Herald 18/12/12
First it was David Cameron, now Tony Blair has entered the fray. He told journalists at a press gallery lunch this week that he stood ready and willing to come to the aid of Better Together's fight to keep Scotland in the UK. All we need is for Margaret Thatcher to come out of retirement to help save Britain and we'd have the set. The Scottish Nationalists are jubilant. 'Christmas has come early'', said Kenneth Gibson MSP. In Nationalist demonology, there are no blacker figures than these with which to scare the Scottish voters.
But I'm not sure. David Cameron is regarded as a benign irrelevance, Thatcher is ancient history to Scots under forty, and even Tony Blair is not the hate figure he was. In fact, he was never quite the hate figure he was said to be. There's little polling evidence that Scots had any particular loathing for the former Labour prime minister, who of course delivered the Scottish parliament after the 1997 referendum. One episode in particular testifies to the contrary.
It was at the height of the Keep the Clause row in 2000. Cardinal Winning and Brian Souter had staged their private referendum to show that Scots didn't want to lose Section 2a, which outlawed the teaching of homosexuality in schools. The late Donald Dewar was at sixes and sevens; the cabinet was split; the press were in revolt. Church figures were warning about homosexual role-playing being introduced to Scottish classrooms. UK commentators suggested that devolution had unleashed a latent homophobia in Scottish society.
Then, Tony Blair made a speech at the Scottish Labour Conference in Edinburgh in March 2000 in which he ridiculed the alarmism of the Keep the Clausers. “Kids are going to be force-fed gay sex education?”, he said referring to the adverts being posted across Scotland. “And it's Donald who's doing it? What utter nonsense”. And with that the panic subsided. I can't recall any single speech which has had such a direct impact on public debate as that one. Blair clearly carried conviction and people trusted him - rather more than his Scottish Labour counterparts. The Scottish Executive – as it then was - made some noises about supporting the family in the bill, the clause was dropped, and the issue duly died.
Of course, this was before the Iraq war, which destroyed Tony Blair's credibility. For many Scottish intellectuals Blair remains the Unforgiven, though memory of the war is rapidly fading into history for most Scots. Blair is probably more widely remembered here for the struggle with Gordon Brown, his embittered rival for the Labour leadership. In the years before Blair's resignation in June 2007, there was a widespread feeling in Scotland that, in some way, the then Labour Chancellor was more in tune with Scottish sensibilities. It was assumed, without a great deal of evidence, that he was less “New Labour” than Tony Blair, and that his attitudes to issues like the market reforms in the National Health Service was more true to Labour values. This was largely wishful thinking.
