PROFESSOR COLIN KIDD AT POLICY EXCHANGE

I’m going to tell you a story that runs from John Major to John Major. But, before I embark on that story, we need to do some rather unsavoury investigative work.

If you want to understand unionism north of the border, and to appreciate the paradoxes and ironies of unionist culture in Scotland, your first port of call has to be bus station toilets. The graffiti there present us with a very telling primary source. I guarantee that you will never see the date 1707 in Scottish graffiti, but you might well come across the date 1690 – the Battle of the Boyne. My point here is not, as you might imagine, to say that there is something very similar between the unionisms of Northern Ireland and Scotland. In fact, I’m going to say the exact opposite. My point is that 1707 is not a significant date in Scottish popular culture, whether to unionists or to nationalists. Other topics are more central.

Scotland did once have a unionist party – between 1912 and 1965. It was a ‘capital U’ Unionist Party, which stood first of all for Britain’s union with Ireland, and then, after 1922, for its union with Northern Ireland. Scottish unionism – ‘small u’ unionism – has been relatively inarticulate and invisible by contrast.

Small u unionism, though, was an idea invented in Scotland, not by the English. It was homemade. Here I’m going to introduce John Major the first: a Scottish philosopher, writing in the 1520s, whose name was John Mair, but who Latinised it to John Major. In his work History of Greater Britain (Historia Britanniae Majoris in Latin – a pun on his name) Major argued that a union was an essential bulwark against an English empire – as well as a way to preserve an element of Scottish nationhood from English domination. Note too, that Major invented the idea of Anglo–Scottish unionism in the 1520s. He wasn’t justifying the Union of the Crowns of 1603; he was writing almost a century in advance of it.

The other John Major – our Prime Minister for much of the 1990s – is conspicuous for being one of the few people to articulate an ideology of unionism. He does it in his memoirs – it’s very unusual to find a chapter on the union in a politician’s memoirs. Secondly, he framed his 1992 general election campaign as a defence of the union.

What is significant about these two John Majors is that they are atypical. Anglo–Scottish unionism over the centuries has been largely banal, inarticulate and understated. It’s been like wallpaper or furniture – something you take for granted, that goes unnoticed. What has been articulate, for much of the union’s history – from the 1710s, shortly after the Union of Parliaments, through to the 1920s – has been ecclesiastical tension. Disagreements over church–state relations, over relations between Presbyterianism and Anglicanism, were the grit in the union. They forced Scottish writers to articulate what the union was.

And so, insofar as we have a body of thought about the union, between the early 18th century and the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, it was essentially ecclesiastical. Before the referendum of 2014, the biggest issue – the major crisis point in the union – was the Disruption. In 1843 the Free Church of Scotland broke away from the established Church of Scotland, because of Scots Presbyterian antipathy to the British state in one respect only: the British state’s Erastianism – that is, the notion that the church is subordinate to parliament. In the nineteenth century Scottish antipathy to the British state was almost exclusively ecclesiastical in character.

The dispute over Erastianism was resolved in the 1921 Church of Scotland Act, which is a highly unusual piece of legislation. It seems to exempt the Church of Scotland from the sway of parliamentary sovereignty and from the civil law more generally. The statute acknowledges a concordat between the Church of Scotland and the British state, to the effect that each possesses its own untrammelled jurisdiction. Certainly, the Church of Scotland occupies a special status in British constitutional law. Consider the Regency Act of 1937, which allows a regent to give Royal Assent to any legislation passed during a regency, except in two matters. One is obvious: any attempt to change the line of succession. And secondly, the part you wouldn’t guess: to change the status of the established Church of Scotland.

There is one final area I ought to mention. And again it’s something that differentiates Scotland from Northern Ireland. Whereas Northern Ireland has an articulate unionism opposed to nationalism, in Scotland, unionism is virtually dead. The union survives, but there is no ideology of unionism that supports it. In 2014, the leader of Scottish Labour, Jim Murphy – then in effect the leader of unionist forces north of the border – said: “I am not a unionist.” What he meant was: “I’m not one of those Proddies, like Ian Paisley.” He was speaking to Labour’s large Scottish Catholic constituency, saying it’s okay for them to support the Union. Support of the Union, in other words, was not tantamount to unionism, which remains something of a dirty word in some quarters.

One other major difference between Scotland and Northern Ireland is that in Scotland, identity politics is conducted across a very narrow bandwidth. One of the terms of art in Scottish historical politics is unionist–nationalism. On the unionist side there are very few out and out Anglicisers, who want to denude Scotland of her own institutions. Equally there are very few outright separatists on the other side. The SNP has always supported some form of association with an entity larger than Scotland, whether it be dominion status within the British Empire, independence within the European Union, or the Union of the Crowns. Ultimately, the SNP favours a supra-nationalist solution to Scotland’s predicament, but something other than the existing Union of 1707, even as amended by the evolving devolution settlement.

Alex Salmond, as well being a nationalist, has also cleverly appropriated unionist arguments whenever convenient. In the referendum campaign he spoke of the ‘social union’ – which hinted at the maintenance of cross border welfare standards; he spoke of the Union of the Crowns; he spoke of the European Union; he supported a currency union and a shared British monarchy. In other words: yes, Alex Salmond is a nationalist, but he’s also capable of spiking unionist guns, by capturing so many unionist symbols and arguments for the nationalist camp.

Ultimately, you can only get to grips with Scottish politics if you realise that when you scratch any unionist, you’ll find a nationalist underneath – it happened to me yesterday when I had difficulties spending a Bank of Scotland five-pound note at a convenience store in London.

And equally you’ll never really understand Scottish politics if you think nationalists are straightforwardly out and out separatists. Ultimately, what I think the nationalists would like is independence – with the Barnett formula.