Colonna, 61, has been in a coma for a fortnight after being savagely beaten in France’s highest security jail by another inmate — an Islamist terrorist. Since he was beaten and suffocated almost to death, anti-French riots have engulfed several Corsican towns. If he dies, local politicians warn, the violence could explode into a “generalised revolt”.

The latest riot, in the northern town Bastia on Sunday, was the most violent event in the Mediterranean island for decades. At least 7,000 people — equivalent to one in nine of the town’s population — laid siege to government buildings.

The prefecture, the local tax office and the post office were all set alight. More than 650 Molotov cocktails, as well as pétanque balls and agricultural bird-scaring rockets, were hurled or fired at riot police. They replied with more than 4,000 stun grenades, before running out of ammunition and being forced to retreat to their barracks. One gendarme was shot in the neck with a hunting rifle.

Amid this chaos, the French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, arrives in Corsica today for two days of emergency talks with the island’s government, which seeks greater autonomy from Paris. With the French presidential election less than a month away, with war raging in Ukraine and with the Covid pandemic showing signs of reviving, the last thing that President Emmanuel Macron needs is a violent rebellion in Corsica.

But why such violence now?

The best known of the jumble of Corsican armed separatist groups, the Fronte di Liberazione Naziunale Corsu (FLNC), gave up its “armed struggle” in 2014. Four years later, a single government for the island with expanded powers was created, run by a coalition of “autonomists” (people who want more independence within France) and “separatists” (those who want complete independence from France).

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In 2017 the Macron government offered steps towards greater autonomy (without using that word). But its proposals were blocked as unconstitutional by the centre-right majority in the upper house of the French parliament, the Sénat. Nothing much has happened since then.

So frustration has built, especially among many young Corsicans who look back to the “independence struggle” of the Eighties and Nineties as a golden age. They have embraced the identity politics of the 21^st century: unlike their parents, they reject any element of “shared” French-Corsican identity. They see themselves as the oppressed colonial subjects of France.

Many of Sunday’s protesters were students or school children — although most of the violence came from a roaming band of 100 or so older people wearing black hoods. For these younger generations, Colonna, a convicted murderer, is a folk hero — a Corsican version of Bobby Sands.

“The young feel themselves exalted by this struggle,” said Professor Xavier Crettiez, an expert on political violence in Corsica. “Nationalism has acquired an aura for many young people, which has become mythified as the years go by.”

Corsica won its independence from Genoa in 1755 and installed the first fully democratic system of modern times, two decades before the United States. The island was conquered by France in 1769 during a brutal war but reclaimed its independence during the French Revolution. In an attempt to keep the French at bay, Corsica formed an unlikely “union” with Great Britain for three years up to 1796.

Although French for over two centuries now, Corsica does not “feel French” — not for many Corsicans and not for visitors. It has its own language, related to Italian, and is controlled by a secretive family clan system, rather like Sicily or Sardinia. Although political violence has almost vanished, the murder rate remains twice as great as in France as a whole.

On my first trip, I drove away from the airport and came across a car driving around a roundabout the wrong way. A few minutes later, I came to another roundabout and another car driving the wrong way. The Wizard of Oz sprang to mind. “Toto, I don’t think we are in Kansas any more.”

To be a working shepherd and an active terrorist could happen in only a few places in the world, including the well-named Ile de Beauté. Colonna’s status as a folk hero is puzzling to outsiders, and also to many Corsicans, but says much about the attitudes of some on the island to violence, to politics and to France.

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After four years on the run, Colonna was convicted in 2006 of murdering, with two associates, the most senior French official on the island, the Prefect Claude Erignac. In 1998, Erignac was shot three times in the back while walking to the opera in Ajaccio with his wife. He had challenged the impunity of the Corsican criminal clans which were deeply entwined with — though not wholly responsible for — the mostly low-level separatist violence of the Eighties and Nineties.

Colonna has consistently proclaimed his innocence but his conviction has twice been upheld on appeal. Among young nationalists, there is widespread belief that Colonna was both not guilty and a courageous fighter for Corsican freedom. How can he be at once innocent and a freedom fighter? This contradiction is rarely addressed by his young worshippers.

Paul-François Paoli, a cultural writer and historian of French-Corsican relations, told Le Figaro: “Colonna doesn’t represent all Corsicans but that part of Corsica which sees itself as exclusively Corsican… If there was a hero in this tragic affair, it was Prefect Erignac who was doing his duty in fighting against the power of the mafia, which has since strengthened its stranglehold on the island.”

There is, however, another reason why Colonna’s near-death has caused such a furious and violent reaction. Part of the much-splintered Corsican nationalist movement is anti-Muslim. Many other Corsican separatists accuse France of being more tolerant of Muslims than Corsicans.

It was unsurprising, then, that they seized upon the fact that Colonna’s assailant, Franck Elong Abe, 36, is a Cameroon-born Islamist, who was originally arrested by US forces in Afghanistan and transferred to a series of French jails. Abe also had a record of violence against other prisoners, but was nevertheless made the overseer of the gym at the high security prison near Arles. According to French media reports, he was at one time friendly with Colonna and they played table-tennis together.

Their relationship was not to last. On March 2, Abe beat and suffocated Colonna when they were left alone by prison guards for eight minutes. His motive remains unclear, though reports suggest that Colonna may have made insulting remarks about Islam.

Whatever the truth, some of the rioters in Corsican towns accuse the French authorities of allowing Abe to kill Colonna — or at the very least of culpable negligence. The march in Bastia on Sunday assembled behind a banner reading in Corsican, “French state assassins”.

Paul-François Paoli said: “The fact that he is an Islamist poured oil on the fire… It suggests to some people that the French prison service is kinder to Islamist terrorists than to Corsican nationalists… And it’s not a big step from thinking that there was a plot to eliminate him. And those Corsicans who already made Colonna a hero now have an excuse to make him into a martyr.”

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There is another Corsican oddity to the Colonna saga. The shepherd-terrorist had three principal lawyers during his three trials. One has since been blown up in his car, in what was presumed to be a mafia hit. Another, the moderate nationalist, or “autonomist”, Gilles Simeoni, 54, has become head of the unified Corsican government which was created in 2018. The third Eric Dupond-Moretti, is Justice Minister in the present French government. Simeoni will be at the heart of the talks with the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, today or tomorrow.

Before leaving Paris, Darmanin said his government had “heard the demands of elected Corsican politicians on the island’s institutional, economic, social and cultural future”. He was ready to launch an “unprecedented cycle of discussions” on the “evolution of Corsica within the Republic, according to the requirements of the Constitution”. Darmanin added, however, that such discussions could only happen if the violence ended.

Each word was carefully chosen. The Macron government is offering to resume progress towards a more autonomous status for Corsica, but the centralising French constitution — which speaks of “one indivisible” republic — puts limitations on what can peacefully happen.  But while polls in the past have suggested that only a small minority of Corsica’s 350,000 people want complete independence — not least because the island’s public services and transport links are heavily subsidised by French mainland taxpayers — support for greater autonomy is growing.

Gilles Simeoni, the head of the Corsican unified government, is trying to harness a volcano but also risks being destroyed by it. The violent unrest has brought the Macron government back to the table but Simeoni’s vision of a kind of Scottish or Catalan devolved status for Corsica could be swept away by an explosion of more extreme, nationalist feeling.

Simeoni said this week: “We need a political process at the highest possible level. When a logic of serious confrontation begins, as we have seen with young people (in Bastia), a grave incident could happen at any moment. We are not immune from a generalised revolt.”

Nothing much can happen before the French election is over on 24 April. Macron is heavily distracted by the campaign and by the Ukraine war. The talks, if they begin, will take months. The secular French state is praying that its former Public Enemy Number One will now do a great service to the state that he detests. All he needs to do is to carry on living.

Street protests in the city have just entered their third week, with tens of thousands gathering on Saturday for a march reported to be the biggest so far. Sparked by the removal of the regional governor, apparently on the Kremlin’s orders, the protests have grown into one of the most sustained regional challenges to the centre for many years. Placards and chants now combine support for the ousted governor, Sergei Furgal, with calls for Putin to resign: “Twenty years in power and we don’t trust you,” they say; “Russia without Putin”, “We are the power here!”

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Small protests outside Moscow are not particularly unusual. What is unusual is that these have been so big and continued for so long. Still more unusual is that the local police have stood calmly by, doing nothing more disruptive than distributing anti-Covid masks and accepting the thanks of the marchers.

The demonstrations began on 11 July, two days after the governor’s arrest and summary transfer to a Moscow prison on charges of contract killings that date back more than 15 years. Initially, the protesters were simply demanding that he be freed or allowed to stand trial in Khabarovsk. Ten days later the protests gained new momentum, after Putin appointed a new interim governor, an MP from the Volga region, with no ties at all to the Far East.

Why Sergei Furgal was removed precisely when he was is not clear, but the political charge sheet against him could be long, and he has enemies, local and national. Back in 2018, he had dared to stand for the governorship of the Khabarovsk region against the Kremlin-approved incumbent. Worse, he had won by a landslide. Worst of all, he had then become popular, introducing changes – including televised government meetings, hot meals for schoolchildren, and auctioning off the previous administration’s yacht. Governors seen as competent who become popular in their own right are quite a rarity, so he would have been noticed.

It is possible that the Kremlin wanted to fire a warning shot across the bows of others hoping to emulate Khaborovsk’s brand of autonomy ahead of regional elections across Russia this autumn. The pro-Putin United Russia party fears that it could lose badly to the right-wing populist party — misleadingly called the Liberal Democrat Party. And, as it happens, this is the party that Furgal belongs to.

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A more immediate reason could have been the relative lack of enthusiasm shown by Khabarovsk voters at the recent, 1 July, constitutional referendum. The referendum was held to approve amendments, including one that would, in theory, allow Putin another two presidential terms, but both the turn-out and the Yes vote in Khabarovsk were among the lowest in the land. The Governor had clearly fallen down on the job — hence, perhaps, the revival of old criminal charges against him.

The use of criminal allegations for a political purpose is, of course, a standard part of the Kremlin playbook — as it was in Soviet times. The Kremlin’s response to the unrest in Khabarovsk, however, has not entirely followed the script. So far, at least, it has resisted dispatching its own “heavies” to make up for the lack of local police action. And while the replacement governor — 39 year-old Mikhail Degtyaryov — is not a local, he belongs to the same populist party as the ousted governor, which was a concession reportedly made by Putin against his chief political aide’s advice, in the hope of drawing the sting of the protests.

There are other indications that the Kremlin may be trying a more calculated, psychological, approach than its usual swift resort to head-bashing. Attempts to dissuade protesters have included warnings of a local upsurge in Covid infections and of a pending terrorist attack (neither of which, it appeared, had any foundation or any effect). The Russian government then announced a new subsidy for the region, to coincide with the new appointee’s arrival (which did not stop him being booed).

Moscow also accepted, uncharacteristically, that the protests were home-grown. Asked whether there was orchestration from abroad or associates of the ousted governor, the official Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov told reporters: “No, we are not talking about that.” He went on to say that the priority was for the local authorities to ensure the smooth running of services and insisted that Putin had no plans to visit.

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In all, this looks like a distinctly more hands-off approach to protests in the regions than Moscow has generally shown before. And this could make sense,  because while the Khabarovsk protests are unusual, they are also part of an emerging pattern. In recent years, some of the most effective — and perhaps threatening — opposition to Vladimir Putin has taken place not at national level, but over corruption and environmental issues that are essentially local.

Take some of the protests that have made a national mark in recent years. In 2010, there was huge and at times violent opposition to government plans to route the new Moscow-St Petersburg highway through the Khimki forest outside Moscow. The then President, Dmitry Medvedev, eventually halted construction and the road was diverted away from the forest. There were also protests in the Far East over tariffs on imported second-hand Japanese cars.

In 2017, there were protests in more than 30 regions against the illegal dumping of waste. Opposition flared up again last year over plans for a vast new waste processing plant in pristine peatland three hours’ drive to the east of Moscow. The protests were routinely broken up by riot police, but this  particular project was eventually abandoned, although other such facilities have gone ahead.

In spring last year the city of Yekaterinburg in the Urals was the scene of huge protests against plans by the Orthodox Church to build a cathedral on a city park. So fierce were the confrontations that Putin eventually took it upon himself to mediate and instructed the city to take a poll of local opinion. The result went decisively against the church hierarchy, which agreed to find another site.

In some ways, the anti-corruption campaigner, Aleksei Navalnyy, stole a march on the Kremlin more than a decade ago by anticipating the trend for local activism. Not only was he a pioneer of political mobilisation via the internet and social media, but he eschewed the capital to establish a network of local offices in friendlier places — including the old Siberian university city of Tomsk. These became hubs for collecting information on local complaints of corruption, which then fed into his national campaign. Over the years, the Kremlin has clipped Navalny’s wings, but the methods he adopted have influenced the conduct of Russian politics, and maybe that influence is now reaching the very top.

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In his first two terms as President, 2000 to 2008, Putin had two priorities. One was to bring order to the financial chaos he had inherited from his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Salaries and pensions were not being paid; and inflation had devoured the earnings of professionals. The other was to keep the Russian Federation together. Scarred by memories of the Soviet collapse, there were widespread fears that Russia would be next. Preventing the break-up of Russia involved concessions to the largely Muslim republic of Tatarstan and is also what the two Chechen wars (1994-6 and 1999-2003) were all about.

Once Chechnya had been mercilessly bombed into semi-submission, Putin had to find a way of governing Russia’s vast expanse without the single-party structures of the Soviet era. His answer was to try to build what he called a “vertikal”, or pyramid, of power that would streamline administration nationally and develop levers that really worked.

Many commentators saw Putin’s “vertikal” as evidence of his autocratic, even dictatorial, ambitions. How effective it ever became, however, is questionable. After his four years as prime minister (2008 – 2012) and extensive travel around the regions, Putin lamented how difficult it still was to get the levers of power to work. In practice, many regions were often a law unto themselves. As the Russian proverb has it, “God is high above and the Tsar is far away”. With their chants of “We are the power here”, the Khabarovsk protesters clearly share some of that mentality.

More recently, however, and especially since his re-election in 2018, talk of Putin’s “vertikal of power” has been far less in evidence. Nor is it just in relation to the Khabarovsk protests that the Kremlin seems so far to be taking, or trying to take, a more cautious approach. From the start, Putin’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic has had much more in common with the approaches of more federally organised countries than is usual for Russia. Authority for deciding such matters as quarantine and lockdowns has been assigned to regional governors and city mayors, as has the building of “instant” hospitals.

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Cynics might argue that Putin was deliberately taking a back seat, to avoid the blame if catastrophe ensued. In fact, though — while the figures can be contested — Russia has not done so badly by international comparisons. Its death rate per million of the population stands at 89, which is well down the global table — far below the UK (685), much of western Europe and the United States. There is another possible straw in the wind, too. While the headline from Russia’s constitutional referendum was about Putin being able to extend his presidency, other changes include greater authority for parliament, the Duma, vis a vis the executive, which could be interpreted as part of a wider move to devolve some power from the Kremlin.

The potential for much greater decentralisation is there. Russia has 85 regions headed by governors or an equivalent and the extent of their authority does not depend only on the Kremlin, it also depends on the state of the local economy, how dependent it is on largesse from the centre and on how much authority the governor can exert in relation to other powerful local interests. Observation and anecdote suggest that Russia’s second and third tier cities have become more prosperous in recent years, with families moving from Moscow to enjoy a better quality of life elsewhere. Greater regional confidence may be one factor underlying the defiance towards Moscow being shown in Khabarovsk. Others have suggested it is proximity to China and disappointment with the relatively slow pace of development on Russia’s side of the border.

It is quite possible that, if the Khabarovsk protests continue, the Kremlin will revert to its old ways. But if what is happening is the start of some re-thinking in Moscow about decentralisation, then these could be interesting times. Change direction too quickly, and there could be a real risk of dislocation, such as resulted from the destructive regionalism and protectionism that accompanied the Soviet Union’s collapse. On the other hand, if Putin were to give up on the “vertikal of power” and accept more give and take with the regions, that could just be the key to making Russia governable as a modern state — not just for what remains of Putin’s presidency, but beyond.

Among these are our attitudes towards borders. Within the EU the concept of ‘ever closer union’ was already faltering. The Schengen agreement has been falling apart, support for ‘Fortress Europe’ growing, and within that fortress, the nation states have become separate bastions.

A virus may not respect borders, but populist politics certainly does, and proponents understand the primal instinct in the  concept of ‘ love of one’s own’ in a wider setting than extended family. Take Nicola Sturgeon’s recent hint at a sovereign Scotland:

“I don’t have the power to close borders, but… if the UK Government took decisions that I thought were premature in terms of coming out of the lockdown, then clearly I would want to make sure that Scotland did what I judged was best to protect the population.”

Sturgeon is more articulate than President Trump, but the sentiment here is not so far from his boorish pronouncements on closing borders to save American lives.

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Everywhere we have seen nations retreating into their castles. More than 80 countries have banned or limited the export of PPE, ventilators and drugs. 72 are WTO members, dedicated to open trade, but only 13 bothered to inform the organisation of their decisions despite it being a requirement. The US invoked a law from the 1950s to order the 3M company to stop supplying protective masks to Canada and Latin America. Germany complained when a shipment of masks it had ordered from an American company was seized at Bangkok airport and flown to the US. France ignored calls from the EU to lift its export ban on some drugs despite being told it was causing shortages elsewhere in the Single Market. The phrase ‘sauve qui peut’ which roughly means ‘every man for himself’ appears to be easily translated into every language.

Within the EU, member states have responded to a pan-national pandemic at a national level. The ‘community’ is an afterthought. At the height of the emergency in northern Italy, the government in Rome made a desperate appeal to the EU for help — especially for supplies of PPE. However, the other member states failed to agree on triggering the EU’s Civil Protection Mechanism. Italy cried ‘betrayal’, causing Germany and a few others to step in — but, again, on their own national initiative. Noticing what was going on, China and Russia staged their own ‘soft power’ interventions, flying in emergency supplies (albeit of substandard material). A subsequent poll found that 88% of Italians believed that the “EU is not helping us”.

There’s also the issue of financial help. The richer northern members of the Eurozone are blocking the ‘Coronabonds’ that the poorer southern states say they need to fund the recovery. Instead, Brussels has offered cash from the European Stability Mechanism, but that comes with humiliating restrictions on how it can be spent. The Dutch have added to the resentment by asking why the southern states don’t have stronger economic policies.

The EU has now endorsed a roadmap out of the lockdown, but not before each country had already announced its own unilateral plans. In Germany, this extends down to the federal level, with the country’s component Länder (states) making their own decisions — there are shades of ‘Make Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Great Again’ and ‘Bavaria First’.

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All of this is consistent with a resurgent tide of nationalism and separatism. In fact, the idea of the nation never actually went out of fashion. It was just said to have done so by a highly educated class that wished it to be true. At a popular level nationalism is alive and kicking, and when it comes to the crunch, national governments join in — kicking hard. The current crisis provides ample evidence, but there are other recent examples — such as the risible response to the German plan to distribute migrants and refugees across the Union in 2016.

Human beings are inherently tribal. A tribe is the extended family writ large, and the nation state is the modern embodiment of a mega tribe. The story of civilisation is one of drawing upon this instinct in order to cooperate and share resources at an ever-higher level — from family to tribe, from tribe to nation. But can we go higher still — from nation to regional union and even to truly global governance?

In modern times we have made some progress in this direction — think of foreign aid, scientific co-operation and the United Nations. Such internationalism has all sorts of motivations, but are these working with or against the grain of our tribal instincts? Historians tell us the nation state is a modern concept, but while this may be true, we have always had borders, and they are the geographic building blocks of the state. You could abolish them overnight, but the first time a trawler from Norway appeared in the sea off Grimsby, a delegation would be sent to explain how far away it had to go before it could begin to fish. The emotion is primal, and in times of crisis it strengthens.

Looking at the EU response to the current crisis, there are (beyond the institutional failures) some examples of Europe coming together as a huge extended family. For instance, Germany took in dozens of critically ill patients when the Italian and French health systems began to be overwhelmed. Realistically though, these are isolated incidents in the sea of Sauve Qui Peut.

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The sharing side of human nature comes under massive strain when, at certain times, and at certain levels, we believe there is not enough to go around. As soon as it becomes a matter of life or death, our tribal instinct, and the related politics, kicks in. In such circumstances, which government is going to announce that it is giving a different tribe the very things its own people believe they need to survive?

Our instincts, while basic, aren’t always base. It’s entirely natural that we should seek to serve and protect what is most familiar to us. This is why individuals who were living and working in other countries rushed to get home as the virus spread around the world. It wasn’t only to be with close family at a time of crisis, but to be with their own tribe and tribal systems.

These feelings will be with us for some time. Thinking of a holiday in the window between the probable first and second waves? If so, I doubt you’re considering a cruise, the Trans-Siberian express, Goa, Lombardy or Hubei province. Almost certainly, your plans will factor in distance from home and hospital.

This goes well beyond tourism, of course. Across western Europe, hundreds of thousands of workers from countries like Bulgaria and Romania have left to go home, adding to existing unemployment issues there. With no clear date for a possible return this will accentuate the huge economic gulf between different parts of the European Union.

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But there are even bigger inequalities between the EU and adjacent regions — and these too will be accentuated by the pandemic. Take the Sahel states. Already wracked by conflict, poverty, and drought, they are not only horribly positioned to deal with immediate threat, but will be less able to recover in the longer term. This will fuel the movement of peoples at a time when the destination countries will have high unemployment — thus putting further pressure on governments to take a hard line and close their borders ever tighter.

It is not just the openness of borders that is at stake, but also where they’re drawn. A recent Pew poll found that majorities in many countries do not support the status quo. For example, asked ‘are there parts of neighbouring countries that belong to your country?’ 58% of Turks and Bulgarians said yes, as did 60% of Greeks, 67% of Hungarians, and 53% of Russians. In recent years we’ve already seen borders change — de facto, if not de jure — in Ukraine, Georgia and Kosovo. The latter is discussing land swaps with Serbia, which, if implemented, could enflame irredentism elsewhere. Meanwhile separatist tensions continue in countries across the Continent. The economic stresses that followed the last great recession played their part in propelling the independence movement in Catalonia, for instance. The looming Covid recession (or depression) is likely to do the same.

Like the Spanish Flu of a different age, the current pandemic won’t change the direction of history, but it will speed it up. Given the already established trend towards nationalism, this should give us cause for concern.

We need to make the most of the positives — especially the international cooperation among the scientists and medics working to beat these diseases. Yet, at the same time, we can hardly deny the evidence of nations retreating behind their castle walls.

Borders really matter to people right now — which means they will become harder, but also, and for the same reason, more brittle.

They are offset by free university places for many Scots students, free prescriptions and free home care for those assessed as requiring it. But these are now straining the budget. The Scots Auditor General judged the nation’s health as “poor” and the free university places have the perverse effect of helping those students who need help least — from middle class and well-to-do families — more than the poor.

The book would be — is — not long, at a little over 200 pages; and dislike of the nationalists’ determination to destroy the United Kingdom — my country — was warm enough to propel me through the weeks and months of writing.

I had not counted on the intervention of emotion. Grappling with the evident desire of fellow Scots — near half — to leave the UK, was to open the mind to occasional doubt prompted by nationalists’ claims which, at times, seemed rational. It was to discover that most English said they would regret Scotland going — but were clearly not deeply concerned by it. Scotland weighs upon the English mind much, much less than vice versa. Naturally.

There was even a small voice, in the mish-mash of thoughts and plans, which whispered: “traitor!”. So powerful has been nationalist propaganda, and so enclosed in Scottishness was my upbringing (as most others of my generation) that to take a hostile stance to those who spoke in Scotland’s name was to occasionally make me look at myself askance. It passed, however.

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Most of all, the exercise let loose a hundred tributaries of memory. Growing up in the fifties and sixties in a small fishing town — Anstruther, on the East Fife coast — was to live among competing shards of “Scottishness” and “Englishness”, which partly structured the young lives of my generation.

“Americanness” was in there too, coming out of the juke box in Eddie Clarke’s café, where the upper streams of the local comprehensive went after school, to buy cigarettes in ones and twos and blow the smoke down a straw into the Coke, in the hope that, as one of our number maintained, you could get high on the resulting mixture.

This was no nationalist enclave. East Fife had been Liberal in the late nineteenth century, though the MPs badged themselves “Liberal Unionist” in the early twentieth. When it passed to the Conservatives, they too put “Unionist” in their election literature, to underscore their support for the Crown, and for Northern Ireland. Distrust of Catholicism was strong, in these Presbyterian and nonconformist fishing towns.

The Liberal party came back in 1987, in the form of Menzies Campbell — who held it till his retirement in 2015, when it was taken by the nationalists. Stephen Gethins was a bright, diligent politician, who had a 4000-plus majority in 2015; and in 2017, hung on with a majority of two: the most marginal in Britain. In December, he lost, Wendy Chamberlain taking it back for the Liberal Democrats with a majority of over 1300.

It was the only seat the Nationalists lost in 2019, and the shame of it was that Gethins was one of the party’s better MPs. But the area, it seemed to me from conversations there, had been only reluctantly nationalist, upset by the constant calls for a second referendum, tending still to the Union. It didn’t take to Boris Johnson, and saw the unflashy Liberals, and the former police officer Chamberlain, as more expressive of its own political nature.

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The secondary school in Anstruther took in children from the other small towns on the East Fife Coast, and inland. A comprehensive before the great expansion of such schools — the area was too thinly populated to have a separate grammar and a secondary modern — it was strictly streamed according to performance in the 11+ exam, from ‘A’ through B C D and E to ‘PR’ (for practical). Its headmaster strove to stress the distinctions: ‘A’ stream boys played rugby, others football: ‘A’ stream boys and girls came in to Anstruther by train, others by bus. Class distinctions were small in a little town where hard, sometimes perilous, manual work provided its main living; but the headmaster, when I was at school, was diligent in creating as much of an elite as the traffic would bear.

Most of the boys went to the fishing, or farming, and left at 15; those of us who remained, with King Lear and trigonometry, produced the ten or so who went to universities. A group of us, all boys, took to speaking cod-Shakespeare – “I trust I see your grace in good health?” When passing the school garden, whose care was the work of the PR class, we might say – “Fie upon it, fie: ‘tis an unweeded garden, that grows to seed”.

Some of the kids from the thin layer of professionals — lawyers, bankers, doctors — went private; a few came to our school, but it was overwhelmingly working and lower middle class. Of my Shakespearean comrades, one had a father often unwell, a mother who worked on the telephone switchboard; the other from a family of the strict Plymouth Brethren sect (thus forbidden from watching or even listening to the plays he loved, and from which he could quote long passages), whose father was a carpenter.

My mother — she had left my (English) father before my birth — was a beautician, whose beauty parlour was in the back room of my grandparents’ house, where we lived, which bloomed into a small shop. We all spoke Scots at home and in the street, but for we intellectuals, it was already thinning out, confined to such as cannae and winnae and dinnae (can’t, won’t, don’t). We knew we were going to speak “proper” English. The Scots we often put in virtual inverted commas to show our superiority, as over the wise saws of common sense — as whit’s fur ye’ll no’ gang past ye or monny a mickle maks a muckle. Unsurprisingly, we were  widely thought to be pains in the neck and, in the way of Scots villages, told so.

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Does Scotland resent the Royals?

By Euan McColm

My grandfather, a retired merchant seaman who had served on one of the great imperial lines, was strongly Conservative-imperialist — but scornful of the English, seeing his apprenticeship in the Clyde shipyards before his merchant service as an entry into the very heart — lost — of Scots craft excellence: “mair ships built in a year,” he would say, accurately, “than the rest o’ the world combined!” This was craft pride seamlessly joined to Scots pride: quite separate from any nationalism, which he saw as demented (as did most Scots, then).

There were two outstanding exceptions. One was James Braid, the long-serving provost (mayor) of St Monans, along the coast from Anstruther, who was an enthusiastic member of the SNP, main organiser of the annual celebration at Bannockburn: he was mocked, but popular — in large part because of his conscientiousness as provost. When he stood, as he did often, in the general election on the nationalist ticket, he got a good show, usually third behind the Tories and the Liberals, in front of the Labour Party (a young John Smith, later Labour leader, stood in 1961 and ’64, coming a good second in the latter).

The novelist Eric Linklater also stood in the constituency, in 1933, as a nationalist: he got 1083 votes, 3.6% of the total: but more rewardingly used the experience for a comic novel, Magnus Merriman, whose chaotic campaign in somewhere looking like East Fife ends in all but total rejection at the hands of the hard-headed, straight-speaking locals.

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The other was a teacher of English at our school, named Alastair Mackie. He was a poet, writing mostly in Scots, in the tradition of the largest figure in Scots literature in the twentieth century, Hugh MacDiarmid — one who gave his hobby in Who’s Who as “Anglophobia”, and in his verse, articles and interviews missed no opportunity to express his detestation of the southern neighbours.

I think Mackie was better: none of MacDiarmid’s straining to use his art to push Scots into a hatred of the English, nor his artificial dialect, culled from every region of the country, which no-one spoke and Scots speakers needed a dictionary to read. He was, though, a private man with a family to support through his teaching: his poems were published in small editions — until, after his death, one of the Shakespeareans close to him, and I, paid for a collected edition of his lucid, memorable work. He, too, had little time for the English: but was too intelligent to let it become an obsession, and much too intelligent to follow MacDiarmid down his love of dictators, Mussolini and Lenin.

The power (and treacheries) of memory slowed me up, took me down half-forgotten or never-trodden paths. It was a youth passed among people unselfconsciously secure of their Scottishness, sarcastic about the English (often presented as posh and snobbish) — but also uncontroversially British, and still, even after empire and the might of the Clyde, at times proud of being so.

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: the Great Mistake of Scottish Independence is published by Polity in April.

What should be discussed, urgently, is how Spain’s rich north-easterly province of 7.5 million people has long been a hub for radical Islamism, and how this relates to the secessionist movement and security in all would-be small states such as Belgium or Scotland.

Catalonia is home to half-a-million Muslims, more than a quarter of Spain’s total, many of them originally drawn to work in the region’s agricultural south-west, around Tarragona.  Many Muslims in northern Europe also regularly transit the region on their return visits to North Africa. Barcelona alone is home to 60,000 Pakistanis.

A quarter of those arrested in Spain between 2013 and 2017 for terrorism offences came from Barcelona or its surroundings, a figure that rises to 37.5% in the case of people jailed for jihadist crimes between 2004 and 2012[1.  Giulia Paravicini ‘Barcelona’s strong ties to radical Islam’ Politico.eu 18 August 2017].

‘THE THREAT IS CLEAR’ (2007)

This is no surprise.

Take this (Wiki)-leaked October 2007 diplomatic cable from the then US ambassador to Spain, Eduardo Aguirre:

“Heavy immigration – both legal and illegal – from North Africa and Southeast Asia has made Catalonia a magnet for terrorist recruiters… the threat is clear… the autonomous region of Catalonia has become a prime base of operations for terrorist activity. Spanish authorities tell us they fear the threat from these atomized immigrant communities prone to radicalism, but they have very little intelligence or ability to penetrate these groups.”[2.  Soeren Kern ‘The Islamic Republic of Catalonia’, Gatestone Institute, 12 October 2012 for text of the cable.]

Catalonia has a quarter of Salafist mosques in Spain, meaning the archaic Islam practiced in and propagated by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, as noted by Spain’s National Center for Intelligence in 2011. The Saudis are financing a mega mosque in Salt for the town’s 12,000 worshippers. The Qataris are going one better by converting a defunct Barcelona bullring – La Monumental – into the world’s third largest mosque after Mecca and Medina[3.  Ignacio Cembrero ‘El CNI alerta de que Seis Paises Musulmanes Financianal Islamismo’ El Pais 31 July 2011].

In reality, most Salafist mosques are modest affairs, in basements or garages, and the sect’s dominance is often achieved through attrition and intimidation against the moderate imams that these zealots routinely defenestrate.

HISBA AND AL-ANDALUS

Wherever there is Salafism, there are invariably attempts to chill normal life, rather in the way that a draught under a door or window makes sitting in a room unpleasant. This is called ‘hisba’ meaning the self-arrogated right to command right and forbid wrong behaviour. The stern enforcers are often marginalised young men whose status is boosted by becoming self-appointed arbiters of public morality.

It means harassing non-Muslim children from bringing ham sandwiches to school, encouraging men to beat their disobedient wives, forcing girls to wear the hijab, kebab shop owners to refrain from selling beer, and in the case of Lleida, allegedly poisoning dozens of dogs on the grounds they are ‘unclean’.

All the better if the Salafist historical narrative also transforms its pious devotees into warriors engaged in the re-conquest of Al-Andalus, meaning the medieval Muslim caliphate that ruled Spain from 711 to 1492, even if Catalan experience of this was for less than a century (which is why the region lacks Islamic architecture) [4.  Lorenzo Vidonio ‘A Case Study: Catalonia’ in his Hisba in Europe? Assessing a Murky Phenomenon (European Foundation for Democracy 2013) pp. 45ff.].

SECESSION AND SECURITY

We should also note a connection between Islamist activity and Catalonia’s drive to independence, which on 1^st October will be tested in an illegal referendum on secession from Spain.

As we saw in the case of Belgium, small states are inexpert in dealing with Islamist terrorism, partly because they are often riven with distracting inter-linguistic conflicts, like those between Flemings and Walloons, which result in hopeless decentralisation of the police and intelligence services.

Spain actually has extremely capable national counter-terrorist forces, which practice early intervention in conspiracies, and due to experience of Basque Eta terrorism, it also knows how to deal with the dangerous by dispersing them through its prisons. The same cannot be said for Catalonia’s Mossos d’Esquadra, the regional police force, whose main current preoccupation is what role they will perform in the illegal referendum.

Pro-independence Catalan parties have long promoted immigration from Arabic-speaking countries on the grounds that (unlike Spanish-speaking Ecuadoreans or Peruvians) these immigrants would automatically learn Catalan rather than Spanish, use of the regional language being integral to Catalan identity and future citizenship. This goes along with the usual flim-flam advertising Barcelona’s diversity or its role in an alleged Mediterranean multicultural society.  The Convergence and Union Party endeavored to scoop up a hundred thousand Muslim votes by saying that they would then license the Barcelona mosque in the bullring (the regional authorities having already banned bullfighting in 2012 to distinguish Catalonia from Spain)[5.  Soeren Kern ‘Catalonia to Muslims: Support Independence, Get Mega-Mosque’ Gatestone Institute 7 August 2014].

One curious effect of this has been a remarkable number of converts to Islam among radical Catalan separatists. That includes two out of every ten members of the extreme Republican Left of Catalonia, which nowadays is part of Catalonia’s ruling coalition. “I’m learning Arabic, but I prefer to read the Koran in Catalan. I praise God in Catalan. It is the language I feel in,” said one such convert. Ditching Christmas, dancing the Sardana, and refusing to eat pork are small sacrifices as the far left and radical Islamists coalesce.

AND FINALLY ISIS

Until Friday, the (Spanish) authorities have managed to thwart major attacks, notably one in 2008 when ten Pakistanis were prevented from replicating the 2004 bombing of Madrid’s Atocha station which left 192 dead and over two thousand wounded in Europe’s worst terrorist atrocity. Their target was Barcelona’s metro system.

On Friday, the Catalans were not so lucky, since hiring a few vans to cause havoc does not leave much of a logistical trail, though a bomb factory in Alcanar should have done. The intent seems to have been to transform a hundred butane gas cylinders into a vehicle-borne bomb, with Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia as the target. By a fluke, the would-be bombers blew themselves up mishandling the explosives involved.

One obvious by-product of the crushing of the physical ISIS caliphate in Iraq and Syria will be compensatory terror strikes, not just in Europe or the US, but in Iran, China, Russia and many more places besides, as jihadists with combat credibility drift homewards. At the very least, the political authorities have a duty to ensure that nothing about the host culture conspires to provide a mulch in which these evil weeds can thrive. Though one is not optimistic looking at Catalonia.