Scotland – late to footy and fair? Oh, get your facts right…
Saturday 5 August 2017 Last modified on Sunday 6 August 2017 11.05 EDT
My old history teacher, Mr McGuire, had a tendency to raise an eyebrow when recounting the careers of Europe's most colourful rogues. A barely discernible smirk curled the right corner of his mouth, suggesting that what he was about to tell us didn't even begin to cover the real story, which he considered too fruity for our Catholic adolescent ears.
These facial mannerisms were in overdrive when McGuire was discussing Grigori Rasputin's pre-revolutionary carousel through Russian high society. And when he told us about the adventures of Catherine the Great there was more than a suggestion that the formidable old Russian empress was no stranger to lively concupiscence with whomever it pleased her so to do.
A few extracurricular visits to the European history section of the library shed further light on Catherine's glorious licentiousness and libidinous ways. These included some scurrilous and uncorroborated suggestions that she had grown unusually attached to her favourite stallion and that this may, in some darkly hinted way, have been a contributory factor in her untimely demise. No matter; we had gleaned enough, we thought, to conduct a gleeful cross-examination of McGuire on Catherine's death narrative during his next foray into 18th-century Russia. The matter, though, was firmly brought to a close when McGuire produced a tawse slowly and menacingly from within his jacket and threatened a summary and corporal reprisal.
Perhaps Donald Trump might care to make reference to this early example of the Russians' propensity for manufacturing fake news the next time he is questioned about Vladimir Putin's involvement in the 2016 US presidential election.
While Catherine was scandalising Russian high society, a harrowing of another sort was well under way in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The Highland clearances, conducted over a century or so, resulted in a huge number of evictions of tenant farmers by absentee, aristocratic landowners eager to embrace sheep-raising on their lands. This effectively signalled the death of Gaelic culture in these places and forced many Highlanders to flee to the Lowlands and further afield to North America and Australia.
According to a museum on Arran, though, the clearances resulted merely from reasonable changes in modern land management techniques, an interpretation that aroused the ire of Catriona Stevenson, a South Africa-born Scottish tour operator. Stevenson has now established a "history police" website citing examples of the more egregiously inaccurate accounts of significant events in Scotland's life and times.
The quote "History is written by the victors" is often attributed to Winston Churchill, while others insist it belongs to the great German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. It is now deployed glibly as an accepted matter of historical fact. Those who do this conveniently skim over the complex matrix of human behaviour and experience that forms the world's dynamic cultural and social landscape.
Though not perhaps written by the victors, some important aspects of Scotland's story have nevertheless been shaped from the top. I now feel morally obliged to bring further examples of fake history to Stevenson for further investigation.
Half of Scotland is owned by around 500 individuals while hundreds of thousands are living in poverty
1
Scotland's independence referendum was a divisive event that left a bitter taste in the mouth. This fiction has been repeated ad nauseam by the main parties of the union and swallowed whole by many London commentators. These people's knowledge of Scotland is such that they think Outlander is an edgy documentary about social tensions in the modern Scottish state. The Tories, especially, have advanced the lie readily because they were spooked by the historically massive turnout at the referendum. It is the default defensive position of the hard right and ruling elites everywhere when far too many people for their comfort start to ask questions about issues and thus get ideas above themselves. When the second independence referendum duly takes place, Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Tories, is set to demand that a UN peacekeeping force be sent in.
2
Scotland is the fairest, most equal and most equally fair country in the world. This, of course, is nonsense, yet it has been wheeled out by all the main political parties, especially the SNP, as often as Gordon Brown's dogeared old speech about federalism. Half of Scotland is owned by around 500 individuals while hundreds of thousands are living in poverty and homelessness is widespread. Fee-paying schools are given tax breaks and our judiciary is formed along medieval patterns of unearned privilege and secret networks of influence. There are African states run by warlords that are more equal than modern Scotland.
3
England invented football. The game was first played seriously in Scotland throughout the 15th century to such an extent that James I was moved to ban the practice by passing the Football Act of 1424. There had been versions of the game in England in the 14th century but this was an unsophisticated affair that was overly reliant on the long-ball game using the heads of mendicant immigrant types. Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox all favour a return to this custom following Brexit.
4
Scotland is too wee and poor to be left to its own devices. And Estonia, Latvia and Moldova aren't? This has been the favoured narrative of the Tories and Scottish Labour for the last five years. It rests on one year of falling oil prices after four decades of fill-your-boots plenitude. During this period, UK governments of both left and right suppressed a report (the McCrone report), which concluded that oil receipts would have made Scotland one of the richest nations on Earth. Instead, Margaret Thatcher used it to pay off the miners and cut the UK's deficit.
5
Scotland is a country riven by religious sectarianism. No, it's not. This is a myth propounded by the governing elite and helped on its way by a sinister and powerful atheist faction that rules at Holyrood. It is a convenient lie to disguise the high levels of poverty, deprivation and premature death that have afflicted the same neighbourhoods for more than 150 years. Thus, it allows successive Scottish governments off the hook by acting as a smokescreen to hide their criminal lack of action in addressing the causes of inequality.
Class dismissed.
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