They remain for our civil society a strong, quickening undercurrent of the values and social critique implicit in the Declaration of Arbroath. His song is indeed a celebration, but the painful, backward reflection does not let us off the hook all that comfortably. T he most widely celerated Scottish works are cast in this mould. As they lowered you down. Peter Nardini's Larkhall pulls even fewer punches with the bigots.
Bigotry pours out the drains like blue blood runs through the veins of princes, and on Sundays.
God wears a fitba' scarf and the sun sets like an orane sash in the distance, but they're a' good Christians. There have been many fine songs written in this vein. John McCreadie's Doomsday in the Afternoon , for example, a mordant defence of travellers, makes our collective guilt part of a far more heinous crime than moving on tinkers' campsites. There were travellers at Belsen too. The Nazi treated the traveller The same as the Jew.