), later Lord Forbes. Some took impressive titles like that Duncan M'Neill who rather greedily became Baron Colonsay and Oronsay. But it is to be feared that of the present Court of Session, only Lord Wheatley's name will ring any bell and that because it fell to him to decide that artificial insemination was not adultery as the law knows that offence. In short, the ways in which the Ancient Kingdom is distinguished from its neighbour to the south or from Great Britain and Northern Ireland are, by the common reader, relegated to the world of mere antiquarian sur- vival. Indeed, they may not even get that degree of attention, for modern Scotland is not even travestied in the manner of A Window in Thrums or Roaming in the Gloaming.
We can't expect, then, much spontaneous eager- ness to learn about the mechanics of Scottish
THE SCOTTISH OFFICE. (THE NEW WHITEHALL SERIES.) By Sir David Milne. (Allen and Unwin, 21s.) t LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN SCOTLAND. (H.M.S.O., 4s.)
government in London, Edinburgh, Paisley or New Galloway. And Sir David Milne's lucid exposition of the duties of his office will not hold even Scottish bairns from play or older citizens from the chimney corner. For, model of lucidity as it is, his book lacks life. There is no trace here of the traditional preefervidum ingenium, no material for controversy; there is, as I compute, one joke and that a very mild one. And the com- mon reader, even the Scottish common reader, might wonder why there is a Scottish Office, why there should be over 300 local authorities in a country with a population a lot less than that of Greater London and not much more than that of the LCC area. He might wonder at the differences in scale between the biggest and smallest of the Scottish units. But as he contemplates the dupli- cation of offices in London and Edinburgh, the cutting-out of Scottish segments of the central governmental system to make of the Secretary of State for Scotland a super Pooh-Bah, as he tries to assess the justification for doing the same things in different ways, he may be assailed with doubts as to whether the Scottish parts of the British governmental system should not be quietly assimilated to the English (or British) pattern; he may ask himself whether there is more in Scottish administrative eccentricity than in the autonomy of the Isle of Man.
There is. But what there is is better conveyed in the brief Stationery Office pamphlett than in The Scottish Office, for the pamphlet reminds us adroitly of the separate historical destiny of England and 'the Ancient Kingdom.' The Ancient Kingdom? Partly because that is how James VI and I referred to the kingdom that he gladly left behind him in 1603 when the noblest prospect dawned for him and for so many of his country- men. Partly because this venerable phrase recalls the fact that the Kingdom of the Scots with its well-established connection through Ireland and the Stone of Destiny with Pharaonic Egypt and the Palestine of the Patriarchs is vastly superior in antiquity, and so in dignity, to the modern political construction founded by Saxon sea and Norman land pirates. The 'sacring' of the King, seated on the Stone of Destiny in the sacred wood of Scone, linked the feudal kingdom to the ancient Celtic monarchy. All this, no doubt, is swathed in legend and mystery like the landscape of the Japanese version of Macbeth. But St. Andrew's House exists in Edinburgh because of this feeling of separateness, of a unique historical tradition that unites Catholic and Gaelic Barra to Protestant and `Anglian' Berwickshire, that ex- plains the role of the General Assembly and dignifies the most refined Murrayfield accent uttering the sacred cry `feet,' or the more formid- able and demotic Hampden roar. Sir David Milne takes all this for granted, which is a pity; but if the reader also takes it for granted, he will learn a great deal from both book and pamphlet that will possibly be new to him even if he is a Scot resident in Scotland (after all, there are millions of them); still more if he is an exile or a foreigner.
He will learn, for one thing, that despite the priefervidum ingenium the Scots, in their govern- mental system, can compromise effectively. The very lopsidedness of tht structure perhaps im- poses this, but compromises 'imposed' by circum- stance do not always come about (took at France). Thus the equivalent of the English county borough is the four `counties of cities' (Edin- burgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee), but Glas- gow is more populous than all the others put together, and so, in addition to the division be- tween London and Edinburgh, there is the real if not legal diviSion of authority between Edin- burgh, the capital, and its overmighty neighbour Glasgow. At the other end of the scale are the small burghs, nearly 200 of them, federal units in the county council system, but proud and cherished. They have their Provost and Bailies- and their own problems. In the golden age before 1914, so the story runs, at the annual meeting of the 'Convention of Royal Burghs, Glasgow and Edinburgh combined to -propose the raising of a penny rate for some 'experiment noble in purpose,' as Mr. Hoover once described pro- hibition. `A penny rate in my burgh,' retorted the Provost of Wester Anstruther, `would produce thirty shillings'—and in Easter Anstruther it would not have produced much more. Some Glasgow housing estates have bigger populations than have some `large burghs.' Yet; as has been said, the broad axe of compromise (to borrow from Scottish legal lore) is at work. Only Glas- gow insists on having its own fire brigade. The days are gone when one could cheer on 'the butts,' confident that the local amateurs in the Royal Burgh of Rutherglen would not arrive much later at a local fire than would Glasgow's haughty professionals. Not only do burghs and county councils work together in federal amity, but groups of counties do. It is possible to rejoice, like Andrew Fairservice, in the glorious chain of burghs of the Kingdom of Fife with the proud knowledge that Kirkcaldy 'is linger than ony town in England,' and yet not worry too much about efficiency. History and symmetry can both be disregarded, as when Perthshire is not deemed to be a Highland county or St. Andrews and Thurso, with good legal, if not much functional, justification, exercise local planning powers.
A good case can be made, and Sir David Milne makes it by implication, for the thesis that Scottish local government and the administrative devolu- tion from London to Edinburgh that has gone on all through this century have met most of the reasonable claims of the Nationalists. And yet, and yet I There is a lot that could be said but not, perhaps, by a serving civil servant. The reader who comes innocently to The Scottish Office will 'earn of the founding of Cumbeinauld.neW*tOwn, but nothing of the acrimonious controversies over its financing that have shown that the spirit of thrift (or of passing the bawbee) is not dead. The scandalously low level of voting in local elections is a bad sign on which Sir David does not find it prudent to comment. Nor„ naturally enough, is there Any attempt to prejudge the results of the inquiry that the Secretary of State is rightly making into the rent policy of Glasgow Corpora- tion where a third of the population are 'Corpora- tion' tenants and only a third of the electors vote in local elections. It is not only a matter of avoid- ing controversy. There is no allusion to the success of the religious settlement of the 1918 Education Act. There is nothing, except by implication, about the superiority of Scottish administration of crimi- nal justice: an allusion to the way the police are kept in their place by the Procurators-Fiscal is not quite enough. All that is here is good, but we could have done with something more like a haggis and less like a black bun. If Wales (which has an embryo Welsh office and now has a capital, Cardiff) gets a volume in this series, let us hope that its author, even if he is an official, is a little less cautious. Scottish government is neither as edifying nor as dull as one might think!
Previous page
