WASHINGTON, May 2 (UPI) -- The name Alex Salmond, a hitherto obscure northern European politician, is about to become very familiar. He is the leader of the Scottish National Party, and most opinion polls suggest that he is likely to emerge from this week's election as the leader of the largest party in Scotland's new assembly.
Depending on the outcome of the vote and the complex prospects of coalitions between SNP, the Labor Party and the Liberal-Democrats, Salmond may well become Scotland's new first minister, and he has pledged to hold a referendum on full-scale independence.
It is an open question whether his success reflects a real surge of Scottish nationalist sentiment or the depth of disgust for Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Labor party, who have traditionally been dominant in Scotland. Blair, who went to school in Scotland, was the politician who gave Scotland its own Parliament almost 10 years ago, along with a measure of political autonomy. And now the Scots are using it to break up one of Europe's oldest and most successful nation-states.
It is one of those strange ironies of history that the very week that sees the 300th anniversary of the union of England and Scotland should also see the likely success of the party dedicated to dismantling Britain by asserting Scotland's independence. On the face of it, this seems a curious ambition. For the past three centuries, the two peoples have fought the same battles, built a global empire, launched the industrial revolution, spread their common language across the world and built one of the world's most civilized, tolerant and prosperous societies. It is not a bad record.
But maybe it is time for Britain to break up into its component parts, and for the English to let the Welsh and Irish and Scots go their separate ways. A lot of the English feel that way, after counting the cost to English taxpayers of the annual $20 billion subsidy to Scotland, $8 billion to North Ireland and $3 billion to Wales. The growing of Scottish and Irish and Welsh nationalism in British politics has produced the inevitable reaction, a revival of English nationalism that has 68 percent of English voters telling pollsters they want their own parliament.
But in genetic terms, all this is pure nonsense. Recent researches have suggested that the British people, whether Irish, Scots or English, are genetically identical. In his new book, "Blood of the Isles," Oxford University geneticist Bryan Sykes found no noticeable difference between Ulster Protestants and Irish Catholics or between English and Scots, and concluded that the genetic character of the inhabitants of the British Isles was largely formed millennia ago.
"The genetic bedrock on the maternal side was in place. By about 6,000 years ago, the pattern was set for the rest of the history of the Isles and very little has disturbed it since," Sykes concluded, after his team took DNA samples from 10,000 people and reviewed genetic records for 40,000 more.
The scientists are doubtless right about the genes, but nationhood is a matter of culture, of history, of common ways and traditions. And despite millennia of sharing the same small islands, and three centuries of shared history and culture, there are still many Scots, English, Irish and Welsh who feel themselves to be distinct and separate nations.
Those feelings seem to have intensified in recent decades, fueled perhaps by Irish independence in the 1920s and then by the three decades of low-intensity war in Northern Ireland. But a more material factor has disturbed the political stability of the Anglo-Scots system: the discovery some 40 years ago of oil under the North Sea. Until then, Scottish nationalism had been a quaint and even eccentric cause.
But the prospect of oil wealth changed all that. And the SNP bluntly rejects English claims that they subsidize the Scots through their taxes by pointing out that it was the English who took the bulk of the oil wealth, and Scotland could get by quite happily today without any English taxes, so long as they had the annual $16 billion in royalties on the oil that comes from Scottish waters.
The latest opinion polls suggest that if a referendum were to be held in Scotland, those calling for independence would lose. But who knows what a referendum would say in a year or two, after some years of a government led by the SNP and after growls of resentment from England about "ungrateful Scots." And with the Conservative Party almost wiped out in Scotland, a Conservative government in London would be doubly unpopular north of the border.
There is another aspect to the upsurge of national feelings -- the role of the European Union, which was supposed to put an end to the petty nationalisms of Europe's various tribes. Instead, across Europe smaller nations within larger states have been asserting their nationhood, whether the Basques and Catalans of Spain, the Bretons of France, the Northern Italians, and the Flemings and Walloons of Belgium. Perhaps within the vast embrace of Europe, there is more room for smaller nations.
But it will be highly confusing for that large proportion of people who, like this columnist, proudly claim Scottish and English ancestors, who have close family members living in Scotland, and who are quite content to be defined in our passports as "British Citizen."
