I don’t know how anyone familiar with Robert Burns’ life
and work can argue he would vote NO in the Referendum so I suppose it is a
tribute to his continuing potency that they even try.
There can be no doubt Burns was a man exercised by injustice
and oppression as well as a love of his country. As an internationalist he
engaged fully in the world around him. So Scotland’s current dilemma, where our
social democratic values are repeatedly thwarted by Governments we did not
elected would undoubtedly have compelled him to put pen to paper.
He reminds us in his poem ‘A parcel of rogues in a nation’
why the 1707 Act of Union was signed – to bail out a financial elite who had
squandered the nations assets on reckless and greedy misadventure – and why it
was so unpopular with the masses who suffered such appalling economic, social
and political ills as a consequence. Enraged at the ‘treachery’ of the Act and
furious, not with ‘the English’, but with the emergent mercantile classes in
Scotland who drew up its provisions he condemned them as ‘…a coward
few….hireling traitors….bought and sold for English gold’.
And as a supporter of the United Scotsmen as well as the
French and American revolutions Burns’ democratic sensibilities – dangerous to
openly advocate and inspired by Thomas Muir and Thomas Paine - ooze out of
every poem he wrote. Every audacious word decries those complacent,
reactionary, Scots who took privileges for granted and treated their fellow
countrymen and women with complete contempt and meted out severe punishment to
any who challenged their authority, as Muir found to his cost.
There can be no doubt Robert Burns supported the Scottish
Independence cause and as an activist in his own time no doubt he would also be
a prominent participant in the Yes campaign today.
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