Dry topic, political Union. Only really cared about by a few wonky PPEists. And yet I really enjoyed last night’s debate. ‘This House believes in the Union,’ was the motion, which even I thought was a bit ambiguous. I wasn’t the only one: poor old Lord MacLennan claimed that he thought he was supposed to be debating the future of the Oxford Union, rather than the 1707 Union of Scotland and England, and had to quickly rewrite his speech. Alex Just, ex-president and an old school friend of the current president, gave a punchy opening speech stressing the economic benefits to Scotland of remaining part of the UK. David Thomas opened for the opposition. When on form, David (DT in hackish circles) can be quite a good debater. This was one of his better speeches – plenty of statistics, some solid jokes – except for the fact that, somewhat bizarrely, he chose to argue against the Union by saying that it was bad for England, because Scotland takes all our money. This is true, but it also happened to be exactly what Just has told us five minutes earlier, only he, being Scottish, thought it was a good thing. No-one really knew whether the debate was supposed to be from a Scottish or English perspective. After DT’s speech, they settled on Scottish, which was understandable, given that apart from David every other speaker on the order paper was born north of the border. Listening to the never-ending torrent of thick Scottish brogues felt a bit like sitting through a particularly geeky Sean Connery film.
There were a couple of SNP M(S)Ps, who proved to be the lunatics that SNP politicians always are, moaning on and on about three centuries of English repression and how if Scotland had remained independent the Iraq war wouldn’t have happened, the banks wouldn’t have collapsed and Jedward would have been kicked out in the first round of X-Factor (or something – I was so busy shivering, thanks to the snow and the chamber’s many broken windows, that I wasn’t really paying much attention by this point.) Lord Forsyth brilliantly pulled the SNP guys up on their whining: Scottish Nationalists, he pointed out, have for three hundred years walked around with chips on both shoulders, made cripplingly hunchbacked by the sheer weight of their bitterness and resentments (ok, I might have embellished his point slightly, but that was the gist of it).
It was a fun, lively debate, but for one, glaring problem: most of the speakers gave the strong impression of being completely historically illiterate. Stewart Hosie, the Deputy Leader of the SNP at Westminster, was the worst: when a member making a floor speech remarked that the Royal Family were now no longer Scottish but German, ‘ever since, um…’ Hosie piped up helpfully: ‘William!’, a big, self-satisfied grin on his face, as if the other speaker should have been grovellingly grateful for the benefit of Hosie’s incredible wisdom. Actually, Stewart, William was Dutch – the first German king was George I. The other glaring historical error belonged to David Thomas, who, when quoting from some seventeenth century English pamphlet about the Scots, read out a line to the effect that ‘the beasts there are not at all great, but the women definitely are,’ or something like that. David seemed to take this to mean that the English author thought Scottish women were really quite fit. Actually, he meant that they were really quite fat. It wasn’t really David’s fault: this is the kind of error that always happens when you let PPEists loose to write a speech without adult supervision, and they start reading historical documents that they’re not really capable of understanding. Has anyone noticed that the UK only really started running into major problems around the time that PPEists started getting into government? Now they run the whole bloody thing, and the Oxford Union too, and as a result everything’s falling apart, from the windows in the Union Chamber to the practise of British Democracy itself. Both David and Hosie demonstrated the kind of mistakes you can make without a decent knowledge of history. Fewer PPEists and more historians in positions of power, please, and then everything will be alright again.
