Wednesday November 26th 2025
MSP Christine Graham
Christine Grahame MSP writes her monthly column for Midlothian View
The St Andrew’s Day Bank Holiday (Scotland) Act 2007 passed unanimously on 29th November 2006. Yet when I searched to find St Andrew’s celebrations in Midlothian and while I have no doubt there will be some, they are not large scale.
I wondered why. Is it because Burns Night on 25th January has captured that as a celebration of Scotland? After all he was the man who wrote in Scots, whose lyrics ring out as one year turns to another. But there is room for both.
One celebrates for me the essence of our culture, the other our affection, protection, of Scotland as a nation. We are indeed one of the most ancient of nations, said to have been founded in 843 AD by Kenneth mac Alpin, uniting the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata with the Picts, establishing the Kingdom of Alba.
Our boundary with our near neighbour has remained fixed -apart from the to-ing and fro-ing of Berwick, some 13 times, eventually landing on the English side in 1482.
Further back in time and to coin a phrase “What did the Romans ever do for us?” Well they failed to conquer this land in their successful invasion of Britain in 43 AD.
In less than 40 years they subdued what we is now northern England and Wales. Before them lay the wilds of Caledonia and by 79 AD they were pushing northwards into southern Scotland.
At Trimontium near Melrose, they constructed a large Roman complex. Some 17,000 occupied there at one time and that site was used several times over the next hundred years or more. But this land remained defiant.
Perhaps that’s what the Romans did for us. It took the execution of Mary Queen of Scots then her son, with the Union of the Crowns succeeding to the English throne, later the Treaty of Union, for Scotland to be united with England but it was and is, an uneasy “union”.
Unlike the English for whom Parliament is sovereign, we the Scottish people are sovereign – that is embedded in the Declaration of Arbroath. That is why any UK monarch is King or Queen of Scots, not Scotland.
Throughout our past, attempts were made to kill our sense of Scottishness: to ban the bagpipes, post the 1745 rebellion, the Dress Act of 1745, wearing of the kilt, demeaning speaking in our native tongue and not the Queens English. I went and seen is not slang, but Scots dialect.
But here we are. A nation, wearing the kilt, with the skirl of the pipes all in fashion, from weddings, to funerals, to football, to rugby. I was tempted to write “to infinity and beyond” because the saltire is recognised world-wide as Scotland’s flag.
So let’s celebrate St Andrew’s day, demonstrating that despite all those centuries when there have been so many attempts to diminish if not erase our Scottishness-here we are as Scottish as ever. By the way I am English by birth.
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