The skyline in Kirkwall’s bustling harbour is dominated by the squat silhouette of a Norwegian ship, a floating school for trainee sailors, with Norway’s national flag fluttering from its mast.
Its students were ashore, mingling with Orcadians absorbing the news that the local council had just formally agreed to investigate the potential for far closer economic and political links to Norway and its Nordic neighbours.
The proposal first floated by the council leader, James Stockan, over the weekend has suddenly catapulted Orkney’s long-running dispute about its underfunding and neglect to a global audience. It has also split local voters.
Victoria Lochore and James Mowat, a couple shepherding their young daughters down Kirkwall’s main street, are tentative supporters. Mowat, 37, happily sports a black Swedish hoodie emblazoned with the Grimfrost brand’s runic logo and stylised Viking helmet.
“There’s a lot of cultural history and associations with Scandinavian countries, which really does benefit us,” said Lochore, 38. “You can see it in the population. There’s a lot of really Scandinavian-looking people here; it’s in the local names; it’s in the architecture.”
Orkney’s extensive and deep historical links with Nordic countries underpins this conversation. Stockan argues that since both Orkney and Shetland to the north were, for nearly 600 years until 1472, once an integral part of a Nordic kingdom that embraced Sweden/Denmark and Norway, this relationship is real.
Orkney’s crossed flag, a blue and yellow oblong cross on a red field, is modelled directly on Norway’s. Every May, Kirkwall celebrates Norway’s national day with the Tog, a procession through the town; there are several Norwegian speakers among Orkney’s 21 councillors, and Norwegian staff in the town’s hotels. Some Orcadians will happily point out that Kirkwall is closer to Bergen than Edinburgh.
For Lochore and Mowat, the core issue is Orkney’s constant underfunding and neglect by Scottish ministers in Edinburgh. Both are carers, looking after her mother and their autistic daughter Thora – her name the feminine version, they point out, of the Norse god Thor.
They cannot find social housing in Orkney, so rent expensive private housing. They blame wealthy Londoners for snapping up local homes. They cannot see what happens to the money spent by the thousands of cruise ship passengers who flood the town during summer and cause “chaos”.
Building much closer economic and political links to Scandinavia might have its merits, said Mowat. “I don’t see it as being any worse or any better, which is why it’s worth thinking about,” he said. “It could be really beneficial. Or it could be just the same. We really don’t know.”
Many critics of Stockan’s proposals are adamant it is legally and geographically nonsensical for Orkney to attempt to join Norway or Denmark. His opponents during Tuesday’s council meeting asserted it would be more damaging and complex than Brexit.
But everyone is united in their anger about the Scottish government’s indifference to Orkney’s ferries crisis. While MSPs in Holyrood rail against the crisis with CalMac’s Hebridean ferry services, Orcadians will argue their 30-year-old inter-island ferry fleet is in far worse repair.
Scottish ministers, however, will not respond to Orkney’s desperate demands for financial help to replace them. It will cost at least £420m to replace the fleet, or perhaps £500m to do so with low-carbon, “green” vessels.
“This is the thing that people are the most angry about,” said Anna Slater, a home-maker whose husband, Bob, was Kirkwall’s harbour director when the last ferries were commissioned, and then became a local councillor.
Orkney was woefully underfunded compared with Shetland to the north, she added. She believes Stockan’s motion, passed by a large majority of Orkney’s councillors, will “stir things up”. Joining Norway is “pie in the sky, but I suppose it’s a bit of fun”.
Outside a stationers, Bruce Moar, a print finisher and delivery man, was doing paperwork next to his van painted with the masthead of the islands’ newspaper, the Orcadian. He pointed out that independence had been a theme here for decades, ever since the Orkney and Shetland Movement put up parliamentary candidates in the 1980s.
Moar would be interested to see more information on Stockan’s proposals, which stretch from much greater and more achievable political support from Edinburgh, through to becoming a crown dependency like Jersey, a plan rejected outright by Westminster, or to somehow becoming similar to the Faroes, an autonomous Danish territory.
But he was unimpressed by talk of Orkney’s Nordic past. “I was born in 1968, and I don’t know my family tree beyond 1900.” He described himself as Orcadian first, a Scot second and British third. The one thing Orcadians needed to consider, he said, was that Norway was a far more expensive place to live – a point endorsed by Slater.
“You have to pay a lot more tax in Norway,” he said. “It’s easy for people to get excited about the idea of independence, but you could potentially be paying much more.”
