WILLIAM Ewart Gladstone, the centenary of whose death is celebrated this week, would have had more than a passing interest in events across the North Channel. Arguably Britain's greatest Prime Minister of the nineteenth century, Gladstone, too, wrestled with the vexed question of Irish Home Rule, ultimately without success.
Gladstone was born in Liverpool in 1809. His father, John, was originally from Leith, the port of Edinburgh, and his mother, Ann McKenzie Robertson, was from Dingwall. As Roy Jenkins points out in his excellent biography, ''his blood made him the most Scottish of all Prime Ministers, with the possible exception of Ramsay MacDonald''.
John Gladstone had moved from Leith to Liverpool in 1787 where he thrived as a successful merchant amassing a fortune, much of which was made from the West Indian slave trade. Not unusually for a son of merchant wealth, William, aged 11, went to Eton and later from there to Christ Church, Oxford. It was the quintessen-
tially upper-class English education designed to produce ah gentleman.
In 1860, after Gladstone's Budget of that year, Walter Bagehot, the prototype lobby journalist and founder of the Economist, recorded this description of him: ''Ah, Oxford on the surface, but Liverpool below.'' He might also have noted that Gladstone's roots were Scottish and that the amalgam of his background and education was profoundly British.
This Britishness was also reflected in the constituencies Gladstone represented during his 62 years and six months of
parliamentary service.
First elected in 1832, at the age of 22, for Newark, he went on to represent Oxford University, South Lancashire, Greenwich, and Mid Lothian. Gladstone's Britishness was not a construct but a
simple fact of life.
Gladstone saw himself and the Liberal Party as representatives of the country as a whole, not the metropolitan centre.
And it was this sense of the whole nation, in which Ireland should be rightfully and fully included, which propelled Gladstone in the cause of Irish Home Rule. Gladstone saw Home Rule as not just necessary because it was the settled will of the Irish people, but because it would be good for the nation as whole. He wished to include Ireland as a full partner in the nation - just as much as England and Scotland.
In summing up his speech at the First Reading of the Home Rule Bill of 1886, he said: ''I ask that we should apply to Ireland that happy experience which we have gained in England and Scotland, where the course of generations has now taught us, not as a dream or a theory, but as practice and as life, that the best and surest foundation we can find to build upon is the foundation afforded by the affections, the convictions, and the will of the nation.'' Ireland was never to be included in the nation and Gladstone's great attempts at Home Rule ended in failure - but there is little doubt about his sense of the British nation and Britishness which was not a dream but life.
Now it is the English, Scottish, or Welsh sense of identity that has come to the fore. The constitutional changes which the present Government has set in train, particularly the creation of a Scottish Parliament, will hasten the demise of Britishness.
As Scots look more towards their own Parliament, it will merely enhance the already blossoming sense of a separate Scottish identity and make Britishness seem a mere construct out of place and
out of date. Two recent events signal the demise of Britishness. First, the polls which testify beyond doubt the birth of the Scottish voter and with it increasing support for the SNP. The surprising thing about this development is not that it is a reaction to the deeds or misdeeds of the Labour Government but, on the poll evidence available, actually pre-dates the winning of the referendum in September last year. For in August 1997 an NOP poll for the Sunday Times showed Labour and the SNP running neck and neck - at 39% and 38% respectively - in elections for a
Scottish Parliament.
Just days before the referendum and three months after Labour's victory in the General Election, the separate Scottish voter had already come into being.
Meanwhile, in the House of Commons, during the report stage of the Scotland Bill, Kenneth Clarke made a speech which recognised the demise of Britishness from the Westminster perspective.
Addressing the insoluble West Lothian question, Mr Clarke argued that it was inevitable that in future Scottish MPs (shadow MPs as he described them) would have to be excluded from voting on English and Welsh measures. He said that his constituents would find it intolerable that Scottish MPs should be able to determine the future of English education, health, etc - and that such a situation would not be allowed to continue.
What better example of the demise of Britishness than these poor shadow Scottish MPs wandering around the British Parliament with little or nothing to do? Britishness gone, Britain being tugged apart by Westminster and Holyrood.
The strange thing about the essentially British Gladstone, given his own political progress from Conservative to Liberal and his commitment to principle over party advantage - as witnessed by his stand on the Corn Laws and Irish Home Rule - is that he would probably be at the vanguard of the present break-up of Britain.
n Noel Dolan is a Scottish journalist who worked as BBC Scotland's political producer in Westminster for seven years before moving back to Scotland and to Scottish Television to produce its General Election and referendum coverage.
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