Doing Britain the Scots way

So Scotland has decided against national divorce. It was an odd settlement that Alex Salmond, the Scottish National Party leader, was proposing. The northern partner would move out but keep a key to the house and all the credit cards.

But divorceland can be a scary place, especially when the marriage isn’t so bad after all. Most Scots pulled back from the brink of what looked like financial crisis, economic depression and, with no organized military, the bad old days of Viking raiders stealing lads and lassies out of coastal villages.

Or perhaps voters remembered what a good deal they have. Since the Act of Union in 1707, Scotland has run its own legal and educational systems. When the Scottish Parliament resumed in 1999 under the decentralizing process known as devolution, responsibility for agriculture, fisheries, and health and social services came under local control. After the referendum polls tightened, London promised even greater devolution of tax-and-spending authority. It is hard to see what independence would add to this apart from satisfying the selfish ambitions of local Scottish politicians.

Without the centralizing, unifying influence of the British Empire, now dissolved, the World Wars, now the memories of bygone generations, and the Soviet threat, now just a story that reads like strange fiction, the British may have to work out a more thorough federal arrangement. It would require a separate, specifically English parliament in a new capital for England as such. The English complaint, quite reasonably, is that presently Scots govern their own local affairs as well as English affairs through their representation in the British government in London.

In other words, the British may be moving toward an American model of state sovereignty within a larger federation, a United Kingdom that resembles the United States, but a monarchy, not a republic.

Since 1950, Europe has become progressively integrated economically and politically. The European Union is a response to their history of nationalistic conflict and the economic need for larger, more integrated markets. At the same time, wider union and deeper integrationbring problems of their own. Decision-making centralized in a distant capital allows aggressive bureaucracies to relieve local communities and distinct peoples of their responsibility for governing themselves—i.e., their noble liberty.

The American arrangement addresses the evils of bothconflict and control. Our Founders feared continual fighting between petty republics, but also an oppressive national government with an interest distinct from that of the people. So James Madison argued for a government that is partly federal and partly national. The constituent parts of the union retain sovereignty but grant limited powers to a national government that draws the parts together in a common political life.

After the 1997 vote on devolution, then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared with satisfaction, “The era of big, centralised government is over. … I believe that we now have the chance to build a modern constitution for the whole of the United Kingdom.” For the stability and longevity of our British ally, their statesmen need to act more comprehensively on that opportunity.