From post-imperial Britain to post-British imperialism

Abstract

The article explores the potential implications for the United Kingdom of Scottish independence. I attempt to situate the possibility of the break-up of the British state in 2014 within a broader understanding of the decline and erosion of the main institutions of British society. In particular, I focus on the malaise created by the end of the British Empire and on the political and institutional effects of the neoliberal restructuring of the British economy. I relate these processes to the current austerity agenda of the Coalition government and the attempt to outline the likely effects of the current government's policy on the debate over Scottish independence. I then focus more particularly on the question of Britain's nuclear weapons, analysing the ways in which discussion of the replacement or renewal of the Trident weapon system has interacted with debates over the future of the British state. I suggest some possible outcomes of Scottish independence on the United Kingdom, including the likelihood that it will increase the speed of British decline and further increase dependency on the United States. I also offer some criticisms of those on the left of Scottish politics who have seen independence as a means of pursuing a post-neoliberal and anti-militaristic alternative to the regime of war and austerity on offer from Westminster.

Keywords:

• Scotland
• United Kingdom
• independence
• neoliberalism
• imperialism

When the histories of the period are written, 2011 may well be registered as the year in which the long downward march of Britain reached a tipping point. ¹ Three events in particular illuminated the dimensions of a decline that is political/institutional, economic and social in character and shows no signs of abating. In January, Brazil overtook Britain to become the sixth largest economy in the world – signifying the growing threat to Britain's economic position from rapidly modernizing and growing economies in the global south. The summer riots in England vividly illustrated the extent of the alienation and social malaise that stalks the denuded and marginal urban landscapes of our neoliberal society. The response of the state and its increasingly isolated and ineffective political class to the riots has thus far been restricted to repression and punishment, while the analysis from state intellectuals has yet to progress beyond the kind of vulgar culturalist tropes offered by Cambridge historian David Starkey on the BBC Newsnight programme in the immediate aftermath of the events. Most seriously of all, in May, the Scottish National Party (SNP) gained a majority in the Scottish Parliament and subsequently published its plans to hold a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014, posing the concrete possibility of the dissolution of the British state in its current form.

Much of the commentary on Scottish independence has and will probably continue to focus on the potential repercussions for Scotland if it were to separate. Less attention has been paid to what the effects will be – beyond the obvious ones of loss of territory, population and GDP – on the rest of the United Kingdom if the Scots were to breakaway. In what follows, I try to offer an analysis of some of the dimensions of the effects that are likely. In particular, I try to determine the likely impact of the breakup of the United Kingdom on its role in global imperial affairs. The implications of the loss of the Faslane Naval Base on the Clyde – the site of Britain's nuclear weapons – will form a central feature of my analysis here. I will show how Scottish independence is only likely to speed up and exacerbate the marginalization of Britain in global politics and increase its dependence on the United States. However, I will also offer some criticisms of the hopes voiced by writers on the Scottish Left that an independent Scotland will become a ‘progressive’ beacon in the world. Instead, I argue that the fates of both countries will be largely determined by global economic and political processes in which they are embedded and over which their control is small and diminishing.

I want first to situate these particular examinations within a broader understanding of the forces precipitating the long term social, political, economic and cultural decline of Britain. The current Westminster government's policy of deepening and completing the neoliberal restructuring of the British economy ought to be understood as a new stage in a protracted rearguard action being waged by the British ruling class to bolster its increasingly unstable position in the matrix of global capitalism. The irony of the coalition government's position is that the policies it is pursuing to bring British capitalism back to health are precisely the policies that are weakening its institutional and social bases and threatening to lead to the demise of the state itself.

Whither ‘Britishness’? Some modern features of a culture of decline

Any observer of British political discourse over the last 10–15 years will have noticed perennial periods of angst over the nature of Britishness. The ‘back-to-basics’ campaign that emerged in the dying embers of the Major government – with its dull Völkisch imagery evoking village greens, cricket and the nuclear family – gave way to the modish but unconvincing optimism of Cool Britannia in the early years of Blair. In 2006, Gordon Brown attempted to deflect unease in sections of the right-wing English press about his overt Scottishness by starting a debate over the substance of British identity, calling on Britons to up their levels of patriotic fervour and glory in the manifest decency of that nebulous thing called British Values. That soon fell by the wayside when the government was interrupted by the onset of global financial collapse.

As lamentable as all these projects undoubtedly were, they did at least testify to the existence of a real problem for the British state – namely that fewer and fewer Britons actually identify as British, and those who do, do so increasingly provisionally and unenthusiastically. As David Mercer has pointed out (cited in McCrone 1997, 581), ‘identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis’.

The decline of British identity is, of course, most evident in the nations of the Celtic Fringe. In 2005, 64% of Scots described themselves either as ‘More Scottish than British’ or as ‘Scottish not British’. In Wales, the number was 44%. Amongst English people, there are higher rates of identification with Britain, but this identification is increasingly precarious – when forced to choose between English and British identity, a plurality choose their English identity (Marquand 2009, 48)

The erosion of Britishness as a popular identity reflects and expresses deeper processes of social change that have weakened the fabric and institutional basis of the British state. It is important to register here the distinction between two phenomena. One is the historical record of British capitalism's decline measured in the disappearance or erosion of its basic structures and supports. I will address these aspects below. However, as Tomlinson notes (2003), even in what is now recorded as the ‘golden age’ of British capitalism – the period of high growth in the 1950s and 1960s – the atmosphere among both high Tory and progressive intellectuals was one dominated by a ‘culture of decline’. That is, post-war Britain is marked both by decline as an objective historical process and by the presence of ‘declinism’ as an ideology taking hold particularly among intellectual and cultural elites (see English and Kenny 2001). A concrete analysis of contemporary British society must attempt to understand the relationship between these two phenomena and how they manifest themselves in the present conjuncture.

Empire and the (un-)making of a nation

The decline and fall of the British Empire in the twentieth century had a profound effect on British nationhood. ² Integration into the patronage networks of Empire in the eighteenth and ninteenth century had bound the Scots gentry and middle classes in particular to the political and economic structures of the new British state. Scottish national identity survived primarily as a romantic gesture, not as a substantive basis for a political movement. The success and riches made available to Scots by Imperial positions or commercial opportunities constituted, in John Mackenzie's words, the ‘political machinery of assimilation’ (1993, 717).

The construction of Empire also involved the creation of certain symbolic and cultural ties between the nations comprising Britannia. The absorption of Highland motifs and the activation of supposedly martial elements of Scottish society and history into the mythos of Empire typified attempts by the Monarchy, most notably under Queen Victoria, to become a properly British institution that could not be depicted simply as an English yoke (Ward 2004, 23). For this endeavour, the Empire found many willing allies among the Scottish intelligentsia, for whom commitment to Empire and the Scots nation were complementary. ³

Writing in the 1970s, the Scottish Marxist Tom Nairn argued that the final disintegration of Empire in the 1940s and 1950s (most traumatically of all the ‘loss’ of India) had removed the raison d'être for the ‘unitary state’ and undermined the political, ideological and institutional bases on which it depended for its legitimacy. The emergence of Scottish nationalism as a political movement in the 1960s reflected the dislocations caused by Imperial decline, which, Nairn predicted, were only going to get worse and would ultimately lead to the end of the Union (1977, 61).

In the post-war period, the welfare state replaced Empire as the principal source of the legitimacy of the multi-national state (Devine 2006, 180). The welfare state helped to provide a material and ideological basis for the British state's claim to still have a function after Empire. The creation of a National Health Service and a National Insurance system covering and serving all the nations of Britain helped to underpin a sense of shared fate and foster the cross-national solidarities crucial to the legitimacy of a multi-national state (McEwen 2002, 68).

The institutions of the labour movement, including the trade unions and the Labour Party, also worked to create solidarities that fused together populations in different areas of the country. The labour movement reflected class interests and the Labour Party prosecuted – in a highly ‘mediated’ form – a class politics. This created conditions in which, for much of the twentieth century, as David McCrone puts it (1997, 590), ‘British politics […] were class politics tout court’. In other words, political conflict arose out of and reflected class rather than national cleavages. The decline of class politics and consciousness in the 1980s and 1990s can thus be associated with the growing prominence of national questions within British politics.

In addition, the internationalist perspective of the left meant that for much of the twentieth century, the major Marxist currents in the British left had viewed the question of Scottish nationhood at best as a distraction and, at worst, as a reactionary diversion from the goal of class unity (Young 1983). Dominant sections of the British left equated the unity of the British state with the unity of the British working class and feared that undermining the former would threaten the latter. In this sense, much of the official left's internationalism resolved into an ultimately rather conservative British Unionism. In Scotland, although the Labour Party had been committed to a degree of Scottish home rule since its inception (apart from a not insignificant interlude between 1945 and the late 1970s), only the contradictions that emerged in the Thatcher era ensured Scottish aspirations for self-government could not be stymied after Labour's return to power in 1997 – despite Tony Blair's oft-noted hesitation regarding Scottish and Welsh devolution (Johnson 2010).

Into the abyss, or, neoliberalism and the end of Britain

The current period – one in which the full effects of the restructuring of British society that Mrs. Thatcher commenced are still emerging – is marked by the decline of the trade union movement and the defenestration of what remains of the welfare state. The neoliberal revolution began by Thatcher and consummated by the New Labour government has been at least partially successful in its objective, as adduced by David Harvey, of restoring ruling class power (Harvey 2007, 74). In other words, it has achieved its goal of rolling back the power of organized labour and reducing the challenges posed to capital's supremacy by workers and the oppressed, particularly in the turbulent years of the 1970s. ⁴

However, particularly in the conditions of a multinational state, class power is not necessarily co-extensive with national or political power. In societies like Britain, the class struggle is necessarily traversed and structured by national and regional antagonisms. Thus, the measures that have restored the power of Capital in British society are precisely the same measures that are weakening the institutional bases of the British state. The restoration of class power across Britain as a whole has weakened the institutional capacity of the state to directly integrate marginal social groups and non-dominant nations.

One of the ways in which this institutional decline plays itself out is in the form of a resurgent and social democratic nationalism in Scotland. In his first speech in England after announcing the Scottish Government's plans for a referendum in 2014, First Minister Alex Salmond attempted to justify his belief in Scottish independence on the grounds that only an independent Scotland could defend what remains of the post-war Keynesian settlement (Carrell 2012). In this sense, he was attempting to convince Scots and progressive English opinion alike that the only way to save the British welfare state was to dissolve the Union.

As the fallout from the global economic crisis has demonstrated, the neoliberal restructuring of British society only exacerbated the structural imbalances in British capitalism. The problems created by dependency on the City of London and the uneven regional development that characterize British capitalism increased as a result of policies pursued by New Labour in particular. Between 1990 and 2007, the share of finance in British GDP grew from 22% to 32%, a rate of increase far higher than that in the United States or in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development as a whole (Wood 2010, 13). As a result, when the financial crisis descended, the British economy was particularly vulnerable.

The reliance on tax receipts generated from London's status as a centre of global financial capital also reflected the failure of successive governments to tackle the sources of British capitalism's historic lack of competitiveness. The depth of the current difficulties for British capitalism clearly derive, at least in part, from the inability of New Labour in particular to develop a long-term strategy of economic development that could challenge the institutionalization of the ‘interests of financial over domestic capital’ in the policy-making process (Hay and Watson 1998, 3).

The deep and developing crisis of what Colin Crouch (2009) has called ‘privatized Keynesianism’ is demonstrating that the policy of promoting high levels of unsecured household debt as an alternative to wage increases is no more sustainable than was the Keynesian consensus that had dominated British politics until the 1970s. ⁵

The present state of the Eurozone tends to hide the fact that, in general, the crisis has been more profound for Britain than for its main European rivals, France and Germany. For late Britain, the crisis is not only economic and financial, it is political and intellectual – it has exposed quite openly and painfully the foolishness of past policies. Each passing day confirms that those who now preside over the state have no real strategy for reversing the decline – except to repeat the familiar formulae, this time with added ideological zeal.

The attempts by the current government to restore Britain's fiscal position on the backs of public sectors workers, benefits claimants and other marginalized sections of British society reflect a new stage in the effort to defend Britain's increasingly precarious position in the matrix of global capitalism. The chances that it will be successful are slim.

Britain's share of world trade shrank from 25% in 1950 to 5% in 2000 (Schenk 2005, 456). In February 2012, the European Commission released a report revealing that Britain's share of total global exports had fallen by a quarter in 5 years, the sharpest decline among European Union states (Waterfield 2012). The decline in exports has contributed to a persistent balance of payments deficit for Britain. The discovery and development of North Sea Oil in the 1970s was expected (see Gamble 1981) to improve Britain's balance of payments and fiscal position (by reducing the amount of oil the country needed to import), but Britain is again a net importer of oil (Coutts and Rowthorn 2010, 4).

For its part, the Coalition government's policy of reducing public sector employment is only likely to increase the development gap between London and the South East and the North – since the latter developed a labour market increasingly dependent on the public sector in the aftermath of deindustrialization (Rowthorn 2005). Furthermore, as well as depressing the labour market, any re-balancing of the economy in the North away from the public to private sector will only exacerbate wage differentials between the regions – the rate of workers receiving low pay in the private sector is around three times that of the public sector (Savage 2011, 5). George Osborne's recent announcement that the government is considering moving to regional pay agreements in the public sector suggests that inequality between London and the South East and the rest of Britain is not at a matter of great concern to the government.

It is plausible to assume then that the economic policies pursued by the Coalition are contributing to the political pressures on the Union itself. In its June opinion survey, YouGov (2012) found that David Cameron's approval rating among Scots was 17% (it was 36% in the country as a whole). To give one point of historical comparison that may illuminate the depth of anti-Tory sentiment in Scotland, this is some 7% points lower than the approval accorded to Richard Nixon by Americans after he had resigned in disgrace from the Presidency.

Of course, there is no simple translation from contempt for the present British government and support for the dissolution of the British state. Yet there is clearly mileage in the attempts by pro-independence Scots to situate the demand for separation within the broader wellspring of anti-Tory sentiment in Scottish society. Indeed, the outcome of the independence referendum may hinge upon the success of attempts to associate the present government with the British state as such.

It is also an open question as to whether an independent Scotland, presumably governed at least initially by nationalists, could break decisively with the model of economic development that London has pursued. While the SNP has made noises about a re-industrialization strategy based around the exploitation of Scotland's potential comparative advantage in renewable energy production, confusion still surrounds the plan for economic development that would be pursued by an independent Scotland. Before the financial crisis hit, the SNP was as likely to exhort the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy of neoliberal Ireland as it was the Nordic social democracies.

While there have been periodic repudiations of the ultra-neoliberal orthodoxy pursued in Westminster, no real sense of a definite alternative model has emerged in the post-devolution period. In their study of post-devolution social policy in Scotland, Gill Scott and Gerry Mooney (2009, 384) argue that the approach of the SNP government since its election in 2007 has been contradictory. ‘The SNP's political commitments to solidarity and to fairness’, they point out, ‘have been couched in a neoliberal framework of growth and competitiveness and history shows that at the very least there are massive tensions between these opposing objectives’. That said, there is no doubt that the ability of the Scottish Parliament to break decisively with neoliberalism is restricted by its reliance on Westminster for a block grant.

Elements of the Scottish left expect a full post-independence break with the neoliberal dogma ‘imposed’ by Westminster. On this account, an independent Scotland would stand a greater chance of instituting a post-neoliberal economic policy if it were freed from London rule (see McAllion 2012). The problem with these expectations is that they tend to treat Scotland as an isolated unit in the global economic system. They also tend to suggest that Scottish capitalism would be ‘born-again’ post-independence, free to choose what course to pursue in the world. The reality is that an independent Scotland would already be embedded into the structures of global capitalism – the same structures and pressures that have provoked the neoliberal mania in Britain will be at work on an independent Scotland. The possibility of any post-neoliberal economic model emerging in Scotland depends, as it does anywhere, on the quality of political leadership available and the strength of the social movements that can support leaders in their confrontation with global capital's demands for yet more austerity and deregulation.

It is possible that the disruption caused by independence could create favourable conditions for popular constituencies to mould the new state into a more democratic form. The likelihood of a period of indeterminacy, particularly when compared with the baleful continuity on offer from all sides in London, remains one of the strongest elements of the pro-independence case. Nonetheless, the pressure that global capital will bring to bear on an independent Scotland will be considerable, and important fractions of Scottish society – particularly the oil industry and exporters – will look to promote as ‘orderly’ a transition as possible.

The Anglo in the Anglo-Scottish Union

In the vacuum of purpose and strategy typical of late Britain, the attempts to justify the Union on the grounds of shared identity or ‘values’ become increasingly tendentious and improbable. Ideological and cultural despair begins to take root even among the dominant nation of the British project, namely the English. ‘There is a sense’, Tom Nairn argues (2000, 58), ‘in which England has been even more affected and deformed by imperial globalization than other parts of the archipelago’. In most cases, fear of decline manifests itself in the more or less benign form of periodic frets about what constitutes Britishness and attempts by political and media elites to convince each other that an answer to this riddle will cure the many ills of British society.

More insidiously, the decline of Britain and its culture expresses itself in increased fears about immigration, doubts over the possibility of successfully integrating ethnic minorities (particularly Muslims) and new violent and thuggish nationalist street movements (such as the English Defence League). ⁶ Pervasive Islamophobia and elite debates about the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ signify the neuroses emerging in a political class incapable of designating the co-ordinates of a uniform culture that can support a national identity drained of any substantial content. As David Marquand (2011) has noted, the anguish finds a peculiarly English popular expression in the form of widespread anti-European sentiment, the extent of which is registered by, among other things, the support for anti-Europe political groups like the United Kingdom Independence Party.

The emergence of a specifically English element to the widespread disenchantment with extant Britain represents a deepening of the same forces that have affected the nations of the Celtic Fringe. The growth of English ressentiment (see Aughey 2007) in the face of increasingly assertive nationalisms in Scotland and Wales has opened up another crack in the edifice of Britishness. The sense emerges that the English ‘forgot themselves’ while the Scottish and Welsh were busy asserting confident national identities became widespread. The idea that England was the ‘last stateless nation in the United Kingdom’ (Aughey 2007, 96) found expression in increased support for an English Parliament (BBC 2010) and in complaints, mainly from those on the Right, that England was subsidizing the decadent welfarism of the Scots in particular (Heffer 2009).

These then are some elements of a conjuncture, shaped by a variety of political, social and economic processes, in which the very future of the United Kingdom in its current form has been called into doubt. The links between economic stagnation and decline, political and ideological inertia and increased popular anxiety about the authenticity of the national basis for the state are developing and deepening. For the remainder of the essay, I want to look more closely at the prospects for Scottish independence and, in particular, what its effects will be on the rest of Britain if it were to occur. I examine how Scotland separating might affect the role of Britain in global Imperial affairs and whether it will augment the pace of British decline.

Elements of a rearguard action: late Britain in the world

Once the prestige of a country has started to slide, there is no knowing where it will stop.– Anthony Eden (cited in Orde 1996, 181)

The end of the British Empire was a central part of the re-organization of global Imperialist affairs at the end of the Second World War, the most crucial element of which was the emergence of the United States as a global superpower and, after the Cold War, as the sole superpower.

It was recognized by senior figures in the ruling class that Britain would have to adapt to the new constellation of power that had emerged during and after the War. Harold MacMillan, writing to a colleague in 1943, suggested that Britain ought to make itself comfortable with a subordinate position in the emerging American led world akin to the role of the Greeks in the Roman Empire (Ashton 2005, 698). The reliance – both financial and military – on America that Britain developed particularly in the 1940s was considered to be unavoidable but dangerous, in part because it was quickly established that the Americans were more interested in the reconstruction of Japan and mainland Western Europe than in Britain.

The American indifference to British hopes was typified in the decision taken by Congress in 1946 to terminate co-operation on atomic weapons between the countries (Reynolds 2000, 151). Significant bilateral co-operation on nuclear technology was not re-established, at least officially, until 1958 (Spinardi 1997, 556).

The disaster that was the 1956 invasion of Egypt during the Suez Crisis – pursued despite opposition from the United States – marked the end of Britain as ‘independent global power’ (Williamson 2007, 1). Suez also badly soured British relations with France – which had joined the adventure to punish Nasser for his supposed assistance to the struggle for Algerian independence – and so dealt a blow to the European element of Britain's post-war diplomatic strategy. The lesson learned by the British ruling class after Suez was – as Margaret Thatcher explained later – that ‘we should never again find ourselves on the opposite side to the United States in a major international crisis affecting British interests’ (cited in Danchev 2007, 197).

One way which British political elites tried to forestall the decline that the collapse of the Empire after the Second World War had signalled was to take the decision to develop an independent nuclear arsenal. Without its own strategic nuclear capacity, Britain would be, in Aneurin Bevan's immortal phrase, ‘naked at the conference table’. Nuclear weapons were also to be recommended, of course, because they constitute the ‘great leveller’ of international relations (Pierre 1972, 90). The relative weaknesses of Britain in relation to its rivals could be short-circuited by its possession of a weapon that could ‘take out capital cities with a single blow’ (Lloyd 1996, 139).

It is also worth recording, in the context of current debates about the cost of replacing the Trident missile system, that nuclear weapons were the ‘cheaper option to whole-sale conventional rearmament in the 1950s’ (Pierre 1972, 87). In this sense, nuclear weapons provided an affordable means of masking or even reversing the period of relative decline and marginalization that Britain was confronting in the immediate post-War period.

Although nuclear weapons are not in any sense decisive when considering Britain's position in the world, I focus on them in the next section because they illuminate important dimensions of the argument we have been exploring thus far. In particular, debates over the future of the nuclear deterrent have become intellectually and practically inseparable from discussion of the future of the British state. The location of the Trident nuclear submarines at Her Majesty's Naval Base Clyde has become a crucial point of contention for Scottish nationalists and those opposed to the way British imperialism operates more generally. ⁷

Getting naked: Scotland and the fate of Britain's nuclear weapons

Perhaps not surprisingly, the historic decisions that resulted in British nuclear weapons being placed in Scotland were the product of Cold War American strategic interests. Scotland had the right geography to suit the needs of the operating bases of the Polaris missile system that the United States deployed in the 1960s (Chalmers and Walker 2002, 4).

The emergence of the ‘Scottish question’ in the 1970s – evidenced by the rise of the SNP and provoked in part by the discovery of North Sea Oil – did not dissuade British defence planners from placing the replacement to Polaris – Trident – in the bases at Faslane and Coulport (the latter provides logistic support to the submarines stationed at Faslane).

The debate that now rages over the renewal of the Trident system has taken place amidst opposition from both the majority of the Scottish public (The Scottish Government 2007), a majority of Scottish MPs and MSPs and from the SNP government in Edinburgh. The current policy of the SNP is to remove Trident from Scottish waters as quickly as possible after independence (SNP 2012a). The SNP's position, explained by its Westminster leader and defence spokesman Angus Robertson, is that the Trident missile system is a historically defunct method of security, a ‘colossal’ waste of money at a time when conventional forces in Scotland are being reduced and, perhaps most importantly of all, an immoral and anti-democratic affront to Scottish society (SNP 2012b). The SNP are committed to an as early as possible removal of the weapons from Scottish soil if Scotland were to become independent.

That said, the SNP's continued commitment to a nuclear free Scotland has been cast into some confusion recently. Pushed by the leadership, the party has recently renounced its objections to any future Scottish involvement in NATO – a ‘defence pact’ of which nuclear weapons form a central element (Hoyos 2012). While Scottish membership of NATO would almost certainly involve pressure to soften opposition to Trident, it is unlikely that the SNP would be able to reverse its opposition to nuclear weapons in Scotland without provoking significant inter-party turmoil and political costs. The small margin of victory for the conference motion calling for NATO membership, and the resignation of two SNP MSPs in the aftermath of the vote, suggests that fissures are already opening up between a cautious SNP leadership and the nationalist base.

As is becoming increasingly clear, the prospect of an independent Scotland not being willing to host British nuclear weapons would pose a major and in all likelihood fatal blow to the program. It is widely conceded that a relocation of the submarines and the weapons they carry from the Clyde to some other location would be extremely difficult if not impossible – or as one MOD source put it to The Daily Telegraph, ‘it would be an unbelievable nightmare’ (Kirkup 2012).

It is, of course, an open question as to what the overall effects of a loss of independent nuclear weapons would have on the post-British state. It is likely that it would further strengthen the impulse to cling to the ‘special relationship’ with the United States and reliance on the ‘security umbrella’ of NATO (Lynch 2011). I will say more about this possibility below.

More generally, the apparent unlikelihood (at least from our current horizons) that Britain's nuclear weapons would ever be used should not lead us to underestimate the role they play in underpinning British policy in the world. Mark Quinlan (2006, 634), reflecting on the future of the nuclear weapons program in International Affairs, remarks that:

[…] the United Kingdom remains, both by all around capability and by attitude towards its use, one of the few countries minded to shoulder difficult and dangerous international military responsibilities far from its shores; and the last-resort underpinning of nuclear capability, even where its use seems remote, is a significant element in its confidence to continue doing so.

There is recognition then that its possession of nuclear weapons is crucial to Britain's ability and willingness to project its power across the globe. Taking its two most significant military engagements in the past decade as examples – the invasion and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan – it is clear that nuclear weapons did not and could not have a direct military role in either the initial toppling of the regimes or in the post-invasion counter-insurgency strategies. However, the possibility that these wars could escalate into regional conflagrations (for instance with Iran and Syria in the case of Iraq) or could leak into neighbouring nuclear capable states (such as Pakistan) rendered Britain's ownership of the ultimate last-resort weapon in a sense fundamental. It follows then that the loss of this last-resort capability could make British politicians less likely to commit to the kind of major military and nation-building operations in which they have involved themselves since 9/11.

Alongside the military and strategic effects of a loss of nuclear weapons capability, there are of course matters of prestige at stake for the British state. As I said above, considerations of status were not the sole or even main reason British leaders chose to develop nuclear weapons, but such considerations did nonetheless play a role. They play a role now when either non-renewal of Trident or Scottish independence threaten to make the state ‘naked at the conference table’ yet again.

Dr Liam Fox MP, the Conservative former Defence Secretary, suggested that considerations of status or the supposed threat to Britain's permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) that would result from disarmament are ‘secondary’ reasons to renew Trident (2006, 18). ⁸ Tony Blair (2010), on the other hand, admitted in his memoirs that while the arguments against Trident renewal were powerful, he was nonetheless in favour of renewal because disarmament would amount to ‘too big a downgrading of our status as a nation’. ⁹

Quite apart from any consideration of the impact of Scottish independence, it may well be that the current government chooses not to renew Trident. The potential costs and the at least questionable military case for renewal may persuade military and government strategists to pursue a different course. What is clear is that the present debate over Trident has become inseparable from the question of the future of the state itself. In this sense, the issue of Trident has become bound up with a concern among political elites – of whose opinion Blair is as good a barometer as any – about the threats to Britain's increasingly precarious status both in the globe and at home.

The danger posed to the future and security of Britain's nuclear weapons is only one aspect of some broader possible implications of Scottish independence. The question of what a post-independence United Kingdom would look like, or what its role would be in the world, is clearly not a simple one to address. Nonetheless, there are solid grounds on which to speculate about the effects of the break-up of Britain on the rest of the United Kingdom. I want to say something first about the role the special relationship with the United States plays and will play in Britain's geopolitical orientation. Then, I want to suggest some future dilemmas that could confront a post-Scottish independence United Kingdom seeking to preserve its present status.

The United Kingdom after Britain: the special relationship and beyond

Popular discussion of the so-called special relationship reached its height in the lead up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2002–2003. Although accusations that Blair was simply a slavish follower of the Bush regime were always somewhat misdirected – Blair was a committed humanitarian interventionist before Bush (see Kennedy-Pipe and Vickers 2007) – it was clear that Blair saw military co-operation as key to protecting privileged access to Washington's power. A close relationship with the White House, particularly for a figure of Blair's ambition, was a ‘necessary counterbalance’ to the ‘frustrations of leading a medium-sized European power’ (Kennedy-Pipe and Vickers 2007, 209).

The run-up to and the aftermath of the invasion in Iraq created great interest in the matter of United States–United Kingdom relations, particularly as those relations were personified in the relationship between Blair and President Bush. It is an irony that Blair – late Britain's premier Atlanticist – was responsible for more damage to the British public's perception of the special relationship than any figure in its history. The portrayal of Blair as a ‘poodle’ – fair or not – did act as a conduit for wider discontent about Britain's apparent inability to pursue an independent course in the world.

As I suggested earlier, there are good reasons for concluding that the dissolution of the British state would provide further incentives to solidify relations with the United States – particularly if it coincided with the end of Britain's independent nuclear deterrent. British diplomatic and political leaders would no doubt hope that special relationship could once again act as a bulwark protecting Britain from some of the more egregious effects of decline and geo-political marginalization.

That being said, one of the dangers of Scottish independence is that it could diminish the sources of the moral and political authority which help to make Britain an attractive ally for the United States. Professor Malcolm Chalmers (2012, 7), making the point recently in an intervention in the journal of the Royal United Services Institute, remarked that:

The UK's weight is also rooted in how others view its political stability, and in particular a history of continuous and constitutional government that is longer than for any other major power […] The UK's confidence in itself has helped secure the confidence that others place in the UK.

The break-up of Britain would, on this account, pose irrevocable damage to the United Kingdom's weight in the world and its ability to command the confidence of its allies, including in particular the United States. Whether one thinks that a weakening of the alliance between Britain and America in the future would be a good thing is of course determined by what one thinks of its outcomes in the present. Whatever the case, it is at least possible that the United Kingdom could become even more reliant on its main ally at precisely the same time as the benefits of the alliance to the major partner become ever more unclear. The question is: will the leaders of the United States be keen to continue to hitch their wagon to a state seen to be embarking of a process of self-dissolution?

There is little room for sentiment in American policy – look, for instance, at the sharp and unhesitating retreat from ‘old Europe’ in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Although it is unlikely that a UK successor state would be immediately cut adrift by Washington, the value of the special relationship, already overstated by British policy makers, would undoubtedly diminish for its major partner. One unfortunate consequence could be that the remnants of the United Kingdom would be forced to concede even greater autonomy to the United States to maintain the alliance.

It is also likely that problems will arise in other areas for the leaders of a post-British United Kingdom. One that has attracted a lot of comment is the status of Britain's permanent seat on the UNSC. Speaking to Al Jazeera, former Defence Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind conceded that a Scottish declaration of independence would ‘certainly open up the question of permanent membership of the Security Council in a way that would be awkward for the UK’ (McFadyen 2012).

The problem arises in the first instance, of course, from the fact that the state that currently occupies the seat on the UNSC would no longer exist if Scotland separated. The successor state to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland would clearly have a strong claim on the seat, similar to the claim of the Russian Federation to the seat of the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the latter's collapse in 1991.

However, the necessary re-organization that would take place is very likely to give new impetus to discussions about the Council's makeup – a relic from the immediate aftermath of the Second World War that looks evermore anachronistic. Countries such as India, Brazil, South Africa and Japan could use the disruption to push their case for entry to an expanded or at least substantially reformed Security Council. It could be the case, in other words, that the United Kingdom could retain its place in a context in which the effective and relative power of the seat has been diminished.

The dislocations that await the United Kingdom if Scotland does choose independence in 2014 are varied and extensive. I have touched only on some of them. What it is important to stress is that the break-up of Britain, if it happens, will be a culmination of a long process of decline, some of the parameters of which I have attempted to spell out above. It is at least possible that Scottish independence could render Britain's nuclear force unviable and threaten its position in major international bodies, such as the UNSC. A re-thinking of the United Kingdom's role in the world would have to occur in the aftermath of Scottish independence. It is to be hoped that this debate will include those voices critical of the way in which British power has been projected across the world, particularly in the years since 11 September 2001. A new course is to be recommended – for the sake both of those subjected to British military power abroad and for those who wish to see a more democratic culture emerge in the United Kingdom, in whichever form it exists.

Conclusions: Scotland – the progressive beacon?

Whatever way the vote goes, the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 will be a watershed moment. Currently, polls suggest that the Unionists hold the advantage. Those in the pro-independence camp are stressing the need to preserve Scottish social democracy from the neoliberal gang in London. The legacy of Britain's role in the invasion of Iraq, coupled with opposition to the location of weapons of mass destruction on the Clyde, will be central to the independence argument. If Scottish voters do vote for independence on these anti-militaristic and anti-neoliberal grounds, then are good grounds for optimism regarding the Scotland that could emerge after separation.

Nonetheless, it would be an example of wishful thinking to assume that Scotland would emerge from the British darkness into the sunshine of social democracy easily or automatically. In the first place, an independent Scotland would confront a whole series of social problems inherited from the time in the Union. For instance, Scottish rates of long-term household poverty are higher than that in the United Kingdom as a whole (see Morelli and Seaman 2009). High rates of drug abuse, alcohol addiction and violence blight communities hit hard by the effects of Thatcher's economic vandalism of the 1980s.

The same pressures towards neoliberal reform that have precipitated the decline of British institutions would not simply disappear the day after independence. Since devolution, successive governments at Holyrood, under both Labour and SNP leadership, have attempted to steer an independent path, sheltering Scottish society in areas like higher education and the NHS from the worst of neoliberalism's prescriptions. Independence is not, on its own, a solution to the problems of Scottish society. The opportunity to steer a different course in Scotland – and, for that matter, in what would remain of the United Kingdom – will depend on the extent to which the social forces hit hardest by austerity and neoliberalism can organize themselves and proffer a viable alternative. Although breaking free from a British state that is handling its economic and political decline with a distinct lack of grace seems attractive, the difficult work of building a different society would still lie in front of Scotland. Independence is not a solution to the diet of austerity and war on offer from London – but it could offer working people in Scotland greater space to create one.

Notes

1. In this article, I use Britain to refer to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, despite the fact that the location of part of this Union on the island of Ireland makes the designation formally inaccurate. I do so because my article focuses in particular on the problem of the Anglo-Scottish Union and also to register the fact while Scottish independence would abolish the British state (making two sovereign territories where before there was one), it would not abolish the United Kingdom, which would survive, presumably, as the United Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

2. For obvious reasons, I focus in particular on the relationship between Scots, Britain and Britishness. I do not mean, however, to hide or avoid the importance of the other constituent nations of Britain.

3. Sir Walter Scott, whose novels were central to the development of Scottish nationhood in the nineteenth century, is the archetypal case in point. Davidson (2000, 152–163) provides an interesting comparison between Scott's ‘conservative’ Scottish nationalism and the ‘radical’ nation evoked in the work of Robert Burns.

4. It is important to stress that Harvey's observation relates to extent and scope of ruling class power or, to put it another way, to the relative power of the ruling class. The use of ‘loss’ and ‘restoration’ in reference to the effects on ruling class power of the Keynesian consensus and the neoliberal revolution, respectively, does not, or at least should not, imply that the ruling class at any time ceased to rule or that society somehow oscillated between ‘capitalism and socialism’ in the period in question.

5. I am thankful to Scott Lavery for this reference.

6. According to Ipsos Mori (2009), in January 1988, only 3% of respondents answered ‘Race Relations/Immigration/Immigrants’ when asked what they thought was the most important issue facing Britain. By the time of the 2005 general election, that number had reached 27%, although it had peaked at 40% earlier in the year.

7. Imperialism is, of course, a rather fraught term in the theoretical debate – as a minimum, I take imperialism to mean a ‘political project on the part of actors whose power is based in command of a territory and a capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources towards political economic and military ends’ (Harvey 2005, 25). With its stress on the ‘command of territory’, Harvey's definition is particularly felicitous for a discussion of the future of British imperialism, since this ‘command’ is precisely what Scottish nationalism threatens.

8. Dr. Fox's stated reasons for renewing Trident are themselves interesting, involving, as they do, a deep excursus into the world of conservative philosophical anthropology (‘Man is a Fallen creature; therefore, we must renew Trident’) and scenarios in which an unnamed Power ransacks Western Europe and threatens Britain with annihilation.

9. I am in debt to Jamie Maxwell for this reference.