Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: The Great Mistake of Scottish Independence

To a certain way of thinking, never has an independent Scotland looked more desirable; to another way of thinking, never has it looked more unviable. Some people – since 2016, I've sometimes been one of them – manage to hold both opinions: "It would be a good idea, if only …" But John Lloyd, a fine journalist with a long career at the Financial Times, has never been among the show more vacillators. In this book, he argues that Scotland's secession from the United Kingdom would certainly be damaging for what was left of it – England, Wales and Northern Ireland, supposing the last still existed – but nothing less than a disaster for Scotland itself. Economically, socially and culturally, secession would do it more harm than Brexit. [...]

His book is never better than when it attacks Scottish ideas of English oppression. Where it fails is its refusal to recognise that England has changed – from a stable and predictable neighbour into a volatile, abrasive and rather friendless country going who-knows-where. Lloyd suggests some form of federalism will hold the UK together, and wants future referendums to stipulate a majority of at least 60% before the status quo can be changed. Good ideas, probably: we know how divisive narrow majorities can be. But where are the federalists? And where is the SNP politician saintly enough to accept this higher bar when the Brexiters now in power were delighted to accept a much lower one? Forces great and small, the pandemic on the one hand and Salmond's trial on the other, have made the Union's future anyone's guess. show less