From the vantage point of England, the short period since 2015 has seemed to contain decades’ worth of political upheaval. Scotland’s equivalent political time-crunch occurred in the preceding five years. The SNP leveraged its surprise 2011 majority in the Scottish Parliament (it had been in minority government since 2007) into an independence referendum in 2014 that...
Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: The Great Mistake of Scottish Independence by John Lloyd. The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, Nation by Scott Hames. Independence is not inevitable, but it is now the engine of Scottish electoral politics, giving shape to its party system, providing motivation for its activists and guaranteeing a constant flow of controversy for its journalists. Every democratic polity needs an existential MacGuffin to imbue the banal questions of governance with something far richer in narrative potential. ‘When will my bins be collected?’ is no match for ‘When will my people be free?’