In four days’ time, we may see the end of Britain as we and our ancestors have known it for generations. If some of the polls are to be believed, Scotland the nation will once again become a sovereign nation state. It is difficult to overestimate the colossal historical significance of such an extraordinary development.
Its consequences for the British archipelago and Britain’s place in the world will be incalculable for many years to come. A third of the UK land mass will immediately cease to be British territory. “South Britain” beckons as the presumptive name for the remainder of the UK. Even if the no campaign manages to achieve a narrow victory, the crisis in the union will continue unabated. The evidence to date suggests that Westminster politicians do not yet possess the imaginative capacity to deal with it.
All this presents a major intellectual challenge for the historian. Little more than a generation ago, in the 1950s and early 60s, the union could not have been more secure. The Scottish Unionist party (only becoming the Conservative party in Scotland in 1965) had won a famous and overwhelming victory in the general election of 1955. The SNP at the time was but an irrelevant and eccentric sect rather than a mainstream political party. Indeed, despite the mythology of Red Clydeside, Scotland had voted mainly for the Tories in the 1920s and 1930s. The Labour landslide victory of 1945 can be seen as an aberration in that context.
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