Sick of being ignored by far-away politicians, officials on Scotland’s remote Orkney Islands are mulling a drastic solution: rejoining Norway, the Scandinavian country that gave them away as a royal wedding dowry more than 550 years ago.
Orkney Islands Council is due to debate options for “alternative models of governance” on Tuesday, including exploring the “Nordic connections” of the archipelago, which lies about 10 miles (16 kilometers) north of the Scottish mainland.
Council leader James Stockan said the islands have been failed by both the Scottish government, 300 miles (480 kilometers) to the south in Edinburgh, and the U.K. government in the even more distant London.
“On the street in Orkney, people come up and say to me, ‘When are we going to pay back the dowry, when are we going back to Norway?’ There is a huge affinity and a huge deep cultural relationship there,” Stockan told the BBC. “This is exactly the moment to explore what is possible.”
Long an impoverished area dependent on the unpredictable fishing industry, Orkney prospered after large reserves of oil were discovered offshore in the 1960s. The islands, with a population of about 22,000, also have a burgeoning wind-power industry and a growing tourism sector.
But Stockan said Orkney gets less support from the Scottish government than other island communities in Shetland or the Hebrides, and is desperately in need of new ferries to keep its many islands connected.
“Every time we’ve been denied. We’ve been asked to wait, we have been asked to do another study,” he said.
“We do look with envy at the communities in Norway," he added, "where there’s a completely different approach to the remote and rural” areas.
A report accompanying Stockan's motion suggests Orkney should investigate options including a status like the Faroe Islands, a self-governing dependency of Denmark that lies between Scotland and Iceland.
Another option is emulating Britain’s Crown Dependencies such as the Channel Islands, which are largely self-governing tax havens.
The report acknowledges that any constitutional change is a long way off, and would likely require a combination of petitions, referenda and legislation by the Scottish and U.K. governments.
Along with the Shetland islands even further to the north, Orkney was under Norwegian and Danish control for centuries until 1472 when the islands were taken by the Scottish crown as part of Margaret of Denmark’s wedding dowry to King James III of Scotland.
“In a place where we have 5,000-year-old houses on the landscape, that’s pretty recent history for us,” said Leslie Burgher, an architect who serves as Norway’s honorary consul in Orkney.
Burgher said there are still “strong cultural and personal connections” between Norway and Orkney, where a parade every May 17 marks Norwegian Constitution Day. The Norse influence is widely evident, from place names and personal names to St. Magnus Cathedral, “a fabulous piece of medieval architecture” built in Norse times.
But the British government poured cold water on the idea of letting Orkney forge new links with Norway. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s spokesman, Max Blain, said there was “no mechanism” to change the status of Orkney.
“Fundamentally we are stronger as one United Kingdom. We have no plans to change that,” he said.
