Happy Hogmanay - and to celebrate, let's put Scotland into liquidation
By Niall Ferguson
(Filed: 01/01/2006)
Well, did you? Did you sing it? Worse, did you put on a kilt and sing it? Worst of all, did you drink half a bottle of malt whisky and sing it? I am referring, of course, to Robert Burns's Auld Lang Syne. No song - not even Lennon and McCartney's Yesterday - can match its status as an authentically global anthem.
Last night, as the bells struck midnight to usher in the New Year in one time zone after another, many millions of people sang it, beginning in Auckland and ending in Alaska.
Only a tiny minority will have sung it in tune, but what the hell. The wonderful thing about Auld Lang Syne is that it is free. There is no Burns Foundation to collect a royalty as we belt it out. Nor does anyone care if we get the words wrong, since hardly anyone knows what Auld Lang Syne actually means (Old Long Since).
All that matters is to get what Burns what have termed "fou and unco happy" - in other words, thoroughly inebriated - to hold hands with perfect strangers and to raise the rafters.
Whatever else 2006 may bring, whatever unknowns the future may hold, a Scottish Hogmanay makes one thing absolutely certain: the New Year will start with a fearful hangover. God knows I have had a few of those. But not this year. No, this year has started differently for me. No Auld Lang Syne. No kilt. And no whisky.
To be absolutely sure of escaping my Caledonian heritage, I have fled south - to Cape Town, no less. And as you read this, the only headache I am worrying about is the one I risk getting if I spend too long in the golden summer sun.
Yes, I have finally reached the parting of the ways as all of us Scots emigrants do. We go through a long period, which can last up to 20 years, of telling whoever will listen that Scotland is God's Own Country; that its Highland scenery is matchless; that its people invented all that is worth preserving in the modern world - Scotch, golf, economic liberalism, penicillin, television and, er, Scotch - and that it is only a cruel fate that consistently robs its sporting representatives of the resounding victories to which they are entitled by dint of Scotland's proud history.
Yes, that was me, practically from the moment I got on the train from Glasgow to Oxford in 1980-something. For two decades I consistently and tiresomely corrected any Englishman or woman, my wife included, who dared to confuse the terms "English" and "British".
I banged on incessantly and tediously about the superiority of Scottish education, Scottish law, Scottish rugby, Scottish water, Scottish tweed, Scottish holidays - you name it. I quoted Burns. I quoted Carlyle. I quoted the statistics that showed that Scottish regiments were the ones that did the real fighting in the First World War.
Now, this wasn't behaviour attributable to an inferiority complex. That would have been forgivable. But the Scottish problem is the opposite. As a nation we are cursed with a superiority complex. We really do believe that we are better - not just better than the English; better than everyone.
We regard it as only right and proper that the world sees in the New Year by singing a Scottish song. We take it for granted that half the broadcasters on the BBC are Scotsmen. We don't envy the English. We pity them. There is no Scottish cringe, in the Australian fashion. There is only the Scottish swagger - a swagger inspired by the authentically Calvinist certainty that we and only we (by which of course I mean we White Aggressively Scottish Protestant males) are the Elect.
Well, it really is time to bin all that and face up to some harsh realities - realities which I think moving from England to the United States has made it easier for me to acknowledge.
1. Scotland is a small, sparsely populated appendage of England. Those who called it 'North Britain' in the 18th century had it right.
2. The weather is impossibly wet.
3. Most of the land north of Loch Lomond is barren rock.
4. Scotland lost its political independence 300 years ago and the creation of a Scottish Parliament, a glorified county council housed in a risible and over-priced folly of a building, has not restored it.
5. Educational standards in Scotland, once the highest in Europe, have - with a few exceptions - collapsed.
6. When it comes to sport - and I do not count the one decent tennis player - Scotland is the Belarus of the West.
7. In fact, when it comes to just about everything, it is the Belarus of the West.
8. That is why so many Scots emigrate. As I did.
This is not to say that there were not once things about Scotland that were truly wonderful. The country's transition from a theocratic Reformation to a bountifully creative Enlightenment was one of the great makeovers of modern history. The point is that (in the words of a mawkish song all Scotsmen know) "Those days are gone now / And in the past they must remain."
It's over. Over the way countries are sometimes just over. Over the way Prussia is over. Over the way Piedmont is over. Over the way the Papal States are over. Or, if you prefer, over the way General Motors will soon be over.
My modest proposal for 2006 is quite simple. The country hitherto known as Scotland should go into liquidation. The assets, such as they are, should be broken up, sold off and the proceeds (which won't fetch much) distributed to the creditors and, if anything remains, to the shareholders.
The Scottish Parliament should be wound up and its ridiculous building turned into a multiplex cinema or a shopping mall. The Scottish Football Association should be taken over by its English counterpart and Rangers and Celtic should go where they belong, which is pretty near the bottom of the Premier League.
The Scots can keep their accents, just as Yorkshiremen keep theirs. They can keep their lawyers, too; I would hate to send any more business the way of those fat London barristers. But the idea that Scotland might one day "be a nation again" should simply be dropped. We had our chance, when everyone else in Europe had it, in the 19th and 20th centuries. But we calculated that the Union and the Empire were a better bet than independence. Well, live with it.
And before you Scottish readers inundate me with incandescent emails and letters, let me remind you that good old Rabbie Burns would not necessarily have disagreed. Burns was too universal a man ever to be consistently a Scottish nationalist; he alternated between half-cut Braveheart mode ("Scots Wha Hae Wi' Wallace Bled") and deep cynicism ("Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!"). He too earned his crust from the British state, making sure that Ayr's "honest men and bonnie lasses" paid their excise tax. He too contemplated emigration, nearly taking a job on a plantation in Jamaica.
Yes, Burns understood the Scottish condition even better than he understood the human condition, which was well. The best of Scotland, like "Old Lang Syne", belongs to the world; it refuses to be confined to the bleak lands north of the Tweed. It's the rest of Scotland I can do without. Frankly, it's the one "old acquaintance" I'll be happy to see "forgot" this sunny, Southern New Year.
" Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University
www.niallferguson.org
