One of the things I remember best about living in
Cambridge was that it was busy. Sometimes I would watch cars queuing for an
hour and more to get into a car park. When I went into London on the train I
noticed that we passed villages and towns continually. There hardly seemed to
be a gap. I never could quite bear to be in London for more than a few hours.
The contrast for someone from rural Aberdeenshire was just too great. When I
travel home from Aberdeen now I see emptiness all around me. Villages are relatively
rare and separated by miles of fields. Whenever I’ve flown over Scotland and
looked down, my immediate impression is that there’s nothing there but
mountains. Only as the plane descends can I actually see examples of human
habitation.
Why should it be that England is so densely
populated, while Scotland is so sparsely populated? There are historical
reasons for this. There are geographical reasons. There are reasons to do with
climate. The vast majority of Scotland’s population lives along a line that
extends from Glasgow to Edinburgh and then up the coast to Aberdeen. If that
thin strip were to disappear Scotland would have almost no population at all. We’ve
all chosen to live in the parts of Scotland that are most fertile and where
there is the most in the way of natural resources. But compared to the world as
a whole even the more remote parts of Scotland could sustain far more
population than they do.
It is easy to find examples of countries which
endure difficult climatic conditions with hugely more population than Scotland.
Chad for example has over 12 million people. Israel has over 8 million. If a
country made up largely of desert can sustain so many people, then clearly
Scotland could. Each little Scottish island could have a large town. With hard
work even the most marginal land in the Highlands could be made productive.
After all, if they can grow plants in the Negev desert, there’s a hardly
anywhere in Scotland that ought to be less productive.
There is an inequality in the UK whereby some people
have to live where it is densely populated while others live where almost
no-one else lives at all. What could we do to remedy this? We could start by
encouraging people to move from those parts of the UK that feel full to those
parts of the UK that feel empty. Unfortunately it obviously wouldn’t be easy to
get people to move. They are free to do so at the moment and if anything more
people tend to want to leave Scotland than arrive.
This is where the UK Government could play an
important role. If people from the rest of the UK don’t want to live in Scotland,
they could be encouraged. New towns could be built in the Highlands with tax
breaks for businesses and people who chose to live there. Communications could
be improved and made cheaper. If the UK Government set itself a goal of
doubling Scotland’s population, it would both benefit Scotland and England.
England would feel less full, while land that is barely used in Scotland would
be made productive. Scotland’s economy
would benefit vastly from this new influx of people. An economy is really only
the people working in it. Growth happens because these people have ideas, put
them into practice and interact with each other.
The SNP have been keen to show that they are in
favour of immigration. But why be so half hearted about it? There are millions
of people already in the UK who could move almost immediately to Scotland given
the right conditions. There is a great inequality in the UK that we have a duty
to amend. England is densely populated while Scotland is sparsely populated.
Scotland needs people and there is a ready supply of them right on our
doorstep.
Let’s imagine if five million people moved to
Scotland from other parts of the UK in the next few years. What affects would
this have on Scotland? Well where I live in Aberdeenshire, we’ve already had
quite a lot of people moving from other parts of Scotland, the UK and the rest
of the world. These people have changed the nature of rural Aberdeenshire, from
the place I remember from my youth. The Doric language is spoken less
frequently, because the majority accent and language in schools is from elsewhere. In
general, whereas before the oil came nearly everyone could trace their ancestors
to the Vikings, now we are much more mixed and cosmopolitan. Many different
accents are heard. It has involved the loss of something that was typically
North East, but we have gained also. The benefits in terms of economy and jobs
are obvious to anyone who comes here.
Imagine if we could move five million people from
England to Scotland. Think of the benefits. We would of course have to adapt
somewhat to their culture and attitudes. But we would rapidly find out that
people everywhere are more or less the same. People born in England would marry
people born in Scotland and soon we’d all be mixed together.
Such a large transfer of population would no doubt
also have political effects. The people least likely to vote for independence
are people from the other parts of the UK. The reason for this is obvious. Who
wants to vote to turn themselves into a foreigner in the land of their birth or rather to turn the land of their birth into a foreign country? There are exceptions to
every rule of course. There are English people who turn out to be more Scottish
than the Scots. There are English wives who find it easier to agree with their nationalist husbands. There are people on the far left who think that breaking up the UK is
a small price to pay if only we can introduce socialism in a part of it. But
other things being equal people from the rest of the UK who come to live in
Scotland are overwhelmingly liable to vote for the UK to remain together.
But the Scottish nationalists can hardly object to
five million people from the rest of the UK coming to live in Scotland. After
all if this were to happen the SNP would consider these people to be as
Scottish as you or me. Civic nationalism does not allow us care about where
someone is from, just where they are now. The downside for the Scottish
nationalists of, course, is that if there were such a mass movement from the
south it would tend to swamp Scottish nationalism. The most likely people to
vote SNP are those who feel themselves to be exclusively Scottish. But as more
and more people entered Scotland from the rest of the UK, this feeling of being
Scottish and not British would be diluted and in time might cease altogether. Union
Jacks might be flown all over the places that have been newly settled. God Save
the Queen or King might once more be played even in Glasgow and Dundee. Everyone might stand up.
Here is one of the benefits of us all mixing
together in the melting pot. It makes ideas like nationalism seem quaint and
from a time when everyone in Scotland could trace their ancestry back to the
Culloden or even Bannockburn. It wouldn't be long before those who sang about a "land that is lost now" would realise that it indeed was lost. At this point no doubt they would cease singing.
