The Road and the fork-tongue rogues
ON THE EVE OF CRUCIAL (and already delayed) elections to the Scottish parliament, the current and former first ministers of Scotland belonging to the Scottish National Party resemble no one so much as two pivotal Scottish leaders from the wars of independence the SNP so delights in (mis)remembering.
The problem for the nationalist cause is that its two most prominent politicians, Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, bring to mind less William Wallace and Robert the Bruce in their hours of victory over English kings, than an older Bruce and his cousin and competitor, John Balliol. This earlier divisive duo brought the kingdom to its 1290s nadir by their short-sighted, long-running melodrama of dynastic jealousy.
With their warring retinues, their determination not to let their rival lead the national cause to victory, and their equally Tweedledummish nomenclature, Bruce and Balliol’s piscine successors appear to the eye of history almost reassuringly traditional.
Like the dispiriting dossier du côté de chez Salmond, the details of the Balliol-Bruce feud are sadly unsuited to captivate the public imagination, however much they may titillate political gossips or their scattered descendants in the historical academy. At the turn of 2020/21 the SNP, in attempting further to embed the already triumphant, conventionally cinematic narrative of Scottish history, met with a then rare political rebuke.
Education Scotland, a body founded during the SNP’s first fine careless It was splendidly denounced by Professor Sir Tom Devine, Scotland’s most decorated historian, as “arrant propaganda”. It was then quietly — and perhaps regrettably — removed from Education Scotland’s website.
