In some ways it’s hard to believe we’re now almost a decade on from one of the most politically fraught periods of my life. On Thursday, 18th September, 2014 this United Kingdom came close to losing one-third of its entire territory in a government sop to an Anglophobic separatist party that had cruised to regional victory a few years before. The coalition government in London had signed into law the right of a Scottish devolved parliament to hold a vote on the effective destruction of the Kingdom itself, and that parliament would get to determine the franchise, the question, and the timing of the plebiscite. This act of craven deference would continue to affect British politics for years afterwards, and it can plausibly be argued that its genesis lay in a botched devolution experiment planned in the days of the Tony Blair administration.
On the evening before the vote, I travelled to a ‘Rally for the Union’ at City Square in Leeds. With ancestral ties to both Scotland and Northern Ireland, I am a living embodiment of the familial and cultural ties centuries of union have created in and for the modern UK. The preservation of the Union is, and always has been, my central political belief. I had holidayed in Scotland as a child; I had my first experience caring for the welfare of others as a sixth former mentoring first year pupils during a trip to Aberfoyle and Abington in the summer of 1990; I’ve toured Scotland many times in the intervening 34 years. During the 18 months before the Scottish referendum, I had written letters to several prominent newspapers North of the Border, as well as donating a few hundreds pounds to the Unionist ‘No’ campaign. The thought that a part of the UK that had more than played its part in our national story could break away was almost too horrific to contemplate.
What surprised me upon arrival in Leeds was the scarcity of people at the rally. In a city of half a million people there were, at the most, 200 – 300 participants. A prominent sentiment among many English voters at the time – understandably tired and furious with the provocative acts of pathos and serial ingratitude from the Scottish nationalist movement – was ‘Oh, let them go. We’ll be better off without them’. It didn’t dawn on many at the time (and I suspect it still hasn’t) the enormity of what was being proposed here. In territorially proportionate terms, the UK losing Scotland would be the equivalent of Australia losing Queensland and New South Wales, and the USA losing every state east of the Mississippi! It would have been an embarrassment unparalleled in our history and it would almost certainly have emboldened the militant toxin of Irish republican sentiment, in addition to Spanish and Argentinian irredentist tendencies in respect of Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands. With the exception of France and the referendums on the future of New Caledonia, and Canada with its two plebiscites on Quebec secession in 1980 and 1995, no other country in the developed world has – or would even contemplate – allowing the secession of its constituent parts. In fact most expressly forbid secession! The United States (the country some here like to foolishly claim we slavishly follow in culture, word and deed) even fought and won a civil war over that principle. Here, Parliament at Westminster presented potential secession as a gift-wrapped reward. How craven was that!?
It was entirely unnecessary for David Cameron to grant any sort of referendum. Constitutional matters were – and are – expressly outside the remit of the Scottish Parliament. In the same way the London Borough of Bromley can’t vote to abolish nuclear weapons on UK soil (even if every councillor was elected on that mandate), the Scottish Parliament cannot vote unilaterally to dismember our country, and it was stupid and churlish of the Cameron administration to give both the SNP and many sympathetic voices in the UK media the impression otherwise. It took Brexit to effectively close off any future chance of the SNP performing a repeat. Because I stand by my assertion that Brexit (and there is no comparison between the UK leaving an economic bloc with pseudo-superstate pretentions, and Scotland quitting a country it has been an integral part of for over three centuries) makes Scottish ‘independence’ nigh on impossible. That is one of the reasons why a SNP machine that possessed 95% of Westminster seats in 2015 now only has 15%.
People across the whole of the United Kingdom need to be far less insouciant about the continued attacks on the constitutional integrity of our country – be they from Sinn Fein or the SNP. For almost no other country on Earth would tolerate that ongoing potential source of instability. The only way to kill off the forces of secessionism is to make it clear their goal is off the agenda. Otherwise they’ll just keep coming back time and time again (https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24584049.curtice-second-independence-referendum-chances-stalled/). You cannot buy off separatism by fiscal generosity. Nor can you ever satisfy it by awarding it greater powers short of its ultimate goal. Blair, Brown and Dewar made that mistake at the end of the 1990s. It is to be hoped the uninspiring current occupant of 10 Downing Street doesn’t go down the path they did.
Our country got lucky in September 2014. It came the closest it has at any point to cease to exist. And, yes, the UK would have ceased to exist without Scotland (just the same as it would cease to exist with the loss of Northern Ireland or Wales). Our flag; our constitution; our economy; our centuries of history; our endeavours on the battlefield in defence of the Realm; our international status; our ability to defend ourselves…..all nearly wrecked on a jagged rock of SNP appeasement. I want to return to a time when the peculiarities of Scottish nationalism add up to nothing more than wearing kilts and ginger wigs at an England-Scotland friendly. In short, I want the sovereign government in London to never again be a handmaiden to the demands of folk who want to destroy what we, as British people together, have created.
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An excellent piece. Very informative of the mistakes of the past.