We too have our illusions. For 30 years, British politicians mistook historical conditions for universal truths. They believed in progress — an improving world, the common rationality of humanity, the better angels of our nature —  and they believed in power, the unquestioned power of the British state. Mired in these illusions, Westminster politicians did something extraordinary — they aided and encouraged the secessionist parties of Scotland and Wales. Heedless of history, careless of the future, most MPs now greet devolution and nationalist power with equanimity or indifference. This equanimity may yet be tested. Yesterday, another poll showed a majority of Scottish residents support independence. In truth, the breakup of the United Kingdom would be a catastrophe — a catastrophe for the British people as a whole, and a catastrophe for the residents of Scotland and Wales. To understand why, we must look away from the constitutional tribulations of the British state, and consider instead the darkening world in which we find ourselves. 

If you are not worried about the future, you have not been listening. Over the following decades, our world is likely to be marked by runaway automation, resource competition, environmental degradation, state collapse, and the mass migration of people. The only mechanism through which the people of Great Britain can navigate these challenges is that of the state. Only the state can extract and redistribute revenue from foreign tech firms, only the state can defend our borders, and the state alone can maintain the popular legitimacy required to achieve both. To Balkanize Britain is to destroy our prosperity and security; no policy goal of Right or Left is strengthened by weakness and disunity.

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Death and glory at the Isle of Man TT

By James Kingston

We cannot presume that we are heading for a more prosperous future. Artificial intelligence is driving profound changes to work, economic activity, and the distribution of economic value. As more and more tasks are rendered subject to automation, the relative value of human labor will change. Lawyers, accountants, financial planners, and other members of the UK’s service-heavy bourgeoisie are highly exposed. Analysts suggest millions of these jobs will vanish in the years ahead, but no plan exists for their replacement. Perhaps, it is argued, we should encourage our children to become plumbers and builders. Yet this too misses an important trend now heaving into view — the mass rollout of humanoid service robots. Such robots will be cheap, tireless, and unable to complain. Cloud-connected and AI-enabled, they will be able to access the compressed summation of the entire body of human knowledge. The competitive logic of inter-company competition means these robots will get better and better, with billions of dollars being poured into boosting their ability to manipulate the physical world. Where, exactly, are human workers meant to compete?

Scale provides bargaining power. In an era of AI, global tech giants, and unabashed geopolitics, Britain’s collective self-interest requires all the scale it can muster. A traditional argument in favor of automation is that automation brings its own economic rewards; the profits from high-producing firms will boost the tax base and spread throughout the economy. Yet here, too, we have a problem — for the United Kingdom is heavily reliant upon US tech firms. It lacks its own AI models, and it lacks a strong robotics sector.  Foreign-owned technology will be taking British jobs, and there is no guarantee that new British jobs will emerge to absorb the unemployed. The only entity capable of extracting resources from foreign companies, and the only entity capable of doing this while also representing the public interest, will be the state. To split the state — to create one, or even three, new weak and fractious states upon Great Britain — is to smash democratic leverage over foreign capital.  

Managing technological change requires a strong state; so too does environmental breakdown. If automation is transforming the basis of the economy; global warming is transforming the material basis of society. By the 2050s, the world is likely to reach 2C of global warming. At 2C, sea levels will rise, droughts will increase, and crop yields decline. Yet 2C is itself a consensus scenario; other forecasts posit a rise as high as 3C or 4C. A few decades on, the earth will be even hotter. Under conservative estimates, we can expect the planet to be 3C hotter by the 2070s. Much of the world will be rendered uninhabitable; productive areas will suffer severe environmental stress, lowering agricultural productivity; major cities will be underwater. 

Environmental collapse will breed political instability. Within the more vulnerable regions, economies will falter and fail. Failing states will descend into conflict, and migrants will move in their millions. In October 2025, the UK Joint Intelligence Committee found that “every critical ecosystem is on the pathway to collapse.” Such collapse will drive migration, and however far away it may seem, such turmoil will affect Britain. Collapsing supply chains will affect our food security. Migrant flows and climate breakdown will increasingly affect international politics, and with it the security needs of the British state. 

An independent Scotland, possessed of nominal armed forces, would be unable to extend effective protection over its own territory. This would harm the people of Scotland; it would also harm the interests of those further south. Scottish independence also poses problems of hard power. Should it secede, the remnant United Kingdom would lose one third of its landmass, over 80% of its oil & gas production, most of its offshore wind resources, and 8% of its population. These figures are not artifacts of academic curiosity — they speak to the core security needs of the British state, and the British people as a whole. The only construct with the collective power and the popular legitimacy capable of navigating us through the storms ahead is that of the nation. As such, it must be rebuilt. The fact we need to rebuild it at all speaks to a fundamental constitutional failure — devolution.

Devolution has failed. It has failed not only because it was wrong; it has failed because it was stupid. Its planners and progenitors imagined it would strengthen the British Union, and provide better local government. They were mistaken, and misunderstood what a nation actually is. The classic account came from Benedict Anderson, who typified nations — nations, not ethnicities — as “imagined communities”. A nation is a group of people who, despite multitudinous variations of place, class, language or religion, imagine themselves to be, in some crucial sense, the same. Imagination brings them together, and imagination sustains them. Imagination is sustained and spread through stories and institutions, and rituals — the shared consciousness created by a “national” newspaper, participating in a “national” elections, or enjoying “national” sports. A nation is not an inevitability, one brought into being by the ineluctable forces of history; these forces do not exist. A nation is a choice, a discourse, and a project.

Elites build nations, for it is they who create and shape the institutions and stories which bind them together. Bismarck created modern Germany; Cavour constructed Italy; Ataturk wrought Turkey from the ruins of Ottoman collapse. Kings, presidents, and prime ministers rely in turn on the civil service — the teachers and administrators who, fanning out within their territorial borders, inculcate their people in the patterns and practices that will bind them together. From Egypt to Vietnam, the modernist states of the 19th and 20th century sought to engage in nation-building, to wield coherent peoples from their disparate groupings of faith, dialect, geography, and occupation. 

Britain’s elite, however, has done the opposite; it has chosen to dissolve the British nation. Blind to the lessons of the past, heedless to the risks of the future, Britain’s leadership class has spent 30 years reifying new nations within its borders. In devolution, and in the devaluing of Britain’s institutions, our leaders are dissolving the ties that bind this island together. The United Kingdom is a composite polity, one born in the union of different jurisdictions, ethnicities, and creeds. Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales existed long before the United Kingdom, as did the local identities of their inhabitants. The United Kingdom, and with it the British people, were born in the Union of these entities. It is the peculiarity of the British elite that they chose to limit their own nationhood via devolution — to place back in these pre-existing forms the power of imagination, the ability to create community, and the story-building institutions of political and institutional life. 

Devolution did more than strengthen local government — it created and strengthened new “imagined communities”, communities away from and in direct contrast to Britain as a whole. The advocates of devolution showed a basic failure to consider history, institutions, and human nature. They failed to consider that newly-created parliaments, populated and staffed by ambitious new legislators, might naturally seek to increase their own power. It is in the nature of institutions to seek power, and of individuals to seek power within them. The new Scottish Parliament was founded in 1999; the Welsh Assembly was opened in the same year. Devolution handed core responsibilities of the state over to the new parliaments. In both cases, but particularly so in Scotland, local nationalists have used these powers to begin corroding the British state. We see this more clearly in education and in health. 

The SNP party state has utilized control of the education system to strengthen its power and to undermine the basis of the British state. It has developed school history curricula to promote anti-English and anti-British sentiment. In 2008, it announced free university tuition for Scottish Undergraduates and citizens of the European Union; meanwhile, English students had to pay full tuition fees. Whereas 30% of Welsh students and 20% of Northern Irish students go to university elsewhere in the UK, 93% of Scottish students remain in Scotland — meaning they do not have the lived experience of the British Union. Graduates now make the core of SNP support.

Health policy shows how devolution hacks at the core collective experiences of British life. It is a truism of British public life that the NHS is the closest we have to a state religion. Its needs, its rituals, and its requirements form some of the core issues of our politics, and a primary focus of public sentimentality. Yet “our NHS” is seen less and less as a collective enterprise. In 1999, control of the NHS in Scotland was devolved to the new parliament. During the pandemic, devolved control over health policy gave rise to endless opportunities for nationalist posturing. Sturgeon’s regular health appearances appeared designed to undercut those of the British Prime Minister. There were leaks of information, and pre-emptions of UK-wide announcements. More importantly, the ability of the SNP-led government to impose different lockdown rules to those of England and Wales further underlined and created the appearance of Scottish separation. In a very real sense, Scottish people had a different pandemic; a core collective experience was instead turned into an opportunity for separatist consciousness formation. Every time Nicola Sturgeon addressed Scotland on its pandemic policy, and every time Mark Drakeford made his own announcements in respect to Wales, a further blow was dealt to the imagined community of the United Kingdom. 

Westminster’s disregard for nation-building, its fundamental lack of seriousness, was further underlined in its haphazard and casual approach to the 2014 referendum. Whereas states with written constitutions require supermajorities for major constitutional changes, the 2014 referendum was allowed to proceed on bare 50/50 vote — leaving a decision of the utmost historical gravity prey to basic questions of turnout or rounding errors. Despite the UK’s centuries-long heritage as a unified polity, one marked by the movement and intermixing of peoples across its regions, the vote was restricted only to those who could claim Scottish residency. Scots resident in London, Manchester, Belfast, or Cardiff — in other words, the Scots who might most fully embrace the Union itself — were barred. By accepting the debate could occur only in Scotland, among those resident only in Scotland, the UK leadership accepted a fundamental weakening of its position, and an implicit dismissal of the idea of Union. In devolution, and in the Scottish Referendum, Britain’s elite gave an intellectual surrender.

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On patrol with Glasgow’s vigilantes

By Felix Pope

The UK has been and is capable of change. Tom Nairn famously viewed the Anglo-British state as “Ukania” — an absurd relic, frozen in premodern form by a premature bourgeois revolution. Far from being a modern nation state, he saw it as an essentially imperial construct, founded and maintained in order to undergird the far-flung hegemony of a London-led empire. His view is paralleled by that of David Edgerton, for whom pre-War Britain was not so much a nation state as the governing and coordinating node in a world economic system. To Edgerton, however, a “British nation” came into being during the 20th century. This British nation was born in central planning, the pressure of war, and a postwar emphasis on material self-sufficiency. Through these, and in the moral narrative of the Second World War, a distinctive new national identity was forged. 

Today, the British elite must once again learn to embrace nation-building. We must make people feel British, and promote or rebuild the institutions that encourage them to do so; only then can the UK endure. The collapse of the United Kingdom is not pre-ordained; nothing is. Instead, it is a matter of chance, contingency, and will. The UK may or may not be an absurd construct, as Nairn considered. But in a world without order, one shorn of higher powers, to live means to embrace the absurd. As a Frenchman once wrote: “The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.”

Plowing through the early sections of the book, I started to understand the worry. There is certainly a startling mismatch between the former first minister’s famed communicative abilities and the descriptions on the page. For instance, if there’s one thing our author wants you to know, it’s that she loves books. The point comes up time and again: as a child, she was “bookish”; “rarely had her nose out of a book”; had a “fascination with words”. Early on, she became “immersed” in Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott. Later in life, no doubt thanks to all that reading, she describes herself as having the power “to communicate in a way that engaged both heart and head” and to understand “the importance in politics of telling a compelling story”.

But why, then, are her anecdotes from her childhood so plodding and banal? That time when she went to the “retail metropolis of Ayrshire” (i.e. Ayr), and her parents wouldn’t buy her a coveted Cilla Black record, but then… her grandad bought it for her instead. That time when her teenage boyfriend Sparky broke up with her: “it’s not impossible that in different circumstances we would have ended up together. Whether we would have lasted is another matter.” Even seismic events become comically flatfooted in her retelling: “It was from Uncle Dave that I first learned about death. He was thrown from a horse and killed during the annual Laminar (sic) Day celebrations in his hometown of Lanark.” So peremptorily and colorlessly does she rattle through various friends and acquaintances, it is as if she is ticking them off from a list.

An optimistic reader might suspect she is getting the boring stuff out of the way so she can get to the moment when life properly began: the fateful day when, aged 16, she knocked on the door of her local SNP candidate’s house and offered to help with canvassing. But even during the sections recounting her formative years as a political operator in a then up-and-coming party, narrative excitement remains elusive. For instance, the highlight of the 1989 Glasgow Central by-election, as far as she can recall, was a nightly “protest” — quotation marks hers — waged with her pal Shona against sexist bartenders at the Laurieston pub. “Every night after campaigning, we would perch ourselves on bar stools and loudly demand to be served, usually to no avail, leaving us to drink pints bought for us by our male friends instead”. Compared to this, Theresa May’s “running through fields of wheat” admission starts to look like glamorous juvenile delinquency.

Still, by the time we get to the heart of the story — that is, an allegedly unguarded recounting of the period between becoming deputy first minister in 2007 and her eventual resignation as premier in 2023 — there is some evidence that reading Robert Louis Stevenson has left its mark, however unconsciously. For a bit like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there appear to be two different people battling within the breast of this book’s protagonist. Indeed, Sturgeon is sometimes herself aware of the tension: as when, in a climactic moment just after she has been made first minister, she describes listening to conference applause, and feeling “a sort of dissociation” between “the shy, dour, always self-doubting, frumpy girl… in the wings” and the “confident, articulate, almost stylish version of herself… [on] the stage”. Along with some readers perhaps, she wonders: “Who is that woman? Is she real?”

There are other, less self-flattering, dissociations evident in the book too. Its narrator keeps implying she is good at empathy and warmth; that she has been able to forge a “deep, almost emotional, connection… with a sizable swathe of the Scottish population”. Certainly, that is her public reputation. But warmth is in the showing not the saying, and there is little on show here; only robotic expressions of sadness and shock at various significant deaths and tragic events, before getting onto the more important business of how they might affect ongoing political maneuverings. Similarly, the official version of Sturgeon is admirably high-minded and principled, and particularly on behalf of women and girls. Constantly monitoring for the potential presence of misogyny, she can’t describe accepting a bunch of flowers from Govan trade union officials without noting “a touch of unconscious sexism in the gesture”. Yet at another point, she ruthlessly criticizes Labour leader Jack McConnell for having eschewed cheap sexist vibes and treated her with respect instead, describing his personal kindness to her as “naïve politics” and a “huge tactical error”.

Another mystery is why Sturgeon is a nationalist at all. Her main reflections on the question are that in 1987, when she first joined the SNP, the party was more of a natural home for her youthful socialist politics than Neil Kinnock’s Labour. Given the strength of social conservatism in the party back then, this is implausible; but more importantly, it is also underwhelming as a justification of her life’s work. Where are the traditional tartan romances, the misty-eyed misty glens, even just some memorized lines from Braveheart?

Her avowed heartfelt desire for Scottish independence is certainly not due to any deep knowledge of her country’s history: the occasional forays into this territory sound heavily mined from Wikipedia. It doesn’t seem to be informed by political theory either: there are no detailed discussions of the ideals of democracy or sovereignty here. It is clear Sturgeon loves Scotland; who could doubt it, faced with a sentence like: “Standing on the shore, looking out at Ailsa Craig — the uninhabited island about sixteen kilometers west of the mainland, home to puffins and gannets, and from which microgranite is quarried to make curling stones — still gives me a sense of peace and tranquility that I don’t find elsewhere”? But still, as she occasionally acknowledges rather grudgingly, many Unionists love their country too.

In Stevenson’s novella, Mr Hyde kills an elder father figure; and in a way Sturgeon does the same. The passages describing her complex relationship with Alex Salmond are among the book’s most engaging, though bound to infuriate his supporters. Whatever the truth of her involvement in the investigations he faced for alleged sexual misconduct (he was eventually cleared of all charges) — she says she had none — it is clear that she had to get out from under the charismatic politician’s spell to become the leader she did.

She owed much of her initial success to him, and she knew it: he plucked her from the crowd to serve as his deputy, which led seamlessly to her becoming first minister after he resigned. At the same time, he was everything she was not — a witty, risk-taking gambler, big on charm and low on detail — and the fact obviously annoyed her intensely. Her infuriated tale of writing a crucial White Paper during the highly pressured referendum period, then fielding a phone call from her boss at the racecourse, tipsily promising he would definitely read it before the big launch, will resonate with every i-dotting, t-crossing female employee ever faced with a slipshod superior.

Sturgeon’s own approach was very different: obsessing over minutiae, micromanaging underlings, staying up all night fretting nauseously about how things might go wrong. This seems to have worked well during her time as health secretary: when she was set clear objectives, she was all over her brief (at least, as she tells it). But once put in charge of overall goal-setting as first minister, she seems to flounder. Unable to bring about a second independence referendum, and apparently devoid of concrete ideas to deal with Scotland’s overwhelming social problems, she adopts a generic, vibes-based playbook and hopes for the best: some renewable energy and child welfare here, a bit of gender reform there, free university tuition fees all round. When Covid hits and she is able to return to full technocrat mode, you can sense her relief, even if the huge responsibility nearly breaks her.

But here, too, there are significant omissions. Despite her professed concern for children stuck in poverty, she offers no reflections about how lockdowns might have grievously affected them, making a bad situation even worse; nor about how social isolation might have led to a generation of unhappy teenagers falling deeper into an online world. And speaking of which: in the end, the gender reform thing didn’t work out so well either, indicating another puzzling split in the Sturgeon psyche.

Early on in the book, she tells readers, perfectly accurately, that “building common ground isn’t possible without compromise” and that “it is always a good idea to know your audience”. Yet in practice, Sturgeon plowed ahead obtusely with plans to reform gender recognition processes along self-identification lines, deaf to reasonable objections, and blind to the way her stance would be perceived by ordinary voters. By the end of the book, discussing the fallout from the Isla Bryson scandal — which saw a rapist heading to a female prison because he said he belonged there — the bad-tempered, stubborn version of Sturgeon seems to have vanquished the more politically astute one. Through gritted teeth, she attempts to admit to her own mistakes in this area, suggesting she should have “hit the pause button” on gender reform in order to develop consensus; but she still can’t help monstering her opponents at every turn. They are on the same side as Orbán, Putin, Trump; they stand alongside “raging homophobes”; they deny such facts with “brittle defensiveness” and “howls of outrage”.

Meanwhile, her attempted justification of her own position on the nature of womanhood is made even funnier by the fact she thinks it is “too technical” for people to properly understand: namely (drumroll) “there is no need for a man to claim to be a woman to commit acts of abuse or sexual assault” because “the threat to women comes from predatory, abusive and misogynistic men, not from trans women”. In other words, her new, post-Bryson assumption seems to be that, as soon as a trans-identified man becomes predatory or abusive, “she” ceases to be a woman — QED. Indeed, in a recent interview she has said that a rapist “probably forfeits the right to be the gender of their choice”. Ironically, this is a case of what is known as a “no true Scotsman” fallacy: the circular idea that “no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge” isn’t falsified by the sight of Hamish from Glasgow wielding the sugar spoon over his oats; because all this really shows is that Hamish from Glasgow is not a true Scotsman after all.

There was a time just after the 2015 general election, now hard to picture, when the wider world went mad for the progressive vibes Sturgeon was emitting, her party having just wiped Labour out north of the border. For a while, the first minister was mobbed and fawned over like a “rockstar” (her words) wherever she went — including by journalists in London. But looking back, it seems the whole thing was a comparison-based trick of the light: she looked more organized than Salmond, more authentic than Cameron, more effective than Miliband, more down-to-earth than Corbyn. Things got even easier for her in this respect when chaos merchants Johnson and Trump arrived.

But while she had diligence in spades, ultimately, she never made a dent in the most pressing national problems — rising drug deaths, falling education standards, terrible public health, violent crime in cities — and that’s partly because, in terms of her capacity to understand the bigger picture, her intellect was always too limited, tempting her towards the superficial gesture as a substitute. If Frankly is anything to go by, then, strictly speaking Sturgeon never did have imposter syndrome. To have that particular malaise, your nagging suspicion you aren’t really up to the task has to be wrong.

In reality, the party’s 20-seat gain was very modest, under-shooting prediction models and tying with the Lib Dems, while falling behind the SNP, who were not expected to make any gains. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar may believe that “Scottish Labour is back“, but his party recorded its second-worst local result in half a century.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Tories have lost a staggering 63 seats. No doubt they will be shouting from the rooftops that it’s all because of Partygate and Douglas Ross’s humiliating U-turn on his call for Boris Johnson to resign over it. But the Conservative result is not as bad as it looks: in terms of seat pluralities, the Tories have placed first in five local authorities, ahead of Labour in three. They’ve also made gains in a few strategic areas such as Moray, Aberdeenshire and Ayrshire.

Nonetheless, there is little room for complacency. The Scottish Tories’ popularity appears to have reached a peak in 2017 in the wake of the Ruth Davidson surge and a fierce unionist backlash against Sturgeon’s plans for a second independence referendum. It has declined in the five years since, and the party’s current vote share of 19.6% will only fall further in a national election for Westminster or Holyrood, where far larger numbers of younger, working class and urban voters will turn out. And of course, the leadership and macroeconomic problems that dogged the Tories across Britain (where their net loss of 487 seats far outstripped the worst expectations) are only set to get worse.

Despite its underwhelming victory, Scottish Labour’s reclamation of the second place mantle matters symbolically — the SNP’s preferred opponents are Tories, who give them the opportunity to define themselves against unpopular Westminster rule. Scottish Labour coming back from the dead would therefore complicate the SNP’s monopoly on the centre-left, even if there’s reason to believe Anas Sarwar has learnt little from the failures of the Jim Murphy era, if his current insistence that no local government Labour groups cooperate with the SNP is anything to go by.

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Scotland has lost its sense of humour

By Daniel Kalder

What does this mean for the fate of the independence movement? There has been talk of the issue being forced onto the back foot by the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis. Yet these developments only seem to have had a marginal impact on polling, which has hovered between 50-50 and 47 Yes – 53 No. In fact, if anything this election is further proof that the Scottish electorate increasingly favour independence. The vote-share of pro-independence parties was around 45%, while that of pro-union parties amounted to 55%. That’s quite a change from 2017, when 40% of votes were for pro-independence parties compared to 60% for unionist ones — especially when one takes into account that voters in local elections are more likely to be older, more middle-class and unionist compared to national elections.

Just after the election, a Panelbase survey for the Sunday Times found that more than 55% of Scots want an independence referendum to be held within this parliamentary term. Since the vote, senior Scottish Conservative grandees have said that opposition to Indyref2 is no longer working on the doorstep. The party’s former head of communications has openly acknowledged that the issue of the SNP dominance won’t be solved until a referendum is held. If this was meant to be an election for Scots to send Sturgeon a “no to Indyref2” message, it certainly doesn’t seem to have been interpreted by unionist parties in that way, to say nothing of voters themselves.

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Scotland's drug shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Interestingly, however, this hasn’t necessarily translated into support for the SNP. In places such as Edinburgh and Glasgow, it certainly appears that progressive and younger SNP voters are decamping to the pro-independence Greens over a variety of issues such as climate and social policy. That isn’t to say we should downplay the SNP’s performance: another insufficiently discussed consequence of the local elections is that council composition will be quite different now — and in the favour of nationalists. Previously, the SNP were only part of administrations in 14 local authorities around the country, but now it is well-placed to form as many as 25.

In practice, this could make all the difference when it comes to Indyref2. Should the impasse between Bute House and Downing Street end up with an emboldened Scottish Government pursuing an independence referendum outside the Section 30 framework laid out by the 2012 Edinburgh Agreement, it will in large part rely upon the cooperation of local authorities in being able to organise polling stations, counters and observers. While previously the largely unionist composition of many administrations would have been a bulwark against this, the strategic gains of the SNP and Greens across the board will make it significantly easier for a unilateral referendum to be held.

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The SNP won't silence women

By Sarah Pedersen

Still, if there’s one thing that did emerge as a pattern from the local elections, it was that there isn’t a pattern. This is by far the most fragmented election Scotland has seen in a long time. The SNP’s gains were highly uneven and scattered, as were the gains of Scottish Labour and Scottish Conservative’s losses. This is a continuation of the dynamic at last year’s Holyrood elections, where a “national environment” couldn’t really be said to exist because every individual constituency became a hyperlocalised contest between the SNP and whichever unionist party was best placed to challenge it.

In this regard, the local elections are best understood as a microcosm of Scottish politics as a whole: it was a grinding war of attrition where significant developments take place on both sides, but where the momentum continues to be on the side of nationalism.

But if you complicate that a little by coming from the northern half of Britain, well, that’s a bit different. Yes, there are many world-famous Scots — Adam Smith, Arthur Conan Doyle, James Watt and Sean Connery, to name only four. But with the exception of the last one, none of them wrapped themselves in tartan, and so they are usually associated with the broader “British” identity.

Of course, if the SNP were to have their way, then the very concept of Britishness would be abolished, and Nicola Sturgeon is adamant that this option should be put to the vote sooner rather than later. Were that to happen, then I think these figures and others would be retconned as purely “Scottish”, in much the same way that the post-Soviet states projected their modern identities into the past. Thus was the prophet Zarathustra resurrected in the late 20^th century as a Tajik national hero, for instance. Whether or not such retcons gain credence with the wider world, however, is another matter: Nikolai Gogol remains resolutely part of the Russian literary canon, despite his Ukrainian origins.

As for Scotland, I think this retconning might prove to be quite challenging, also. For instance, in more than two decades spent living outside the UK, I have found that many people are quite foggy when it comes to my homeland’s precise constitutional status. They know that it’s not part of England, but the shared parliament and royal family and currency are confusing. Despite this, awareness of Scottish symbols is high, thanks in no small part to Walter Scott cobbling together all that malarkey about clans and tartans in the 19^th century. Our whisky is also held in high regard, and many a golfer aspires to play at the Old Course in Saint Andrews. In fact, I’d say that as far as small countries go, we don’t have it too bad — we’re certainly better off than the Belgians with their waffles, Tintin books and melancholy kickboxer.

But still, as Scots are few in number and comparatively rare beyond British shores, we remain quasi-mysterious to many. So whenever Scotland has appeared in the media, or come up in conversation in the different places where I have lived, I have always found it interesting to think about what that says about my homeland, how it is perceived, and whether, after almost a decade and half of nationalist rule, those perceptions are changing.

For instance, in Moscow in the late Nineties, I learned very quickly that by far the most famous Scotsman as far as Russians were concerned was a wee Australian in blue face paint named Mel Gibson.  “Ah, Scotland,” they’d say. “Braveheart!” “Yes,” I’d say, “Braveheart.” True, members of the older generation were familiar with Robert Burns in the Soviet era translations by Samuil Marshak, and quite a few people had seen Highlander (where the Scottish guy is played by a Frenchman rather than an Australian). But overall, to be a Scot abroad then — and since — was to live in the shadow of Braveheart.

Usually I would bluff my way through discussions of the film because I hadn’t seen it, and most people found that baffling, even disappointing (“How can you not have seen Braveheart?”). I suppose it would have been easier just to watch it, but I am very good at sustaining Larry David-style points of principle over things that are inexplicable to others. I’d been taught about William Wallace as a child, but even then, I thought there was something not quite right about the myth. I think it was all that stuff about losing, and then being eviscerated while still alive — it just didn’t seem like something I wanted to aspire towards.

I was more of a Robert the Bruce kind of guy, and not just because his bones were buried in my hometown of Dunfermline. I liked how he — you know — won. Besides, yearning for the days when hairy dudes roamed the heather and had periodic fights with the English just wasn’t my bag. I preferred the bewigged intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment: a handful of brilliant individuals coming up with world changing ideas on the fringes of Europe. That seemed like a healthier model for the nation, (though, I grant you, less appealing as fodder for a Hollywood blockbuster).

However, despite the predominance of Braveheart, it wasn’t all Mel Gibson all the time. I remember discussing Dolly the Sheep. I liked to explain that Dolly had aged much faster than a sheep produced by the traditional method and was now preserved forever in the National Museum of Scotland, where she received visitors every day — our Lenin. I also tried to steer people towards Trainspotting because I felt that it captured Scottish nihilism quite well, and I had a story about Irvine Welsh renting Jean-Claude Van Damme movies from the video shop in Dunfermline which made him sound very uncool. But Trainspotting did not endure; people did not want janky Edinburgh junkies. They wanted Braveheart.

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Don't fall for Putin's enemies

By Daniel Kalder

And so it continued, for years. It was while I was living in Russia that Scotland held its referendum on devolution, but I don’t remember that catching people’s attention. It wasn’t supposed to; Labour thought that Scotland was their fiefdom and that that they would run it forever, like Moscow ran its satellite states during the Cold War.

When I moved to the US in 2006, I discovered that Braveheart also cast a long shadow over the land of the free, although Sean Connery was very popular, as was the late night chat show host Craig Ferguson, extracted to LA via Cumbernauld. One year later the SNP took power, but things were still quiet for at first, although I do remember one unusual story making it across the waves a few years later. In an early act of cultural auto-colonisation, the likes of which are now commonplace across British institutions, an MSP lodged a motion supporting the gay wedding of the little-known Canadian superhero Northstar to his partner Kyle in the Astonishing X-Men #51, published by Marvel Comics, the New York-based subsidiary of the Disney corporation. Admittedly, I read about it on a crap comics website; even so, it felt like a new development.

But the hitherto super-boring world of Scottish politics was about to change drastically. Mel Gibson’s dominance as a conversation topic for people mildly curious about where I came from was seriously challenged in 2014 when Scotland voted on whether or not to remain inside the UK. Suddenly the possible dissolution of a 300-year political union was in the headlines and, for the first time ever, the continued existence of a collective British identity seemed in doubt. Most people in the US had simply never thought about any of this before. Starting about three days before the referendum I found myself fielding all kinds of questions about independence (not that I had a say in any of it, mind, because the SNP had disenfranchised all Scots living overseas).

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A cheat sheet, rather than a detailed discussion of, say, claims about the viability of North Sea oil was all that was desired, so I didn’t discuss the issues at length. But that was fine — it was startling, and refreshing, after all this time to find that the Scotland my family lived in, and to which I regularly returned, was finally more compelling to the people I knew than Mel Gibson’s bekilted action movie.

Still more striking, however, was the mood the day after the referendum. I vividly recall going into work and feeling a strange sense of anticlimax among those who had talked to me about it. Presented with the opportunity to turn everything upside down and strike out on its own, Scotland had voted to… maintain the status quo. What lay behind this sense of disappointment, I wondered, among people who had zero skin in the game? At first I thought it was the influence of the revolutionary war — for Americans, declaring independence from the meddlesome parliament in London is ground zero for their national identity. And perhaps that was part of it; but now I wonder if it wasn’t also the shadow of Braveheart. Everyone appeared to have seen that film, they had all heard Mel’s stirring words about freedom, and here, given the chance to at long last fulfil Wallace’s dream and seize independence, a majority of Scots had turned around and politely declined to do so.

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Scotland's mid-life crisis

By Ruth Davidson

The referendum was a watershed moment in the global imagination, the moment at which Scotland ceased to be a nostalgic fantasy and became a modern country, a place where things sometimes happened, things that required further explanation. Now, with Nicola Sturgeon insisting on another referendum, I suspect it is only a matter of time before I find myself answering questions about Scotland’s constitutional status again. The conflict with Boris is scoring headlines even amid the raging garbage fire of America’s self-obsessed media. I’ve already discussed the hypothetical of a hard border between Scotland and England with one curious Texan.

An awareness overseas of Scotland as a place that, culturally at least, is not fully British is definitely on the rise. I’d say that’s half the battle for the SNP, but it isn’t — independence is a zero-sum game, after all. It is a change, however, and a significant one. Something else has changed, too: these days I’m more likely to be asked about Outlander than Braveheart. And I haven’t seen that, either.

Yet just last week one of the SNP’s more excitable parliamentarians made the startling claim that the recreation of this medieval border could be an engine of job creation — something that hasn’t obtained since Geordie Burn and “Kinmont Willie” Armstrong were stealing cattle and rustling sheep in Tweeddale and Tynedale. Indeed, the very remoteness of these borderlands, beyond the reach of London — or even Edinburgh — created a unique and lawless civilisation, home to feuding bands of Scots and English highland clans who lived a guerrilla life of arson and plunder, and whose nomadic ranching culture and traditions of military service and recreational belligerence would eventually be transplanted wholesale to the dangerous “back country” of the American colonies.

These families were more loyal to their kinsmen than to abstract notions of nationality. Indeed, at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh outside Edinburgh in 1547, one observer noticed how Scottish and English border levies could be seen chatting cordially with each other — until spotted by their commanders, whereupon they put on a spirited show of combat. On his accession to the English throne in 1603, James VI may have remarked that “hath not God first united these two kingdoms, both in language, religion, and similitude of manners?”, but this was especially so in the Borderlands and adjacent counties of Northern England.

In Linda Colley’s key text Britons: Forging the Nation she records how the poor in the North East consumed oatmeal like the Scots and “to pass from the borders of Scotland into Northumberland”, a Scottish clergyman wrote at the end of the 18th century, “was rather like going into another parish than into another kingdom”. John Buchan would make similar observations as he passed into England from his beloved Tweeddale. By the early 1500s, there were hundreds of Scots living in Newcastle, including John Knox who was appointed a preacher at St Nicholas’s Church in 1550. Many of the coal miners and keelmen on the Tyne in the 17th and 18th centuries had come down to England from Lothian and the Borders, as did Captain James Cook’s father, a farm labourer who arrived on Teesside from Roxburghshire.

By the time of the ’45 so many Scots had made Tyneside their home that the native Northumbrians differentiated what they saw as the savage highlanders from the more civilised lowland Scots, with whom they shared a loyalty to “King Geordie” and the Protestant succession. Similarly, the unusually high levels of literacy in Northumbria owed much to an appreciation for the neighbouring system of parish education in Scotland, and Northumbrians shared many other traits with the Scots including a taste for classical architecture well into the Neo-Gothic period, and for living in flats (which was highly unusual in England), as well as an obsession with football — a macho and martial strain that was useful on imperial battlefields — and a debilitating enthusiasm for alcoholic beverages.

A second wave of Scots migration to Tyneside shipyards and coal mines helped to establish what can be seen as a North British Industrial Zone, linking places such as Newcastle, Glasgow, Liverpool and Belfast as well as outliers like the shipyard town of Barrow-in-Furness. North East England and West Central Scotland were the only places in the world with large-scale engineering, shipbuilding and coal mining all in the same place, a nexus critical to the technological developments essential to capitalism and the wealth of Britain: Scotland gave us the steam engine, the pneumatic tyre and the telephone, while North East England gave us the locomotive, the turbine and the lightbulb.

Some of Tyneside’s greatest industrialists had strong Scottish connections: George Stephenson had worked in Scottish collieries as well as those on his native Tyneside, and Sir William Armstrong’s business partners were the Scotsmen Charles Mitchell and Andrew Noble. Indeed, Scots played a huge part in the North East’s maritime trades: John Barbour’s wax-jacket empire grew from supplying the Tyneside fishing fleet, hundreds of Scots “fisher lassies” who followed the trawlers down the East Coast settled in North Shields, and so many Scotsmen came to work at Andrew’s Leslie’s shipyard that Hebburn became known as “Little Aberdeen”.

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Why the North East of England is different

By Dan Jackson

Thousands of families, including mine, crisscrossed the Anglo-Scottish border in the late 19th and early 20th century — and figures such as Arthur Henderson, Manny Shinwell and latterly James Herriott and Mark Knopfler spent their early lives swapping Tyne and Wear for the Clyde (and vice versa). You see this in the career of the theatrical impresario Arthur Jefferson who owned theatres across “North Britain” but principally on the Tyne and the Clyde. It is significant that his son, Stan Laurel (who always considered himself a Tynesider), actually made his first professional appearance in his father’s theatre in Glasgow.

Coming from Northumberland, Scottish things have been a constant in my life: nurtured first by grandparents who took the Sunday Post and bought me The Broons and Oor Wullie annuals at Christmas. My father’s best pals were his Glaswegian workmates who’d relocated to Newcastle from IBM’s plant at Greenock, and I can vividly remember the boisterousness of “Glasgow Shipyard Fortnight” when holidaying Scots would migrate en masse for fun and frolics at Whitley Bay.

As kids we drank Barr’s pop and ate Scotch pies, Tunnock’s teacakes and “McCowan’s Highland Toffee”. Many of us followed Celtic, Rangers, Hibs and Hearts as our “second teams”, and took character-building family holidays in the midge-infested highlands, or on the freezing coasts of Fife and Ayrshire — not to mention regular trips to the Edinburgh Tattoo. McEwan’s Best Scotch was the first pint I ever bought (at 3.6 ABV a good “training beer” for thirsty teenagers), and my first flat was around the corner from St Andrew’s Kirk in Newcastle — right by the old Deuchars Brewery on Sandyford Road.

The sense of similarity and affinity between Scotland and North East England has shaped my own unionist outlook, but also my growing sense that England is, in the radical analysis of Alex Niven, “a nebulous half-country”, riven in two for centuries by a geological fault-line that separated a prosperous and dominant South East, centred on London, from the poor and sparsely populated lands north of the Trent. The medieval North was simply a different country, and the Far North was more different still — a quasi-autonomous border country, run as a buffer zone against the Scots by warlord aristocrats and (uniquely for the British Isles) ruling Prince Bishops — the longevity of whose power meant that North East England was only fully integrated into a centralised English, then British, polity not that long before Scotland was.

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This sense of Northern difference was cemented still further in the 18th and 19th centuries with the emergence of the distinctive working class culture of the North of England, whose politics built on the anti-Anglican traditions of recusant Catholicism and muscular Methodism, and birthed a municipal Labourism that raised working-class living standards, and underpinned what Ian Jack, in The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain described as an “independent civilisation”.

And yet the history of the North of England is basically a litany of defeats (both militarily and politically) at the hands of the South: starting with the brutal “Harrying of the North” by the Normans, the Wars of the Roses (where the North lost), the Catholic rebellions of the 1500s (ditto), the Civil War (where the King’s heartlands were in the North and West), and then the failure of any subsequent challenge to the power of London and the South East — from the Jacobite risings, to the Chartists, and then the General Strike and Miners’ Strikes.

In her 1921 book, The Kings’ Council of the North (about Elizabeth I’s brutal suppression of the Rising of the Northern Earls’ in 1569), the historian Rachel Reid wrote that North is “the natural refuge of lost causes”, and yet as the late Scottish historian Christopher Harvie once put it, English regionalism is “the dog that never barked”. Something did seem to stir during the pandemic though, when Northern grievance found its champion in Andy Burnham, and not long afterwards a Northern Independence Party was founded committed to “Northumbrian” secession  — and cringey tweets.

But the North has never been able to stand up to London alone. In his book The Shortest History of England James Hawes made the brilliant observation that, after 1885, the South of England became “a virtually impregnable Tory bloc while the North voted otherwise”, the North therefore had to look for “alliances with the Celts [the Scots and Welsh] to outgun them: we call that alliance, which lasted until 2015, when the Scots deserted it, ‘the Labour Party’”. With the SNP now dominant in Scotland, and then Red Wall in the North crumbling, the South East looks more invincible than ever.

For those dismayed by Northern enfeeblement, and the prospect of a border being reimposed between Berwick and Carlisle —  with the potential for a brassic Scotland becoming a client state of a hostile power, as it was under Mary of Guise – what should be the response?

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Well, if I were tasked to save the union, I would focus on two things: firstly rekindling those alliances between the North of England and Scotland, and thinking creatively about how to knit them together economically and culturally — not just dualling the A1, but how about a maglev joining Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow, with a tunnel to Belfast too.

I often get the impression that the Scots — and even the Irish to an extent — don’t mind sharing sovereignty with their larger neighbours, as long as it isn’t the English calling the shots. But my hunch is that it’s the caricatural Southern English that the rest of these islands finds so insufferable. Far too many English Tories fit into the sneering stereotype of Tim Roth in Rob Roy or Tobias Menzies in Outlander, whereas in my experience Scoto-Northumbrian relations are almost always extremely cordial.

I think the strong horse theory explains why high-status opinion in Scotland is so wedded to “independence in the EU”. I’m reminded here of the Catalans, who like the Scots in the British Empire were ardent Spanish imperialists, but as Spain’s power and prestige declined after the loss of Imperio Español, they were beguiled by a new imperial power in Brussels. Ambitious Scots, looking South to an increasingly threadbare post-imperial Westminster, had similar feelings.

So, forget constitutional tinkering, and even emotional appeals to former glories and “our NHS”; the Scots are too hard-headed for that. I suspect that the one thing that will change attitudes to Britishness in Scotland is for the UK to just be a wealthier and more successful country. Easier said than done, but 4% on GDP will do more than any Royal Commission to raise the prestige of the Union in Northern Britain. Can Boris Johnson pull this off? For those of us who fear the imposition of border controls at Carter Bar, we’d better hope so.

Putin aside, Scottish voters are now having to contend with the return of two Scottish political heavyweights of yesteryear: Galloway and Alex Salmond, two RT hosts who now find themselves leading two new political parties.

Each is attempting to outflank their former tribes on the constitutional question, playing to their respective unionist and nationalist bases as strongmen who will hold the current crop of MSP’s feet to the fire. But in doing so, both risk doing more damage to the cause they claim to support. North of the border, there’s more than a lingering suspicion that both are using their creations as a vehicle for their respective egos, rather than as a genuine attempt to shake up the body politic.

The comparisons don’t end there. For while Galloway and Salmond are not quite the opposite of each other, they represent, in a phrase favoured by the former, “two cheeks of the same arse”. They are both, in effect, attempting to game the Scottish electoral system.

Unlike the House of Commons, where an MP simply has to record one more vote than their nearest challenger to win a constituency, the Scottish Parliament — as well as the Welsh Senedd — is elected using the Additional Member System. In Holyrood, there are 129 seats, of which 73 are elected using the traditional first-past-the-post system. Scotland is then divided into wider electoral regions, where 56 further MSPs are elected on a proportional basis. This “list” is designed to ensure that parties are not penalised for recording their support evenly across the country, rather than seeing it pooled geographically in a number of individual seats. Or so goes the theory.

But when the architects of devolution were deciding on this modified “d’Hont system”, there was a general assumption that the same parties competing on the list would also choose to stand candidates in the constituencies; this matters, because the number of constituencies a party wins is ratio’d out of their list returns to make the result more proportional.

Both Galloway’s party, All for Unity (also, confusingly, called Alliance4Unity), and Alex Salmond’s vehicle, Alba, are standing solely on the list. And at least in tactical terms, that may make electoral sense.

In Galloway’s plan, the SNP will likely take the overwhelming number of first-past-the-post seats, but with less than half of the vote. So if pro-UK voters simply cast their wider politics aside and vote for the leading unionist candidate in the constituency vote and the Alliance4UK candidate in the regional list vote, the SNP would be crushed. Nicola Sturgeon would be out on her ear and there would be no more talk of independence referendums.

Salmond’s offer to independence supporters is the inverse of Galloway’s claim. Because the SNP records so many first-past-the-post wins — and will likely do so again in May — they return very few MSPs from the regional list. In effect, goes the Alba narrative, thousands of true believers in independence have their list votes cast aside. But, says Salmond, if they decided to split their vote — SNP in the constituency and Alba on the list — Scottish nationalists could record what he calls a “supermajority” for independence. With so many pro-independence MSPs in Holyrood, Boris Johnson would be forced to capitulate and offer another independence referendum immediately.

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On paper, there appears to be a logic to both arguments. But in reality, they are to varying degrees a combination of sleight of hand, misdirection and utter cobblers.

Both Salmond and Galloway fail to appreciate that Scottish voters are unlikely to put all other considerations to one side when they cast their ballot. Yes, there is tactical voting between Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem voters — Conservatives sweep up thousands of Lib Dem votes in the borders, many Tory voters in West Dunbartonshire are happy to vote for their local Labour MSP to keep the nationalists out and a fair whack of both Labour and Conservatives will cheerily vote for the avuncular Scottish Lib Dem leader in his NE Fife constituency.

But there is no wholesale transfer, nor would you expect there to be from such diverse political traditions. Indeed, because Scottish councils are decided on multi-member wards and with a single transferrable vote, where voters rank their choices, it is easy to track their second and third preferences. In the glut of council by-elections we have seen following the lifting of Covid restrictions, it is clear that as many  — and sometimes more — Labour voters would rather give their second vote to the SNP than to the Conservatives, even if the Tories are best placed to keep a nationalist out of office.

Moreover, as the vast majority of pro-union MSPs are elected on the list system, rather than winning constituencies outright, adding another unionist party such as Galloway’s and splitting the vote four ways, rather than three, is likely to reduce each party’s share and allow more nationalists in through the middle.

I suspect that George Galloway — whose itinerant political career has taken in the Labour Party, The Respect party, the Workers Party of Britain and now All For Unity — probably knows this. This is not, after all, the first time he has stood for Holyrood; in 2011, he managed to record 3.3% on the Glasgow list.

Fast forward to today, and the most recent three Scottish polls have All For Unity failing to cut through. But while it looks unlikely that Galloway will return any MSPs, he could still gather enough votes to keep some pro-UK members out. For a man who refused to join the Better Together campaign at the 2014 independence referendum because “I hate the Union Jack”, who has previously called for a United Ireland and last week saw a clip resurface of him calling on the UK government to deliver a second independence referendum, it is almost as if his new party is just another grift to keep himself in the public eye.

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By Henry Hill

For Alex Salmond, however, even his most devout opponents accept that he believes fervently in Scottish independence. It is a cause to which he has committed almost his entire adult life. Whether, though, he is fully invested in seeing his protégé, Nicola Sturgeon, be the one to deliver it is another matter.

The fallout between the two former allies has been seismic. It centres on a complex and unedifying series of events, involving Salmond winning a civil battle over Sturgeon’s government over the way it investigated allegations of sexual assault against him, and culminating in Salmond being acquitted of multiple allegations of the same nature. Along the way, Ms Sturgeon traduced the character of her former boss, mentor and friend of 30 years — and she has carried the attacks into this campaign, highlighting his gambling habits and suggesting his new party was about putting “self-interest first”.

For his part, Salmond appears to have buried the enmity he showed throughout the investigation into the Scottish Government’s handling of the harassment complaints, during which he accused a group of Sturgeon’s allies (including her husband) of colluding to have him removed from public life and jailed. He now claims he simply wants Alba representatives to help get the SNP over the line with a majority that the UK government can’t ignore.

But is this likely? While a new nationalist party throws a spanner into some of the statistical modelling of polls and results, the general rule of thumb is that you need 5% of the regional vote to start taking seats. Get more than 5% of the vote and Alba begins doing damage to the pro-UK cause by displacing some pro-UK MSPs; receive less than 5% and the damage is mostly inflicted on the nationalist side by taking SNP and nationalist-supporting Green votes without anything to show for it.

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The most recent three polls, in which Alba has recorded between 2-3% of the vote, suggest the latter scenario is increasingly likely. Indeed, it’s hard not see Alex Salmond’s power play as anything other than a revenge mission. When he stepped down in 2014, he handed his deputy a parliamentary majority. Nicola Sturgeon promptly squandered it in the 2016 Scottish election — a setback which allowed the UK government to deny all claims that an independence referendum should be rerun.

But even if Alba does somehow manage to return the sort of “supermajority” Alex Salmond claims to be hoping for, there’s nothing to say that it will pay off. The UK Government would be well within its rights to point out that gaming the system isn’t the same as gaining support. After all, in recent polls a majority of Scots have not been in support of separation. It would also, I suspect, be easier to counter a fractured nationalist Scottish movement composed of squabbling splinter groups than an SNP majority.

Come election day, though, far more important will be the fact that voters simply don’t like the sense that they are being played; that so-called big beasts think the political stage is theirs for an encore even if there’s no applause.

Even the late Sir Roger Scruton’s worldview represented an uneasy marriage between Thatcherite capitalism and the last vestiges of the world that came before it. It didn’t ever quite perceive that the Thatcher revolution was too successful: by kicking away the last props of the pre-capitalist order that underwrote the traditional conservative worldview, it killed off that which it proclaimed to love. 

The ultimate irony was Scruton’s appreciation, late in life, of the post-Communist, quasi-authoritarian conservatism of Hungary and Poland as a model. For all the anti-Communism of their post-Cold War governments, surely it was the statist paternalism of their communist regimes that preserved in aspic societies fundamentally more conservative than those eroded by capitalist liberalism in the free-market West. Without Marx, there could be no Orban or Kaczynski; without communism, Hungary and Poland would look like Britain or France.

With this irony in mind, perhaps Government officials, ideologically adrift at a time of national crisis, would do well to read the Marxist historian Perry Anderson’s 72-page dissection of Britain’s decline in the latest issue of the New Left Review. A first draft of modern history from the groundbreaking author of Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, Anderson’s savage critique of modern Britain is as far from the court gossip and palace intrigue which characterises political journalism in this country as it is possible to be.

A product of Eton and Oxford, and of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, the 82-year old Anderson demolishes the British establishment from within. Like many European if not American Marxists, Anderson is a stern critic of the hyper-liberalism, derived from French Theory via American Puritanism, which disfigures much of the modern Anglophone Left. He is, indeed, more conservative in his thinly-veiled and patrician distaste for Anglo-Saxon liberalism than our own nominally Conservative government. So what guidance can this elderly communist give our Conservative leadership at a time of national crisis?

Citing the most doom-laden author of Germany’s interwar Konservative Revolution — noteworthy in itself — Anderson warns that “Decline, banished for a season from reputable discourse, has returned in more drastic guise. What lies ahead,” for Britain, “is more like the term in Spengler’s mistranslated title — Untergang: not decline, but downfall”.

Britain’s problems are structural, the combination of appalling economic planning over decades and inherent constitutional dysfunction: “Without any mass upheaval, or even such turbulence as marked the seventies, the order of Ukania  [a term for the UK adopted by Anderson from the Marxist and Scottish nationalist historian Tom Nairn] has been disrupted as never before since 1911–14, with no new equilibrium in sight. All its components — economy, polity, ideology, territory, diplomacy — have simultaneously and interconnectedly been destabilised. The model of growth around which the country has been built since the late nineteenth century has generated such internal tensions that it has finally backfired.”

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The outcome, for Anderson, is the inevitable collapse of what he terms “the Westminster state”. As he declares, the “nexus is bound to dissolve, in one way or another. When or how is anyone’s guess.” Anderson’s essay, which follows the  slow-burning fuse of British decline back to the Early Modern period, is not party political: indeed, like many conservatives, he reserves his greatest ire for the various political and economic innovations of New Labour, which, like Thatcher before it, eroded Britain’s old order and replaced it with something worse. 

It is remarkable, for all his Marxism, how much Anderson sounds like a Tory grandee of old when he observes that Thatcher “had staged an intra-party coup, routing Tory paternalism as well as Labour corporatism with a cult of the market and a petty-bourgeois zeal no longer restrained by fear of the proletariat.” It is difficult, at times, in his dissection of the finely-graded class differences of Conservative leaders, or in his digressive lament for the declining standards of public schools, to discern where Anderson the Marxist analyst of power networks ends and where Anderson the harrumphing patrician begins. Either way, the upshot is the same. By the beginning of this century, he observes, “Tory England in the old sense was dead. What had replaced it in the Conservative Party was not better.”

In foreign policy, Anderson channels Powell as much as any left-wing thinker when he excoriates Blair and Brown’s “hyper-subalternity to the US in an era when America had become the sole super-power, whose pay-off overseas was a hugely greater sum of killing and torture”. Paraphrasing the conservative writer Peter Oborne approvingly, Anderson savages the “surrounding incrustation of advisers, assistants, researchers, lobbyists, think-tankers, client journalists and broadcasters” which New Labour introduced into Britain’s political life, which, “instrumental in all its relationships, without roots or connections beyond its own shallow, insecure, public-relations obsessed, ideas-empty world” still dominates our politics.

We think here, of the lobby correspondent Matt Chorley, who gloated on the downfall of Dominic Cummings, like a palace eunuch in the court of the last Chinese emperor Pu Yi, that “every genius who arrives vowing to shake up the media, undermine, bypass and destroy the lobby, ends up leaving. And for good or bad, we’re still there.” That is, of course, precisely the problem, and it is Anderson’s open contempt for our elites that guides the path to some form of solution.

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There is, perhaps, an echo of the Neo-Tories of the 1930s in Anderson’s tracing of the roots of Britain’s current day decline to the political settlement of the Glorious Revolution, though of course fantasies of cutting a path back to Merry England do not occur to him. The source, for Anderson, of our relative economic decline is that “unlike any of its major competitors, the country knew no second revolution from above after the settlement of 1689, nor intervening convulsion on the road to modernity,” and thus the “fault-lines now becoming visible followed from the original composite nature of the British state itself.” 

Summarising the Nairn-Anderson hypothesis underpinning the New Left Review’s analysis of modern British history, Anderson, like the Scottish nationalist historian and writer Neal Ascherson, traces our current woes to our inhabiting an unreformed Early Modern union of three crowns, in which “the very success of the Anglo-British parliamentary monarchy in overtaking all rivals to become, as early as the 1690s, the most advanced power of Europe, fixed it fast in a shape whose counterparts elsewhere were later swept away”. 

Our early success is thus the cause of our modern failure: “Developmental priority and imperial success had arrested the British ancien régime—‘the grandfather of the contemporary political world’— half-way between feudal and modern forms, leaving its structures an ‘indefensible and unadaptable survival’ of the transition from absolutism to constitutionalism,” with the result that we remain trapped in “a conceptual landscape of Britain swept clean of all but ‘one significant life-form and one technology: the post-1688 ruling bloc and its prosthesis, the Westminster state.’”

If Anderson’s thesis is correct then all our problems, in one way or another, lead back to Westminster and the great gothic fantasia on the Thames, the increasing decrepitude of whose architectural fabric is an almost too obvious metaphor for the British state itself. Can it be restored without bringing the whole structure crashing down? The very antiquity of the British state is argued, by some, as a source of potential strength: if devolution could be rolled back, if the almost dictatorial powers available to a confident executive could be wielded effectively, perhaps some of the rot could be cut away, as long as the essential structure underpinning it remains strong?

But the British state is only as strong as the people entrusted with its care, and it is the deteriorating quality of our elites — a theme running through Anderson’s essay — that is perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of all. It is not, unfortunately, an exaggeration to observe that both main parties are dangerously incompetent, and that the also-rans are, if anything, even worse. The conservative journalist Henry Hill’s recent call for a British “Meiji Restoration,” a reassertion of the power of the central state in a programme of national renewal, “conducted with an eye to tradition and the power and sovereignty of the nation” surely falls at this hurdle: the idea may be good, we are forced to answer, but have you seen who’d carry it out?

So what comes after Westminster? The European experiment — a Tory attempt at “taking Britain into Europe as a surrogate for Empire”— clearly failed, leading to a fraught denouement whose terminal “Brexit referendum was a domestic quarrel, in which both sides were at mass level essentially oblivious of the ostensible object of the occasion, the European Union itself, other than as an object of polar cathexis; Remain and Leave opinion at large equally ignorant of, and indifferent to, its structures and mutations.”

As befits the editor of the New Left Review, whose deep engagement with European politics is not matched by that of Britain’s FBPE media ecosystem, Anderson is notably more critical of the wounded class consciousness or “status anxieties” of Britain’s bourgeois Remainers than of the Brexiteers, noting dispassionately that Remain was a project of the AB social class, support for which has led Labour to be “penned in to the corral of an increasingly middle-class— professional, managerial, clerical— Europeanist constituency, where it risks competing more with Liberal Democrats than Conservatives.” 

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As Anderson observes witheringly, “the correspondence columns of leading dailies overflowed with professorial fury at the prospect of exiting the Union, literary periodicals raised a din such as London had not heard for a century,” yet in time, “some of the Remainer emotion of recent memory, the part reminiscent of mourning for Diana, will presumably fade.” Instead, for our post-1688 political class, it is “peripheral nationalism” that will likely be “their potential nemesis,” yet Anderson’s analysis of Scottish nationalism is entirely devoid of the lust for national self-negation, part romanticism-by-proxy and part-schadenfreude, displayed by the London intelligentsia for whom he shows such disdain.

Following Nairn, Anderson undercuts the self-aggrandising mythologies of the SNP, reminding his readers that Scotland was not a colony but a beneficiary of Britain’s industrialisation, and a keen and active participant in the imperial project. Instead, he traces Scotland’s sudden drive towards independence to distaste for New Labour, “the neo-liberal regime in London, packed with vociferously unionist Scots — Brown, Cook, Reid, Darling, Campbell et al: bards of Britishness to a man” whose economic mismanagement “antagonised more and more sectors of Scottish society”.

The essential dilemma for the SNP is that Brexit has made independence simultaneously more attractive and impossible to achieve, at least as a member of the European Union. Pleading to enter Europe from without, its way barred by another fragile Early Modern kingdom, Spain, “departure from Europe has both inflamed Scottish nationalism and entrapped it”. We remain, unfortunately, trapped in a loveless marriage for the foreseeable future, with no preferable partners available and an ugly rift of some kind awaiting us. 

Intriguingly, Anderson takes the case for English nationalism more seriously than does our political class, sounding like a Marxist Simon Heffer in his sympathy for “the country that had not spoken yet, the English, whose voice had long been usurped by a British-imperial class speaking for them”. As it stands, New Labour’s constitutional reordering, by granting autonomy to the peripheries while keeping England subject to the Westminster entity, has set the stage for English nationalism to manifest itself in unappealing forms: “in not affording it any institutional expression” Anderson argues, “Blair’s project made it likely that [Enoch] Powell’s intonation of it would be heard once more.” 

There are two Englands struggling to be born, Anderson argues: the angry, resentful England of the streets and a social-democratic European nation “with a sensibility closer to the historic connotations of ‘Little England’ — insular, but unambitious and pacific, socially somewhat Scandinavian, free of all illusions of grandeur.” Indeed, here Anderson approaches a call for what we have in these pages called a certain National Hobbitism. Whether this is what we’ll get is, of course, another matter entirely. More likely, in Anderson’s view, is “a very British attempt to ‘muddle through’ with a model which is itself not working,” treading water as “a dinghy towed by the capital ships of Washington and Brussels” until the Westminster state’s final collapse.

If there is a coherent thread to Anderson’s broad sweep of British history, it is that the relentless outward focus of the Westminster establishment set in train a slow-burning decline at home. As he writes, “Imperial expansion had formed this state. When that was no longer available, it followed its traditional outward bent, resolving to ‘press towards the internationalisation of the UK economy as the answer doing most good to the flourishing parts of the system and the least damage to the ailing ones.’”

Yet every attempt at reform, by trying to solve Britain’s structural problems at home through leaping headlong into the wider world, whether Europe, a subordinate role in the American empire or globalised finance, has only patched up the surface cracks and allowed the underlying rot to advance further. From 1945 onwards, British politics has been consumed by “futile attempts at retrieving national greatness, in which the very term ‘decline’ was a lure inviting the notion that ‘revival’ was possible”.

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The essential problem we now face is whether or not Britain can survive as a unitary state. For Anderson, the answer is simply No: Britain was a project of empire, and without empire, the glue that held it together has dissolved. Simply, in Anderson’s thesis, “the stability of the old order had rested on the external forcefield of empire; once that was gone, the patriciate lost its grip at home, deference giving way to a ‘molecular, resentful sort of rebelliousness’, disabling the supports of the old regime, and Thatcher’s lower-middle-class crusade could finish off the grandees”.

The work of misguided destruction in the cause of renewal that Thatcher began, Blair finished, emplacing the charges that now threaten to destroy our state. The British state, for Anderson (sounding at his most like Peter Hitchens), was the British establishment of old: once they and the empire were gone, shuffled off the historical stage by the Pyrrhic victory of the Second World War and its consequences, decline and collapse were inevitable. 

The current government, entirely devoid of any meaningful political thought, would do well to read Anderson’s essay. He presents a narrative stripped of all illusions, in which, as in Marx’s famous quote, the British reader “is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind”. There is a strange unreality to British political life, with the relentless outward focus on the wider world so detached from our material conditions that it has become a kind of tragic delusion.

But there is no purpose pursuing dreams of a Global Britain while the Union fractures at home: any serious attempt to save the British state will require a serious, dispassionate appraisal of the structural flaws threatening to break it apart. If the current occupant of 10 Downing Street does not intend to make his mark in history as the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, he could do worse than inject a dose of rigorous Marxian thought into Britain’s body politic, and there is surely no more suitable vessel than the detached, patrician analysis of Perry Anderson, that most High Tory of Marxists.

That the Government is under pressure from the national and not just the Scottish press for calling devolution a disaster is a similarly depressing sign. Of course devolution was a disaster, for the British state: that was the express intention of the Scottish nationalists when they demanded it. If Blair’s intention was to arrest Scotland’s steady march towards secession, then the results were clearly yet another, and perhaps the most dangerous, of the many slow-fused time bombs he emplaced beneath the structure of the United Kingdom.

There are four possible outcomes now, and none of them is especially attractive: the first is that Scotland leaves the union, and the pieces fall where they will; the second is that Scotland’s government is persuaded to stay under the same roof, in the fraught and loveless cohabitation we are now accustomed to; the third is that we plunge headlong into a great constitutional reordering, a full confederalisation of the United Kingdom, incorporating either an English parliament, or an England broken into pieces small enough to assuage the periphery; and the last is that London calls last orders on the devolution experiment and rings the bell for Westminster rule once more.

The last idea, popular among some online Unionists, though far beyond the bounds of reality, would call for the dramatic reassertion of the power of the central state, a high-stakes gamble by the executive that the powers relinquished with such fanfare a generation ago can be suddenly reclaimed without aggravating crisis. Decisive as the idea may be, the hurdles it faces are most likely unsurmountable.

No matter how bloodlessly and bureaucratically the task was carried out, revoking devolution would surely inflame Scottish sentiment to a degree no Westminster government could long survive. Would the Scottish police, like their Catalan counterparts, put down the street protests that would likely ensue? If anything, Westminster is dependent on the Spanish state to wield the metaphorical baton for it, by blocking Scottish entry to the EU for fear of the precedent it would establish for its own separatist nations. 

But Britain is not Spain, and the idea of sending English police north of the border to shutter the Scottish parliament is unthinkable, not so much for any legal reasons but because the reaction of the London press would soon make the entire country ungovernable. The wave of political mania unleashed by Brexit, with its entire cast of resistance QCs and online political celebrities, buoyed by the grey-haired legions of Guildford and St Albans, would be dwarfed by the derangement unleashed by so stirring and romantic a cause; and a good proportion, perhaps a majority, of the English electorate would feel more sympathy for the Scots trying to escape Westminster’s rule than the government trying to enforce it.

This option must, then, surely be struck off the list of potential outcomes, at least as a choice for Westminster: yet if the Scottish government decides to hold an independence referendum against London’s will, as the Catalans did, surely these exact same dynamics would play out, and with the same results. The option to escalate is in Scottish hands and not English ones: Westminster is forced to stake the union’s existence on a hand no one would ever have chosen.

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By Aris Roussinos

For those of us in what is irritatingly called the rump UK, clearly the time has come to make hard and serious decisions about our political future, before fecklessness and entropy make them for us. Could an independent England be a solution? If collapse is inevitable, or even probable, should we not start planning the successor state now, rather than leave it to be hashed out haphazardly in the courts and the press?

If the loss of Scotland would be painful, that of the Westminster apparatus would at least be some kind of liberation. At one stroke, if handled well, Westminster and all its baggage could be cut adrift and replaced with a more coherent and streamlined government, both closer to and less despised by the electorate.

An independent England would, it must be said, be a weaker state than we are accustomed to. Scotland possesses unique strategic and (through the solicitous self-interest of Labour governments past) industrial capacities necessary to maintaining our place among the upper-second tier of world powers. Perhaps a smaller, more inward-looking, even more Scandinavian England would not be a tragedy: we would be richer, for one thing, and we can always hope that the final severing of world power status would force a future English government to devote the attention to industry and infrastructure that has been neglected for so many decades.

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How we bend the knee to our HR overlords

By Aris Roussinos

For Tories, there is the minor consolation that an independent England would at least be a significantly more conservative polity than the UK, and a less congenial political home to the London media class cheering on our nation’s dissolution out of some strange and self-negating sense of Brexit schadenfreude. A divorce would be sad, of course — they always are — but some good may come of it, eventually. Perhaps it is England’s destiny to be born not with any great burst of enthusiasm, but with a shrug of resignation, and only after all other options have been exhausted. 

If such a breach is too much to bear, then we are left with the alternatives of keeping things as they are, and hoping that the Scottish electorate changes its collective mind, or with the grand experiment of confederation. An English parliament in the singular, or a collection of regional ones, all within a looser union, would effectively mean a trial separation, and would at least offer the benefit of allowing England some meaningful practice in governing herself, for herself, before she is forced to do so by events out of her control.

If it meant the shuttering of Westminster, this would be no catastrophe in itself: a certain contempt for the inhabitants of the Gothic confection on the Thames is one of the few things that unites this country politically, and its mothballing might offer a rare moment of national consensus. 

Federalism could come in many different forms: a unitary English state within a loose union, an England broken into regions or even counties, or even a parallel reconfiguration of Scotland and Wales, so that across the entire country local governance take the place of nationalist fervour and sullen resentment. The idea should be seriously discussed, at least, before the moment for compromise is lost: yet whether a Westminster long-regretting devolution and an Edinburgh already scenting nationhood could accept such a half-way house, and its diminishment of both their power, is surely doubtful.

In truth, none of the options available to us is appealing, but then the status quo is not sustainable either. It is intolerable that the political future of the entire nation is kept waiting on the finely-balanced whims of four million Scottish voters. One way or another, the situation that currently exists must be resolved. If the Government intends to make the case for the union, then it should do so now, and not leave the great ship of state drifting rudderless to crash where it will.

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Trusting that the narrow economic self-interest of the Scottish electorate will make the case for the union on its behalf is madness: lurid warnings of economic disaster did not sway England’s voters away from Brexit, as Johnson well knows. The case for Scotland’s independence is a romantic one, like that of all nationalisms, and though the SNP shrinks from comparison to its sharper-clawed counterparts, it is a nationalist movement like any other, whose strange and irrational impulses will likely override any measured arguments made by Downing Street. 

Yet even if the Government devotes itself to maintaining the Union, it is long past time to begin planning for what comes after its collapse. Its heartland is in England, and England has been ignored in this debilitating psychodrama for far too long. Perhaps the birth of England as a coherent political entity will stave off rupture by proving to wavering Scottish voters that the stakes are real; perhaps it will do the opposite, and convince the nationalists that history is on their side; we do not know.

But a sober appreciation of the options available to the Government must surely underline that the responsible task ahead of it is to limit the damage that a disorderly and contested breakup of our nation will entail. Johnson is unlikely to go down in history in the manner he intended, but he can at least salvage something for the nation in the decisions he takes now, by preparing a working lifeboat for the mass of his electorate as we rush towards the rocks ahead.

Yet it cannot be right that the Scottish National Party should subject the good people of these Isles to yet another nationalist, divisive, separatist “little Scotlander” referendum, kicking off a new round of an entirely unsolvable political bun-fight that will tear our country apart even further. We’ve had the “once in a generation” referendum and the nationalists lost. Should the SNP succeed next May, Westminster — Parliament for all the United Kingdom — should simply refuse to authorise it.

The SNP is by any measurement Left-wing, a social democratic party that prides itself on being as unlike the Tory and Brexit-voting hordes of the south as is possible. They are Left-of-centre on economic and social issues, fiercely pro-EU and in the European Parliament would align with progressive and green groups from across the continent. Yet this is not the whole story, as anyone who has upset their supporters can testify to.

Despite being a Remain-voting liberal, my views on a second referendum have attracted the sort of racism — from Scottish nationalists — that you would usually expect to receive from the far-right. In many exchanges with SNP supporters, I have learned that that Left-wing racism against people of colour is apparently acceptable, if we veer off an approved script.

But, then, as surprising as English liberals may find it, Scotland is not the progressive paradise they like to believe — and  my anecdotal experience is borne out by wider concerns. Last year more than 80 public and professional figures signed an open letter warning that the struggle against racism in Scotland is “rolling backwards”, creating a climate of “resentment towards frank discussion of race and racism” that is threatening to undo progress on race equality.

It is significant that the signatories also highlighted a trend to “silence the voices of people in Scotland who face colour-based racism”. This letter came less than two months after Scotland’s national poet laureate Jackie Kay warned openly  that Scotland had to “grow up” as it was “decades behind” in its treatment of black and ethnic minority people.

Too often, when minority voices such as mine — children of the colonies, born in Britain — oppose the break-up of what we now consider our country, Scottish nationalists too readily seek to silence our voices by accusing us, instead, of being English “colonists”.

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Such rhetoric is not only overly antagonistic, it also displays a fundamental ignorance about why most ethnic minorities in Britain have expressed a preference for calling ourselves British over English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish. And while I embrace being both a non-Anglo-Saxon Englishman and a Brit, it is not easy for many of us to forget the nationalist-inspired violent racism levied against us growing up, and still present today.

For ‘progressive’ Scottish Nationalists to draw an equivalence between ethnic minorities who oppose their separatism and British colonialism, smacks of the very colonial privilege they seek to denounce. The fact of the matter is that Scottish colonists profited greatly from the creation of the British Empire. Scotland’s debt to Empire is her dirty little secret, seldom acknowledged but ever-present. The “tobacco lords” of Glasgow were enriched by slavery in the Americas and Africa, while a quick visit to the former North British Rubber Company in Edinburgh serves to disabuse most naysayers suffering under such a false sense of righteousness.

The pernicious narrative peddled by Scottish nationalists that England colonised Scotland, and then the rest of the world — and so England must even now be resisted in Scotland — sounds suspiciously like an act of whitewashing Scottish culpability, at least to the ears of this descendant of a former colony.

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Labour is institutionally anti-Semitic

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This is not something SNP supporters like to hear, but SNP supporters have gained a reputation for intimidating critics. Recently, BBC News Scotland Editor Sarah Smith learned the hard way why Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has earned the nickname “Nippie Sweetie” for adopting the  “aggressive and adversarial approach of male politicians” early on in her career.

Ms Smith had made the admitted error of accidentally describing Sturgeon as  “enjoying the opportunity” to shine during lockdown, instead of saying that she was “embracing” the challenge. Ms Sturgeon’s supporters were not happy to say the least, and an online pile-on inevitably ensued. Ms Smith, though, was quick to push into reverse gear, her resultant climbdown being perhaps the swiftest and most complete of any journalist in recent years, to my mind. Scotland’s BBC chief was so remorseful, in fact, that she felt the need to issue no fewer than four swift back-to-back apologies online to Ms Sturgeon, with one of them remaining pinned to her profile page for days. Ms Sturgeon regally confirmed that she accepted her apology.

So wouldn’t it be lovely if Nicola Sturgeon also apologised for, and investigated, the racism present among all too many of her online supporting trolls?

While it is true that Ms Sturgeon is not personally responsible for the behaviour of her supporters, such racism appears not to be a mere bug for the SNP, but may well be a feature. Indeed, just because a nationalist party identifies as being on the Left, it does not mean that an undercurrent of racism cannot be found beneath all the cuddly talk.

Historically, many nationalist parties and nationalists have started on the Left, from the French Revolution onwards; indeed one of the most famous of 20th century nationalists, Benito Mussolini, was on the National Directorate for the Italian Socialist Party, before he turned rightward to fan the flames of nationalism.

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By Tim Marshall

Violent hostility to outsiders and critics is in the DNA of nationalists, whether on the Left and Right, as anyone who has debated with SNP can testify to. When that outsider has different colour skin the rage seems to be heighted.

As party leader, it is Nicola Sturgeon’s duty — not mine — to make minorities feel safe from the racism of too many of her supporters. And until she can do so, do not be fooled by the progressive overtures of this SNP. For too long commentators of all persuasions have harboured a policy and ethical blindspot for Scotland’s nationalists, viewing them as polar opposites to English nationalists, rather than their counterparts.

We should beware the kid gloves with which metropolitan opinion formers treat the SNP. Their party machine is curiously similar to Momentum, and much of what we would never tolerate from Corbyn now rules in Edinburgh. As such, they are riddled with all the trappings of power, while harbouring a nasty, illiberal and authoritarian streak. Alarm bells should be ringing now, lest after lockdown we enter blindly into yet another experience like the three years before the virus struck.

And if you thought Brexit Britain got bad, just wait until Scexit.

They are offset by free university places for many Scots students, free prescriptions and free home care for those assessed as requiring it. But these are now straining the budget. The Scots Auditor General judged the nation’s health as “poor” and the free university places have the perverse effect of helping those students who need help least — from middle class and well-to-do families — more than the poor.

The book would be — is — not long, at a little over 200 pages; and dislike of the nationalists’ determination to destroy the United Kingdom — my country — was warm enough to propel me through the weeks and months of writing.

I had not counted on the intervention of emotion. Grappling with the evident desire of fellow Scots — near half — to leave the UK, was to open the mind to occasional doubt prompted by nationalists’ claims which, at times, seemed rational. It was to discover that most English said they would regret Scotland going — but were clearly not deeply concerned by it. Scotland weighs upon the English mind much, much less than vice versa. Naturally.

There was even a small voice, in the mish-mash of thoughts and plans, which whispered: “traitor!”. So powerful has been nationalist propaganda, and so enclosed in Scottishness was my upbringing (as most others of my generation) that to take a hostile stance to those who spoke in Scotland’s name was to occasionally make me look at myself askance. It passed, however.

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Most of all, the exercise let loose a hundred tributaries of memory. Growing up in the fifties and sixties in a small fishing town — Anstruther, on the East Fife coast — was to live among competing shards of “Scottishness” and “Englishness”, which partly structured the young lives of my generation.

“Americanness” was in there too, coming out of the juke box in Eddie Clarke’s café, where the upper streams of the local comprehensive went after school, to buy cigarettes in ones and twos and blow the smoke down a straw into the Coke, in the hope that, as one of our number maintained, you could get high on the resulting mixture.

This was no nationalist enclave. East Fife had been Liberal in the late nineteenth century, though the MPs badged themselves “Liberal Unionist” in the early twentieth. When it passed to the Conservatives, they too put “Unionist” in their election literature, to underscore their support for the Crown, and for Northern Ireland. Distrust of Catholicism was strong, in these Presbyterian and nonconformist fishing towns.

The Liberal party came back in 1987, in the form of Menzies Campbell — who held it till his retirement in 2015, when it was taken by the nationalists. Stephen Gethins was a bright, diligent politician, who had a 4000-plus majority in 2015; and in 2017, hung on with a majority of two: the most marginal in Britain. In December, he lost, Wendy Chamberlain taking it back for the Liberal Democrats with a majority of over 1300.

It was the only seat the Nationalists lost in 2019, and the shame of it was that Gethins was one of the party’s better MPs. But the area, it seemed to me from conversations there, had been only reluctantly nationalist, upset by the constant calls for a second referendum, tending still to the Union. It didn’t take to Boris Johnson, and saw the unflashy Liberals, and the former police officer Chamberlain, as more expressive of its own political nature.

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The secondary school in Anstruther took in children from the other small towns on the East Fife Coast, and inland. A comprehensive before the great expansion of such schools — the area was too thinly populated to have a separate grammar and a secondary modern — it was strictly streamed according to performance in the 11+ exam, from ‘A’ through B C D and E to ‘PR’ (for practical). Its headmaster strove to stress the distinctions: ‘A’ stream boys played rugby, others football: ‘A’ stream boys and girls came in to Anstruther by train, others by bus. Class distinctions were small in a little town where hard, sometimes perilous, manual work provided its main living; but the headmaster, when I was at school, was diligent in creating as much of an elite as the traffic would bear.

Most of the boys went to the fishing, or farming, and left at 15; those of us who remained, with King Lear and trigonometry, produced the ten or so who went to universities. A group of us, all boys, took to speaking cod-Shakespeare – “I trust I see your grace in good health?” When passing the school garden, whose care was the work of the PR class, we might say – “Fie upon it, fie: ‘tis an unweeded garden, that grows to seed”.

Some of the kids from the thin layer of professionals — lawyers, bankers, doctors — went private; a few came to our school, but it was overwhelmingly working and lower middle class. Of my Shakespearean comrades, one had a father often unwell, a mother who worked on the telephone switchboard; the other from a family of the strict Plymouth Brethren sect (thus forbidden from watching or even listening to the plays he loved, and from which he could quote long passages), whose father was a carpenter.

My mother — she had left my (English) father before my birth — was a beautician, whose beauty parlour was in the back room of my grandparents’ house, where we lived, which bloomed into a small shop. We all spoke Scots at home and in the street, but for we intellectuals, it was already thinning out, confined to such as cannae and winnae and dinnae (can’t, won’t, don’t). We knew we were going to speak “proper” English. The Scots we often put in virtual inverted commas to show our superiority, as over the wise saws of common sense — as whit’s fur ye’ll no’ gang past ye or monny a mickle maks a muckle. Unsurprisingly, we were  widely thought to be pains in the neck and, in the way of Scots villages, told so.

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My grandfather, a retired merchant seaman who had served on one of the great imperial lines, was strongly Conservative-imperialist — but scornful of the English, seeing his apprenticeship in the Clyde shipyards before his merchant service as an entry into the very heart — lost — of Scots craft excellence: “mair ships built in a year,” he would say, accurately, “than the rest o’ the world combined!” This was craft pride seamlessly joined to Scots pride: quite separate from any nationalism, which he saw as demented (as did most Scots, then).

There were two outstanding exceptions. One was James Braid, the long-serving provost (mayor) of St Monans, along the coast from Anstruther, who was an enthusiastic member of the SNP, main organiser of the annual celebration at Bannockburn: he was mocked, but popular — in large part because of his conscientiousness as provost. When he stood, as he did often, in the general election on the nationalist ticket, he got a good show, usually third behind the Tories and the Liberals, in front of the Labour Party (a young John Smith, later Labour leader, stood in 1961 and ’64, coming a good second in the latter).

The novelist Eric Linklater also stood in the constituency, in 1933, as a nationalist: he got 1083 votes, 3.6% of the total: but more rewardingly used the experience for a comic novel, Magnus Merriman, whose chaotic campaign in somewhere looking like East Fife ends in all but total rejection at the hands of the hard-headed, straight-speaking locals.

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The other was a teacher of English at our school, named Alastair Mackie. He was a poet, writing mostly in Scots, in the tradition of the largest figure in Scots literature in the twentieth century, Hugh MacDiarmid — one who gave his hobby in Who’s Who as “Anglophobia”, and in his verse, articles and interviews missed no opportunity to express his detestation of the southern neighbours.

I think Mackie was better: none of MacDiarmid’s straining to use his art to push Scots into a hatred of the English, nor his artificial dialect, culled from every region of the country, which no-one spoke and Scots speakers needed a dictionary to read. He was, though, a private man with a family to support through his teaching: his poems were published in small editions — until, after his death, one of the Shakespeareans close to him, and I, paid for a collected edition of his lucid, memorable work. He, too, had little time for the English: but was too intelligent to let it become an obsession, and much too intelligent to follow MacDiarmid down his love of dictators, Mussolini and Lenin.

The power (and treacheries) of memory slowed me up, took me down half-forgotten or never-trodden paths. It was a youth passed among people unselfconsciously secure of their Scottishness, sarcastic about the English (often presented as posh and snobbish) — but also uncontroversially British, and still, even after empire and the might of the Clyde, at times proud of being so.

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: the Great Mistake of Scottish Independence is published by Polity in April.

Take Prometheus, for instance. He was the titan who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to humans. As a result, we built civilisations, while Prometheus, for his trouble, was chained to a rock and had his liver ripped out by an eagle every day, day after day, over and over again.

The power of this myth is such that, unlike (say) the one in which Zeus transforms himself into a big bird so he could rape a girl, it can easily be re-contextualized even for a contemporary, Darwinian reading. After all, was not fire important to cavemen? Without fire, how could our ancestors have stayed warm, cooked animal flesh, or reduced their enemies’ villages to smoldering embers?

And yet, having finally got around to reading Prometheus Bound I discovered that this is only one variant of the story, and that according to Aeschylus (or whoever wrote the play, there being some debate on that score) fire was actually the second thing Prometheus gave mankind. His main sin was to liberate we mortals from foreknowledge of our own dooms — replacing it with “blind hope”.

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It’s the “blind” part of this version of the story which I find most interesting. In our culture, we are raised to believe that hope is always positive. Every cloud has a silver lining; it is always darkest just before dawn; etc. Hope is recommended to us by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:13, between faith and love. When the cancer patient survives, it is because he did not give up hope. Hope must die last, and to lose hope is a terrible thing.

Against this, Aeschylus offers a more ambiguous assessment. Hope is based on ignorance of something inevitable, which is hidden from us. It is based on nothing and we are probably wrong to hope much of the time.

As someone who grew up marinated in the cultural Calvinism of post-industrial Scotland, followed by a further 10 years stewing in the fatalism of post-Soviet Russia, I not only found myself agreeing with Aeschylus, but even flattered myself that Prometheus had skipped over me when it came to dishing out the blind hope.

But then I remembered that time a TV producer pitched a travel show in which I would be a combination of Dog the Bounty Hunter and Doctor Who, on a motorbike, and that we would make millions on the residuals and DVD sales. Had the programme been commissioned, I would have gone to war with the producer over the concept, but… just think of the residuals. Blind hope kicked in and I spent quite a lot of time on treatments and a test reel before I saw, and then accepted, my doom.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I find Aeschylus’ take on Prometheus to be a handy tool for cutting through all manner of confusing situations to reach the frequently un-mysterious core of a great deal of human behaviour: blind hope.

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Consider Ukraine, for instance. Recently they elected as president a light entertainer whose only previous experience of politics was playing a president on a TV show. For those of us with no skin in the game it is obvious that Volodymir Zelensky is doomed, that Putin will eat him alive (though not before tormenting him first), and that the leaders of the US and EU will shake their fists and emit word-clouds of condemnatory verbiage — but fundamentally they will do nothing very much as his doom reveals itself and then consumes him. Yet, such is the power of blind hope, that a majority of Ukrainians voted for him, making him the third would-be political saviour they have elected in less than 15 years.

Then there’s climate change. Remove blind hope, and what do we have left? It is obvious that, all treaties and declarations notwithstanding, it is vanishingly unlikely that we will be able to do much about it. Poor nations want what rich nations already have, while the inhabitants of rich nations, although willing to make a few tweaks here and there, want to maintain their lifestyles.

If we gazed upon our doom with clear vision, we might come to the conclusion that a better strategy would be to prepare and adapt. But politicians, instead, invite Greta Thunberg to tea, who for all her urgency, still holds out the promise offered by all truly effective apocalyptic prophets: that it is not too late to repent, to change our ways, and be saved.

And what about all those prime ministerial or presidential candidates who insist on running even when they have no name recognition, and nobody cares, and it is obvious, even to their mothers, that their campaigns are doomed? They are not all angling for jobs in some future administration; that would be to attribute too much foresight and clarity of vision to our political class. No, some wait in blind hope that they will pull a Trump, that their campaigns will catch fire, and that they might yet overcome the odds, amaze everyone, win power and save us.

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It's your fault newspapers don't tell the truth

By Douglas Murray

And that brings me to Brexit, where Aeschylus has been especially helpful when it comes to piercing through the surface shenanigans of our political class to perceive what is actually going on. Consider, for instance, the bizarre behaviour of the obviously doomed Theresa May, the likes of which has never been seen in our lifetimes. Having, in her brilliance, contrived a path to Brexit by which means everybody could feel they had lost, her persistence in the face of overwhelming rejection was often put down to a sense of duty, or epic levels of stubbornness.

I don’t deny that both of these traits played a part, but fueling them was a hope, entirely blind, that one last plea to the people, or plea to her “friends and partners” in the EU, or appeal to her party, or appeal to the other party, or appeal to the attorney general to change his advice, or reworking of the verbiage in the nonbinding bit, would somehow redeem her premiership and get the withdrawal bill over the line, when no such thing was possible. This is why, I think, despite her cosmic failure, she remained a strangely sympathetic figure: there was something so profoundly, tragically human in this desperate clinging to blind hope. There but for the grace of God, etc.

It also explains why hardcore Brexiteers and Remainers alike kept voting it down despite having entirely different goals; it wasn’t just that they thought the deal was a dismal failure (which they undoubtedly did), it was that it wasn’t what they wanted, and both sides persisted in the blind hope that they could still have it all their own way.

And even now, as the government stumbles at the exit, and Labour writhes in confusion and torment, and the Lib Dems imagine their moment has come, and the SNP plots how it can leave the UK and stay in the EU at the same time, and the Guardian peddles Remainer porn, and Farage prepares to split the vote and risk losing the thing he wants most, and everybody remains bitterly divided — still everybody thinks they can have it all their own way.

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By Matthew Goodwin

Could there even be a whiff of Freud’s “narcissism of small differences” to all this? I especially wonder if it doesn’t add a little something extra to the antipathy felt by the SNP in particular for “Tory Brexiteers”. Until recently, they had the monopoly on blind hope, in that they stood for a leap into the dark, which would obviously be followed by disruption and upheaval, but which they represented as a scenario with nothing but upsides.

Now they have rivals to the south, offering a competing version of liberation from the constraints of a different, larger political entity. Certainly the question of Scottish independence has become infinitely messier, in every respect, for both sides: time to dial up the blind hope.

So many; I had not thought blind hope had undone so many. But wait: didn’t Prometheus claim he wanted to help us? I’m starting to understand why Zeus chained him to that rock.

Daniel Kalder’s Dictator Literature is published by Oneworld 

In August 2014, I stood at a rally in Trafalgar Square, watching a friend’s four-year-old daughter dancing joyfully around the lion statues in a tartan dress. We Londoners were there to ask the people of Scotland, ahead of the independence referendum: please stay. The thought that part of my country – a part of my heritage – might be split from us, broke my heart.

We won that referendum. But since then, unionism has gone out of fashion in our Brexit-induced culture war. That inconvenient border in Northern Ireland has inspired leaders of the (now ironically named) Conservative and Unionist Party to turn their back on history. Conservative party members, polls suggest, don’t care about Scotland and Northern Ireland or their place in our union. They just want Brexit, at any cost.

In the absence of any decent leadership on our nation’s unity in today’s politics, I want to pay tribute to a unionist hero, Queen Anne. She brought the nations of Scotland and England together under a shared government for the first time in 1707: she helped shape the political legacy our leaders are now trashing.

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Carlisle, lynchpin of the Union

By Michael Merrick

It’s time to reclaim Queen Anne’s reputation, which has been unfairly traduced by the Oscar-winning film, The Favourite. Olivia Colman, who played the ailing monarch, gave a glorious performance, and a wonderful acceptance speech at the Academy Awards, which rightly claimed her place as a national treasure. But Queen Anne was not a demented, childish old sot, and fiction should not replace history in our national consciousness.

More importantly still, we need to make unionism fashionable again – if not for Queen Anne’s sake, then for our own.

Queen Anne came to the throne in 1702, replacing William III, who had ruled alone since the death of his wife Mary (Anne’s sister). It is a wonder she accomplished anything during her 12 years as Queen, given what she had lived through by the time of William’s death.

She is often referred to as “childless” because, by the time she died, she had no heir. But this is an extraordinary contortion of the truth. Anne lived through seventeen pregnancies, and was mother to nineteen babies, only one of which survived infancy. Seven miscarriages, two of twins. Five stillborn babies, at least two of which had lain dead inside her for over a month. Two babies who died within hours of birth. Two little girls carried off by smallpox before their second birthday. And one, Prince William, who was born with hydrocephalus. He suffered from ill health throughout his childhood, and died from pneumonia less than a week after his 11th birthday, with his mother holding vigil at his bedside until she passed out from exhaustion.

If I had lived through a tenth of the adversity that confronted Queen Anne, I’m not sure I’d have got out of bed each day. Perhaps she was a tiny bit crazy. She was certainly obese, had failing eyesight, and could barely walk. But to live through loss on an unimaginable scale, to battle on through disability, and still to govern? These are accomplishments that should not be ignored. And Anne did not just govern: she governed well.

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How do you solve a problem like Theresa?

By Polly Mackenzie

Queen Anne was always considered too weak to be a decent monarch, even in her own time. But the evidence shows she was diligent, patient, and capable. Her first speech to Parliament, on her accession to the throne, was admired for its insight and skill – foregrounding her patriotism and Englishness, and building instant popularity. Anne worked hard, despite her ill health. She met with ministers daily, attending more Cabinet meetings than any of her predecessors. It was only 50 years since the end of the Civil War: the absence of disputes between the monarch and Parliament should not be considered a sign of her weakness, but a sign of judgement and a willingness to help settle in these new constitutional arrangements, by respecting them.

The Acts of Union were her greatest legacy. In her first speech, she declared it “very necessary” to conclude a union between England and Scotland, two nations that had shared a crown since 1603 but were still governed separately.  It was essentially to prevent the Scots from choosing a different monarch and taking a different political direction.

In 1705, fresh negotiations were opened between England and Scotland, which concluded in 1706, and were followed by the Act of Union in 1707. This granted Scotland – still reeling from the financial collapse of the Darien scheme to start a colony in Panama – access to England’s domestic and colonial markets. It also protected the Scottish Presbyterian church, and separate legal system, allowing Scotland to retain much of its separate identity within a supranational structure.

I’m not starry eyed about the history of these islands. Too often England sought to obscure other national identities, and subjugate or abuse the peoples of Scotland, Wales and Ireland rather than share sovereignty with them. But at the heart of unionism is the idea that peoples with differing senses of their national identity might, nevertheless, be willing to share a government, to the benefit of all.

 Anne’s leadership enabled us to establish a system of government which permitted that, establishing a political union which has lasted longer than any other in global history.  It’s an idea worth saving; an idea worth celebrating.

Unionism stands opposed to the narrow nationalism that is dominating politics these days. We are increasingly in thrall to the idea of self-determination: the idea that every people must be able to govern itself, alone, without the interference of anyone who defines their identity differently.

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Is there a future for English nationalism?

By Paul Mason

But self-determination is the wrong idea for an age of complexity. Nations need to work together in the common interest, whether it’s to govern multi-national corporations, fight cross-border crime, or combat climate change. And there’s no such thing as a pure national identity, where everyone is of a single tribe. We are complicated people, and getting more complicated, as migration transforms the demographic landscape of almost every country on earth.

That’s what I’ve always loved about being British: the acceptance of a complicated, trans-national identity. I was born in England; I spent half my childhood in Wales. My father is Scottish, and my mother traces her heritage to England, Ireland, Scotland and the Netherlands. I have roots in every one of our nations, with a smattering of continental Europe for good measure, and this always struck me as exactly what it meant to be British. Britishness is not an ethnic identity: it’s a civic one, where all are welcome.

For Queen Anne, unionism was simply about holding together Scotland and England. In our era, it needs to be bigger, if it is to counter the seductive call of ethnic nationalism in an age of diversity. But, as the proud inheritors of the world’s oldest political union, we should have the confidence that Britain can lead the way. In our age of complexity, this is the kind of identity politics we need to build: where we can be all things, and one.

This is a scenario, of course, that has lurked in the wings ever since the EU referendum produced the result it did, with Scotland and Northern Ireland notching up substantial majorities for Remain. Victory for Leave was only achieved thanks to the vast numerical superiority of England. The UK of June 2016 was already a disunited Kingdom.

Where others concerned about the Union’s future have focused on the prospects for an independent Scotland or a united Ireland, however, Lidington turned to the English. “In England,” he told The Times, “I think that there is an indifference to the Union, a sense of taking for granted. It is something that is there as part of the landscape rather than something that you’ve really got to make a conscious effort to work to sustain.”

His argument, however, presupposes that there is support among the English in general, and English Conservatives in particular, for preserving the Union, and that the English are just not paying attention. But is this so?

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Is there a future for English nationalism?

By Paul Mason

A recent YouGov poll produced the startling finding that members of the Conservative Party across Great Britain had leaving the European Union as their absolute priority – and if that meant the break-up of the Union, well, so be it.

Some 63% of those polled said they wanted Brexit to happen even if it meant Scotland would vote for independence, while 59% said they wanted Brexit, even if it precipitated a united Ireland. That Unionist element, as in “Conservative and Unionist”, it would seem, might not be as deeply rooted as many believe.

But could the “indifference” of the English really foster, or even contribute, to the break-up of the UK? Those who disagree might cite the unusual flexibility of the UK’s institutions and argue that the varying forms of devolved government introduced by Blair’s Labour government in the late 1990s have in fact enabled the UK to muddle along with the Union intact.

That is one way of looking at what is now going on. But there is another – and, for those who prize the Union, it is far less comforting.

The old Soviet Union, while obviously very different from today’s UK in almost every way, was analogous in one significant, structural, respect. It was a country that that purported to be a federation, even as one of its constituent republics – the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as it was known then – was as dominant as England is in the UK. The RSFSR was nominally just one of 15 republics, but it accounted for more than three-quarters of the USSR’s territory and more than half of its population and GDP, creating a federation that was out of balance, to say the least.

There is another parallel with England, too. Despite the dominance of ‘their’ republic in the Soviet Union, Russians could legitimately claim to be under-represented and under-valued, echoing complaints made by the English in the UK. Of the 15 Soviet republics, the RSFSR was alone for much of the USSR’s existence in not having its own Communist Party organisation or any permanent assembly or executive to represent its interests.

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The dangerous influence of expats

By Mary Dejevsky

So long as regional aspirations were held in check and Moscow essentially ruled each republic through proxies, this went generally unchallenged. Russia and the Soviet Union could be regarded as essentially the same. Mikhail Gorbachev was General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and President of the Soviet Union, but also, de facto, leader of Russia.

As national aspirations grew, however, and Gorbachev’s glasnost (transparency) and perestroika (restructuring) made it possible for such sentiments to be expressed, Russia and Russians began to air their resentment. Once upon a time, their lack of direct representation could have been parried with the argument that Russia and Russians ruled, so they did not need their own institutions. Suddenly, though, they did.

Compare this to the UK. When Scottish devolution prompted new calls for England to have its own parliament, the disparity between England and the rest was advanced as the main reason why not. England’s dominance was so great, it was argued, that the UK could never be a genuine federation along the lines of, say, Germany. England’s Parliament was Westminster, even if it was shared.

When the calls could no longer be ignored, the then Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, proposed a compromise that entailed a more federated national structure with regional assemblies for England. This, however, was roundly rebuffed by the North East, which had been designated the pioneer. This looked less like representation for England than divide and rule. Devolution has been limited to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales to this day.

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What's the point of central government?

By Peter Franklin

The fate of the Soviet Union stands as a salutary example of what could happen next, and why David Lidington’s warning about the attitude of the English to the Union is so apposite. For break-up is not only about separatism at the periphery. It is also about the capacity, even the will, of the centre to hold.

The collapse of the Soviet Union is commonly ascribed to the unsustainability of the planned economy, the iniquities of Soviet communism, incipient bankruptcy forced by the USSR’s (vain) effort to keep up with the United States militarily, and growing separatism in some (but not all) of the constituent republics. Often disregarded, though, is another factor that played a big, even decisive, role: the frustrated national sentiment of the Russian majority.

Far from feeling privileged, many Russians felt that the other – mostly poorer – republics were a drag on their own well-being and development. A Rand Corporation report of 1991, published before the Soviet collapse, identified “a strong movement for self-assertion among the Russian people” and saw some of the writing on the wall.

Boris Yeltsin, the quintessential Russian in so many ways, gave voice to that resentment. He rode the wave of Russian aspiration, claiming the chairmanship of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet (a hitherto toothless legislature) in 1990 and winning the new post of President of the RFSFR a year later in a direct election. The RSFSR also set up its own Communist Party structure. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union was no more.

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Did Chernobyl kill communism?

By James Bloodworth

In championing the interests of the Russian Republic, Yeltsin found himself challenging, and then destroying, central, Soviet power. But this happened not just because of his force of character – though that was a consideration. It was also the reality that Russia could never be just one constituent republic of a genuine federation, or even first among equals. It was too big and too dominant in every way.

Within months of the RFSFR Supreme Soviet gaining real, in theory devolved, power, Russia’s new and revamped institutions were vying for precedence with their Soviet equivalents. Through the autumn of 1991, sections of power transferred almost by the day from the Soviet organs of state to those of Russia. Key personnel and money followed.

We have not yet reached that situation of dual, rival power in the UK, in part because England does not have the institutions that might allow it to realise its ambitions. But just as the part played in the Soviet break-up by frustrated Russian nationalism should not be underestimated, nor should the extent to which Brexit has been an English phenomenon, representing frustrated English national sentiment at not having its own institutional voice, unlike Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

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Don't scorn Boris's ambition

By Mary Dejevsky

Not to be underestimated either is the part in the Soviet break-up that was played by Russians’ indifference towards the Union. There came a point when Russia, as the dominant republic of a lop-sided federation, whose citizens felt they had been neglected by the centre and milked by the periphery for decades, lacked the will to keep the federal show on the road.

Brexiteers might note that the story of post-Soviet Russia has been the story of Russia’s national rebirth, with all the pluses and minuses that entails.

The English voice in the Brexit process might have been muted, but very similar forces are in play: unrepresentative state structures, a lop-sided devolution and an aggrieved majority. Giving the Russian Republic real devolved power contributed directly to the Soviet collapse. But not doing so is unlikely to have saved the Union, because by then Russia was – to use David Lidington’s word – profoundly “indifferent”, if not actually hostile, to keeping the Union intact.

This, quite as much as any move by Scotland or Northern Ireland to leave, is what could precipitate the break-up of the United Kingdom, too.

Carlisle could stand as proud as any in an audition for the privilege of being the nation’s capital. It played a vital role in the health and wealth of the nation long before some of our more illustrious counterparts were any more than a glint in the Industrial Revolution’s eye. An ancient settlement that later became the largest Roman camp on the Wall, my home city is no stranger to prominence in the socio-political drama of these islands.

Indeed, Carlisle has due heritage: Parliament has been held here before, on at least two occasions. The Great Seal of state was held at Lanercost Priory while Edward I journeyed north to pick a fight with the Scots; alas he could not finish the job, perishing on the windy marshes to the west of Carlisle, giving the city the honour of hosting the coronation of Edward II.

Of course, Edward was here for the same reason as generations before him, and generations after: Carlisle played a key strategic role in the affairs of the entire North. William Rufus seized the city in 1092 to finally extend his father’s Conquest to the north-North. He built a castle on the ancient Roman fort, which was later to become the residence of King David I of the Scots (“Prince of the Cumbrians”), who chose Carlisle as his favoured residence, passing away in the private chapel of the Keep in 1153.

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By Peter Hitchens

Of course, if you’re Cumbrian, then you’re Cumbrian, and thus slightly different from just English, or Scottish, or even Welsh, but containing hearty dollops of all three (and Irish too – but more of that later). Geographically and historically, Carlisle was part of a Celtic kingdom locked in a tug of war between later Scottish and English overlords. Carlisle’s two dragons on its coat of arms references its Brythonic roots, and wander the Cumbrian countryside map in hand and you’ll soon find more than just the odd clue to its Welsh heritage in its place names and dialect.

Throw in William Wallace (‘wylisc’), a Strathclyder (so Welsh really), and the buried bones of Robert de Brus, father of… yes, you guessed it, and finish off with the centuries old tug of war over Carlisle – at one moment part of Scotland, at another part of England – and Carlisle begins to show itself as a particularly lively theatre of British cosmopolitanism.

It doesn’t stop there. We’re also claiming St Patrick, Old King Cole (Coel Hen – enriching childhoods with memorable ditties from time immemorial), as well as the setting to any firm history that does exist around King Arthur (this is not even controversial), all of whom if not directly from Carlisle are certainly from its hinterland. St Cuthbert visited Carlisle regularly – it had been granted to the diocese of Lindisfarne by Ecgfrith – and St Ninian set out from Carlisle to convert the Picts, while St Mungo – whose legend still shapes the arms of the city of Glasgow – was a Stratchclyder who more than left his mark on field and marsh around Carlisle.

Indeed, one might even make a case that the first steps of the inexorable journey toward a unified Isles took place not far from Carlisle, as Athelstan sought to bring to heel the Northumbrians, the Welsh, the Scots and the Vikings in a little village of henge and earthwork, called Eamont, just outside Penrith.

Carlisle has earned its place at the top table in the gathering places of these lands. Of course, the historical may not convince everyone, so for the doubters let us turn to the practical. Geographically, Carlisle sits at the very nexus of the Isles – it is more or less equidistant between our northernmost reaches and the south coast, a gateway city straddling the old roads north to Glasgow, north-east to Edinburgh, the Wall road east to Newcastle, West to the coalfields and old ports (and nuclear plant) of Maryport and Workington and Whitehaven, and of course south down the ancient A6 to what we might call Down There.

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By Peter Franklin

And remember that Carlisle is the biggest city in England – though admittedly 98% of its land use is rural (most certainly an upgrade from the cramped living of central London). Add to that Carlisle’s long and historic status as a nationally important hub for rail and freight – at one point with a seven rail companies serving its station, second only to London – as well as its long established cultural and historical links with Ireland through constant waves of immigration and trade (Cleator Moor, on the west coast of the county, is affectionately known as “Little Ireland”), and you come to realise that Cumbria has been a lynchpin of UK culture and cohesion for centuries.

Ah, I hear you cry, but could you accommodate the refined tastes of the metropolitan classes that would no doubt descend on Carlisle should we be raised to just prominence? Well, we had the first ever pillar box, we are the home of McVities and make more custard creams than you thought imaginable (that’s the meetings sorted).

Carlisle is also the home of Linton Tweeds, suppliers to Chanel, thus satiating the sartorital demands of the sophisticariat, while we also have the two oldest prizes in horse racing, dating to the 16th century, horses being a key export and cultural signifier of these lands for nigh on 2,000 years. Walter Scott was married here while William Paley – scourge of every A-level philosophy student, and Richard Dawkins – was archdeacon and is buried here, at our cathedral.

One struggles to imagine what more any soul could need.

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By Phillip Blond

There is a serious point to be made too. If there is any case to be made for moving the capital, however temporarily, then it is to break the monopolistic dominance of London on the political and cultural capital of the UK, to renew the democratic covenant with those beyond the M25. Illustrious rivals – Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool – might all have a strong claim for a relocated Parliament, though the politically disruptive pulses flowing through society now are more parochial than that. It is the steely cries of our neglected towns, our isolated regions, our down-at-heel coastal areas, our struggling countryside that is ripping up the status quo. Decamping to another metropolis, particularly a place with a broadly similar sociocultural outlook, would do little more than replicate the problem.

In this sense, Cumbria provides a unique microcosm for those who would seek it out – the post-industrial decline, the struggling coastal areas, the decimation of rural services, the creaking infrastructure. What better place to stand as proxy for a debate we really need to have?

There will be significant downsides of course, and it would take great sacrifice on our part, though I’m sure we would be willing to do so, for the national interest. The increased traffic, the extra noise, the pollution, the jump in house prices, the gentrification, the hipster cereal shops…

On second thoughts, maybe Jon Elledge had a point. Maybe keep it down south after all. Why not try Manchester instead?

—

Every nation is entitled to its patriotism. When, for a few brief days during the 2018 World Cup, the England football team started firing on more than its habitual single cylinder, I painted my face with the cross of St George and joined a lot of other drunken people trying to stop traffic at the junction outside my local pub. But beyond football I cannot see the point of English nationalism.

In fact, it’s quite hard to be enthusiastic about a nationalism that didn’t exist when you were young. As a child I played Napoleonic war games, but the regiments we were taught to venerate from the battle of Waterloo were the Gordon Highlanders, the Scots Greys and the Inniskillings. The patriotism I was taught was, if anything, British.

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By Paul Embery

But it is near certain that Scotland will gain independence in the first half of this century, and a united Ireland is a distinct possibility. So the rise of an English national identity in response to the UK’s breakup would be logical. The problem is, there is very little logic to a purely English nationalism once you get beyond the Tudor era.

From James I onwards, the London-centred elite’s mission for two centuries was to create a single kingdom out of Britain and Ireland, and use it as a springbard to build a colonial empire. Even under Cromwell, the essential mission remained the same. English nationalism, such as it existed, was never about separating off from other countries but conquering them.

As a northern English person, I find it even more complicated. The most resilient identity I’ve carried with me across the airport lounges of the world is “northern”. There’s a strong regional identity which expressed itself, for my Dad’s generation, through antipathy to other parts of England

And then there was mining. Mining culture was one of the strongest components of the British labour movement and created a kind of glue through which people from towns like Easington, Ysdradginlais and Auchinleck could create a shared experience that transcended their national and regional origins.

So it’s not surprising that our current form of English nationalism – centred around southern English culture and traditional institutions such as the Royal Navy, the Monarchy, the BBC and the flat horse racing season – has not proved particularly resilient.

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More than a beautiful game

By Michael Dalton

On top of all the regional and cultural forces, there is also globalisation, which has created – not just in London but in most of England’s major cities – a cosmopolitan vibe, in which your talent, not your nationality or ethnicity, is the route to success.

Do the polls reveal the emergence of a distinct, new English identity? Not conclusively. Residents of England forced to make a straight choice between “English” and “British” have been dividing roughly equally over the past 30 years.

Pride in English identity is weaker among the young (45%) than among the old (72%) according to a YouGov survey for the BBC. Meanwhile if 61% of white English people express pride in being English, only 32% of those from ethnic minorities do so. By contrast British national identity remains equally strong between all these groups.

The point is, an English nationalism moulded around its current symbols, ideologies and cultures cannot be successful in its own terms. If pushed hard enough, it would divide Britain, alienate the inhabitants of most big cities and find scant support among the creators of culture. It would, at worst, become a form of ethno-nationalism completely unsustainable in a diverse, open economy like ours.

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How Jane Austen makes fools of her fans

By Tanya Gold

Some on the Left, like the musician Billy Bragg, have argued that the Left should create its own version of English nationalism, out of the radical traditions that inspired the Levellers, Peterloo, the Chartists and the Peasants’ Revolt. But Leveller soldiers were shot by Cromwell for refusing to participate in the founding act of Left English nationalism – the conquest of Ireland. At Peterloo they carried the red cap of the French republic.

Like it or not, our past of continuous trade, conquest and openness to immigration makes the whole English nationalism project difficult to sell.

And yet the centrifugal dynamics of the UK make it inevitable that, at some point, a state comprising just England and Wales will have to find a viable ideology to explain its own existence.

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Britain's first Brexit was the hardest

By Tom Holland

My guess is that if such a state ever emerged, the only viable ideology would be one that validated its existence as a confederation of regions. They may not map exactly to the so-called ‘heptarchy’ of the Anglo-Saxon period, but if you separated off South West England from Wessex, made Birmingham the capital of Mercia and created an energetic Leeds-Manchester conurbation as the power centre of a new Northumbria, you would then have something similar to the power balance under King Ecgberht in the year 800.

The ‘nationalism’ that might emerge out of a neo-heptarchy would be centred around a common language, legal institutions and money – and thus be quite weak in terms of breast-beating emotionalism. But it would stand a better chance of being accepted by the 21^st-century population of England than all the current attempts to create a nationalism of exclusion. Having St George as its patron saint – a Greek conscript venerated by Christians from Palestine to Georgia and celebrated as a martyr in Islamic texts – would be pretty cool.

Paul Mason’s Confessions with Giles Fraser is out on Monday