What is the Union?

TALKING POLITICS

Catherine Carr

News, News & Politics

4.7 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2021

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For this first in our series looking at the future of the UK, we talk to the historian Colin Kidd about the origins of the Union and the ideas that underpin it. Is the island of Britain a natural territorial political unit? Is nationalism compatible with Unionism? What changed in the 1970s? Plus we discuss how the shifting character of the SNP has shaped the arguments for and against the Union.

Talking Points:

Historically, the Kings of England considered themselves rulers of the whole island.

But any large community must be imagined. It’s inherently artificial.
Those who have tried to impose unified rule over the island by force have historically struggled.
England has served as a quasi-imperial power on the island.

The union in 1707 was a product of contingency, part of a succession crisis.

At the time, the real drama was Jacobitism, not the English versus the Scots.
What united Britain in the 18th century is not so much positive factors, but an ongoing series of wars.

The height of British consciousness came during the two world wars.

What happened in the 60s and 70s that made the union look less attractive?
The 70s with the election of Thatcher are the crucial decade.
Asymmetrical devolution has been destabilizing for the union.

Secularization led to Scots moving away from private identities being linked to denominational allegiances to a broader, more secular national identity.

The SNP in the 1930s had little traction; the communists were more influential.
It’s only in the 1960s that the SNP made a breakthrough.

For at least a time, there was a sense of coexistence between patriotism and Britishness.

The BBC from the 1920s to 1970s helped cement an authentic sense of British nationhood.
Labour played an important part of this story; British patriotism was tied to collective war experiences, the welfare state. When those things came under pressure in the 1970s, finding an outlet for union patriotism became more difficult.

The SNP is a curious hybrid: it includes hard-core nationalists, but also social democrats, like Sturgeon, who think the best way to preserve the welfare state in Scotland is by going it alone.

The unionist/nationalist binary might not be helpful; arguably the most important binary is within the SNP itself.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Further Learning:

And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here:

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, my name is David Brunsonman and this is Talking Politics. Today's episode is the first in a series we're going to be doing over the next few months.
0:14.0	Looking at the history and future of the United Kingdom and today we're starting with the big question, what is the union?
0:21.0	Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Reviewer Books, a literary magazine full of politics and a political magazine full of literature.
0:33.0	Listeners can subscribe at a special rate of just one pound an issue by using url lrb.me slash talk.
0:49.0	I'm delighted that joining Helen Thompson and myself today we have the historian Colin Kid who has written widely about the history of the union and particularly the Anglo-Scottish union but we're going to go a bit wider than that today as well.
1:06.0	Colin is the author of the book Union and Unionisms and we're going to get on to the ism too.
1:11.0	Colin, maybe if we can start with a question, I don't know if this is an obvious question or not and I genuinely have no idea what the answer to this is.
1:18.0	But if you think about the island that we're on, the geographical space, Britain, so we'll leave Ireland, the island of Ireland out of it for now, England, Scotland and Wales.
1:29.0	So we are cut off from the rest of the world by sea.
1:32.0	Do we have we at various points formed what you might think of as a natural territorial political unit? Is there anything natural about thinking that this island obviously should govern itself?
1:43.0	We do know that historically the kings of England did consider themselves in some respect as overlords or sussurrants of the whole island and we find a coinage of King Atholston that refers to him as the king of the whole of the world.
2:01.0	So there is some element here of geographical determinism, but of course that is by no means the whole story.
2:13.0	And I think I take seriously what Benedict Anderson said in imagined communities that any community beyond a small tribe or a village, any kind of face to face community, anything beyond that.
2:27.0	Somehow has to be imagined and is unnatural. So there's nothing more natural say about Scottish identity than about British identity.
2:40.0	Each is as artificial as the other.
2:43.0	I think we could think about this maybe in terms of making some comparisons with other islands.
2:49.0	In some sense you would think that actually islands are relatively easy to unify me. There are cases where you have like, they've hit the three states on one island, born, you've been the example of that.
3:01.0	But I think I don't want you make it this kind of it. What I think I think that is striking is is that whoever's tried to have a particularly unifying project for ruling the island and leaving the union aside, which I think is a so the union as it was constructed the Anglo-Scootish unions.
3:16.0	It was constructed from 1707 and let's say the way that it lasted between 1746, the end of the Jacobite rebellion in the 1970s is really struggled to do it.
3:27.0	Those are tried to impose it by force from on the island itself, whether that be the plantageness or whether that be Oliver Cromwell, that doesn't last.
3:37.0	Those who've tried to do it from the outside, whether that be particularly the Romans weren't able to impose unified rule over the island.
3:46.0	So although that I don't want to commit to the idea that there's something inherently difficult about having a union over the island of Britain, there is a decided pattern.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Catherine Carr, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Catherine Carr and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.