Heather sniffer, JD Vance
Just after President Trump had a holiday a few miles from my Ayrshire hometown, it now the turn of his VP J.D. Vance to do likewise. He appears to be staying just outside Kilmarnock in a pleasant but rather nondescript country hotel about 3.5 miles from the "worst run prison is Scotland."
While Trump's motivation to stay in bonnie Ayrshire was to visit his golf resort at Turnberry, Vance's reason to visit the area is, apparently, to get in touch with "muh Hilly Billy roots." You see, Vance identifies as part of that much-misunderstood category the "Scotch Irish."
Actually, I would call them the "Tariff Irish" or more accurately the "Tariff Scots" because, whether one wants to see the hand of God at work here or not, the story of Vance and his ancestry is very much the result of tariffs, with Ireland merely a staging post until his ancestors could find a powerful enough political entity to settle in to protect themselves from the sharp end of trade taxes.
A quick history lesson on the so-called "Scotch-Irish" is in order here. They were a Scottish people who settled in Ireland, mainly in the 16th and 17th centuries, as part of the pacification and "protestantization" of that island by the Tudors and the Stuarts. Due to the religious difference, they generally married within their own group. In those days, the relatively undeveloped lands confiscated from the Catholic lords in the North, were a big inducement to hard-working but impoverished farmers from the South West of Scotland.
But, why were those hard-working farming folk so impoverished in the first place?
One reason was that the Union of the Scottish and English crowns in 1603 did not lead to free trade between these two countries. In fact, quite the reverse!
England, as yet unenlightened by the future genius of Adam Smith, continued to follow mercantilist policies, condemning itself and its Northern neighbour to greater poverty and higher prices than would otherwise have been the case.
Actually, I would call them the "Tariff Irish" or more accurately the "Tariff Scots" because, whether one wants to see the hand of God at work here or not, the story of Vance and his ancestry is very much the result of tariffs, with Ireland merely a staging post until his ancestors could find a powerful enough political entity to settle in to protect themselves from the sharp end of trade taxes.
A quick history lesson on the so-called "Scotch-Irish" is in order here. They were a Scottish people who settled in Ireland, mainly in the 16th and 17th centuries, as part of the pacification and "protestantization" of that island by the Tudors and the Stuarts. Due to the religious difference, they generally married within their own group. In those days, the relatively undeveloped lands confiscated from the Catholic lords in the North, were a big inducement to hard-working but impoverished farmers from the South West of Scotland.
But, why were those hard-working farming folk so impoverished in the first place?
One reason was that the Union of the Scottish and English crowns in 1603 did not lead to free trade between these two countries. In fact, quite the reverse!
England, as yet unenlightened by the future genius of Adam Smith, continued to follow mercantilist policies, condemning itself and its Northern neighbour to greater poverty and higher prices than would otherwise have been the case.
The wide number of tariffs included almost everything, including such goods as wool, linen, cattle, and coal. Also, like we see with "TACO Trump," many of these were on-again-off-again-on-again, creating general uncertainty and chilling the hand of commerce.
Scotland was also shut out of England's growing trade with its North American colonies, most particularly by the Navigation Acts of 1651, 1660, and 1663, leading the nation to attempt its own ill-advised colony in the malaria-infested swamps of Central America.
Scotland was also shut out of England's growing trade with its North American colonies, most particularly by the Navigation Acts of 1651, 1660, and 1663, leading the nation to attempt its own ill-advised colony in the malaria-infested swamps of Central America.
Essentially, until the union of the parliaments of Scotland and England in 1707, Scotland was kept impoverished and thus effectively overpopulated by the tariff hammer. Settling the undeveloped lands of Northern Ireland, and greatly boosting their productivity in the process, was a way out, and one taken, according to Vance, by his ancestors and that of several dozen other US Presidents.
But our tale of the "Tariff Scots" does not end there. Initially, the English government, which controlled Ireland, had welcomed Protestant Scots to Ireland for economic and security reasons. The Ulster Scots were certainly a useful bulwark against Catholic rebellion. So, they flourished, increasingly exporting their excess produce to the English and colonial markets, in the process lowering prices and increasing the living standards of the average Englishman and proto-American.
But unfortunately these two beneficiaries of Irish beef, butter, cheese, corn, linen, and wool were not represented in Parliament; only the selfish landowners. A 1663 amendment to the Navigation Act hit back on their behalf against the flood of cheap Irish beef to England's colonies. This was followed up by the Cattle Acts or 1665, 1666, and 1680, which prohibited the import of Irish cattle into England, and a number of other tariffs that hits wool, linen, and corn, like the infamous "Corn Laws."
In short, what had been a flourishing colony was economically devastated by English upper-class greed.
Unable to export their produce to the growing colonies of America, many Scots-Irish, including Vance's ancestors, made the decision to get round the English tariffs by "exporting" themselves.
Now to return to the present, I am not really sure why a fat, flaccid, eye-liner-wearing couch-fucker, married to an Indian woman, insists on identifying with me and my fellow Scots. Of course, he is free to do so and it may even be good for Ayrshire's tourist trade. But it is clear that JD Vance could make an additional journey of self-discovery and economic enlightenment by viewing his DNA-trajectory through the prism of the "Tariff Scot."
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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.
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