Podium: The auld alliance is still healthy

From a lecture by the former Liberal Party leader to the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh

IT IS an old joke, which I use frequently, that there was no such thing as a British empire; it was a Scottish empire on to which the English attached themselves. Certainly in terms of missionaries, explorers and engineers, the Scottish impact was substantial. I live a few miles from the humble cottage birthplace of Dr Mungo Park of Selkirkshire, whose expeditions to the Niger opened up the western part of the African continent, whereas his more famous Lanarkshire successor, Dr David Livingstone, achieved the same for east and central Africa. It is a humbling experience to visit the tough-hewn memorials bearing the names of Scottish missionaries who died of malaria on the shores of Lake Malawi in pursuit of bringing education, medicine and Christianity to the peoples of the region.

Twentieth-century African presidents such as Nyere of Tanzania and Kaunda of Zambia have paid repeated tributes to their Scottish influence.

Lord Kelvin and James Watt turned the Clyde into the shipbuilding and engineering capital of the world. The Mackinnon family operated the great British India shipping line. David Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson provided an intellectual export from Scotland of an equally world-wide importance.

More than half the signers of the American Declaration of Independence were of recent Scots descent. Most of the Scots who arrived in Canada had been sharpened on the grindstone of hard lives in Scotland. Resilient and resourceful, they quickly established themselves at the forefront of Canadian society.

Of course, Scotland had long been more closely linked to the European continent than was England. Historically the relationship between Scottish universities and those in Leiden and Bologna were real. The "College des Ecossais" in France in 1325 was the forerunner of our own universities.

There were our church links with Luther and Calvin, influencing not only John Knox. Our legal system was - and remains - the Roman-Dutch one, not that of English common law; trade with the Low Countries left Dutch red-tiled roofs all over Fife and East Lothian and built up our woollen textile industry; similarly the Scandinavian trade routes left us with a commonality of dialect words such as "kirk", "tatties" and "scrieve".

Even today a teenage hitchhiker in Europe will have greater success wearing a kilt than the universal jeans.

A Mori poll for the European Movement in 1996, at the height of Eurosceptic dominance of the Europe debate, found that Scots favoured staying in Europe by a majority of 23 per cent, compared to a majority of 9 per cent for the UK as a whole. The advent of the euro is an opportunity to strengthen Scotland's close trading links with other EU countries, free from currency fluctuations.

The auld alliance of Scotland and France had its comic aspect as well as its historic, turbulent one. At one point before the Act of Union, the English government was so at odds with the French that it banned the drinking of claret. This delicious export continued in larger quantities into Leith, the port of Edinburgh, from where my Border constituents - or rather their ancestors - made a tidy profit by smuggling it across into England.

Today it would be difficult to find two European countries between whom goods go back and forth more than between England and Scotland, which is why I find calls for total independence and the break-up of the Union so absurd. To debate who would or could not qualify for Scottish citizenship seems a pointless and irrelevant exercise when the new parliament will be faced with more pressing problems of employment, housing, education, health and agriculture.

My own conversations with other heads of government from Europe and Africa persuade me that the very restoration of the Scottish Parliament next year will greatly enhance Scotland's profile in the world, to the tangible benefit of our trade and industry.

We do not need to imitate the Republic of Ireland. I mean no disrespect to them when I say that their global influence is limited to representation in 41 countries, compared with 153 for the UK. Nor will you find, in Eire, Air Force bases to match Leuchars, Kinloss and Lossiemouth.

We should concentrate in the future in continuing to export the best of the Scottish ethos - thrift, hard work, innovation, sturdy egalitarianism, high-quality education, pioneering in medicine, Scottish football and rugby and the arts can play their part.

The task of the Scottish Parliament will be to provide focus and voice for that identity.