Any book which addresses itself to the subject of Scottish independence may just run the risk of being presumptuously branded with a tartan Hooch Aye image, and a limited circulation between the Tweed Valley and the Western Isles. But the reader should beware of premature assumptions. In the complex world of the Mind-benders things are seldom what they seem, and the social and political problems to which I direct the attention of my own people are already there in triplicate for similar agonising appraisal by sister races across the border, and indeed by those of our common culture and bloodstock, who have created great nations beyond the seas. Why should the Scots make their bid for independence during the death throes of an Empire, which they had served so well? Was it because they sensed, almost subconsciously, that in relinquishing its world role without a fight, the British parent unit had surrendered its own independence to international forces, which know no frontiers, — and because in the ultimate the nation of William Wallace and Robert Bums, of David Livingstone, Fletcher of Saltoun and Thomas Carlyle, was unwilling to exist ignominiously as the dependency of a dependency?
The point is made, I hope clearly, that sovereign independence is not a nasty little “separatist” ploy whereby we might wallow selfishly in the (illusory) riches of North Sea Oil, or erect a tartan curtain behind which to indulge an appetite for dogmatic assertiveness and parochial bickering. The concept is outward-looking. My countrymen are asked to accept that the Western World has a problem, a deep-seated and insidious problem, and that we the Scots, if we chose to exert ourselves, might just contribute towards the solving of it. There are penalties to be paid for bucking the System, and in touching upon these, we look from a novel viewpoint at some controversial aspects of world affairs.
