What Was the Point of the Union in the First Place?

Something a lot of people don’t realise is the first unionists were Scots.

It seem counter-intuitive. Surely it’s the English who spent all that time and effort fighting the likes of Robert the Bruce to unify the island?

But what Edward I offered was imperial conquest. To reheat a slogan from 2014, no thanks. The problem of having England as a neighbour saw unionism offered as a solution. As far back as the 1520s, John Mair published Historia majoris Britanniae, which first mooted the idea of a federal union.

That’s right, the first driver of union was to stop the English attacking Scotland.

Peace must have been an attractive prospect to Borderers of Mair’s age, but the concept was well before its time, rejected by the people and nobility of either country. It wasn’t until the later 17th century that any realistic prospect of union came up again. The reasons were threefold, and it finally succeeded because it brought benefits to both countries. What were those reasons? For England, they were:

• To prevent Scotland being used by France in a war against England
• To ensure the Protestant succession of the monarch

Scots also wanted to ensure the Protestant succession, plus:

• Access to English colonial trade

Do these reasons still hold today?

The union happened in 1707 for very good reasons. Few people wanted a Catholic on the throne. A 1701 English law, the Act of Settlement, banned Catholics from ever taking the throne of England, and that law was explicitly included in the clauses that set up the new British state. [See Article II.] But let’s ask a question today.

Does anybody in the 21st century care about the monarch’s religion?

If not, one of the three main pillars of union are no longer relevant.

What about war with France?

Today neither Britain nor France are first-rate powers. Both live under the umbrella of NATO, controlled by the USA. If Britain and France ever looked like heading for war, the US would knock some heads together until sense was seen.

The idea that we need saved from a war with France is a non-starter today.

That leaves trade. Union brought immense riches for some: not just the tobacco trade in America, but India, Africa, the peopling of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and the sugar trade in the Carribean, which depended upon a regular supply of slaves who were worked to death in horriffic conditions:

‘What a glorious and advantageous trade this is!’ said slaver James Houston, ‘it is the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves.’ [Houston, Some New and Accurate Observations, Geographical, Natural and Historical, p. 43.]

Imperial investment and export markets brought heavy industry, railways, shipbuilding. It completely changed the face of Scotland. But we no longer have an empire to exploit. The final reason for union, colonial trade, no longer exists.

In terms of trade we swapped empire for European Union, which voters in England (and Wales) took us out of. Ending the UK may seem a further act of economic harm, but I don’t think that advantageous terms with England and Wales only, to the detriment of trade with the rest of the world, is the great argument unionists think it is. Being stuck in the union is harming our trade.

Are there any reasons to keep the union today?

Yes, there’s two I can think of.

The first was mentioned at the top of the article. Union prevents England attacking Scotland. Fortunately that is a remote prospect, which I will cover in another article.

That leaves only one reason. Are you British? If yes, then why would you want to break up your country?

Time will tell if the BBC, King Charles III, and blood ties across the border are strong enough to maintain the British identity critical to the maintenance of the union. But if I were a unionist, I’d be getting gey worried at Britannia’s fading glamour.