Robert Burns’ Scots Wha Hae (1793) is perhaps the greatest ode to freedom ever written. It purports to be in the form of a speech by King of the Scots Robert the Bruce before the Battle of Bannockburn (1314), at which the forces of the Scottish monarch successfully repelled the invading army of King Edward II of England and helped secure Scotland’s medieval independence.
Obviously, for nationalist Scots, the symbolism of the Battle of Bannockburn is overwhelming and has shaped the object of their politics – the recovery of Scottish independence.
But there’s no suggestion that at the time of writing the song, Burns’ was making a call for Scottish independence or secession from Great Britain. (Some Unionist Scots suggest Burns saw no contradiction between being a patriotic Scot and a patriotic Briton). After the political union of England and Scotland in 1707, there was no agitation for greater Scottish autonomy until the middle of the nineteenth century, when a Home Rule movement began to develop north of the border.
It’s fairer to say that it wasn’t Scottish nationalism that informed Burns’ lyrics but a radical universalist egalitarianism shaped by the Enlightenment and the French and American revolutions.
Christopher Hitchens also points to the influence on Burns of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, as reflected especially in Burns’ poems The Tree of Liberty and, perhaps Burns’ most notable poem, A Man’s a Man for a’ that – both, Hitchens says, repudiations of the monarchy and the hereditary principle in general and calls for radical social justice:
Heard ye o’ the tree o’ France
I watna what’s the name o’t
Around it a’ the patriots dance
Weel Europe kens the fame o’t.
It stand where once the Bastille stood
A prison built by kings, man
When Superstition’s hellish brood
Kept France in leading-strings, man.
(The Tree of Liberty)
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp
The man’s the gold for a’that
(A Man’s a Man for a’that)
However, while it makes no sense to refer to Burns as a Scottish nationalist, his internationalism and egalitarianism is precisely the strain in Scottish culture and politics that the SNP now says it represents.
Indeed, the SNP argues that these precious Scottish values are being undermined by Scotland being tied to a Westminster government that has as its heart a Little England political philosophy – epitomised by Brexit – and an ideological commitment to neo-liberalism, which subordinates equality to free markets and cares little for narrowing social division. The only way for Scotland to realise the ideals Burns embodies, the SNP says, is by becoming independent.
In the video above, that is the American poet Maya Angelou whooping and cheering at the end of Dick Gaughan’s rendition of Burns’ song.
Angelou frequently spoke of the importance of Burns to her poetry.
‘I fell in love with poetry and, amazingly, in a small village, a hamlet in Arkansas, I met Robert Burns. He was the first white man I read who seemed to understand that a human being was a human being, and we are more alike than unalike.’