Letter: How wrong to see Scotland as a colony

I HESITATE, but not for long, to describe the eminent Professor Young's article (Comment, 16 August) as academic drivel but frankly that is what it was.

What a glorious Braveheart-ish picture of the Scots ascending from their caves, painted with woad, into some post-colonial self-governing nirvana.

However, he proceeds, I feel, with a misplaced confidence based on a few fallacies - for instance that Westminster any longer matters to most Scots or that the Welsh language is buoyant as a consequence of some struggle to retain an identity, rather than because it is a compulsory subject in Welsh schools.

To regard one's country as a colony suggests introspection and in this case a surprising ignorance.

It is, I would maintain, impossible to apply such strictures to the 17th, 18th and 19th century Scots, who peopled and enriched the English and the rest of the world with ideas and skill.

It is possible to argue that we achieved a colonialism of a kind in the willingness with which Scotland entered into a dependency culture in the last century and such argument might be substantiated by the cringe-making chippiness of Professor Young's contribution to your newspaper, which was unworthy of even the most unthinking Braveheart.

ARCHIE STIRLING

Bridge of Allan

Stirling

Do WE really need a Professor Robert JC Young (born in Hertfordshire; currently lecturing in New York) to tell us here in Scotland that "post-colonialism is all about how to resist oppressive forms of power and how to heal its psychic costs"?

Surely I am not the only reader to still have a copy of Michael Hechter's seminal 1975 classic Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development 1536-1966 on my bookshelves from a generation back before we won our long struggle for home rule?

Butis it not a little ironic that Professor Young chose to deliver his short history of treachery and double-dealing during the Clearances from an Edinburgh Festival platform sponsored and chaired by yet another Englishman (Vernon Ellis) sponsored by the British Council?

No wonder Alex Salmond took some time out from colonial Edinburgh to make a day trip to Norway to announce progress in tidal power.

NEIL ROBERTSON

Glamis Terrace

Edinburgh

Robert J C Young may be correct that Scotland was never colonised by England in a military sense. However, these days colonial rule takes on a more subtle shade.

Large swathes of Scottish public life such as the arts, academia and public bodies arestill headed by the type of English middle-class professionals who several decades ago might well have performed the same role in one of the far-off counties of the Empire.For arecent example one need look no further than the appointment of the right-wing academic Roger Scruton to a senior post at St Andrews University (perhaps the most anglicised of Scottish institutions), despite the fact that his Thatcherite views are anathema to the vast majority of Scots.

SOPHIE ANDERSON

Marchmont Road

Edinburgh