Step on the gas and wipe that tear away

You never give me your money, sang Paul McCartney on Abbey Road, the
last album to be recorded by all four Beatles together before their acrimonious
break up. A partnership that had changed the face of music was dying. Bitter
arguments over the bands finances were starting to fray everything that had
made it the greatest in the world: friendship, creative synergy and optimism.
McCartneys song, written against a backdrop of endless legal wrangling,
expressed the end of a dream. To anyone who loves The Beatles, as Ian
MacDonald once beautifully put it, the bittersweet nostalgia of this music is
hard to hear without a tear in the eye.

Enthusiasts for the partnership between Scotland and the rest of the United
Kingdom may currently feel like brushing away a similar tear. A Union that
helped to forge the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, to defeat
fascism, and to give birth to the Welfare State, currently seems to be
fracturing over squabbles about currencies and oil revenues. All Alex
Salmond and Alistair Darling could talk about in their debate on Scottish
independence last Monday was money. On one level, this was hardly
surprising: the issue of what policies will make voters better off tends to be
fundamental in any election. Except, of course, that the referendum in which
Scots will be voting in under three weeks is not an election. Something much
more is at stake: a partnership between different peoples who, nevertheless,
brought together in a single union, have amplified each others strengths,
inhibited each others short-comings, and achieved truly incredible things. A
partnership, in short, very much like that of the Beatles.

Perhaps that is why, then, yesterday afternoon, Sir Paul McCartney signed a
letter that I and the historian Dan Snow have posted at
www.letsstaytogether.org.uk: an attempt to express the admiration in which
the Scots are held by their fellow citizens across the rest of the United
Kingdom. Who better to appreciate the costs of a fractious break up than
McCartney? To this day, the Beatles serve as emblems of Britain at its most
joyous, creative and generous. They remind all of us in this shared island of
ours that we are united by more than just tax systems and pension schemes:
that we also have a common stock of memories, pleasures and songs. These
too are what matter to a country; these too are what enable people to live
together, and feel that they belong.

Cant buy me love, as the Beatles themselves might have put it. More than
the bonds of government would be cut to ribbons in the event of a Yes vote in
the Scottish Referendum; so too would the bonds of mutual responsibility.
Ive always remembered, Billy Connolly once told the BBC, that I have a
lot more in common with a welder from Liverpool than I do with someone
with an agricultural background from the Highlands. It is disingenuous of
the SNP to pretend that what an independent Scotland would be rejecting is
merely Westminster. The United Kingdom is not defined by the Houses of
Parliament. A great city like Glasgow does indeed have more in common
with Liverpool than with anywhere in Wester Ross. One of them may be
Scottish and the other English: but both, over the course of the past three
hundred years, have had histories so similar that it is hard to know how
better to define them than as British.

No surprise, then, that Scotland should always have been a part of the Beatles
story. Quite when the McCartneys emigrated from the Highlands is
unknown; but what we do know is that by 1864 Pauls great-grandfather was
settled in Liverpool, living on what else? Scotland Road. John Lennon too
had close Scottish links. So happy were the school holidays he spent with his
aunt in Edinburgh and in the Highlands that all his life he remained
unabashedly romantic about both. Touring in a rickety van round Scottish
dance halls was as much a part of the Beatles apprenticeship as their trips to
Hamburg. All of which is to say, of course, that they were never merely an
English band.

And when the break up came, and Paul McCartney retired to lick his wounds
and grieve, it was to Scotland, and the remote farm on the Mull of Kintyre
that he had bought in 1966, that he went with his young family. The tribute he
wrote in 1977 to its beauties heather, mists, and all remains to this day
Britains best-selling non-charity single. Back in July, at the orgy of
Scottishness that was the opening of the Commonwealth Games, there was no
surprise as to the song with which Susan Boyle should have chosen to
welcome the Queen. A Glasgow stadium, a singer from West Lothian, a band
of pipers and drummers recruited from assorted Scottish regiments and an
anthem by an Englishman. The best of British indeed.

Certainly, whether the Scots vote to renew their bonds of citizenship with the
rest of us in the United Kingdom, or to sever them, it is vital to avoid the
bitterness that marked what has been, until now, post-War Britains most
notorious split: the break up of the Beatles. That is why I hope that all those in
England, Wales and Northern Ireland who value our links to Scotland will
join Paul McCartney in signing our letter, and expressing our affection for the
Scots which will surely abide, no matter what. After all, as Abbey Road
reminds us: In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.