Why It Is About The Money

Most of the original Treaty of Union was about money. Identity-based matters such as the Protestant Succession may have come first, but they did not take up awfully much space.

They did not need to. They were the easy bits, and they did not necessitate a Union, but merely provided the basis for the Union that was necessitated by economic circumstances, especially in Scotland.

Moreover, the identity aspect of the present debate is intimately bound up with ideological differences which are themselves profoundly and even definitively economic.

The events of the 1980s were what loosened the bonds of the Union.

Two months before the 1979 General Election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power, barely a third of Scots had voted for even modest devolution, and 80 per cent of the Welsh had voted against it. After all, where was the need?

Adherence to a certain not very specific but nevertheless very easily recognisable economic ideology, against which the Conservative Party has explicitly defined itself for more than 30 years, is now more or less definitive of being Scots, or Welsh, or indeed from any part of Britain outside the south-eastern corner.

Even within that corner, the alternative, and thus the party defined by that alternative, is less and less liked with each new cohort of voters.

To that ideology's and that party's remaining defenders, it is a source of sheer bafflement, as it was to them when jubilant rage exploded on the death of their heroine, that the lands beyond this Island's Equator (although the line in question is in fact a very great deal more than halfway down) feel so strongly against a government of that ideology and party that at least politically the most self-aware and self-organised of those lands would undoubtedly be days away from outright secession were it not for the certainty of a Labour victory in the spring.

Those remaining defenders truly do not know how much damage is wrought in these territories whenever there is not a Labour Government. It is here that their own preferred system is given free rein, as if on laboratory rats.

All manner of means is employed to cushion and cocoon the places that actually vote for it, when they do. The effects of that free rein are always completely and utterly catastrophic, but the experience of the cushioned and the cocooned is held up as somehow having proven the success of the experiment.

Such a regime is incompatible with the common sense of allegiance necessary for the Union to exist. To vote for such a regime is the most anti-Unionist act imaginable, effectively guaranteed and even calculated to call this State itself very gravely into question.