Deep waters of confidence in Scotland?

Tom Nairn (Edinburgh): After the Holyrood election of 2003, a deep psychological shift got under way among Scots. Intended to stabilize Great Britain under Labour Party control, devolved government unlocked deep-seated attitudes and collective emotions, whose cumulative effects have only now been seen. In a post-electoral interview SNP leader Alex Salmond put his finger on it: ‘A new self-confidence has begun to show itself’ — in a population notably cursed by its absence. The secular ‘cringe’ deposited by self-colonization has broken up, to release an acquifer long contained by the permanent-seeming rock-plate of Britain. ‘Acquiclude’ is the geologist’s term for the latter, a formation normally impermeable but susceptible to break-up by earth tremors, or continent shifts. In this case, ‘globalization’ is of course to blame. Rockplate (or ‘Establishment’) warriors like Gordon Brown naturally rush to restore the old days: their persons and parties owe everything to the latter. Hoping to stay the collapse, they have aggravated it by warfare and all-British ‘cringe’ in Washington. Their present hostility towards the SNP and Plaid Cymru carries on the same Dodo tactics. In truth such changes are going with the global grain, not against it: they express what Aviel Roshwald has called The Endurance of Nationalism (CUP 2006), reanimated by a democratic warming that (fortunately) accompanies the global kind. David Cameron does seem slightly more aware of acquiclude collapse, but not much. Yet what can it be that he feels lapping uncomfortably somewhere between socks and underpants? What but the larger acquifer of England? Do the contributions of Peter Oborne and David Marquand in OurKingdom signal a moving of the waters?