ADRIAN
Wooldridge says there is no evidence the Nordic countries want to engage with
Scotland
THE
STORY is all too familiar. The marriage grows stale with the years. Those
charming idiosyncrasies become intolerable irritations. The unhappy husband or
wife catches the eye of a comely stranger. A glance turns into an affair. After
a lot of rowing the unhappy couple finally divorces and life begins again.
This
is half the story of the possible divorce between Scotland and the rest of the
United Kingdom: a significant number of Scots think they would be much happier
with the comely Nordics than with the dowdy English. But the other half of the
story is more complicated. The Nordics show no sign of reciprocating the
suitor’s affections. And the Nordic model that the nationalists have fallen in
love with disappeared 25 years ago.
Evidence
of the affair can be found all over the place. The Scottish National Party
cannot get enough of the Nordic model. The Nordic model is not only vastly
superior to the English model – it provides people with a higher standard of
living while guaranteeing a safety net that is so generous that fathers get a
year’s worth of paternity leave. It is also more in tune with Scotland’s
collectivist and egalitarian tradition. The Jimmy Reid Foundation argues that
the Scottish idea of the Common Wealth is the local equivalent of the Nordic
ideal of the “folkhemmet” or People’s Home. Lesley Riddoch, a columnist on this
paper, has established a thinktank, Nordic Horizons, to push for closer links
between the Holyrood parliament and its northern neighbours. Angus Robertson,
the SNP’s spokesman on foreign affairs and one of its leading Nordo-philes,
says that one of the first things an independent Scotland will do will be to
apply to join the Nordic Council, a steering group of Nordic countries.
Scotland’s
infatuation with the Nordic model is not hard to understand. The Nordic
countries routinely come at or close to the top of every official measure of
success, from economic success to social wellbeing. It is common to argue that
countries face a trade-off between economic growth and quality of life. The
Nordic countries show that it is possible to have the best of both worlds.
Scotland
and the Nordics are also drawn together by powerful ties of culture. Some ties
are direct and genetic: the Viking raiders of the early Middle Ages left a
profound mark on the country. The Shetland islanders still burn a Viking
longboat every year. The language is littered with Scandinavian words. Other
ties are cultural and geographic. Both Scotland and the Nordics are profoundly
shaped by the Protestant religion and a frequently challenging climate and
geography (asked to list his nearest railway station on a parliamentary expense
form Jo Grimond replied “Bergen, Norway”).
Both
the Scots and the Nordics lead the world in extracting natural resources. Both
have a marked taste for the grain and the hop. And both excel in producing the
modern equivalent of Viking sagas. Henning Mankel’s Inspector Wallender and Ian
Rankin’s Inspector Rebus are cut from the same cloth: brooding individualists
determined to get to the bottom of the blood-soaked story whatever the
higher-ups tell them.
There
are all sorts of obvious problems with this Scandimania. The Vikings left a
more profound imprint on Northumbria, Cumbria and Yorkshire than on Scotland.
Scotland’s west coast is more Irish than Scandinavian. Denmark and Southern
Sweden look more like East Anglia than they do the Scottish Lowlands, let alone
the Highlands.
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