New Statesman Scotland
A few days ago, in a hostelry in Edinburgh's New Town, this diary overheard a bunch of Scots youngsters complaining about how all the city's best pubs and clubs were being overrun by big-spending students from England. "They're all on daddy's gold card," one young man muttered. "They can spend as much in a weekend as I can in a whole term." There was a consensus among the group (three young men and two girls) that "something should be done" about the "yahs", but what it should be they had no idea. They all agreed, however, that not all the "yahs" were a pain in the behind and that many of them were very nice. One of the lads went so far as to suggest that some of the female "yahs" were not only acceptable but were "extremely fanciable" (an opinion that earned him a sharp Scots elbow in the ribs).
For the past few years, some people have been fretting about Anglophobia in Scotland, and indeed a few complaints from English people have gone to race relations tribunals. But what these youngsters were articulating was not anti-English racism, it was an early 21st-century version of old-fashioned class antagonism. It was not the Englishness of the upper-class "yahs" that these Scots kids resented; it was their money and the assurance that went with it.
It occurred to the diary that this is a syndrome that might well be exacerbated by the Scottish Executive's policy of charging tuition fees for students from England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This is bound to deter ordinary, hard-up youngsters from the rest of Britain, leaving Edinburgh's universities (which are now very fashionable among England's private schools) to those young Britons whose parents do not have to worry about tuition fees (or beer money). This, in turn, is not likely to improve young Scotland's perception of the English. Have Donald Dewar and Jim Wallace thought this one through?
As the rest of this year is likely to be dominated by American politics, this diary felt that it might be helpful, every now and again, to meander down some of the Great Republic's political byways, particularly those that have a resonance in Scotland. And as the state of Texas was largely the creation of Scots (and the Irish variety thereof), it seemed like a good place to start. Not a lot of people seem to have twigged this, but there is a small but noisy lobby growing up in the Lone Star state that wants to return Texas to the independence it enjoyed between prising itself away from Mexico in 1836 and joining the United States in 1845.
Although its title - the Texas Constitutional Convention Coordinating Committee (TxCCCC) - sounds respectable enough, the movement's aims are seriously alarming. This is home rule with a difference. Having got together in 1997, these independence-minded folk are now seeking to recreate a Texas that would have been familiar to Sam Houston, the Scots-Irish militia man (and frequent drunk) who led the slaughter of the Mexicans at San Jacinto. It would be a Texas with no taxes of any kind, no state-funded schools, no driving licences, no social security, no government-regulated banks and, of course, the absolute right to defend yourself and your property with whatever kind of weapons you can lay your hands on (up to and including automatic assault weapons). In short, the TxCCCC has a "libertarian" agenda of a kind that not even the Adam Smith Institute in all its 1980s pomp would have dared to put on paper. How unlike our own dear home rule parties.
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