End of the union?

In the 1690s Scotland bankrupted herself. She attempted  to set up a colony, 'New Caledonia', on the Isthmus of Panama — a disaster culminating in a devastating assault by the Spanish. A quarter of Scotland's cash was squandered.

The result was the 1707 Act of Union — with England picking up the debts and the two nations uniting under a banner of growing trade and prosperity.

That union is now under threat. The Scottish Nationalists have a clear mandate to put a referendum to the Scottish people on independence. The battles ahead will be keenly fought and the result critical. As an avowed  unionist I believe that there is much at stake.

As we move beyond the tussles over how the referendum questions will be framed, how many questions there will be and when the referendum will be held, the focus will swing more firmly onto the pro and anti independence debate.

My expectation is that the appetite for Scottish independence will wane  as the arguments are rehearsed. What Scotland needs to conjure with is not the romantic and 'patriotic' idea of standing on her own, but the economic, political and social consequences of doing so.

There need to be answers to the questions surrounding the loss of English funding, about who owns the oil. The challenges of accommodating the loss of the NHS north of the border, the military dislocations, how Scotland will defend herself, what influence she will have — alone as a country the size of Slovenia — the issue of her currency, with the SNP committed to joining the Euro.

These are the thorny matters upon which Scotland will make her decision — the biggest it will make in centuries — the biggest since that ill-fated push for New Caledonia 300 years ago.