Robert Burns’ image graces many a tin of shortbread and not a few bottles of whisky. He’s hard to avoid amid the tartanry of the gift shops on Edinburgh’s Princes Street. For two centuries following his death, Burns was a familiar and safe image of Scottish identity; safe in the sense that being Scots fitted comfortably with being British.

Generations of schoolchildren had to learn To a Mouse, across the British empire his tribute to a haggis was pronounced at Burns suppers each January, and on TV shows like the BBC’s White Heather Club songs such as Ae Fond Kiss were sung. Burns seemed to fit safely into the sort of Scot portrayed on the music hall stage a century ago by Harry Lauder, or in the 19th century Kailyard school of literature set in an idyllic rural lowland setting which never, in truth, existed.

This was a sanitised Burns, though it was admitted that he liked a nip or two and that he fathered a few bairns out of wedlock. Perhaps because of this, or because I never took to To a Mouse, I was never a fan of Burns when I was young although I received a welcome shock when I discovered Holy Willie’s Prayer, which satirises the hypocrisy of a Church of Scotland elder. Perhaps, too, it’s the reason why another great Scottish poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, blew hot and cold about him.

The Scotland I grew up in largely identified itself in terms of its military history in service of the British empire – the charge of the Scottish Greys at Waterloo, the Thin Red Line at Balaclava in the Crimean War – on the sporting field and by a sort of faux Jacobitism with a royalist hue to it. Over the past three decades that has changed utterly. A Scottish identity has emerged that is defined largely in separation from Britain, which has often become a badge of resistance to the enthusiasm of Westminster for the free market and which has a self-confidence that was missing from my youth. Scots, put simply, are no longer North Britons.

In the course of this, the real Robert Burns has been brought to light and he was truly subversive. This was a Burns who, to escape penury, searched for a noble patron but poked fun at the same nobles in his poem To a Louse. His opposition to slavery meant he went further in the hard hitting Ode, Sacred to the Memory of Mrs Oswald of Auchencruive.

Mary Oswald was the wife of Richard Oswald, one of Scotland’s great slave traders. The couple used the wealth they accrued from slavery to improve Auchencruive House in Ayrshire, filling it with works of art. She had a reputation for being a skinflint and Burns wrote on her death:

Dweller in yon dungeon dark,

Hangman of creation! Mark,

Who in widow-weeds appears,

Laden with unhonour’d years,

Noosing with care a bursting purse,

Baited with many a deadly curse?





View the wither’d Beldam’s face;

Can thy keen inspection trace

Aught of Humanity’s sweet, melting grace?

Note that eye, ‘tis rheum o’erflows;

Pity’s flood there never rose,

See those hands, ne’er stretched to save,

Hands that took, but never gave:

Keeper of Mammon’s iron chest,

Lo, there she goes, unpitied and unblest,

She goes, but not to realms of everlasting rest!

That was in 1789. Burns had earlier championed American independence but now he greeted the French revolution with enthusiasm. Not for him the about-face of William Wordsworth, Burns would stay true to the revolution after the rise of the Jacobins and the execution of the king, and read Tom Paine’s Rights of Man.

By 1793, by now living in Dumfries, Burns was effectively put on trial by his employers, His Majesty’s Customs and Excise, after a government spy reported that he was the head of a group of Jacobin sympathisers. It was reported he had been singing the French revolutionary anthem Ça ira in a Dumfries theatre, rather than God Save the King. Faced with the loss of his livelihood, and with a family to feed, Burns denied all the charges and kept his post. But he did not stop writing in support of the revolution, although now he did so anonymously.

One of his most famous songs was a contender for modern Scotland’s national anthem – Scots Wha Hae. It was published anonymously in the same year he was brought before his masters to face accusations of treason, coinciding with the trial of the most prominent Scottish champion of the French revolution, Thomas Muir. Bruce’s army marched to the tune while on its way to Bannockburn, or so Burns believed. Its words are an attack on tyrants and despots, and a call for liberty.

Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,

Scots wham Bruce has aften led,

Welcome tae your gory bed,

Or tae victorie.



Now’s the day and now’s the hour:

See the front o’ battle lour,

See approach proud Edward’s power –

Chains and slaverie.



Wha will be a traitor knave?

Wha can fill a coward’s grave?

Wha sae base as be a slave?

Let him turn and flee.

A Man’s a Man For A’ That was written two years after he took a vow of silence. He described it as the ideas of Tom Paine worked up into verse. One verse says:

Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,

Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;

Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,

He’s but a coof for a’ that:

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

His ribband, star, an’ a’ that:

The man o’ independent mind

He looks an’ laughs at a’ that.

It ends:

Then let us pray that come it may,

(As come it will for a’ that,)

That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth,

Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that.

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

It’s coming yet for a’ that,

That Man to Man, the world o’er,

Shall brothers be for a’ that.

Burns went to an early death in 1796 worn out by the struggle to make ends meet. When the news reached Belfast’s Northern Star, a newspaper of the republican Society of United Irishmen, they said of Scots Wha Hae: “Originally a clarion call for Scottish radicals in the political circumstances of 1794, but now a call to rebellion in the Ulster of 1796.”

So how would Burns have voted on 18 September? We can never know for sure but he was an opponent of monarchy and slavery, and a champion of the rights of man and democracy. Put simply he was a radical. I find it hard to envisage him putting his cross in favour of the status quo. His every instinct would be with the common people and, the further down the social ladder you go in today’s Scotland, the greater the support for independence.