Will it be a 'Union dividend'
or the 'Arc of prosperity'?
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The statue of the Duke of Wellington outside the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art in Glasgow, Scotland.
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By HARRY McGRATH
I recently met my good friend Donald Paton in Glasgow. Donald divides his time between Scotland and Vancouver and, amongst his many claims to fame, has written an excellent local history of the street where he was brought up in Perth (Twixt Castle and Mart). He is also a member of two Burns Clubs eight thousand miles apart and, with his wife Wilma, acts as an impresario bringing first-class Scottish entertainers to Vancouver.
From our rendezvous at Buchanan Street bus station, Donald and I went to visit the townhome of Glasgow tobacco lord William Cunninghame. William wasn't home, of course, having shuffled off this mortal coil some 200 years ago, but his house is now the impressive Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art and we spent some time happily viewing the three floors of thoughtfully arranged, uncluttered, exhibits.
From the gallery, we wound our way into the heart of Glasgow's "Merchant City" where Cunninghame and his cohorts once conducted their business. The Merchant City was restored in the 1980s and is now a thriving area of upscale shops, coffee bars, pubs and venues for the Arts. We finally washed up in one of these new pubs, bought two "Malts of the Month" (tasty Speyside Benromachs) and took a perch by the window to watch the world go by.
It soon became obvious that we were going to get a better show than anticipated. The street before us was blocked to traffic by police cars and a crowd slowly started to form. Calm in the middle, it became increasingly agitated at the edges with individuals breaking off to talk to police officers who, by now, had formed a phalanx against them.
It transpired that what we were looking at was a reception committee for British Prime Minister Tony Blair who was speaking in the City Hall's Grand Hall in the Merchant City. The crowd wanted to talk to him about the war in Iraq and had gathered by the stage door in anticipation of his slipping away by a back exit.
Inside the hall, however, Prime Minister Blair was not talking about Iraq but about the upcoming Scottish election. He had come north on a two day visit to Scotland to extol what he considers the virtues of Scotland's 300 year Union with England and substitute this positive message for the hitherto generally negative campaign based around the supposed dire consequences that independence would have for Scotland.
As always in modern politics, the argument requires a pithy slogan and the incumbents in both Westminster and the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood seem to have settled on "Union dividend" as the idea that needs to be sold to the Scottish electorate.
Prime Minister Blair could hardly have picked a more appropriate place to talk of Britain and Union. The Grand Hall itself, though recently restored, was originally designed by George Murray in 1841 and hosted Disraeli and Gladstone before him and the merchants of the city of Glasgow throve after the Union of 1707 gave Scottish merchants access to Britain's American colonies.
A few hundred yards to the west of where he was speaking, the statues of George Square - Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Gladstone, Peel, Indian Army Commander Lord Clyde, Peninsular War Commander Sir John Moore, etc. - are a daily reminder to the citizens of Glasgow of their city's British and imperial past.
A few hundred yards to the south, Adam Smith, as a student at Glasgow University, noted the covered markets on King Street where traders exchanged "rude for manufactured produce" as he began to form the ideas that would eventually underpin the entire free market system.
A short walk to the east of the Merchant City whether taken 200 years ago or today, however, and the "Union dividend" is much harder to detect. In 1832 an outbreak of cholera killed 3,000 people in Glasgow, most of them living in the poor communities east of Glasgow Cross. Today the district of Calton in Glasgow's east end has a male life expectancy under 60.
This is the so called "Third Scotland" identified by Professor Tom Devine, who spoke at Simon Fraser University last year, in the new chapters of his recently updated seminal work The Scottish Nation.
The continued existence of areas of profound deprivation along with the general enrichment of the middle classes, he argues, divides Scotland and, despite an increased will to do something about it since Devolution, is still a problem with no obvious solution.
The Scottish National Party has its own slogan to counter "Union dividend." The "Arc of Prosperity" is their term for the three independent countries - Ireland, Iceland and Norway - which surround Scotland, have fewer (if any) areas of chronic deprivation, much higher economic growth rates, and are amongst the richest nations in the world. With independence, the SNP claim, Scotland could join them.
Despite the effects of a couple more Benromachs, Donald and I kept a keen eye out for Prime Minister Blair but, according to reports, he left by a side door thus avoiding our gaze and the attentions of the anti_war protestors at the back. As Tony Blair flew south to London, Donald took the bus north to Perth and I started walking back to the West End of Glasgow.
My perambulations took me back to the Gallery of Modern Art where I passed the statue of the Duke of Wellington on his horse situated outside the main entrance. Despite recent official discouragement, the Duke usually has a traffic cone sitting at a jaunty angle on his head. This is the same statue that Scotland's "worst poet" William Topaz McGonagall eulogized in his poem Glasgow:
Then there's the Duke of Wellington's
statue in Royal Exchange Square -
It is a beautiful statue I without fear declare,
Besides inspiring and most magnificent to view,
Because he made the French fly at the battle of Waterloo.
It could be, however, that the gentle mockery of the traffic cone will soon seem as dated at McGonagall's unctuous celebration of Imperial Union. Serious questions are about to be asked concerning the 300-year old Union and a core issue in the Scottish election on May 3 will be whether Scotland's voters believe in the "Union dividend" or in the "Arc of prosperity."
Harry McGrath emigrated from Scotland to Canada in 1981. He is now living back in Glasgow from where he files this column.
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