Until the 1970s, it was difficult to persuade anyone in England that there was anything much to say about territorial politics in Britain. It (if not the United Kingdom) was an integrated nation-state in which territorial divisions had given way to the functional and class cleavages of modernity. By the time Jim Bulpitt's Territory and Power in the United Kingdom appeared, territorial politics was (almost) a respectable topic.Footnote 1 A quarter of a century later there is a whole genre of literature on the end of Britain, of Britishness or of the Union.Footnote 2 McLean and Macmillan go so far as to proclaim the Union dead.Footnote 3 Opinion polls in Scotland show between 25 and 50 per cent support for independence, depending on the wording of the question. More striking still, polls have shown similar levels of support for Scottish independence in England – a finding not found in comparable cases of minority nationalism. Something has happened to the Union; it is not at all clear what, or why.
Most explanations depend on winding back the historical clock, so that Britishness, as a largely instrumental device, is shed, revitalizing pre-Union identities. Colley, like Bryant, argues that, having been created by Protestantism and war against France, Britain may revert to its constituent parts when these factors are no longer operative.Footnote 4 Yet other nations created by religion and war have proven resilient as national identity takes on a life of its own. An older argument is that Britishness was created by empire and, after its disappearance, lost both its instrumental appeal and its ideological underpinnings.Footnote 5 Yet, post-war Britain reconstructed itself as a modern welfare state on the way to forging an identity based on common rights and entitlements. The argument that the Scots have embraced Europe while the English reject it finds little support from surveys.
Weight argues that Scots are turning to independence because they are doing poorly economically under the Union.Footnote 6 This echoes Hechter's contrived (and later largely retracted) argument about internal colonialism.Footnote 7 Yet the historical record shows that support for nationalism is weaker in bad times, such as the 1930s or the 1980s, and stronger when Scotland is thriving. Others argue that Scots have given up on the Union because their political opinions, more egalitarian and pro-welfare, are diverging from a market-driven England.Footnote 8 Yet Scots' views on the main dimensions of social and economic policy are close to the mean, and the outlying region appears not to be Scotland but the south of England.Footnote 9
A Bulpittian approach is more promising. This emphasizes the historical diversity of the United Kingdom, the failure to build a unitary or centralized state and the central role of territorial management. Under the dual polity, central elites were concerned with high politics, leaving low politics to local collaborators. In what would now be known as a historical institutionalist mode, Bulpitt examined the evolution of the polity over time and the way that elites sustained distinctive modes of governing according to the needs of the moment. Politics is at the centre of the argument. Bulpitt's approach, however, was determinedly Anglo-centric, a view from the metropolis or, as he put it, a central perspective. It was also a deeply Tory approach, consciously and rightly critical of the Whig narratives that had long underlain Britain's national mythology, but also dismissive of the Labour version of unionism. The argument that follows is that not only has central management failed in the United Kingdom, but that both Tory and Labour unionism are in crisis.Footnote 10 New Labour's efforts to create a new Britishness faces a distinct Scottish project based on the same modernizing and universalistic principles. Scotland, seen by Bulpitt as a periphery to be managed, is being rebuilt as a political community within a new form of union. This is not because Scotland is more differentiated socially, economically or in core values. To the contrary, such differentiation has, if anything been diminishing. Rather it is because Scotland has provided the territorial and institutional framework for addressing the latest phase of modernity. Britishness is in crisis, but is not giving way to a counter-project of Scottishness based on the same nation-state principles. Rather we are seeing competing projects for the rebuilding of political community at a time when both statehood and nationality are being reformulated. The Union may be finished, but all parties are still talking the language of union in one form or another.
THE IDEOLOGY AND PRACTICE OF UNION
Bulpitt correctly saw the United Kingdom as a union rather than an integrated nation-state. Its central principle was unionism, which Bulpitt identifies as statecraft, or strategy, dismissing its ideological component as largely for ‘external consumption’Footnote 11 or as part of the discredited Whiggism.Footnote 12 Yet unionism must also be understood as ideology, a peculiarly British formula for unity in diversity. Committed to the unity of Britain and opposed to self-government even on Gladstonian lines, it emphasized the sovereignty of Westminster as the supreme constitutional principle. Yet unlike state nationalists in other European countries, it embraces national diversity within the United Kingdom.Footnote 13 Indeed, it is precisely because they recognize nationality that unionists such as Dicey and Wilson were unwilling to concede any measure of home rule to Scotland or Ireland, since home rule parliaments would exploit the principle of nationality to assert their own sovereignty.Footnote 14 Within these limits, unionists accept administrative decentralization, legal differentiation and cultural diversity, and claim that the Union is precisely the best way of nurturing Scottish nationality. This has been described by Morton as ‘unionist nationalism’,Footnote 15 but this is to confuse nationality with nationalism. It would be more accurate to label it simply as ‘unionism’ since the mark of British unionism is distinct precisely in that it recognizes national diversity under unitary authority. Scottishness is balanced by a British patriotism, presented as more enlightened and less aggressive than competing nationalisms from within or without.
Conservative unionism tends to be traditionalist, based on Burkean notions of respect for the wisdom of ages.Footnote 16 On the Labour side, unionism is linked to a denigration of nationalism, the need for broader forms of solidarity and an emphasis on class. Yet the politics of class covered up a deeper British national identity, revealed by the hostility of the Labour left both to devolution and to European integration. A strong British state was needed to gain the commanding heights of the economy, develop welfare services and ensure both social and territorial equity.
The sovereignty of Parliament allows for variation in practice across the constituent nations, since none of this can really affect the basic principles of authority. It also, by avoiding the principle of popular sovereignty, makes it unnecessary to define the ‘people’. The doctrine has never been uncontested in Scotland, but the genius of unionism, together with the British lack of interest in dogma meant that this Scottish anomaly was something with which the political class could live. Indeed, the different interpretations of the Union on either side of the border, together with the English habit of thinking of England and Britain as essentially the same thing, allowed the English to believe that the Union imposed no constraint on them. It also explains the ease with which they accept the prospect of Scottish independence, on the assumption that their own polity will carry on regardless.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF UNION
Bulpitt's analysis is firmly political and based on strategic calculation. The political economy element is weak and distracted into an attack on the all-too-easy target of Hechter's internal colonialism. It is true that the Anglo-Scottish Union was not created for economic reasons, but for dynastic and strategic ones, although economic threats were used to bring the Scots into line. Economic policy was, however, used as an instrument of territorial management. By the late nineteenth century, Scotland was benefiting as the heavy industries thrived in imperial markets. The Scottish industrial bourgeoisie was firmly wedded to the empire and union, source of its prosperity. The organized working class showed more nationalist inclinations, but was equally unwilling to risk its prosperity and was strongly committed to free trade.
After the First World War, these calculations changed. Scotland's heavy industries were hit by depression and, unlike in the south and midlands of England, there was no general recovery in the 1930s. Some observers, looking at the rise of a generation of nationalist literati and the foundation of the first nationalist parties, have concluded that depression and nationalism were linked. In fact, the opposite was true. Business looked to government in London for protection and subsidies and merged into UK-wide conglomerates and cartels. One consequence was the demise of the local industrial bourgeoisie, previously a mainstay of the Union. This had particular repercussions on the Unionist (after 1965 Conservative) Party, which lost voters, leaders and finance. Labour ended its flirtation with nationalism and turned to the centre for help. Scottish economic interests still pointed to union, but for very different reasons, and with different implications. Henceforth, Scotland was an economic dependency, and leaders from politics, administration and both sides of industry made the extraction of resources from the centre the mainstay of their political strategy.Footnote 17 It became established wisdom that there was a trade-off between Scottish autonomy and privileged access to the centre, and the parties would always opt for the latter.
Bulpitt identifies a central preference for avoiding detailed control and intervention and a search for an auto-pilot for managing the economy, through Keynesianism to monetarism. Yet Scottish unionism (about which Bulpitt says little) sought central intervention into the 1970s and beyond. The Labour government's devolution proposals sought to concede a measure of autonomy but kept economic policy with the centre. The Thatcher recession of the early 1980s saw support for nationalism plummet even as the oil revenues peaked and were used to finance the disastrous experiment with monetarism. Scottish politicians and civil society instead rallied around the defence of industrial icons such as the Ravenscraig steel mill, or Scottish banks and firms threatened by takeover. There was, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, no alternative to the Union in bad times. This is not picked up in Bulpitt, whose treatment of the political repercussions of the monetarist failure is limited to the restraints introduced on English local government.
By the 1990s (beyond Bulpitt's timeframe) matters had changed. International thinking about regional development moved away from the centralized and directive model towards the idea of endogenous growth and the ‘new regionalism’. Drawing on institutional economics and economic sociology, it now sees the drivers of growth within territorial societies themselves. Favoured instruments are research and development, education and training, innovation and entrepreneurship. Policy has been widely devolved to sub-state governments, with an increased role for European interests, and regions and localities are expected to compete for a share of investment, technology and markets. The change is reflected in the 1998 devolution settlement, which gives the Scottish Parliament the economic tools withheld in the 1978 Act.
At the same time, the issue of Scottish ownership has largely faded as Scotland is integrated into global production chains. By the end of the 1990s even the nationalists welcomed inward investment and accepted mergers and takeovers, although preferring to keep headquarters functions in Scotland. The extensive Conservative programme of privatization in the 1980s and 1990s was not used to revive a Scottish business class – a strategic mistake that cost them dear – and the small number that did emerge have shown no interest in the Tory Party.
By the 1990s, the old heavy industries had largely gone and the economic structure of Scotland was almost identical with the United Kingdom (UK) regional mean. Scotland was neither an under-privileged nor an over-privileged periphery but had a GDP per capita nearer to the mean than any other nation or region of the UK (96 per cent). Yet this functional alignment was not the death of nationalism. On the contrary, it provided the basis for a vision of Scotland as a small northern European nation competing in global markets. If Ireland and the Nordic countries could thrive in these conditions, so could Scotland. The glow may now have gone from some of the Scottish National Party's (SNP) ‘arc of prosperity’ (which included Iceland), but in the longer term the argument that large states are not needed is likely to prevail – short of a drastic collapse in the world trading system such as the one that killed Scottish nationalism after the First World War.
THE WELFARE STATE
The welfare state (largely neglected in Bulpitt) has been one of the pillars of the modern union as an expression of British-wide solidarity and particularly central to Labour conceptions of union. It has not been dismantled, nor is it true that the Scots are more favourable to welfare spending than the English. Surveys show that on matters of income distribution and welfare, they are only marginally to the left of voters south of the border, and rather close to those in the north of England.Footnote 18 The only clear and consistent Scotland–England difference is on comprehensive education, which the Scots have not abandoned.Footnote 19 The difference in Scotland is that rejection of the neoliberal dispensation has a territorial expression and a territorial unit on which to base it. Defence of the welfare state in the 1980s and 1990s was linked to the campaign for self-government, giving it the extra momentum that previous home rule campaigns had lacked. Paterson shows that the more people identify as Scottish, the more they agree that there is ‘one law for the rich and one for the poor’.Footnote 20 Bond and Rosie show that there is a small but consistent tendency for those identifying as Scottish to espouse more social democratic values.Footnote 21 Hence Scottish nationality has been rebuilt around themes of welfare and egalitarianism, with party competition revolving around slightly different modes of welfare.
Political rhetoric has perhaps unwittingly helped to sever the link between the Union and social solidarity. Conservative politicians during the 1980s and 1990s spoke of Scotland's ‘dependency culture’, lack of entrepreneurship and high welfare rolls. This was contrasted with another vision, the Scotland of the industrial revolution and of a woefully misrepresented Adam Smith. Had this self-help rhetoric been accompanied by a positive attitude to Scottish self-government, as was the case briefly with Edward Heath in the late 1960s, it could have made a consistent message. Instead, it had to coexist with absolute resistance to constitutional change. New Labour rhetoric is less hostile to welfare and public services and represents an effort to reinvent social democracy for a new age. Yet despite its emphasis on community, New Labour has continued to delegitimate the state as a vehicle for expressing it. Its attacks on the public service professionals and dogmatic support for private provision, apart from alienating sections of the Scottish middle classes, have helped to break the connection between the state and social solidarity or public services. When the state ceases to be the institutional expression and foundation for national solidarity, state and nation not surprisingly fall apart.
This has encouraged a distinct conception of the welfare state at elite level in Scotland, more favourable to universalism and sceptical about the restructuring pursued under both Conservative and New Labour governments. A survey by Paterson of university academics shows a greater civic commitment in Scotland and a lesser tendency to see the university as apart from society. Another 2003 survey found that just less than 60 per cent of medical general practitioners across the UK would like to charge for home visits, while in Scotland the same proportion were opposed. Scottish medical practitioners show less inclination to private practice than those in England.Footnote 22 During the 1980s and 1990s few Scottish schools opted out of local authority control, and the take-up of fund-holding by general practitioners was much lower than in England. Hearn uses the old concept of the moral economy to capture a diffuse sense of what is fair, and which serves to moderate the application of purely market criteria in public affairs.Footnote 23 A Scottish public domain has thus been constructed which, like other territorial political cultures, is not merely an aggregation of individual attitudes, but an inter-subjective way of framing public discourse and engaging in debate.Footnote 24
CLUB GOVERNMENT
The British state has had a distinctive relationship to civil society. The failure of revolutionary activity and the successful management of the nationalities question outside Ireland meant that it was unnecessary to build a centralized state apparatus above civil society. An unwritten constitution was complemented with a self-regulation in the City of London, in the legal and medical professions, the universities, business and the trades unions, allowing the state itself to govern with a light touch. The civil service, the judiciary, the boardrooms and much of the political elite was drawn from a narrow social background in the elite public schools and ancient universities, characterized by the gifted amateur rather than technical specialization. Marquand's metaphor of ‘club government’ combined exclusiveness and coherence with the ethos of the London gentleman's social establishment, and matched Bulpitt's conception of the ‘right chaps’ who managed the territorial state.Footnote 25 Between the 1950s and the 1970s there was a broad consensus on policy issues, together with an unwillingness to confront either trades unions or business.
Club government was attacked from left and right, and blamed for Britain's apparently inexorable decline from the late nineteenth century. From the 1960s there was a frenzy of institutional reform covering the health service, local government, the civil service and the universities but which left the essentials of club government at the centre intact. It was only in the 1980s that radical change began, with Margaret Thatcher breaking with the consensus and abandoning much of the consultation and conciliation of earlier years. Thatcherism was the declared enemy of the state, but it pursued a social authoritarianism and decidedly nationalist rhetoric in external policy.Footnote 26 Liberalization of the economy was accompanied by centralization over local government and the rise of a massive and intrusive regulatory state.Footnote 27
The old Scottish Office system was embedded in the old assumptions about consensus, conciliation and informality. Ministers could carry out central policies while discreetly signalling their dissent for audiences back home. The latitude given to the professions and other self-regulating bodies also had a Scottish dimension. This is not to say that Scotland ran its own affairs before Thatcher but there was a Scottish set of institutions and practices for the management of its affairs, run by people identifying with Scottish traditions and with an understanding of the politics of the Union. Conservative attacks on club government therefore hit the old mechanisms of territorial management forcefully, exacerbated by the difficulty the government experienced in finding enough Scottish MPs to run the Scottish Office. Thatcherism's lack of appeal to the Scottish middle classes and the gradual erosion of Conservative support there may also be linked to the disdain for the old professions. None of this contradicts Bulpitt's analysis, which identified indirect rule as a strategy of statecraft and gave some evidence that it was already in trouble at the time that he wrote.
EUROPEAN INTEGRATION
For many years, there was widespread hostility to European integration in Scotland, on national, class and ideological grounds. The Labour Party feared for the welfare state and the power of national government to manage social and economic progress, and worried about the competitive challenge to industry. These concerns intersected with a British nationalism that was suspicious of foreign entanglements.Footnote 28 Labour in Scotland was especially opposed to Europe. The SNP, after pursuing a vaguely pro-European line in the 1950s, turned sharply against it in the 1960s and campaigned for a ‘no’ vote in 1975, although a pro-European minority had leave to dissent. Scotland voted ‘yes’, but by a notably smaller margin than England. The Conservatives and Labour pro-Europeans, for their part, presented Europe as a strategy of British modernization to strengthen the state and rebuild what Bulpitt calls the external support system after the loss of empire and disappointment with the special relationship with the USA. Only Jim Sillars and the ephemeral Scottish Labour Party in the 1970s made a strong link between the unification of Europe and the disintegration of Britain.
In the 1980s matters changed. Labour and the trade unions embraced Europe as a reaction to Thatcherism and in response to Jacques Delors' ‘social Europe’. The SNP changed tack in 1988 so that Europe became an external support system for an independent Scotland, a possibility identified already by Bulpitt.Footnote 29 Both parties make a connection between Europe and Scottish self-government. Labour has joined the Europe-of-the-Regions movement, seeking influence in Brussels through the UK and by lobbying the institutions, while the SNP favours independence in Europe. Yet neither party has made a coherent link between Europe and Scottish self-government. Labour subordinates European concerns to the UK line and was careful in government not to depart from the UK position. The SNP favours an intergovernmental Europe, with the prime role for national governments. Both parties face a Scottish electorate that shares much of the Euro-scepticism that has dominated public discourse in the United Kingdom since the late 1980s. They are also cross-pressured by sectoral concerns and the impact of European policies. Both were able to play up the impact of EU structural funds in Scotland during the 1990s, although the real gain is debatable because of UK non-additionality rules. European competition policies on subsidies for ferries, and especially agriculture and fisheries policies have attracted less favourable attention. So neither party is able to make a clear choice for Europe, as over the draft Constitutional Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty. While the UK Labour government put forward some proposals for regional input in Europe, its attitude to the Convention as a whole was defensive, and its argument for the outcome based almost entirely on what it had stopped. The SNP, which might have taken advantage of Labour's timorousness to stake out a stronger pro-Europe stance and proclaim the need for independence, opposed both the treaties on the grounds that they continued the Common Fisheries Policy.
The Scottish Social Attitudes Survey (SSAS) shows a pervasive Euro-scepticism, but slightly less pronounced than in England. It affects supporters of all parties, including the nationalists. Supporters of independence in Europe are, at best, somewhat less Euro-sceptic. Those identifying as Scottish are less Euro-sceptic than British identifiers; English respondents identifying as English are more Euro-sceptic again. Most of the electorate, however, take rather centrist positions on both Scottish and European constitutional issues. This all suggests that there is a market for a pro-European policy for more Scottish autonomy or independence, and that the SNP has made some progress in convincing its supporters, but that the link is by no means obvious to all. Working-class voters, a key part of the nationalist constituency, are inclined less to both Euro-scepticism and Europhilia, while the small business people, another (albeit not numerous) pool of SNP support, is highly sceptical.Footnote 30
So neither unionism nor nationalism has been able to exploit the European issue. The nationalist project for independence within the European Union has had a limited impact in the electorate but the European factor does seem to loosen the dependence on the British Union and, when considering independence options, the electorate now takes the EU context for granted. Europe may also have disarmed unionists by undermining some of their classic arguments about the perils of independence. A YouGov survey in April 2007 showed that electors are unimpressed with Labour fear-mongering that in an independent Scotland they would be cut off by borders and barriers from their relatives in England. Only 14 per cent of people believed that an independent Scotland would establish border controls with England, while 70 per cent thought that it would not. It was the UK government that had refused to join the Schengen area of passport-free travel and is introducing drastic new controls for entry and exit. So Europe has become less of an external support system for the British Union and more a force for its loosening.
SHIFTING IDENTITIES
Bulpitt was concerned mostly with elite strategy, yet there has long been a sociological unionism. Most people in Scotland are both British and Scottish, with only a minority seeing these as exclusive. For some, Scottishness is a cultural and historical identity, with little relevance to constitutional issues; at the other extreme, it leads directly to support for independence. These identities are linked in complex ways to class and other identities, which may undermine or reinforce the national one. These combinations are sustained by institutions and the public, shared and intersubjective culture and promoted by political leaders. Both unionism and nationalism play on these themes to construct their own synthesis. So Scotland could at one time be presented as a Protestant country, with religion and nation sustaining each other. Conservative one-nation narratives were used to combat class politics as well as Scottish nationalism, by emphasizing how the British prevailed over, while not suppressing, the Scottish nation. On the left, there is a recurrent image of Scotland as essentially egalitarian or even working class, although by the middle of the twentieth century Labour had linked class politics and progressivism to a British discourse, portraying Scottish nationalism as divisive and reactionary and using the SNP's support base in the petty bourgeoisie and small towns to depict them as ‘Tartan Tories’. These narratives have become more difficult to sustain. Protestantism no longer defines the Scottish nation. Class itself has declined as a factor in political identification and choice, and Labour has recast itself as an interclass party. The Conservatives failed in their efforts to reinvent Scotland as quintessentially individualist.
This is the context in which national identities in Scotland have shifted, away from the British and towards the Scottish pole. Given a straight choice between identifying themselves as Scottish or British, the proportion choosing Scottish rose steadily from 65 per cent in 1974 to peak at 80 per cent in 2000, before falling off slightly in 2003.Footnote 31 The decline in Britishness in Scotland is not therefore linked to devolution, although devolution does seem to have eroded Britishness in England, with increasing numbers making a distinction between Britain and England, and English identifiers overtaking British identifiers there in 2006.Footnote 32
Not surprisingly, SNP voters overwhelmingly prioritize their Scottish identity but two-thirds of Labour voters, a majority of Liberal Democrats and nearly half of Conservatives do so as well.Footnote 33 Tilley and Heath's study shows a marked decline in pride in Britain among Scots over succeeding generations, particularly in relation to political matters such as democracy and history, as opposed to science, sports, arts and literature.Footnote 34 The shift is also marked in social security and in economic achievement, suggesting that newer generations do not construct their vision of economic development or social solidarity around the British nation. On the other hand, Scottishness has not displaced Britishness completely and often seems complementary to it, as nearly half of even SNP supporters retain at least some element of British identity and often take pride in the British past.Footnote 35 Only at the extremes is there a polarization, with more than half those strongly repudiating Britain's past supporting independence, against a fifth of those who were very proud, but these numbers are small.Footnote 36
These developments mean that Scotland is being reconstructed as a social, economic and political space. This is not, it must be emphasized, the result of increasing differentiation of economic or social structures or political values. On the contrary, these continue to converge. As McCrone has repeatedly argued, Scotland does not have to be ‘different’ in order to exist. It is, rather, a territorial and social framework and a set of identities on which a political community can be rebuilt in the modern circumstances of a weakened state, transnational integration and a failure of the old union formula.Footnote 37 This is not a mere reversion to a previous pre-Union identity since that Scotland no longer exists. Rather, historic materials, institutions and social practices are used to rebuild a new civic community and, after devolution, a form of state resting upon modern values and social structures. At one time, unionists could disparage nationalists as backward-looking, clinging to the residue of past times. Now it is the Union that is portrayed as an ancien régime, stuck in a constitutional mode that does not fit the times – hence the frantic efforts to reinvent and find an ideological justification for Union.
THE BRITISHNESS AGENDA
Bulpitt downplays ideology, yet unionism was an influential set of ideas, whose very contradictions were the secret of its success. Contrasting understandings of the Union in England and in Scotland (not to mention Wales or Ireland) meant that Britishness had rather different meanings in each. England and the Westminster elite could believe that they inhabited a unitary state governed by parliamentary sovereignty, while the Scots flattered themselves that they had a contractual relationship with the centre. Margaret Thatcher never really grasped unionist ideology or its relation to British nationalism. Her nationalist rhetoric contained echoes of imperial nostalgia and was backed by strong evocations of the USA and the English-speaking old dominions. Its other element, however, was drawn from the Little Englander tradition, assuming the superiority of British/English ways and historically associated with hostility to mainland Europe. There was no clear projection of the internal dimension of national identity and symbols within a multinational union.
It was not until New Labour that anyone really saw the need for a formulation of Britishness as a unitary doctrine. For the first time, the internal dimension of Britishness is being articulated in response to two challenges: the multicultural and the multinational. Multiculturalism is about cultural diversity among ethnic minorities of recent immigration. Multinationalism is the recognition of the diverse nations that constitute the UK. New Labour has sought an ideology of Britishness that can subsume both while reducing their impact and reintegrating the British nation-state. The ideology is civic, based on common human values and open to all. Criticisms that a national identity cannot be based on universal values miss the point; many national ideologies are based on universal values, the nation being the place for their realization. On the other hand, many people think that something thicker is required. Sometimes this is the claim that the nation in question has a special mission, or that it was the first to discover universal values, or that it evinces them better than others. Its history is presented as a progress towards enlightenment and its symbols are given a democratic and liberal meaning.
New Labour has done all of these things. Ministers have called for a revival of national pride. Britishness is linked with democracy, fair play and the National Health Service (NHS) and detached from empire. Citizens are encouraged to fly the flag. The language of rights has been countered with a reminder of citizen duties. British identity, according to a minister, is ‘different from our English identity or Scottish identity or our Bengali or Cornish identities because it is quintessentially plural’.Footnote 38 Citizenship is to be boosted through ceremony, legal tests, oaths of allegiance, statements of national values and pledges of commitment. Yet there are four problems with this programme. The first is the paradox that this kind of nation-building is essentially un-British, as Bulpitt would have agreed. Second, the twenty-first century may not be the time for a programme of nation-building that other countries underwent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in very different circumstances. Third, the effort to promote Britishness based on universal values confronts not a Scottish identity based on exclusion and ethnicity, but a revived Scottish national identity based on exactly the same universal values and with a distinct European and global dimension to add. Fourth, the measures to tackle what the government sees as an excess of multiculturalism do not fit well with the reality of a multinational state in which the nationality bargain is being negotiated differently in different places. Britishness is presented as a uniform identity felt equally everywhere, but located above the subordinate identities, which themselves are diverse. A traditional unionist, however, could have told them that Britishness itself is constructed differently in the various parts of the UK.
Lord Goldsmith's report on citizenship devotes a long section to citizenship education, linking this to the inculcation of Britishness but referring exclusively to the English system.Footnote 39 There is no indication of how this might work in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, or what citizenship means there. There is a breezy assurance that none of his recommendations affects national plurality within the UK, but nowhere is this plurality addressed. It is seen rather as a subordinate element within the overwhelming narrative of Britishness rather than, as a traditional unionist might have argued, a core component of Britishness itself. Goldsmith recommends an oath of allegiance to the monarch and a pledge of allegiance to the UK by young people coming of age, with only a passing acknowledgement of how this might go down in Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Appeals, such as Gordon Brown's evocation of the National Health Service as the embodiment of British solidarity, stumble against the fact that the NHS is being reconstructed in very different ways in the constituent parts of the UK, drawing on distinct ideas about social citizenship. While reform in England focused on recasting the user as consumer, in Scotland and Wales the underlying image is that of citizen. When Jack Straw, Lord Chancellor (of England) and minister for constitutional reform, lectured in the USA in early 2008 on ‘Modernising the Magna Carta’, he gave a view of British constitutional history which included a list of pre-Union English milestones as well as British developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but failed to mention the Acts of Union with Wales, Scotland and Ireland; he also incorrectly told his audience that the House of Lords was currently the ‘final court of appeal for the UK court system’.Footnote 40
This kind of posturing would have provoked the most merciless of Bulpittian derision. Bulpitt would have seen why central elites might need to strengthen their position faced with devolution but, seeing the UK essentially as a project for English control over its periphery, could only have been profoundly sceptical about the means.
SUPPORT FOR INDEPENDENCE AND THE UNION
So the Union is loosening and unionists are struggling to find their message, but this does not mean that the UK is finished or that independence for Scotland as a nation-state will be the consequence. Indeed, even as the Union (upper case) fades, the language of union has become pervasive. Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have embraced the title ‘unionist’, previously associated with Irish matters, and have launched an inquiry into devolution that has itself struggled to articulate a defence of the UK.Footnote 41 The SNP has a National Conversation loaded with references to the European Union and a vaguely defined ‘social union’.Footnote 42 Scotland is not alone here as parties, intellectuals and the public in other plurinational states are also searching for a new formula for self-government in an interdependent world.
The increase in primary identification with Scotland has coincided with increased support for independence, but at the individual level the relationship is by no means straightforward. Part of the problem is that Scottish identity is so pervasive that it explains rather little; indeed historically it has been a key component of traditional unionism. In 2005, half of those identifying themselves as only Scottish supported independence but, perhaps surprisingly, so did a fifth of those identifying as only British (although numbers are low). The hardest core is the group who were purely Scottish and who wanted out of both the UK and the European Union, but this amounted only to 6 per cent of respondents.Footnote 43 Support for more devolution is linked to identity but again in a very loose way and the largest group is in the middle, recognizing both Scottish and British identities and preferring stronger devolution within the UK. So, while the Scottish dimension is strengthening, it is not hegemonic. While Scottishness predicts support for constitutional change, it does not determine it. Rather, identities and their constitutional implications exist in overlapping compartments, with much room for negotiation and manoeuvre. Political parties can use this margin to construct messages and bases of support for the Union, an independent Scotland, or positions in between.
Support for independence in Scotland appears to fluctuate over short periods of time, but this is mainly because of the wording of the question, with ‘harder’ options that mention separation gaining lower levels of support. Responses are also affected by the presentation of options. For many years, a straight question about whether the respondent would vote for independence has regularly gained substantially more support than one that compares independence with various options for devolution. It seems that, as elsewhere, voters do not make a clear distinction between independence and more devolution but tend in their majority to want more self-government.Footnote 44 Even an apparently straight question asking Yes or No to independence provokes different responses, depending on exactly how it is put.
A more consistent measure is provided by the SSAS, which measures a hard question on independence (‘separate from the UK’) against a question on Scottish Parliament with tax-raising powers, the present Parliament, or no Parliament. The offer of more powerful devolution depresses independence support, and massively reduces support for the status quo (to less than 10 per cent). Support for independence increased slowly from 29 per cent in 1999 to 34 per cent in 2005, but fell away to 23 per cent in 2007, curiously just when the SNP was winning the election. This suggests that many electors may be acting strategically in pursuit of their favoured option of more autonomy for Scotland somewhere short of independence. With Labour in power, they may ‘vote tactically’ (that is respond to survey questions), demanding independence. They may also vote SNP. With the SNP in power, they are keen to exercise a restraining hand. It is entirely possible that a majority will vote ‘no’ in an independence referendum but that the SNP will win the subsequent election, as has happened on two occasions in Quebec.
CONCLUSIONS
The old Union was not a unitary state, but was more than a marriage of convenience. A specific conception of Britishness, stronger at some times than others, was combined with a strategy of territorial management to sustain a distinct form of polity. It was managed by political and administrative elites, through institutions and public policies, which themselves adapted over time. Bulpitt identified territorial management as a critical factor, if he did rather downplay ideology and political economy. The lack of an assimilating union left Scots free to resume the path of independent statehood, but mostly permitted a regular renegotiation of the terms of union. The distinct ideology of unionism is now dead and the alternative agenda of Britishness is misconceived, treating Britishness as homogeneous, lumping the multicultural and multinational issues together and failing to incorporate the European dimension. Yet there is no hegemonic project of Scottishness with clear political and institutional implications to take its place. We are still in the age of informal union, but now it is extended to include a European dimension. The language of union remains pervasive, with even the SNP assuring the public that, after independence, the social union (whatever that means) will remain intact.
This would appear to open the way to a reconstituted Union, and indeed devolution within the UK has consistently emerged as the choice of the largest number of voters. Traditional unionism is dead and traditional nationalism undermined by state restructuring and European integration. Yet they survive, reshaped as two distinct tendencies. Neo-unionism sees the UK as a nation-state, with common civil, political and social rights. Unlike old-style unionism, it favours devolution within limits and supports a stronger territorial dimension to government generally. It is not, however, favourable to substantial policy divergence or to Scotland working out its own social settlement. On the other side is a neo-nationalism that sees Scotland as the main focus of citizenship, loyalty and social integration. It is nested within multiple unions, in the United Kingdom, the ‘Isles’, Europe and the North Atlantic, and negotiates its way among these without necessarily claiming statehood.
Neo-unionism might appear to be less of a threat to the central elites and more strongly favoured by English opinion. In fact the opposite is true, for reasons that Bulpitt identified with his key concept: central autonomy. A union reconstructed on federal lines or as a unitary state with a stronger territorial articulation would limit Whitehall and Westminster prerogatives. A looser union, with a corresponding diminution of Scottish influence at the centre, would not – nor would Scottish independence. This explains the curious circumstance that the majority nation, at both elite and mass level, seems so relaxed about the prospect of secession of the minority nation. While not always clearly articulated, this division is the basic issue underlying discussions about fiscal autonomy, devolution of the welfare state, or the otherwise terminally tedious West Lothian Question.
