Word: scotland
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...knew how to play to an audience. He soon had the Americans firmly committed to the cause of Scottish independence. Dressed in a kilt with all the trappings, the text of his speech was primarily the American Declaration of Independence. He compared the Act of Union, which joined Scotland and England in 1707, to America's hated Stamp Tax, and he likened SNP leaders William Wolfe and Margo MacDonald to Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. The analogy was undeniably forced, but Bicentennial fever had struck the Americans already, and they gave a thunderous ovation to this fiery Scotsman whose cheeks...
...SCENE: St. Andrews University Scotland, during a typically damp, gray Scottish summer in 1974. Having bribed their parents into sending them to Europe by promising to study at a university, 200 American high school students were sitting in a lecture hall awaiting another lecture on British politics. Past lectures given by members of different political parties, cabinet ministries and interest groups had been nowhere near as exciting as the non academic hours the students had spent exploring Macbeth's Glamis castle and the romantic lochs. But the students quickly realized that this lecture would be different...
...regional assemblies to be established in Edinburgh and Cardiff. What prompted Labor's initiative was not a question of soul but of cold politics. Though the Nationalists had been campaigning for greater independence for years, they never won much attention until 1974, when the Scottish party won in Scotland a surprising 30% of the vote in general elections and took over eleven seats in Parliament. By then Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, had won three seats. So the minority Labor government, troubled by the nationalists' inroads on traditional Labor strongholds, decided to press for devolution...
...when the plan was finally put to a vote in Scotland and Wales last week, it was turned down. Welsh voters, fearing that the practical effect of limited self-rule would be the creation of a costly new bureaucracy, rejected the idea by a 4-to-1 margin. Still, the big surprise came in Scotland, where as recently as a month ago opinion polls showed voters favoring devolution by almost 2 to 1. In the end, barely 33% of the eligible voters had said yes to the plan, while 31% had said no. Since 40% of all those registered...
Appealing to local pride, the Scottish Nationalists argued that if devolution failed to pass, Scotland would "be good for nothing more than to tart up a few British ceremonies." But the antidevolution forces, led by the Conservative Party, mounted a late-blooming campaign that focused on an even more basic Scottish instinct: they charged that the cost of home rule would be quickly felt in the form of higher taxes. Some Scots also began to ponder the fact that devolution might lead to the breakup of the United Kingdom, which none but the most extreme nationalists want...