There is still a turn-off on motorway to independence

There are politicians whose opinions shift with the changing wind. Nobody has ever accused Tam Dalyell of being like that. He has been distinguished by consistency and pertinacity. Though his ancestor “Bluidy Tam” was known as a scourge of the Covenanters, Our Tam is as stiff in opinion as any of the Persecuted Brethren. Or an Old Testament prophet. He warned us 15 years ago that voting for devolution would put us on a motorway to independence with no exits, and now he tells us that independence is inevitable – or something as near to independence as dammit anyway.

He never shrinks from repeating himself. A good argument is a good argument is a good argument, no matter how often it has been advanced. It is, he says, in the nature of any organisation, such as a parliament, to seek to grow and extend its powers.

At a debate in Glasgow University Union in the late Nineties, I heard him recall how his Labour colleague Barbara Castle, who had been fiercely anti-European while a minister and opposition front-bencher in Harold Wilson’s day, changed her tune after James Callaghan dropped her from the cabinet and, as a sop to her pride, made her leader of the Labour group in the European Parliament. Immediately, he said, she clamoured for that parliament to have more powers. Members of the Scottish Parliament would, he averred, behave in just the same way. Now he recycles this example in his autobiography. Tam is in this respect more like his old adversary Margaret Thatcher than he might choose to admit. No U-turns. “You turn if you want to,” she told the Tory conference. “The lady’s not for turning.” Nor is Tam.

Moreover, in this forecast, he has been proved right. The Scottish Tories opposed devolution and some of them honourably ended their careers in the last ditch. On the day when the Scottish Parliament came into being, the Tories’ leader, David McLetchie, observed that this was a day his party had never thought to see. With a gleam of humour – and honesty – he added that it was a day that many of them had hoped never to see. That was then, 1999. Things are different now. The Holyrood Tories are not only ready to acquiesce in an extension of their parliament’s powers; some of them are even eager for such an extension. For Barbara Castle, read Murdo Fraser, who speaks of the need for greater fiscal autonomy.

All this is undeniable. But are there really no exits from that motorway to independence Tam spoke of? Is there no road-block or even traffic-light stuck at red? Are we careering down that motorway to that seat at the United Nations and that other seat at the EU Council of Ministers’ table? Alex Salmond, every bit as consistently single-minded as Tam Dalyell, has no doubt about it. The happy destination is in sight: one more river, and that’s the river of Jordan.

When I spoke to him a few days before his election triumph in May, he said: “People told me there would never be a Scottish Parliament, and there is one. They told me there would never be a SNP government, and there is one. Now they tell me there will never be an independent Scotland. Why should I believe them now when they’ve been wrong before?” Good point, I had to admit, even though I was still left wondering if he himself would be condemned to play the role of Moses, permitted to see the Promised Land from Mount Pisgah, but denied the chance to lead his Children of Israel over Jordan, and compelled to cede that honour to his successor, Joshua.

Yet, while both Alex Salmond and Tam Dalyell speak with authority, they may both yet be wrong. The idea of historical inevitability is seductive. Nevertheless, as Orwell pointed out, it is closely connected to power-worship; and the belief that what is happening now will continue to happen has been proved false time and again. You don’t actually have to study history to realise this. It’s enough to listen to sports commentaries, in which the assumption is frequently made that a player or boxer or team on top at some stage in a match has established an unchallengeable ascendancy and is bound to win. It ain’t always so.

There is still one stumbling block on the road to independence. Well, there is actually more than one: for instance, some who favour independence may lose their nerve when it comes to the vote. Yet this is not the major obstacle. That is simply the idea of Britishness, or, to put it another way, the fact that a great many of us are happy to think of ourselves as both Scottish and British, or British and Scottish; that we are comfortable with this dual identity.

We may not be able to come up with a clear statement of what we mean by Britishness or why it matters to us, but then we might be equally unable to offer a clear definition of what it means to be Scottish. The truth, surely, is that Scotland will not become independent as long as a majority of us retain our strong sense of a British identity and are happy with it.

It may, of course, be whittled away, and the British Scots become a minority. In that event, the independence battle will be won, and there will be a majority in favour of ending the political Union. It is also possible that independence will arrive, as Tam Dalyell thinks it will, in stages, salami-style, as the Scottish Parliament acquires more and more powers until there is a constitutional settlement, “indistinguishable”, as he puts it, from independence.

Perhaps: yet perhaps not. There is a famous scene recorded in Lockhart’s Life of Scott. After a debate about reforms of the Court of Session, intended as a modernising measure to bring the administration of Scots law into line with English practice, Scott was found in tears on the Mound. “Little by little,” he said, “you will whittle away until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland will remain.” The whittling continued, but Scotland remained.

In like manner, what makes the United Kingdom what it is may be whittled away, and yet it may remain, surviving the “modernising” Nationalists, just as Scotland, and the idea of Scotland, survived the modernising Scottish-British Whigs of Sir Walter’s day.