Braveheart cast the English as effeminate fiends and the Scots as heroic freedom-fighters. Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar
If the SNP win the election today, and take one step towards the break-up of the Union between Scotland and England, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid will surely crack open a tin of Tartan Special somewhere in his thistly heaven. MacDiarmid was the colossus of 20th-century Scottish letters, now largely forgotten - perhaps because his ranting anti-Englishness has since fallen (even further) out of fashion. "England, frae whom a' blessings flow", he wrote, dripping with sarcasm, in his poem The Parrot Cry, "what could we dae withoot ye?"
MacDiarmid is the warrior-king of anti-English art - but the army he leads is sparsely populated. Yes, Scotland's antipathy towards the Sassenachs has found occasional artistic expression since the Union, 300 years ago. When John Home's ropey drama Douglas premiered in Edinburgh in 1756, one punter distilled the nation's pride in the immortal phrase: "whaur's yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?" The Dundonian doggerel-peddler McGonagall hymned Robert the Bruce, who "beat the English in every wheel and turn/And made them fly in great dismay/From off the field without delay". And Burns, of course, railed against the Union. But his famous verse Sic a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation refers not to the English, but to the Scots who surrendered to them.
Self-loathing makes more appearances in Scottish art and literature than loathing of the English - the most notorious recent example being the "We're colonised by wankers" scene in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. And when anti-English sentiments do appear, they're often political rather than nationalistic. Walter Scott called the English "prone to feverish fits of suspicion ... shabby and litigious" in The Letters of Malachi Malagrowther. But Scott was a devout Unionist and the Letters were part of a now-obscure campaign to defend the independence of Scottish banking. Likewise the supposed anti-English tone of the novels of James Kelman, say, or the poems of Tom Leonard, which tend to be class- rather than nationality-based. Although I admit, it's not exactly a compliment to our southern neighbours that we Scots often get the concepts "posh" and "English" confused ...
The most conspicuous current examples of English-baiting in Scots culture are Mel Gibson's hideous Braveheart, which cast the English as effeminate fiends and the Scots as heroic (if curiously accented) freedom-fighters; and our de facto national anthem, Flower of Scotland. The song, written by the folk band The Corries, demands that "proud Edward's army" of Englishmen be "sent homewards ... to think again" - as happened at the Battle of Bannockburn, a mere 700 years ago.
But the peevishness travels both ways. Not only has England produced a healthy share of anti-Scottish artists (Ben Jonson was jailed for Scot-bashing by James I), but its own national anthem promises "rebellious Scots to crush" - which, as if the sick-making toadyism weren't off-putting enough, makes it tricky for we "north Britons" to sing along. Whatever the result of today's election, let's hope it gives the Scots fewer flimsy excuses to resent the English, and more reasons to remember, as the great Proclaimers put it, "The Gael and the Pict, the Angle and Dane/We're all Scotland's story, and we're all worth the same".
