5 June 2025

It has always surprised me that from the football and rugby pitches of Scotland, people have wanted to view our national identity through a song which takes us right back to Bannockburn and the sorrows, cruelties and barbarity of medieval warfare.

It’s a world characterised by man’s inhumanity to man – prisoners dragged through the streets so that people could throw urine and excrement at them, cut of their testicles and pull out their bowels before beheading them.

And where women were put into cages and hung from castle walls not for a winter or two but for many,  exposed to the elements and on constant view to public humiliation, condemnation and vilification!

Look to the rock from which you were hewn, suggests the prophet Isaiah. Is this the rock from which we were hewn? Isn’t this another case for viewing history together – the English and the Scots making sense of what has happened not separately nor sentimentally but honestly?

And if we did this seriously, would we continue to view our national identity and heritage through such a peculiarly inhumane prism? Wouldn’t we think again – and, at the very least, turn to our national bard for a better anthem?

Then let us pray that come it may,

(As come it will for a’ that,)

That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth,

Shall bear the gree, an a’ that.

For a’ that, an a’ that,

It’s coming yet for a’ that,

That Man to Man, the world o’er.

Shall brothers be for a’ that.