The Spectator’s Notes | 21 January 2012

In Thought for the Day, of all places, the weird bitterness behind much Scottish nationalism was revealed. On Wednesday, John Bell of the Iona Community complained of the suffering of the Scots and asked people in the south-east of England how they would like it if their history books had been ‘written in Aberdeen’. We should not have minded a bit. Indeed, though I cannot immediately recall a schoolbook from Aberdeen, the quantity of excellent British educational material coming out of Scotland — think of Collins in Glasgow — always far exceeded the relative proportions of the UK population. So did the writers — Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan, Arthur Conan Doyle (in his historical novels) — who made vivid our island story. Lord Reith (born in Stonehaven) created, through the BBC in its early days, a Scottish version of Britishness which dominated the south-east just as much as anywhere else.