Maybe it's time to go home. Labour's landslide victory in the British general election last May meant that, after 16 years, I could choose to end my self-imposed exile in Ireland, having made a solemn vow that I would never go back to Britain while Margaret Thatcher and/or the Tories were still in power. Now I was at last free to return to my native Scotland: free Scotland, after the historic referendum victory 10 days ago. (On more recent matters, and with the surname Morgan, the least said the better about Friday's shaving of the vote in Wales.)
Watching the Scottish campaign from my adopted country I imagined myself an injured striker watching a football match from the bench. I kept wanting to run on to the pitch and muck in. Memories of the last, disastrous referendum in 1979 flooded back. The anger of the sell-out of the Scots by the Labour government returned, tempered only be the voice of reason in my head which kept saying: "This time it'll be different." And it was. There was to be none of the vote rigging of 1979: just a straight past-the-post "yes" or "no".
Eighteen years ago, not long after the discovery of huge oil and gas reserves in the North Sea, the Westminster parliament decided (with, I'm sure, a dose of the wobblies) to give the Scots a say on independence. The rub was that the result would have to be a 40 per cent "yes" vote. Nothing peculiar there, you might say, but there were hidden complexities.
Sneaky manoeuvre
If a person registered to vote and voted "yes" it counted as a yes vote. If the same person was registered and voted "no", it counted as a no vote. But if that person was registered and didn't vote, it automatically went as a "no". This foxy, sneaky manoeuvre by a Labour administration put most Tory machinations of the next 18 years in the halfpenny place, including the notorious poll tax, tested first in Scotland, like the ghastly Anthrax experiment some decades previously.
The fact that the constituency which sealed the "yes, yes" vote in the recent referendum was the Kingdom of Fife had a particularly sweet taste to this bleary-eyed viewer at 3.36 a.m. on September 12th. In 1979 I was in my fourth year at St Andrew's University in the Kingdom, more preoccupied with the referendum than with my looming final examinations. Although not a card-carrying member, I was busy canvassing for the Labour Party's "yes" campaign.
A peculiarity of St Andrew's University, aside from its having more English students than Scottish, is that, perhaps because of its geographical location as the third most northerly British university, it attracts large numbers of Icelandic students. All of these, plus the usual complement of Americans, Nigerians and other overseas students found in most British universities, were entitled to vote in the referendum (Commission on the Constitution, please take note).
Part of our strategy was to canvass the halls of residence and other hang-outs to discuss the issue of devolution and try and persuade those who had an interest - either way - to register to vote. We also advised those who were bamboozled by the issue (most of the aforementioned) not to register if they felt they were likely not to turn up at a polling station on DDay.
Court report
Little did we suspect as we trekked up and down the grimy corridors of the residences - God bless us, most of them still single sex - that darker forces were at work. For a university that has among its alumni more Tory MPs per capita than, I imagine, any in Britain outside Oxbridge, this shouldn't have come as a surprise, but it did.
A few months after the not unexpected defeat of the referendum, ensuring that Scotland remained shackled to England until Braveheart Blair took up the cudgel this year, a court report appeared in the local newspaper. A first-year English student of divinity - a luminary of the university Conservative Party - had been before Cupar Sheriff's Court on electoral fraud charges.
What he and his cronies had been doing, the Courier's court reporter told us, was this. While canvassing for "no" votes around the campus, they had identified an undisclosed number of students who expressly said they were not registering to vote because they couldn't make head nor tail of the issue. Off went our aspiring vicar and registered them. He was, I recall, convicted of between 11 and 20 false registrations. Damn him, that was 11 to 20 "no" votes (never mind the fact that the result was a resounding "no").
The sheriff administered a slap on the wrist by way of probation, and for good measure said a few words about an enthusiastic young man who, although committing the crime of electoral fraud, was well-intentioned, if a little over-enthusiastic, and what a pity it would be to ruin a promising career if the university authorities were to "send him down".
Pulpit or back-benches
I've sometimes wondered what became of that chap; if he's preaching from a pulpit or from the Tory back-benches. Time has obviously healed the rage because I can't even remember the little blighter's name now; but his face stays firmly in my memory.
As the Kingdom of Fife sealed Scotland's future early on the morning of September 12th, the first face to enter my mind was not Blair's, Donald Dewar's, Alex Salmond's or the late John Smith's, but his. I pictured it crumpled, crestfallen and - best of all - guilty about the injustice he had perpetrated on the Scots all those years ago.
And when, after a few hours' sleep, the RTE news reader said the magical words "Donald Dewar could be the First [Scottish] Minister," I had to pinch myself before I let out an earsplitting whoop of joy. It had the same unreal, magical, spinetingling effect as the first time I heard "the British prime minister, Tony Blair", "The South African president, Nelson Mandela", or "President Vaclav Havel". And what a parliament is in store. None of your stuffy greyshirted men and pleated-skirted women. No, the Scottish parliament is going to be the coolest in the world. It's going to have pop stars - someone's even suggested Lulu for speaker - personalities, comedians, actors, journalists. Maybe it is time to go home?