According to Neil Oliver the referendum will be ‘the biggest decision in 300 years’. So ca’ very canny … I wonder.
In 1707-15, as far as the mass of Scots were concerned, there was no decision. The deal was done, for good or ill, by elites – or parcels of rogues – north and south, for dynastic and diplomatic reasons. In 1837 the same Union was partly dissolved, when Victoria could not, by Salic Law, become Queen of Hanover. She was replaced by the reactionary Ernest August, Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, whose repression helped provoke the German liberals who rose and fell in 1848. In 1866 Hanover’s king backed the Austrians against Bismarck. The blind George V’s state was swallowed by Prussia, and with it the chance of a type of liberal confederalism. Did anyone notice?
What operated in the UK after 1707 was more a tacit confederation than a union. The ruling groups of both Scotland and England invested in distinct ways, and the separate Scots ‘estates’ of kirk, law, learning and local government had about as much autonomy as small states enjoyed within the European empires. The alternative wouldn’t have been the ‘freedom’ that the likes of Paul Henderson Scott optimistically infer from Fletcher of Saltoun’s pamphlets, but either a version of England’s ‘Poynings’ Law’ that paralysed nominally self-governing Ireland, 1494-1782, or a drastic French-Jacobin-style ‘co-ordination’ of administration and civil society. Continue reading

















