The Kingdom to Come: Thoughts on the Union before and after the Scottish Independence Referendum
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Peter Hennessy discusses the run-up to the Scottish Independence Referendum and its immediate aftermath, as well as the constitutional issues the referendum opened for the entire United Kingdom. This book includes Hennessy’s personal impressions of recent questioning of the Acts of Union that created Great Britain and describes when he, as the top expert on Britain’s unwritten constitution, became an important voice in what might happen next. The Kingdom to Come also offers a valuable examination of the possible agenda for remaking the constitution in both the medium and long term.
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The Kingdom to Come - Peter Hennessy
mind
Introduction: Thoughts from South Ronaldsay: Hope, anxiety and the shadow of Orwell
I am writing these opening words overlooking Scapa Flow and surrounded by the gentle rim of the Orkney Islands in the last days of July 2014. Exactly a century ago Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, despatched swiftly and secretly what was to become the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet from its Dorset base in Portland to its forward base for a Great Power War, in the waters of this huge natural harbour north of the turbulent Pentland Firth where the North Sea meets the Atlantic.
In his vivid account in The World Crisis 1911–1915, first published in 1923, Churchill allied a brilliant imagination to a pen as punchy as any Dreadnought:
We may now picture this great Fleet, with its flotillas and cruisers, steaming slowly out of Portland Harbour, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought …
If war should come no one would know where to look for the British Fleet. Somewhere in that enormous waste of waters to the north of our islands … shrouded in storms and mists, dwelt this mighty organization.¹
A hundred years ago the waters before me became the geopolitical centre of the world. From here the mightiest seaborne force the world had ever seen would operate what was confidently, though erroneously, expected to be a war-shortening economic blockade against Imperial Germany. From here the King’s Dreadnoughts and battle cruisers would sail if there was to be, as was also expected, a great day of reckoning with the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet, steaming out with their accompanying flotillas of escorts through the narrow Hoxa Sound between the islands of South Ronaldsay and Flotta – as they later did in May 1916, on their way to the Battle of Jutland off Denmark.
The serene waters in front of me this calm summer morning inspire hope. No visitor to Orkney would, unless well primed, have any sense of this place’s significance in both the great conflicts of the twentieth century, at least until their cars and coaches took them past old gun emplacements at the entrances to the Flow or carried them across the Churchill Barriers, thrown up in haste after a U-boat crept in and sank the Royal Oak in the opening weeks of World War II. In the depths, too, are thousands of tons of finest Kaiser-commissioned steel, deposited there in June 1919 by a German Admiral ordering a Grand Scuttle of the incarcerated High Seas Fleet.
For all the calm, the blissful sense of temporary escape, there lurks in my mind a sense of anxiety mingled with hope, as we are less than two months away from a referendum on Scottish Independence which could rupture the United Kingdom I’ve called home since my first conscious memories at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s. The referendum could alter its very configuration for ever.
In no way could any Brit on Armistice Day 1918 have foreseen the circumstances in which the Union of 1707 might be reversed. The preoccupation then was Ireland. The foundation of the Scottish National Party – through a merger of the National Party of Scotland and the Scottish Party – was 15 years in the future.
My own individual sense of Scotland began to form in the 1950s. Napoleon liked to remark that if you wished to understand a man or woman, you needed to appreciate the world as it was when they were 20.² In my case it’s earlier than that. It’s between the ages of six and ten – Coronation Year 1953 and my first visit to Scotland in 1957.
It’s hard to recapture the moods and mentalities of early post-war Britain or even the party system in which they were played out, despite the main political groupings carrying much the same labels as they do today, though the Tories were firmly known as the Conservative and Unionist Party and the Liberals had yet to acquire the word ‘Democrat’. There was no equivalent of the United Kingdom Independence Party, though there was, on the rightist fringe, the League of Empire Loyalists, who wanted to remain territorially intimate with large parts of the world rather than wishing, like UKIP, for the opposite.
Family conversations often began in those days with either ‘before the war’, ‘during the war’, or ‘after the war’. The Second World War was the pivot, the shared experience above all others, the creator of the emotional geography of the nation and its politics – and that nation was very definitely a united kingdom. We had stood firm alone on our own after the fall of France in June 1940 until Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941. With our allies, we had eventually prevailed in 1945 as Brits. It was the last time we acted powerfully and collectively together as a union over a sustained period. The fleeting moments we have done so since – the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953; the Falklands War of 1982; the London Olympics of 2012 – have served, particularly over the last 30 years, only to emphasise the leaching away of the sentiments derived from shared experiences over the decades since 1939–45.
One mustn’t overdo what that remarkable social historian, Peter Laslett, called ‘The World We Have Lost’.³ Though we may not always feel it, there is much more of that early post-war world that runs through to today than one might think. It is not a matter of the occasional faint pulsar getting through from a long-faded political, economic and social solar system. The National Health Service remains the emblem of that era – of institutionalised altruism, pooled risk and a level of social solidarity. Right from the start, in July 1948, it has been a bond and a talisman of shared citizenship, with its services taxpayer-funded and free at the point of delivery. And the NHS was a UK-wide phenomenon. Its bonding effect was just as powerful in Scotland as it was in England. Above all, it was a national service regionally and locally