Forget any other attempt at an explanation. Tom Devine
In four days’ time, we may see the end of Britain as we
and our ancestors have known it for generations.
If some of the polls are to be believed, Scotland the nation will once again become a sovereign nation state. It is difficult to overestimate the colossal historical significance of such an extraordinary development.
Its consequences for the British archipelago and Britain’s place in the world will be incalculable for many years to come. A third of the UK land mass will immediately cease to be British territory.
“South Britain” beckons as the presumptive name for the remainder of the UK. Even if the no campaign manages to achieve a narrow victory, the crisis in the union will continue unabated.
The evidence to date suggests that Westminster politicians do not yet possess the imaginative capacity to deal with it.
All this presents a major intellectual challenge for the historian.
Little more than a generation ago, in the 1950s and early 60s, the union could not have been more secure. The Scottish Unionist party (only becoming the Conservative party in Scotland in 1965) had won a famous and overwhelming victory in the general election of 1955.
The SNP at the time was but an irrelevant and eccentric sect rather than a mainstream political party. Indeed, despite the mythology of Red Clydeside, Scotland had voted mainly for the Tories in the 1920s and 1930s.
he Labour landslide victory of 1945 can be seen as an aberration in that context.
The memory of the collective British sacrifice of the second world war lived on for the postwar generation in comics, books and films.
The empire, in which the Scots were so fundamentally involved, started to dissolve with the independence of India in 1947.
Yet, contemporaneously, the welfare state was established and soon became the new sheet anchor of the Anglo-Scottish union.
Nationalisation of key industries further strengthened the idea of a British-wide collective economic enterprise.
Yet all this can be seen in retrospect as the quiet before the storm.
Winnie Ewing’s surprise victory for the SNP at the Hamilton byelection of 1967 was a small but significant portent of what was to come.
By then, and even more so in subsequent decades, the age-old stability of the union state was being undermined by developments both within Britain and beyond.
The crucial historic importance for Scotland of maintaining free access to English markets ceased to be of such importance when the UK joined the European common market in 1973.
A primary factor affording the union stability had long been the perception of a collective existential threat from a foreign foe: France and Spain in the 18th century, Nazi Germany and a nuclear-armed Soviet Russia in the 20th.
The end of the cold war removed the fear of the Other, although whether that will return depends in the future on Putinesque sabre-rattling and Islamist fanaticism.
A shared English and Scottish commitment to Protestantism in the past had provided much of the ideological glue of union. This is no longer so in the age of secularisation.
The Church of Scotland has lost two-thirds of its membership since the 1960s. That working-class Protestant culture of the Kirk, the Boys’ Brigade and Rangers Football Club, long a bulwark of unionism and the Tory vote, is in decay.
With that has withered the old sectarian voting patterns, of Protestants supporting the Conservatives and Catholics giving automatic allegiance to Labour.
That sectarian electoral pattern, especially significant in the west of Scotland, derived from the age-old hostilities between Protestant and Catholic that had reached a crisis between the wars, when the Church of Scotland leadership petitioned the UK government to prohibit Irish Catholic immigration.
That policy failed but left deep scars. As late as the 1970s, labour market discrimination against Catholics remained endemic in several economic sectors.
Working class adherence to the two political parties most committed to the union left little space for the growth of nationalism.
Moreover, Catholics had at that time a profound suspicion of the SNP, believing it to be dominated by Presbyterians, as well as having a few notorious bigots in its senior ranks.
The experience of Scotland in the 1980s is a critical factor in this narrative
Between 1976 and 1987 the nation lost nearly a third of its manufacturing capacity. The great heavy industries that had made Scotland’s global economic reputation over more than a century disappeared in a matter of a few years.
A post-industrial economy did emerge in the 1990s, but the crisis left behind a legacy of social dislocation in many working class communities and created a political agenda north of the border in marked contrast to that of the south of England.
Rightly or wrongly, the devastation was blamed on the Conservative governments led by Margaret Thatcher. Scotland soon became a Tory-free zone in electoral terms. Another bastion of the union passed into history.
Equally fundamentally, state involvement and public spending became even more important to many Scots, in some parts of the west accounting for as much as three-quarters of the local economy.
As Lord Sumption, justice of the supreme court, argued in a notable 2013 lecture, these levels of public expenditure inevitably had profound effects on attitudes to the state in Scotland, which differ significantly from “the rather more equivocal view of the state taken by most Englishmen”.
Herein lay much of the basis of the divergence in political cultures and voting patterns that has emerged between the two nations , imposing much stress and strain on the union.
It is also the root of those Scottish political attitudes that seem to favour Scandinavian-type social policies, and which strongly oppose neoliberal market economics, associated in the public mind with the alien ideology imposed during the Thatcher years.
Despite the mythology, the nation only became leftwing in its electoral choices during recent decades – and this transformation in large part derives directly from the experience of the 1980s.
The foundation of the Scottish parliament in 1999 and the referendum were not directly linked causally.
But the parliament did eventually become the vehicle for a transformed SNP to gain political power and then trigger the referendum process.
As Old Labour became New Labour, the SNP adopted left-of-centre policies of considerable appeal to the electorate. Its reputation for competent government was established during the first minority administration.
This, then, became the basis of the historic SNP victory in 2011.
There may well be a no vote on Thursday. But a victory for unionism will be far from decisive or definitive.
Nearly half the Scottish electorate will almost certainly vote yes and may not be easily satisfied by post-referendum devo max concessions that are also likely to further fuel resentments south of the border.
If the yes campaign wins, Britain will never be the same. Three centuries and more of political union between England and Scotland will be consigned to history.
It’s the possible end of an old political union rightly thought by many Scots to be no longer fit for purpose.
If some of the polls are to be believed, Scotland the nation will once again become a sovereign nation state. It is difficult to overestimate the colossal historical significance of such an extraordinary development.
Its consequences for the British archipelago and Britain’s place in the world will be incalculable for many years to come. A third of the UK land mass will immediately cease to be British territory.
“South Britain” beckons as the presumptive name for the remainder of the UK. Even if the no campaign manages to achieve a narrow victory, the crisis in the union will continue unabated.
The evidence to date suggests that Westminster politicians do not yet possess the imaginative capacity to deal with it.
All this presents a major intellectual challenge for the historian.
Little more than a generation ago, in the 1950s and early 60s, the union could not have been more secure. The Scottish Unionist party (only becoming the Conservative party in Scotland in 1965) had won a famous and overwhelming victory in the general election of 1955.
The SNP at the time was but an irrelevant and eccentric sect rather than a mainstream political party. Indeed, despite the mythology of Red Clydeside, Scotland had voted mainly for the Tories in the 1920s and 1930s.
he Labour landslide victory of 1945 can be seen as an aberration in that context.
The memory of the collective British sacrifice of the second world war lived on for the postwar generation in comics, books and films.
The empire, in which the Scots were so fundamentally involved, started to dissolve with the independence of India in 1947.
Yet, contemporaneously, the welfare state was established and soon became the new sheet anchor of the Anglo-Scottish union.
Nationalisation of key industries further strengthened the idea of a British-wide collective economic enterprise.
Yet all this can be seen in retrospect as the quiet before the storm.
Winnie Ewing’s surprise victory for the SNP at the Hamilton byelection of 1967 was a small but significant portent of what was to come.
By then, and even more so in subsequent decades, the age-old stability of the union state was being undermined by developments both within Britain and beyond.
The crucial historic importance for Scotland of maintaining free access to English markets ceased to be of such importance when the UK joined the European common market in 1973.
A primary factor affording the union stability had long been the perception of a collective existential threat from a foreign foe: France and Spain in the 18th century, Nazi Germany and a nuclear-armed Soviet Russia in the 20th.
The end of the cold war removed the fear of the Other, although whether that will return depends in the future on Putinesque sabre-rattling and Islamist fanaticism.
A shared English and Scottish commitment to Protestantism in the past had provided much of the ideological glue of union. This is no longer so in the age of secularisation.
The Church of Scotland has lost two-thirds of its membership since the 1960s. That working-class Protestant culture of the Kirk, the Boys’ Brigade and Rangers Football Club, long a bulwark of unionism and the Tory vote, is in decay.
With that has withered the old sectarian voting patterns, of Protestants supporting the Conservatives and Catholics giving automatic allegiance to Labour.
That sectarian electoral pattern, especially significant in the west of Scotland, derived from the age-old hostilities between Protestant and Catholic that had reached a crisis between the wars, when the Church of Scotland leadership petitioned the UK government to prohibit Irish Catholic immigration.
That policy failed but left deep scars. As late as the 1970s, labour market discrimination against Catholics remained endemic in several economic sectors.
Working class adherence to the two political parties most committed to the union left little space for the growth of nationalism.
Moreover, Catholics had at that time a profound suspicion of the SNP, believing it to be dominated by Presbyterians, as well as having a few notorious bigots in its senior ranks.
The experience of Scotland in the 1980s is a critical factor in this narrative
Between 1976 and 1987 the nation lost nearly a third of its manufacturing capacity. The great heavy industries that had made Scotland’s global economic reputation over more than a century disappeared in a matter of a few years.
A post-industrial economy did emerge in the 1990s, but the crisis left behind a legacy of social dislocation in many working class communities and created a political agenda north of the border in marked contrast to that of the south of England.
Rightly or wrongly, the devastation was blamed on the Conservative governments led by Margaret Thatcher. Scotland soon became a Tory-free zone in electoral terms. Another bastion of the union passed into history.
Equally fundamentally, state involvement and public spending became even more important to many Scots, in some parts of the west accounting for as much as three-quarters of the local economy.
As Lord Sumption, justice of the supreme court, argued in a notable 2013 lecture, these levels of public expenditure inevitably had profound effects on attitudes to the state in Scotland, which differ significantly from “the rather more equivocal view of the state taken by most Englishmen”.
Herein lay much of the basis of the divergence in political cultures and voting patterns that has emerged between the two nations , imposing much stress and strain on the union.
It is also the root of those Scottish political attitudes that seem to favour Scandinavian-type social policies, and which strongly oppose neoliberal market economics, associated in the public mind with the alien ideology imposed during the Thatcher years.
Despite the mythology, the nation only became leftwing in its electoral choices during recent decades – and this transformation in large part derives directly from the experience of the 1980s.
The foundation of the Scottish parliament in 1999 and the referendum were not directly linked causally.
But the parliament did eventually become the vehicle for a transformed SNP to gain political power and then trigger the referendum process.
As Old Labour became New Labour, the SNP adopted left-of-centre policies of considerable appeal to the electorate. Its reputation for competent government was established during the first minority administration.
This, then, became the basis of the historic SNP victory in 2011.
There may well be a no vote on Thursday. But a victory for unionism will be far from decisive or definitive.
Nearly half the Scottish electorate will almost certainly vote yes and may not be easily satisfied by post-referendum devo max concessions that are also likely to further fuel resentments south of the border.
If the yes campaign wins, Britain will never be the same. Three centuries and more of political union between England and Scotland will be consigned to history.
It’s the possible end of an old political union rightly thought by many Scots to be no longer fit for purpose.
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