When Empires Fall...
This is a rather lengthy history lecture, so here is my conclusion upfront
7.4 The Roman Empire in Britain did not suddenly collapse. It slid slowly into decay , falling apart region by region. The centre, Londinium, could not hold the broken pieces together. The Union of 1707 between English and Scottish parliaments began falteringly but as the British Empire grew, it success forged stronger and stronger ties between Scotland and England. But now the British Empire is no more. As it recedes into history, so the constitutional foundation of the United Kingdom has began to change. Although it is alleged that the United Kingdom has no written constitution, the British Parliament was established by Article III of Treaty of Union of 1707 : That the United Kingdom of Great Britain be represented by one and the same Parliament, to be styled the Parliament of Great Britain. Regardless of what powers it does or does not have at present, the Scottish Parliament, simply by existing, will eventually trigger a British constitutional crisis. This will be a crisis of sovereignty. Out of which either a single federal state or two separate sovereign states will emerge.
1. The Roman Empire in Britain
1.1 Forget where I read it, but one of the most useful suggestions I have found is that the Romans were not really interested in ‘conquering’ the whole of Britain. All they really wanted was the more fertile lowland zone - from the Cheshire Plains in the north west down through the midlands to the south-east plus the south west as far as Devon. That region would have ‘paid for itself’, I.e. would have produced enough agricultural surplus to have supported a small Imperial army and bureaucracy and would have generated enough trade to make it a positive contributor to the Imperial economy.
1.2 The problem the Romans then had was that in order to maximise the prosperity of this lowland zone, they had to neutralise the upland zone ’tribes’ (in Wales, in the Pennines, in the far south west ) who threatened to disrupt it economy through raiding. So they had to push their frontier north and west into the upland zone. But the upland zone was a drain on resources - needed lots of forts and soldiers and roads (and eventually Walls) to keep the ‘tribes’ in check, but did not produce enough agricultural surplus / trading opportunities to make the investment self- financing. So the Romans had to carry on even further north into what is now (but was not then : no Scots) Scotland . Militarily, they could defeat the north Britons and ‘Picts’ , but economically/ practically they could not sustain the Empire in the far north.
1.3 The eventual outcome was a compromise. The Forth/ Clyde ( Antonine Wall ) became the northern limit of Roman influence, the region between the Forth / Clyde and the Tyne / Solway ( Hadrian’s Wall) boundaries became a buffer zone controlled for the Romans by client rulers. The upland Pennine/ Cumbrian area became a military zone controlled from York, with Wales in a similar situation controlled from Chester. The main lowland/ southern economically viable zone was left in civilian hands.
2. Geography and politics
2.1 This Roman ‘rationalisation by geography’ of Britain survived the end of Roman rule. What did not survive was the Imperial administrative structure. Unlike mainland Europe, there was no massive movement of ‘barbarian tribes’ into Britain. Rather there were constant sea-borne raiding by Picts (from north of the Antonine Wall) and Scots ( from Ireland.) into the lowland/ civilian zone. These raids were similar to the later raids by the Vikings.
2.2 To defend the civilian zone, an attempt was made to use Saxons and Angles as ‘auxiliaries’ - but once established, the Saxons and Angles became more of a problem than the raiders. They had to be paid, but once the immediate threat had gone, there was little willingness by the main landowners to stump up the cash to pay them. There was also the fear that the Saxons were being used as a private army in power struggles between politicians seeking control of the province.
2.3 An alternative source of military strength lay in the militarised zone. Here, the soldiers of Roman garrisons had been settled for so long they had become part of the local population. Since ‘Romanisation’ had never fully occurred, the non- Roman local population retained features of their ‘Celtic’ Iron Age past. As a result, small ‘kingdoms’ based around chieftains and their warrior-bands (re) emerged. These warrior-bands were happy to fight the Saxons and Angles, but were no less disruptive of the post- Roman ‘civilianised’ society and economy. They too demanded payment for the ‘protection’ they offered and were in a position enforce their demands.
2.4 The precise details are lacking, but the end result was the total disappearance of Roman Britain and its replacement by dozens of warring kingdoms. Some were Saxon, some were Anglian, some were British. Gradually, the Saxon and Anglian kingdoms pushed west - to create what is now England, leaving the British in control of Cornwall, Wales and parts of southern Scotland [ not sure about Cumbria].
3. Scotland.
3.1 In Scotland , it was the Irish ‘ Scots’ rather than the English ‘ Anglo-Saxons’ who gained control. Starting from a foot hold in Argyll, in the 6th and 7th centuries they expanded east to absorb the Picts before moving south to come in conflict with the Angles of Northumbria who were pushing north as well as west. The Scots checked the northward expansion of the Angles, but the Angles consolidated their hold in the south - as far west as Whithorn in Galloway and also into Ayrshire. In between, the Britons of Strathclyde managed to hold on until they were weakened by Viking attacks in the late 8th century after which Strathclyde came under Scots influence.
3.2 The Vikings from the 8th century onward, and especially once they (especially the Danes) could deploy land-armies throw more confusion into this picture. For example, the Battle of Brunanburh in 937 - which may have been fought at Burnswark in Annandale involved West Saxons, Irish Vikings, Northumbrians, Scots and Britons. This battle has been claimed to have secured the existence of ‘England’ as a distinct entity.
3.3 It was this England which William of Normandy invaded in 1066. However, William’s conquest was initially that of the old Roman civilian province of southern England. In 1069/70 William had to forcibly subdue the north of England, devastating the region in the process. Even at the time of the Domesday book in 1086, Westmoreland, Cumberland, Northumberland and County Durham remained outwith its detailed description of ‘Norman England’ .
3.4 Effectively, despite the battle of Brunanburh, the boundary between what was to become Scotland and what was to become England - the territory of the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria - remained uncertain right up until James VI of Scotland became James I of a ‘United Kingdom of Scotland and England (and Wales) ’ in 1603. At various times for 1000 years up until 1603, depending on the ebb and flow of national and local power, the south of Scotland was under English rule and the north of England under Scottish rule - whilst the Borderers themselves did their best to live by their own rules… Nor did the numerous armed conflicts between England and Scotland often, if ever, stray further south or further north of the Roman ‘military zone’.
4. 1638 to 1746
4.1 Although the Union of the Crowns in 1603 pacified the immediate Border zone, it did not bring peace. Rather it set in motion a struggle which lasted nearly 120 years. In Scotland the Stewarts’s may have held the throne, but their effective power was constrained by the almost equal influence of Scotland’s other powerful families. On several occasions, Stewart kings (and queen Mary) were held hostage by on or other of the rival ‘noble’ houses of Scotland. But as rulers of a united Kingdom, the later Stuarts were not so directly constrained. What they failed to realise was that in England (unlike Scotland) Parliament had come to act as a constraint on royal power.
4.2 The result was a power struggle which became a long drawn out civil war. It began with a skirmish at Turiff (near Aberdeen) in May 1639 and ended at Culloden (near Inverness ) in April 1746. Although the power struggle was fought out across Scotland, northern England, Ireland and Wales and although France, Spain and Holland became involved, at its heart lay a city founded by the Romans - London. Here wealth and power were concentrated . This why, in a last, desperate gamble for power, Charles Edward Stuart led his army south towards London in 1745.
4.3 Yet it was precisely to deter such an attempt that the Treaty of Union of 1707 was designed. It was meant to close the door against a return of the Stuarts to power in England (with French or Spanish support) via Scotland. But why this desire to keep the Stuarts out? “Business” is the answer. England was at the beginning of its progress towards Empire. What drove this process was trade and commerce. The last thing needed was a king who believed he had a divine right (a theory invented by James VI /I in reaction to the ‘contractual’ theory of kingship advanced by Scottish Presbyterians ) to interfere in the workings of the emerging economy.
4.4 The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, when William of Orange replaced James VII/ II as king should have ended the Stuart threat to the growth of England’s economic wealth and power. But it had an unintended consequence. After 1689, the Scottish parliament revelled in its new independence from Stuart control and tried to set Scotland on its own, separate, path to economic prosperity. The ‘Company Trading in Africa and India ‘ - the Darien scheme - was the main result and received massive support. The failure of the Company (for which lack of support from king William was blamed) led the parliament to claim the right of Scotland to choose its own king. This raised the spectre, unlikely but possible, of the Scots returning the Scottish crown to the Stuarts, to James VIII.
4.5 To prevent such an eventuality, a deal was done. In exchange for giving up their parliament, the Scots were guaranteed their Presbyterian religion, granted freedom of trade with England and her colonies (with Scottish ships protected by the Royal Navy) and compensated for losses experienced through the failure of the Company Trading in Africa and India. The Hanoverian succession to the new United Kingdom of Great Britain was also agreed.
4.6 The Scots did not immediately prosper. The Jacobites (Stuart loyalists) played the nationalist card, arguing that the Treaty of Union was a ‘stab in the back’, pushed through parliament against the will of the Scottish people by a Whig elite ‘bought and sold for English gold’. However, the Stuarts, despite Charles Edward holding court in Edinburgh in 1745, were never interested in ruling Scotland alone - re-claiming the English throne was their goal. The Jacobite uprisings in Scotland - in 1708, 1715, 1718 and 1745 all had this objective and would have required external (French or Spanish) support to have succeeded in re-restoring a Stuart to the English throne.
5. Nationalism and Empire
5.1 Historians have puzzled over the absence of a ‘Scottish’ nationalism in the 19th century. One theory is that there was a Scottish nationalism, but it existed within a wider British/ Imperial nationalism. The Jacobite Scots could express their nationalism militarily through the courageous exploits of the ‘Highland’ regiments with their tartan kilts and bagpipes - the Scots as the shock-troops of an expanding Empire. For other Scots, national pride could be expressed through the engineering industry - the steam ships and steam trains for which the Scots became famous. Other Scots helped to manage and run the Empire. And for hundreds of thousands of Scots emigrants , the old (American) and new colonies (Australia, New Zealand) offered the chance of escape from what remained (despite industrialisation) a poorer country than England, though still more prosperous than Ireland.
5.2 This overlap between Scottish and British nationalism grew through the 19th century and survived into the 20th. But, as both Industry and Empire began their slow decline, so too did the once taken-for-granted dual identity. Whilst the two great ‘patriotic’ wars of the 20th century encouraged loyalty to the British state, their economic impact damaged Scotland. They reinforced Scotland’s economic reliance on heavy
( shipbuilding, iron/steel making, railway engineering, coal-mining) industry, a reliance which reached its peak in the 1950s when the Scots benefited from the war time destruction of Germany and Japan’s heavy engineering capacity.
5.3. In the 1930ies, the risk that a collapse in Scotland’s manufacturing base would encourage Scottish nationalism was recognised by both Conservative/ Liberal Unionist and Labour parties in Scotland.
Unable to do little more than scratch the surface of Scottish economic problems, Unionist politicians were forced to use scare tactics to dampen down Scottish nationalism. Whilst accepting that the Scottish economy was in considerable difficulty, it was argued that anything in the way of a severance or loosening of the ties with England would spell disaster. In short, if people believed that the situation was bad at the moment , it was nothing compared to the nationalist abyss of economic collapse which would be inevitable should the Scots opt for their own parliament… again and again it was emphasised that Scotland needed England to survive. Whereas unionism in the pre-war period was strident and confident, in the inter- war period it had become defensive and negative [ R. Finlay: Unionist Scotland 1800-1997: 1998:104]
5.4 The success of the wartime ‘planned economy’ created a belief (shared by both Labour and Conservatives) after the Second World War that Scotland could under go a managed industrial transformation away from its over reliance on heavy engineering, and a social transformation through massive investment in new housing and new towns. This post-war consensus began to break down in the 1970ies. By this time it was also clear that ‘planned economy’ was not working as planned. The nationalist upsurge, which had been so feared in the 1930ies, became a reality in the 1970ies to the benefit of the Scottish National Party. The SNP were able to counter a revival of the 1930ies ‘economic collapse’ threat by pointing to the newly discovered North Sea oil reserves.
6. Home Rule
6.1 To counter the SNP, a proposal to allow the Scots a limited degree of ‘home rule’ (originally proposed back in 1913) was drawn up. To satisfy the fears of Scottish Labour backbenchers, a ‘40% of all registered voters’ threshold was placed on the devolution referendum of 1978. Although there was a 51% majority for devolution, this was not enough to achieve the 40% of all voters threshold. The SNP Mps withdrew their support from a minority Labour government and in the 1979 General Election the Conservatives won.
6.2 Over the next 18 years , Conservatives adopted economic and social policies which favoured the ‘free market economy ’ over the ‘planned state economy’ . Whilst this benefited the City of London, the ‘service sector’ and new industries like the electronics industry, traditional manufacturing industries were decimated. The Conservatives also took a strong anti-trade union stance, determined to humble the miners in particular. [The miners were blamed for bringing down the 1970-74 Conservative government].
6.3 In structural terms, whereas 19th century industrialisation had to an extent dispersed economic and political power away from London and the south of England - to south Wales, to the Midlands, to north east and north west England and to central Scotland - between 1979 and 1997 this process was reversed. Although it can be argued that these regions were already in decline and the Conservatives simply made the process more obvious. For the Labour Party, this process was extremely painful, since the regions affected were their heartlands. Labour’s failure to win the 1992 General Election led to a total collapse in confidence and the party’s re-invention as ‘New Labour’ under Tony Blair. Re-positioned to the right of ‘old’ Labour, new Labour were able to keep their traditional voters in the former-industrial regions whilst winning over voters in the Conservatives’ southern heartlands and won the 1997, 2001 and 2005 General Elections.
6.4 In Scotland, it might have been expected that the break-down of the Unionist ‘planned economy’ consensus would lead to a nationalist resurgence, but this did not happen. Instead, the Scottish Labour Party presented themselves as defenders of Scottish industry and Scottish society against an attack by an ‘English’ Conservative Party. It is possible that this marked the end of Unionist Scotland. To reinforce their nationalist credentials , the Scottish Labour Party re-discovered the merits of devolution and pledged to hold another devolution referendum should Labour win a UK General Election. At this time, the assumption was that so long as elections to any such Scottish Parliament were held under a system of proportional representation, Labour would always have a controlling influence. When Labour won in 1997, a referendum was held and the first elections to the new Scottish Parliament took place in 1999.
7. The State of the Union - May 2007
7.1 In the Scottish Parliament, a minority SNP government is the most likely out come of a confusing election on 3rd May. On the same day in England, the Conservatives made gains in local council elections. With Tony Blair about to be replaced by Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, the Union could be in trouble. Unless Gordon Brown can reverse the slide in support for Labour, the Conservatives will be fighting hard to win the next UK election. But in Scotland, the Scottish Conservatives are unlikely to win more than one or two seats in any such election, having made no advance in the Scottish election in May. If the Conservatives are to win in 2009 or 2010 they will have to make gains in England at Labour (and the Lib Dems) expense. Scotland will be an irrelevance.
7.2 Will the Conservatives ( or more to the point, their supporters in the right wing press) be able to resist the temptation to undermine a Gordon Brown led Labour Party by playing the ‘West Lothian’ card - I.e. to ask why a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat should have the power to make decisions affecting only England, when a Prime Minister representing an English seat would have no equivalent power to make decisions affecting Scotland? Another problem area is that of public spending. It is a cheap but easy trick to manufacture outrage by splashing headline figures about showing how much more public money the Scots get per head. The Scottish Labour Party no doubt held itself aloof from the Scottish Sun’s front page ‘noose’ on 3rd May. The English Conservative Party would likewise have no comment to make should any anti-Scottish hysteria grip the English tabloid press.
7.3 In the run up to 3rd May, it was difficult to detect any positive support for the continuation of the Union of 1707. The Unionists did little more than re-cycle scare stories first run in the 1930ies [see 5.3 above], whilst there was a strong anti-Union theme emanating from self- proclaimed ‘ English nationalists’ even in the ‘Comments’ sections of online Scottish newspapers. Most worrying of all for supporters of the Union, was the revelation (in the Spectator) that Francis Maude, chair of the English Conservative Party, was proposing a ‘velvet divorce’ with the Scottish Conservatives. Although the story was denied, out of 12 pieces of Conservative election material received ahead of 3rd May (for Galloway and Upper Nithsdale, where the Conservatives increased their majority) the party is consistently described as ‘Scottish Conservatives’ , with ‘Scottish Conservative and Unionist’ appearing only twice - in the context of ‘how to place your votes’ examples of ballot papers on which the full party name was used.
7.4 The Roman Empire in Britain did not suddenly collapse. It slid slowly into decay , falling apart region by region. The centre, Londinium, could not hold the broken pieces together. The Union of 1707 between English and Scottish parliaments began falteringly but as the British Empire grew, it success forged stronger and stronger ties between Scotland and England. But now the British Empire is no more. As it recedes into history, so the constitutional foundation of the United Kingdom has began to change. Although it is alleged that the United Kingdom has no written constitution, the British Parliament was established by Article III of Treaty of Union of 1707 : That the United Kingdom of Great Britain be represented by one and the same Parliament, to be styled the Parliament of Great Britain. Regardless of what powers it does or does not have at present, the Scottish Parliament, simply by existing, will eventually trigger a British constitutional crisis. This will be a crisis of sovereignty. Out of which either a single federal state or two separate sovereign states will emerge.
7.4 The Roman Empire in Britain did not suddenly collapse. It slid slowly into decay , falling apart region by region. The centre, Londinium, could not hold the broken pieces together. The Union of 1707 between English and Scottish parliaments began falteringly but as the British Empire grew, it success forged stronger and stronger ties between Scotland and England. But now the British Empire is no more. As it recedes into history, so the constitutional foundation of the United Kingdom has began to change. Although it is alleged that the United Kingdom has no written constitution, the British Parliament was established by Article III of Treaty of Union of 1707 : That the United Kingdom of Great Britain be represented by one and the same Parliament, to be styled the Parliament of Great Britain. Regardless of what powers it does or does not have at present, the Scottish Parliament, simply by existing, will eventually trigger a British constitutional crisis. This will be a crisis of sovereignty. Out of which either a single federal state or two separate sovereign states will emerge.
1. The Roman Empire in Britain
1.1 Forget where I read it, but one of the most useful suggestions I have found is that the Romans were not really interested in ‘conquering’ the whole of Britain. All they really wanted was the more fertile lowland zone - from the Cheshire Plains in the north west down through the midlands to the south-east plus the south west as far as Devon. That region would have ‘paid for itself’, I.e. would have produced enough agricultural surplus to have supported a small Imperial army and bureaucracy and would have generated enough trade to make it a positive contributor to the Imperial economy.
1.2 The problem the Romans then had was that in order to maximise the prosperity of this lowland zone, they had to neutralise the upland zone ’tribes’ (in Wales, in the Pennines, in the far south west ) who threatened to disrupt it economy through raiding. So they had to push their frontier north and west into the upland zone. But the upland zone was a drain on resources - needed lots of forts and soldiers and roads (and eventually Walls) to keep the ‘tribes’ in check, but did not produce enough agricultural surplus / trading opportunities to make the investment self- financing. So the Romans had to carry on even further north into what is now (but was not then : no Scots) Scotland . Militarily, they could defeat the north Britons and ‘Picts’ , but economically/ practically they could not sustain the Empire in the far north.
1.3 The eventual outcome was a compromise. The Forth/ Clyde ( Antonine Wall ) became the northern limit of Roman influence, the region between the Forth / Clyde and the Tyne / Solway ( Hadrian’s Wall) boundaries became a buffer zone controlled for the Romans by client rulers. The upland Pennine/ Cumbrian area became a military zone controlled from York, with Wales in a similar situation controlled from Chester. The main lowland/ southern economically viable zone was left in civilian hands.
2. Geography and politics
2.1 This Roman ‘rationalisation by geography’ of Britain survived the end of Roman rule. What did not survive was the Imperial administrative structure. Unlike mainland Europe, there was no massive movement of ‘barbarian tribes’ into Britain. Rather there were constant sea-borne raiding by Picts (from north of the Antonine Wall) and Scots ( from Ireland.) into the lowland/ civilian zone. These raids were similar to the later raids by the Vikings.
2.2 To defend the civilian zone, an attempt was made to use Saxons and Angles as ‘auxiliaries’ - but once established, the Saxons and Angles became more of a problem than the raiders. They had to be paid, but once the immediate threat had gone, there was little willingness by the main landowners to stump up the cash to pay them. There was also the fear that the Saxons were being used as a private army in power struggles between politicians seeking control of the province.
2.3 An alternative source of military strength lay in the militarised zone. Here, the soldiers of Roman garrisons had been settled for so long they had become part of the local population. Since ‘Romanisation’ had never fully occurred, the non- Roman local population retained features of their ‘Celtic’ Iron Age past. As a result, small ‘kingdoms’ based around chieftains and their warrior-bands (re) emerged. These warrior-bands were happy to fight the Saxons and Angles, but were no less disruptive of the post- Roman ‘civilianised’ society and economy. They too demanded payment for the ‘protection’ they offered and were in a position enforce their demands.
2.4 The precise details are lacking, but the end result was the total disappearance of Roman Britain and its replacement by dozens of warring kingdoms. Some were Saxon, some were Anglian, some were British. Gradually, the Saxon and Anglian kingdoms pushed west - to create what is now England, leaving the British in control of Cornwall, Wales and parts of southern Scotland [ not sure about Cumbria].
3. Scotland.
3.1 In Scotland , it was the Irish ‘ Scots’ rather than the English ‘ Anglo-Saxons’ who gained control. Starting from a foot hold in Argyll, in the 6th and 7th centuries they expanded east to absorb the Picts before moving south to come in conflict with the Angles of Northumbria who were pushing north as well as west. The Scots checked the northward expansion of the Angles, but the Angles consolidated their hold in the south - as far west as Whithorn in Galloway and also into Ayrshire. In between, the Britons of Strathclyde managed to hold on until they were weakened by Viking attacks in the late 8th century after which Strathclyde came under Scots influence.
3.2 The Vikings from the 8th century onward, and especially once they (especially the Danes) could deploy land-armies throw more confusion into this picture. For example, the Battle of Brunanburh in 937 - which may have been fought at Burnswark in Annandale involved West Saxons, Irish Vikings, Northumbrians, Scots and Britons. This battle has been claimed to have secured the existence of ‘England’ as a distinct entity.
3.3 It was this England which William of Normandy invaded in 1066. However, William’s conquest was initially that of the old Roman civilian province of southern England. In 1069/70 William had to forcibly subdue the north of England, devastating the region in the process. Even at the time of the Domesday book in 1086, Westmoreland, Cumberland, Northumberland and County Durham remained outwith its detailed description of ‘Norman England’ .
3.4 Effectively, despite the battle of Brunanburh, the boundary between what was to become Scotland and what was to become England - the territory of the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria - remained uncertain right up until James VI of Scotland became James I of a ‘United Kingdom of Scotland and England (and Wales) ’ in 1603. At various times for 1000 years up until 1603, depending on the ebb and flow of national and local power, the south of Scotland was under English rule and the north of England under Scottish rule - whilst the Borderers themselves did their best to live by their own rules… Nor did the numerous armed conflicts between England and Scotland often, if ever, stray further south or further north of the Roman ‘military zone’.
4. 1638 to 1746
4.1 Although the Union of the Crowns in 1603 pacified the immediate Border zone, it did not bring peace. Rather it set in motion a struggle which lasted nearly 120 years. In Scotland the Stewarts’s may have held the throne, but their effective power was constrained by the almost equal influence of Scotland’s other powerful families. On several occasions, Stewart kings (and queen Mary) were held hostage by on or other of the rival ‘noble’ houses of Scotland. But as rulers of a united Kingdom, the later Stuarts were not so directly constrained. What they failed to realise was that in England (unlike Scotland) Parliament had come to act as a constraint on royal power.
4.2 The result was a power struggle which became a long drawn out civil war. It began with a skirmish at Turiff (near Aberdeen) in May 1639 and ended at Culloden (near Inverness ) in April 1746. Although the power struggle was fought out across Scotland, northern England, Ireland and Wales and although France, Spain and Holland became involved, at its heart lay a city founded by the Romans - London. Here wealth and power were concentrated . This why, in a last, desperate gamble for power, Charles Edward Stuart led his army south towards London in 1745.
4.3 Yet it was precisely to deter such an attempt that the Treaty of Union of 1707 was designed. It was meant to close the door against a return of the Stuarts to power in England (with French or Spanish support) via Scotland. But why this desire to keep the Stuarts out? “Business” is the answer. England was at the beginning of its progress towards Empire. What drove this process was trade and commerce. The last thing needed was a king who believed he had a divine right (a theory invented by James VI /I in reaction to the ‘contractual’ theory of kingship advanced by Scottish Presbyterians ) to interfere in the workings of the emerging economy.
4.4 The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, when William of Orange replaced James VII/ II as king should have ended the Stuart threat to the growth of England’s economic wealth and power. But it had an unintended consequence. After 1689, the Scottish parliament revelled in its new independence from Stuart control and tried to set Scotland on its own, separate, path to economic prosperity. The ‘Company Trading in Africa and India ‘ - the Darien scheme - was the main result and received massive support. The failure of the Company (for which lack of support from king William was blamed) led the parliament to claim the right of Scotland to choose its own king. This raised the spectre, unlikely but possible, of the Scots returning the Scottish crown to the Stuarts, to James VIII.
4.5 To prevent such an eventuality, a deal was done. In exchange for giving up their parliament, the Scots were guaranteed their Presbyterian religion, granted freedom of trade with England and her colonies (with Scottish ships protected by the Royal Navy) and compensated for losses experienced through the failure of the Company Trading in Africa and India. The Hanoverian succession to the new United Kingdom of Great Britain was also agreed.
4.6 The Scots did not immediately prosper. The Jacobites (Stuart loyalists) played the nationalist card, arguing that the Treaty of Union was a ‘stab in the back’, pushed through parliament against the will of the Scottish people by a Whig elite ‘bought and sold for English gold’. However, the Stuarts, despite Charles Edward holding court in Edinburgh in 1745, were never interested in ruling Scotland alone - re-claiming the English throne was their goal. The Jacobite uprisings in Scotland - in 1708, 1715, 1718 and 1745 all had this objective and would have required external (French or Spanish) support to have succeeded in re-restoring a Stuart to the English throne.
5. Nationalism and Empire
5.1 Historians have puzzled over the absence of a ‘Scottish’ nationalism in the 19th century. One theory is that there was a Scottish nationalism, but it existed within a wider British/ Imperial nationalism. The Jacobite Scots could express their nationalism militarily through the courageous exploits of the ‘Highland’ regiments with their tartan kilts and bagpipes - the Scots as the shock-troops of an expanding Empire. For other Scots, national pride could be expressed through the engineering industry - the steam ships and steam trains for which the Scots became famous. Other Scots helped to manage and run the Empire. And for hundreds of thousands of Scots emigrants , the old (American) and new colonies (Australia, New Zealand) offered the chance of escape from what remained (despite industrialisation) a poorer country than England, though still more prosperous than Ireland.
5.2 This overlap between Scottish and British nationalism grew through the 19th century and survived into the 20th. But, as both Industry and Empire began their slow decline, so too did the once taken-for-granted dual identity. Whilst the two great ‘patriotic’ wars of the 20th century encouraged loyalty to the British state, their economic impact damaged Scotland. They reinforced Scotland’s economic reliance on heavy
( shipbuilding, iron/steel making, railway engineering, coal-mining) industry, a reliance which reached its peak in the 1950s when the Scots benefited from the war time destruction of Germany and Japan’s heavy engineering capacity.
5.3. In the 1930ies, the risk that a collapse in Scotland’s manufacturing base would encourage Scottish nationalism was recognised by both Conservative/ Liberal Unionist and Labour parties in Scotland.
Unable to do little more than scratch the surface of Scottish economic problems, Unionist politicians were forced to use scare tactics to dampen down Scottish nationalism. Whilst accepting that the Scottish economy was in considerable difficulty, it was argued that anything in the way of a severance or loosening of the ties with England would spell disaster. In short, if people believed that the situation was bad at the moment , it was nothing compared to the nationalist abyss of economic collapse which would be inevitable should the Scots opt for their own parliament… again and again it was emphasised that Scotland needed England to survive. Whereas unionism in the pre-war period was strident and confident, in the inter- war period it had become defensive and negative [ R. Finlay: Unionist Scotland 1800-1997: 1998:104]
5.4 The success of the wartime ‘planned economy’ created a belief (shared by both Labour and Conservatives) after the Second World War that Scotland could under go a managed industrial transformation away from its over reliance on heavy engineering, and a social transformation through massive investment in new housing and new towns. This post-war consensus began to break down in the 1970ies. By this time it was also clear that ‘planned economy’ was not working as planned. The nationalist upsurge, which had been so feared in the 1930ies, became a reality in the 1970ies to the benefit of the Scottish National Party. The SNP were able to counter a revival of the 1930ies ‘economic collapse’ threat by pointing to the newly discovered North Sea oil reserves.
6. Home Rule
6.1 To counter the SNP, a proposal to allow the Scots a limited degree of ‘home rule’ (originally proposed back in 1913) was drawn up. To satisfy the fears of Scottish Labour backbenchers, a ‘40% of all registered voters’ threshold was placed on the devolution referendum of 1978. Although there was a 51% majority for devolution, this was not enough to achieve the 40% of all voters threshold. The SNP Mps withdrew their support from a minority Labour government and in the 1979 General Election the Conservatives won.
6.2 Over the next 18 years , Conservatives adopted economic and social policies which favoured the ‘free market economy ’ over the ‘planned state economy’ . Whilst this benefited the City of London, the ‘service sector’ and new industries like the electronics industry, traditional manufacturing industries were decimated. The Conservatives also took a strong anti-trade union stance, determined to humble the miners in particular. [The miners were blamed for bringing down the 1970-74 Conservative government].
6.3 In structural terms, whereas 19th century industrialisation had to an extent dispersed economic and political power away from London and the south of England - to south Wales, to the Midlands, to north east and north west England and to central Scotland - between 1979 and 1997 this process was reversed. Although it can be argued that these regions were already in decline and the Conservatives simply made the process more obvious. For the Labour Party, this process was extremely painful, since the regions affected were their heartlands. Labour’s failure to win the 1992 General Election led to a total collapse in confidence and the party’s re-invention as ‘New Labour’ under Tony Blair. Re-positioned to the right of ‘old’ Labour, new Labour were able to keep their traditional voters in the former-industrial regions whilst winning over voters in the Conservatives’ southern heartlands and won the 1997, 2001 and 2005 General Elections.
6.4 In Scotland, it might have been expected that the break-down of the Unionist ‘planned economy’ consensus would lead to a nationalist resurgence, but this did not happen. Instead, the Scottish Labour Party presented themselves as defenders of Scottish industry and Scottish society against an attack by an ‘English’ Conservative Party. It is possible that this marked the end of Unionist Scotland. To reinforce their nationalist credentials , the Scottish Labour Party re-discovered the merits of devolution and pledged to hold another devolution referendum should Labour win a UK General Election. At this time, the assumption was that so long as elections to any such Scottish Parliament were held under a system of proportional representation, Labour would always have a controlling influence. When Labour won in 1997, a referendum was held and the first elections to the new Scottish Parliament took place in 1999.
7. The State of the Union - May 2007
7.1 In the Scottish Parliament, a minority SNP government is the most likely out come of a confusing election on 3rd May. On the same day in England, the Conservatives made gains in local council elections. With Tony Blair about to be replaced by Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, the Union could be in trouble. Unless Gordon Brown can reverse the slide in support for Labour, the Conservatives will be fighting hard to win the next UK election. But in Scotland, the Scottish Conservatives are unlikely to win more than one or two seats in any such election, having made no advance in the Scottish election in May. If the Conservatives are to win in 2009 or 2010 they will have to make gains in England at Labour (and the Lib Dems) expense. Scotland will be an irrelevance.
7.2 Will the Conservatives ( or more to the point, their supporters in the right wing press) be able to resist the temptation to undermine a Gordon Brown led Labour Party by playing the ‘West Lothian’ card - I.e. to ask why a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat should have the power to make decisions affecting only England, when a Prime Minister representing an English seat would have no equivalent power to make decisions affecting Scotland? Another problem area is that of public spending. It is a cheap but easy trick to manufacture outrage by splashing headline figures about showing how much more public money the Scots get per head. The Scottish Labour Party no doubt held itself aloof from the Scottish Sun’s front page ‘noose’ on 3rd May. The English Conservative Party would likewise have no comment to make should any anti-Scottish hysteria grip the English tabloid press.
7.3 In the run up to 3rd May, it was difficult to detect any positive support for the continuation of the Union of 1707. The Unionists did little more than re-cycle scare stories first run in the 1930ies [see 5.3 above], whilst there was a strong anti-Union theme emanating from self- proclaimed ‘ English nationalists’ even in the ‘Comments’ sections of online Scottish newspapers. Most worrying of all for supporters of the Union, was the revelation (in the Spectator) that Francis Maude, chair of the English Conservative Party, was proposing a ‘velvet divorce’ with the Scottish Conservatives. Although the story was denied, out of 12 pieces of Conservative election material received ahead of 3rd May (for Galloway and Upper Nithsdale, where the Conservatives increased their majority) the party is consistently described as ‘Scottish Conservatives’ , with ‘Scottish Conservative and Unionist’ appearing only twice - in the context of ‘how to place your votes’ examples of ballot papers on which the full party name was used.
7.4 The Roman Empire in Britain did not suddenly collapse. It slid slowly into decay , falling apart region by region. The centre, Londinium, could not hold the broken pieces together. The Union of 1707 between English and Scottish parliaments began falteringly but as the British Empire grew, it success forged stronger and stronger ties between Scotland and England. But now the British Empire is no more. As it recedes into history, so the constitutional foundation of the United Kingdom has began to change. Although it is alleged that the United Kingdom has no written constitution, the British Parliament was established by Article III of Treaty of Union of 1707 : That the United Kingdom of Great Britain be represented by one and the same Parliament, to be styled the Parliament of Great Britain. Regardless of what powers it does or does not have at present, the Scottish Parliament, simply by existing, will eventually trigger a British constitutional crisis. This will be a crisis of sovereignty. Out of which either a single federal state or two separate sovereign states will emerge.
posted by Unknown | 1:54 PM
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