Hello, my name is David Runseman and this is Talking Politics. Today, our final stop on our tour of the history and future of the Union

we're looking at England with two historians of England, Robert Tunes and Robert Saunders, which way will England jump?

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So if we could start with a question that we've talked about a bit on this series about the history of the Union

we've never really looked at directly from the perspective of English history and that's our subject today we want to see how this all looks from England.

And the question is, is the island of Britain a natural seat of government and particularly when seen from England?

Of course, we, it depends what we mean by we here, but we're sometimes called an island people but the English are not an island people. England is not an island.

Robert Tunes, do you think there's a point we can identify in English history, this is obviously a slightly schematic question, when it starts to look like Britain is the natural unit of government for England?

Oh wow. Well, there is the famous event in which the Anglo-Saxon king was it Atholston was rode on the D by seven other British monarchs?

You all know about this, I'm sure it was thought at the time to be a highly important symbolicist and so I'm told by experts what he's so I've read this was because at that time the Kingdom of England, the Anglo-Saxon king of England, was thought to have a kind of position of primus interparees in what's been called a sort of maritime confederation of the islands.

So there's obviously something about the geography of the islands that makes it seem that there's some sort of political unit.

It was the normal conquest that seems to have messed that up particularly, but of course attaching England to the continent and leaving Scotland outside.

So the answer is yes and no, I suppose.

If you're thinking about more recent times, there were many attempts over the centuries to unite the English and Scottish crowns and it was eventually the Scots who took over, of course, and continued to a very considerable extent or a disproportionate extent I suppose one might say to govern the resulting union.

I think as a maritime power, it was clearly useful for England to be able to move its borders to the sea to make sure that rival states like France or Spain or the United States couldn't get a military foothold in Scotland or Ireland.

And it might be that that's something that we don't think about enough when we're trying to explain why the foundations of the Union might be weakening.

If we think about the 1990s, the Downing Street Declaration in 1993 and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, both stated that the UK government had no selfish strategic interest in Ireland.

I think if you'll set that to a Victorian, that has been astonished.

But when the military threat stops being about French ships in the Irish Sea and is dead becomes about things like intercontinental ballistic missiles or cyber attacks,

or when you have an organisation like NATO that offers an alternative security framework for the British Isles, then the strategic arguments for the existence of the UK.

They obviously don't disappear, but I think they do perhaps weaken.

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