Robert Burns and Scottish Indepedence

By Dr Duncan Pickard (as received by email):

"Those who are trying to persuade us to vote for Scottish ‘Independence’ are keen to imply that Robert Burns would have supported their cause. It cannot have been simple coincidence that January 25th was chosen for the speech and press conference to declare the supposed benefits to the people of Scotland of a vote for 'Independence'. My reading of Burns has led me to conclude that he would not have been in favour of the 'Independence' we are asked to choose.

Burns' enthusiasm for freedom, liberty, independence and the end of tyranny was on behalf of individual people, not the county of Scotland. The tyrants whom Burns wanted to be rid of were the landowners, who were the rulers of Scotland -not the English. The poem "Scots! Vha hae wi' Wallace bled" had nothing to do with rousing the Scots of the late eighteenth century to fight for independence for their country. It was a call for his compatriots to fight for their freedom from the tyrannical oppression by Scottish landowners.

He tried to make the people aware of their Birthright in Land, and wanted the fundamental features of the English Constitution, laid down in 1688, to be established in Scotland. He by no means wished to revive old national feuds. Burns was a close friend of William Ogilvie, Professor of Humanity at the University of Aberdeen who wrote his Essay on the Right of Property in Land in 1781. Such were the powers of the landlord, that the essay had to be published anonymously. At that time, it was a criminal offence to be found with a copy of "The Rights of Man" by Thomas Paine.

In 1793 Thomas Muir was deported for supporting calls for the extension of the right to vote and Burns only narrowly escaped conviction. It is worth noting that, in 1793, Burns gave a copy of "De Lolme on the British Constitution" to the Subscription Library of Dumfries, with a plea "that they take it as a creed of British Liberty, until they found a better". Burns' poem "The Twa Dogs", which was inspired by his friendship with Ogilvie, avoided overt disclosure of his agreement with the sentiments expressed in the Essay and refers to Ogilvie as Caesar and himself as Luath, to protect both their identities. Ogilvie's Essay was suppressed for many years and few were aware of its existence until it was brought to public attention in 1891 by DC MacDonald.

Ogilvie's Essay is a well-reasoned discourse on the fundamental birthright which everyone has to a share in the earth's natural resources which were present before human beings appeared on its surface. He traced the "oppression, misery, injustice and poverty of the majority" to the unjust acquisition of the 'Right of Property in Land' by a minority of the population. The ability of those who owned the land "to produce Land Laws, preserved their power to claim the rent resulting from the labour of others". Ogilvie's introduction to his Essay states "With respect to property in land, that system which now prevails is derived from an age not deserving to be extolled for its legislative wisdom and is in need of reformation and improvement". A statement that is as true in 2012 as it was in l781.

The reformation and improvement which Ogilvie proposed was the Single Tax, whereby the annual rental value of all land would be collected by the government to pay for its necessary functions. He regarded it as inherently unjust to levy taxes on landless working people whilst leaving those who owned land to keep its unearned rental revenue. Ogilvie was quite clear that individual people cannot enjoy genuine freedom and independence by their acquisition of political freedom. They also have to be granted economic freedom and that cannot occur when their earnings, obtained as a result of their own labour, are taxed by the state which leaves the unearned rental value of land with those who have the unjust right to claim ownership of it.

Those who seek to use Robert Burns in their quest for 'Independence' for Scotland would be well advised to study the words of the poet in detail and understand what he meant by freedom and independence. Although everyone has heard of Robert Burns, not many are aware of his desire to improve the condition of poor, oppressed people everywhere. He agreed with Ogilvie that any improvement could only come through land and tax reform. William Ogilvie should be a name familiar to all who have ambitions for economic prosperity and social justice.

The simplistic belief that the separation of Scotland from the rest of the United Kingdom will result in economic prosperity for all will only lead to disillusion and disappointment without land and tax reform. The aims of any government should be to maximise the people's standard of living whilst minimising their cost of living and minimising the cost of doing business. These aims are not compatible with a tax system which favours the ownership of landed property and discourages employment and enterprise."