Creation Of UK Was 'Union Of Convenience'
Updated: 11:36pm UK, Thursday 18 September 2014
By Adam Boulton, Sky News Presenter
"There's ane end of ane auld sang", Scotland's chancellor famously remarked when his nation's parliament voted for political and economic union with England in 1707.
It was a union of convenience. Scotland was facing bankruptcy thanks to a failed colonial experiment in the Caribbean.
At the very top of the power structure, the Union of Thrones had already taken place a century earlier when James VI of Scotland became James I of England.
The notion of "Britishness" was born and held together for most of the next three centuries.
According to the historian Professor Linda Colley, Britishness was "forged" by four factors which the people of the UK held in common: war, Protestantism, liberty and empire.
Scots have played an essential part in the British armed forces. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the British military was united in adversity against a common foe - the French, a role taken over in the 20th century by Germany.
The established religion of Protestantism defined Britain in its heyday. Roman Catholics were un-emancipated and even suppressed.
Key figures from the Scottish Enlightenment, such as the economist Adam Smith and the philosopher David Hume, provided much of the intellectual firepower for the rapid evolution of British democracy and the scientific advances of the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
Scots, some now regarding themselves simply as "North British", were quick to take advantage of the opportunities of the British Empire and could be found as soldiers, administrators, farmers and businessmen at every corner of its expanding boundaries.
But by the middle of the last century all these bonds were fraying. The British Empire broke up and with it the economic opportunities it offered.
Sectarian Christianity declined across the UK, and new cultural identities migrated inward from the old Empire. There was no longer a direct threat of war from Europe, in part because of common membership of the European Union.
Meanwhile the discovery of North Sea oil convinced some Scots that their country might have a viable alternative economic future.
The strains of the old song of Scottish nationalism began to be heard more loudly.
The SNP was formed in 1934 but it got its first Westminster MP in 1967, when Winnie Ewing pulled off a sensational by-election victory.
The UK parliament backed holding a referendum on Scottish devolution in 1979.
A narrow majority voted in favour of establishing a Scottish assembly but this was never implemented because of a threshold clause insisting that 40% of all those eligible to vote must back it.
Scotland with its traditional heavy industries and mining sector was particularly hard hit by the deindustrialisation policies of the 1980s.
Lasting resentment resulted from the Thatcher government's decision to pioneer the unpopular poll tax there.
New Labour was elected in 1997 with the promise of another Scottish Devolution referendum. Some 74% voted for the Scottish Parliament which was re-established at Holyrood in 1999.
Labour's Donald Dewar, the first Scottish first minister, died suddenly a year later. The SNP leader Alex Salmond quickly became the dominant personality in Scottish politics.
He led his party into government in Holyrood in 2007, and in the 2011 the SNP won an overall majority of MSPs.
This was a mandate for the Scottish Government to pose once and for all the question which has faced voters resident in Scotland: "Should Scotland be an independent country?"
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