from Herald 6/6/13
The Herald-STV Road to Referendum documentary series was sabotaged by technical difficulties on Tuesday. Apparently 65% of viewers in Scotland were unable to watch the first 25 minutes of the first instalment of our three-part television history of the national question in Scotland since the war. Part one of Road to Referendum will now be shown on Sunday June 9th at 7pm on STV, and is available now on the STV website. My book of the same name is published this week by Cargo.
And no, this wasn't a Unionist conspiracy to obliterate Scotland's history. ITV in England was also blanked out for two hours, the first time since the miners' strike, or so I was told. The only region that didn't get a blank screen was London, and they wouldn't have been watching anyway. But I'm pleased to say a version of Road to Referendum will be shown in England later this year.
However, some have already made up their minds. It was a "60-minute advert for nationalism" according a headline in the Spectator magazine. Yet I defy anyone to view this unique collaboration between The Herald and STV as an exercise in nationalist propaganda. The first documentary is all about how the SNP was electorally insignificant as recently as the 1960s and could only register its existence by blowing up pillar boxes.
The unsolved mystery of Scottish politics, which I explore further in my book, is why an independence referendum should be happening at all in a country which hasn't had a tradition of political nationalism until the day before yesterday – at least not since the Scottish wars of independence in the Middle Ages, which is where my investigation of the national question begins.
Some Unionists believe a veil should be drawn over the history of Wallace and Bruce for fear of inciting hatred of the English. As if history itself is suspect. Yet 19th-century Unionists, like the Tory novelist, Sir Walter Scott, weren't in the least afraid of Scottish nationalist history – in fact, he invented a lot of it.
Scottish nationalism is unlike nationalist movements in other countries. This is not, and never has been, about national liberation in the conventional sense. Scots don't feel they are oppressed; rather, they feel they are being excluded from a unique multinational entity, the UK, that they helped create.
