Alex's army on the march

vote: people do. Even the most ardent Nationalist would, then, be unwise to dance in the streets, high as the SNP at present soars in surveys of Scots' voting intentions.

Yet, last week, this paper's monthly System Three survey put the Nationalists at their highest level, 41%, now ahead of Labour for the first time and - on such a vote - clear to become the largest party in Scotland's Parliament. Pundits are beside themselves with excitement; teeth gnash and grind at Keir Hardie House; shivers run along the Government front bench, seeking spines to run up. And Nationalists, of course, from Alex Salmond down, at present grin like slices of melon.

One can be forgiven for enjoying the situation. The Government has completed its first tedious year in office. The politics of ideology is out; managerial, grey-suited politics is in. All the tension and excitement of old-style Westminster are gone. There are no issues of moment, no chasms of policy or vision between the parties. The

Liberal Democrats are half in bed with the Government. The Tories are a

rabble and Willie Hague, like Michael Foot 15 years ago, is perilously close to the status of a national joke.

In Scotland things are different. Something strange builds this side of Hadrian's Wall. The Government flounders. There are blunders, embarrassments, mistakes. Tony Blair's magic casts little spell on Scots. And, the

nearer our Parliament looms, the more distinctly Scottish our politics becomes; the more Scots play with notions of independence, of voting SNP.

A note of caution is wise. It is all very well to ask the citizenry how they would vote in a Scottish election tomorrow; but there ain't going to be one, and few have yet seriously applied their minds to parties, manifestos, pledges, and principles. Besides, the history of politics is littered with parties that won glittering promise in opinion polls only - come the day - to spiral into the sea.

In December 1981 the SDP/Liberal Alliance stood at vertiginous heights in surveys of opinion. In the spring of 1977 the Nationalists were backed by some 37% of Scots. In the 1992 election campaign - but, tush; Labour has sufficient woes, without reviving old ones. One should not intrude into

private grief.

These and other recollections remind us that mid-term opinion polls are but beauty contests, bearing little relation to final outcome or political reality. And political reality, for the Nationalists, is most difficult. In Labour the SNP faces a formidable, entrenched opponent, with a massive base of support and a Scottish network of local government domination, a white-collar establishment in Scotland's public sector - there a headteacher, here a director of social work - and mighty, personal, dearly defended interests.

Labour, in Scotland, is a bastion; a fellowship; an establishment; and, for many, a veritable religion. Through Scotland, decade upon decade, many tens of thousands of people vote, and have always voted, Labour, without thought for policy or regard for personal interest, but rather as a mystical act of working-class self-validation. The Nationalists for years have fought this irrationality, in Bathgate and Hailes, in Cumbernauld and East Kilbride - to little avail. The walls of Jericho stand still.

Salmond knows this and, rightly, he seeks to dampen enthusiasm and to crash hard on any notes of SNP triumphalism or complacency. Too many people in Scotland have too much to lose if their Labour network loses its grip. Come the election, a handful of SNP MPs, a local council or three, and a modest Nationalist campaign budget are facing the battle of their lives, without - yet - the backing of any significant Scots newspaper or any Scottish institution of importance. To attain a vote of 30% would be a remarkable achievement, on the day; to emerge as a party of Scottish government, first crack of the whip, would be miraculous.

Yet the times they are a-changing. And to what may we credit the present Nationalist advance? I suppose, for one, the SNP has changed in itself. It is not the rather scary coalition of powerful - not to say eccentric - personalities that made things so exciting in the seventies. Douglas Henderson, Douglas Crawford, and Margo McDonald no longer kick ass on TV or rouse Nationalist gatherings to

passionate levels.

The SNP, these days, looks moderate. It has shifted markedly to the left; the tweedy days of Tartan Toryism are but memory. You do not see the appalling infighting of the eighties, nor the media marginalisation Nationalism endured between the 1979 debacle and the Govan by-election of 1988.

Most of all, perhaps, people are used to the SNP. The novelty of 30 years ago has passed. It is part of the accepted order of things. Its prominent personalities are pleasant, witty, competent people; their eyes do not blaze with hints of claymores in the thatch. Apart from defence (the Nationalists would take us out of Nato) and nuclear power (the SNP hates it), one cannot think of any strong reason of policy that might put voters off Alex and his army.

But there is also this brand X: this mysterious ''Scottishness'' of which scribes write in wonder. Here, I think, there are many components, of which perhaps the most significant is the sheer passage of time: the passing of generations, the shifting of viewpoint. Why was the Union of 1707? (I am well aware that most Scots opposed it, but the ruling elite of the day was ardently for it.) It had a powerful religious motivation. Scotland was vigorously Protestant, and after decades of strife and despotism there was widespread dread of a Stuart restoration. But there was also the commercial motive of trade and empire. Great Britain offered world markets; colonies, opportunities over the globe.

Today Scots are secular - more superstitious than religious - and the empire is gone. Binding institutions, such as the monarchy, have lost much of their hold on our affections. Fewer and fewer Scots identify as British; remember the Second World War; keen for George VI, Churchill, and the empire.

We have seen great cultural change. Schools now teach Scottish history, of which little was taught before my generation. We have also felt the impact

of globalisation, and cross-cultural exchange; it affects even our diet, for Scots seem now as apt to dine on pizza, chow mein, chicken tikka masala, or donner kebab as on tea and stovies.

You have this new confidence in culture, and the arts: you have a developing Scottish identity in fiction, drama, popular music; you have a newly-

distinctive press, and distinctive broadcasting. We no longer rate standard English and received pronunciation as a superior ideal to our Gaelic and Scots and glottal stops and burring Rs; Scots sages these days do not, like David Hume, die repenting not their sins but their Scotticisms.

And in Europe we see little countries making a go of it and in Ireland, a near neighbour, we see a lively, young country progressing fast towards the 21st century, free and proud and vigorous, fast evolving from the languishing Popish bog of the fifties. It is this new awareness in Scotland, this confidence, on which Nationalism must build.

The concern must be, though, that underlying Nationalism is inevitably a darker, negative force - that old hatred for the old enemy. We deny it. We laugh about it. But it is still there, that smouldering resentment of England, seen at its worst - perhaps - on the stage of world football, where Scots would happily thole the loss of our own side to some banana republic as long as the English, whoever they were playing, had a really good gubbing.

Scots will be of age, as Margo McDonald once said, the day England win the World Cup and we say: ''So what?''