Scotland and the Union

Published: Jan. 11, 2021, 9:45 a.m.

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The Acts of Union 1707 brought together England and Scotland, \\u2018United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain\\u2019. But the historian Karin Bowie tells Andrew Marr that in the years preceding a growing number of pamphlets and demonstrations showed that many people were divided on the issue. In \\u2018Public Opinion in Early Modern Scotland c.1560\\u20131707\\u2019 Bowie charts the growing debate across society. The failure of Scotland\\u2019s trading ambitions in the Darien Scheme also hit the country hard, both financially and emotionally.

However the idea of an independent Scotland emerged surprisingly recently into public debate, according to academic Ben Jackson. In his book The Case for Scottish Independence he argues that an influential Scottish nationalism only began to take shape from the 1970s onwards. It was at heart a political project, born out of opposition to the Thatcher government. \\n \\nRuth Wishart is a pro-independence journalist who has written about Scottish affairs for many decades. As s columnist for The National she is following every twist and turn as Scottish nationalists agitate for a second independence referendum to follow the Scottish Parliament election in May.

The political scientist Ailsa Henderson will be watching the coming elections closely too as she\\u2019s an expert on voting behaviour and attitudes to both Scottish and English nationalism. A number of Scots felt a deep sense of grievance against their neighbours at the formation of the Union. Now more than three hundred years later Henderson shows, in her forthcoming book Englishness \\u2013 co-written with Richard Wyn Jones \\u2013 that English nationalism contains a strain of grievance about England\\u2019s place within the United Kingdom.

Producer: Katy Hickman

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