Union flagging

John Haldane

On Tuesday this week, 300 years ago, the then Scottish Parliament ratified by 110 votes to 69 the treaty to merge politically and economically the kingdoms of England and Scotland, so paving the way for the creation of the United Kingdom on 1 May 1707. But how much longer will it last?

The British Isles have long been admired as a model of political stability: home to the mother of parliaments, ruled over by a constitutional monarch and with ministerial accountability to the national assembly. For all that, however, the United Kingdom may be in its final stages, and if so, its life as a unified state will have been a relatively short one.

The 1800 Act of Union conjoined Ireland with Great Britain, which itself was the product of the union of the Scottish and English parliaments effected less than a century before in 1707. In both cases there had been prior forms of sovereign union between these kingdoms, with Henry VIII being declared King of Ireland in 1541, and James VI of Scotland acceding to the thrones of England and Ireland in 1603, thereby acquiring the further title of James I.

In the nineteenth century, Westminster governments spoke of the threat to the Union posed by the Irish question. And for the past four decades Republicans and Nationalists have done their best to end British rule on the island of Ireland. As in the past, however, the main key to the future of the UK lies with the Scots. Once again, as 300 years ago, there are parliaments north and south of the border, and, as in 1603, there is a Scot hoping to ascend to the leadership of the whole of Britain.

Gordon Brown studied history at Edinburgh University and must have thought through the issues from every direction. For the last three years he has been stressing the importance of British identity, most emphatically his own. Yet as Frank Field observed last week following Brown's latest declaration of the importance of the Union: "Every time he embraces Britishness it just emphasises his Scottishness. We know from the polls that the demand for independence is now stronger in England than it is in Scotland. So he should do the only sensible thing - embrace the English question."

The present situation arises from the creation in 1999 of a devolved Scottish parliament. This was New Labour's response to the pressure within Scotland for a degree of home rule. As late as 1955 the Scottish Tory Unionists held a majority of the country's Westminster constituencies, but they came to be seen as representing the interests of an Anglicised aristocracy. Then the Thatcher revolution took its toll on industrial Scotland, and by 1997 the Conservatives were unable to secure a single Scottish parliamentary seat.

In the meantime the Scottish National Party had become a serious political organisation, and argued effectively that the "theft" of "Scotland's oil", by Conservative and Labour governments, made it clear that the only parliament that would ever serve their interest was a Scottish one.

New Labour offered a concession that still left the party with Scottish constituencies providing for a Westminster majority: a devolved Scottish Parliament within the United Kingdom. This provision made due acknowledgement that, unlike Ireland and Wales, Scotland had a history as a sovereign state, while yet ensuring that it would not separate. So it seemed.

At the time, many argued that the "solution" was untenable: philosophically, culturally, psychologically and politically. Parliaments make national law and approve tax and expenditure. The Scottish Parliament is restricted in its law-making powers and operates within the framework of an annual grant from the Treasury in London. Parliaments are part of the framework of established national institutions, and Scotland has its own legal and university systems dating from the Middle Ages, and its own Churches pre- and post-dating the Reformation. Inevitably these now look to Holyrood rather than to Westminster, and are frustrated to be told that policy has to accord with London.

Invite a people as acute and sceptical as the Scots to celebrate the restoration of autonomy and they are likely to check that the terms of the settlement allow for home rule. Inevitably, since it involved a parliament but not sovereignty, the devolution settlement is more than the regional government provided for in Wales and Northern Ireland, but less than self-government, which is what the Scots, like the English, once had, and what they seem to want again.

New Labour was never in keeping with the character of Scotland. It is often said that Thatcher was uniquely unpopular north of the border, but the Conservatives faded faster under Ted Heath, while Thatcher stimulated the traditional Scots taste for prudence and independence among younger, more radical Conservatives. Certainly the late Donald Dewar, the cerebral cabinet minister charged with delivering Scottish devolution, was well liked at home, but the Blairite embrace of recreational individualism and lifestyle liberalism appealed to very few.

Scotland combines pockets of real poverty and deprivation with a strong sense of proud history, marries a democratic intellectualism to an elitism of excellence, and links radicalism over social justice with respect for traditional values. Old Labour in the political heartland of Strathclyde and the West demanded economic redistribution in order that the poor should have the material means to enjoy the traditional domestic and cultural opportunities available to the middle class.

The Scots radicals had little time for lifestyle liberalism. Often coming from Presbyterian, Roman Catholic or Episcopal backgrounds, they viewed sexual promiscuity and abortion not as choices to be defended but as problems to be addressed. The late Cardinal Winning was very much in this tradition and Cardinal O'Brien is increasingly identifying himself with it. It is no accident that resistance to liberalisation over same-sex relationships, including civil partnership and adoption, has been more public and more marked north of the border and been led by figures from working-class backgrounds.

Gordon Brown's efforts to seem at ease with New Labour's social liberalism are unconvincing. The PinkNews website reports that he has never attended a Parliamentary vote on gay rights issues since Labour came to power. At the same time he speaks with pride of his Christian formation and of the values and purposes of the Christian Socialist Movement.

Brown is a moral and intellectual heavyweight. Those qualities put him at ease among the Scots but have put strain on his relations with many in New Labour, and contribute to an impression of dour Scottishness that is unwelcome in the fun-loving, property-acquiring, free-living world depicted in media visions of New Britain.

The Scots are discontented with the halfway house of devolution, and the Prime Minister-in-waiting is discontented with the conduct and priorities of the UK Government. Being a genuine believer in Britain he is loath to yield to the demands for independence, but even the lesser condition of devolution poses a direct threat to him via the challenge presented by the West Lothian issue. This precisely mirrors the old Irish question: how can non-English MPs properly vote on English bills? In Brown's case the constitutional issue is deepened by the fact that his own constituents in Fife are mostly regulated by the Holyrood Parliament, while as PM he would oversee policies for England and have prime ministerial accountability to Westminster although he lacks an English electoral mandate.

Gladstone's solution in 1893 was to bar Irish MPs from voting on English bills. It failed and in due course Ireland sought independence. Gordon Brown is most likely to become Prime Minister in the weeks following the May election to the Scottish Parliament in which the Nationalists will have unparalleled success. One of the SNP's first steps will then be to seek support from one of the other main parties for its plan to hold a referendum on Scottish independence. It is quite possible that before the tricentenary year of the Union is complete, the first steps will have been taken towards the withdrawal of Scotland from the UK (and if that should happen Northern Ireland will not be far behind). Scottish admirers of the Queen will be relieved at the thought that, even so, she might still rule as Elizabeth I of Scotland.

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