Thinking aloud here.
The status quo is unstable and so cannot last.
It cannot last because The SNP will never stop campaigning for full independence – Why should it, the SNP only has to win a referendum once, whereas the unionists have to win every time.
Sometimes any decision is better than no decision at all, so let us force one.
Can we not offer another referendum that will exclude the option of the continuation of devolved government altogether? The choice can be between full independence on the one hand and the return of unitary government from Westminster on the other. The Scots can make the decision.

The Scottish Nationalists are showing themselves more every day to be a really horrible bunch of fascists.

The sooner England is shot of them and anyone who would vote for them, the better, although it would be sad to lose the decent ones.

An excellent timely and thought provoking article in Unherd again. For me devolution was and is a disaster for the people of Scotland and will result in an eventual unwinding of the Act of Union – which might not be a bad thing for either party. In that regard, a consultative referendum including all U.K. voters might prove instructive. When it comes to a divorce surely it’s a good idea to hear from both sides of the current union? It might not only prove instructive for the politicians but also speed things up and make them less acrimonious. Mind you, I suppose it would be awkward if the English and Welsh voted for Scotland to go and the Scots voted to stay. However, maybe that would result in better manners all round.

Why must England be broken up?
Rubbish, we are not that big a country.
If Scotland wants to go, good luck to them but they had a referendum and voted to stay, once in a generation it was supposed to be but the result was wrong so have another go?
Voted to leave the EU but the result was wrong so have another go?
If they want independence good luck to them, try another referendum in 10 years and see what happens because the SNP are going no where and they hate England.

One should also look at this as a product of the much larger Marxist movement which since its inception will support any revolutionary movement against the state, and ultimately will look to reconfigure the state as a Marxist (socialist) one ever tending towards a “communist paradise”, so breaking up of the Empire in 1945 with a landslide then, and the Union with the landslide of 1997 is just a path to that Marxist pardise (sadly no longer a Berlin wall to remind us of the paradise on the other side), the target is not Scotland but England which has to be broken up even further and must be taken to before the Tudors.
The most vulnerable section of the population is no longer given patriotic indoctrination to counter any “bright new ideas” and snowflakes fall to the sirens of Marxism. They don’t have the history of evolution of thought and why we are like we are, they are being made to “reinvent the wheel” by the Marxists.
Bad as it was before, in 2019 “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition” which was thrown at the leavers of power of the UK and England was principally easily linked to Marx and the IRA. The Marxists would be happy for the kingdom to split.
As many say here and as we all saw on June 7th in London itself, there is incalculable, unsustainable instability not only in our relationship with Scotland and its devolution but with the logical continuation of this “devolution” as a path of breaking up the entire Empire and Kingdom and now Kingdoms, specially the breaking up of England. The Marxists would welcome a Parliament in Edinburgh which James VI of Scotland knew was a stupid idea, but the Marxist would avoid like the plague an English Parliament.

My understanding is that Scottish devolution has been on the agenda for over 100 years. The progress of the Government of Scotland Bill 1913 (aka the Scottish Home Rule Bill) was seemingly only scuppered by the advent WW1.

Independence is not an inevitable outcome. Quebec has twice in my lifetime held independence referendums. If I recall correctly, on the last occasion independence was only rejected by the smallest of margins. However, appetite for independence amongst the people of Quebec is now apparently low. I do not what Faustian sacrifices were required from the rest of Canada to bring about this change or whether the rest of Canada thought it was worth it.

Ultimately independence has to be an issue for the people of Scotland (or should that be the Scottish people) but those fervent democrats the SNP will presumably insist that in any vote those areas of Scotland that in recent years have expressed concern about remaining part of an independent Scotland are also given the choice of remain part of the Union or full independence.

Finally, I always had a lot of time Tam Dalyell, an old school politician whose independence of mind you could respect regardless of party allegiance. This article bought to mind a quotes from his book The Question of Scotland, “I am a Man of the Union because the alternative is puerile, romantic folly”,

This is written very English orientated towards what a Britain should look like. Perhaps the English (perhaps better put as London) project of britishness forgot that other ways of being British exist and to the point they are now excluded and residents of each nation would agree they are seen as too stupid or poor to govern themselves (only london can borrow money and fund each nation – so of course financially they are handicapped) – and in terms of inclusion Wales isn’t even on the flag, for example.

Devolution, though has a longer history far before Blair and their seems to be an assumption implied in this article is that pre-devolution was better for each nation, but maybe I am reading into it too much. Maybe simpler, but by no means was it fairer or a partnership of equals. Even London was devolved at the same time as the Wales, Scotland, and N.Ireland, but this too seems forgotten by London centrics.

What criteria are being discussed to justify “disaster” because it seems to be successful in Scotland and mediocre in Wales, and is 20 years really enough? Using Jacob Rees Moggs assertion, the true success of Brexit won’t be fully known for 50 years, surely we should be a bit more tolerant for things to embed? For those that can remember, pre-devolution was a disaster, too with all the ridiculous quangos, mis-spend, and ridiculous decisions by secretaries of states with absolutely no clue about local issues; it was embarrassing e.g. John Redwood / Neil Hamilton.

Finally, each nation was given an opportunity to vote in a referendum, but because the current government think its not valuable, its ok to now take it away? how ummm democratic…. god forbid we cancel brexit in the same way if it becomes a “disaster”.

Perhaps a confederation is now inevitable if it ever gets discussed – is it really a bad idea? It might just make the idea of being british more meaningful across the UK than it currently appears. But perhaps If the tories were in control of each parliament I am sure devolution would be a great idea and we wouldn’t be having these discussions and opinions.

This is the key sentence for any reader: “Perhaps a smaller, more inward-looking, even more Scandinavian England would not be a tragedy: we would be richer, for one thing, and we can always hope that the final severing of world power status would force a future English government to devote the attention to industry and infrastructure that has been neglected for so many decades.”

Years ago I accepted that an England, shorn of the pretension of the United Kingdom, would be smaller on the global stage but richer and deeper and stronger as a nation. Like many I’ve been frustrated with politics over the last decade but, unlike most, only because no national party seeks this very obvious goal.

It’s lopsided devolution that was the mistake. England is as frustrated with Westminster as Scotland, and wants change just as much. That’s the sad thing.

If the Government intends to make the case for the union,..that would be a refreshing change-lets have at least a half informed grown up debate about the pro’s & cons-as it is(like the EU) there seems to be the assumption that because it exists it’s by definition the preferable option or its “just too difficult to unravel–it may be but lets have some back up rather than one off point scoring on Trident/North Sea Oil etc etc.

My question is what is Scotland to do IF secession occurs? Debt is too high to immediately join EU. North sea oil whether depleting or not flies against a fossil fuel green future promoted by politicians including SNP. Perhaps a 21st century Darien expedition? We all know how that ended up.

This is all very interesting, but if the Great Reset goes ahead as feared, democracy will instantaneously become dead, Parliaments will be powerless talking-shops, and the identity of which talking-shop contains the representatives of which geographical region will be a matter of complete irrelevance to the general public. The general public will in any case have more important things on their mind, headed by trying to work out how to take the Great Reset and put it in the incinerator, making arrangements to hang everyone connected with the treasonous act of seeking to impose it on a disapproving general public, and restoring democracy in such a way that its institutions of power can never again be populated by anyone with a personality disorder.

I’ve been waiting for a piece like this from a reasonable commentator and I’m sympathetic to this English yearning to be Denmark . It seems we have all wanted to be Denmark at some point. I come from a traditional Scottish Labour home rule tradition and my family eventually migrated to the SNP after some time in the wilderness following Labour’s dropping of Scottish home rule from their manifesto in 1956. I left the SNP eventually, but later than I care to admit.

But it is important that those of us who don’t come from a formal unionist tradition in Scotland are listened to. The traditional unionist version of events is as problematic as any , and does little to hinder the SNP. You need to understand your enemy to defeat it properly, and Scottish unionism has long been in a battle with a pantomime monster. Scottish Conservatism under Ross/Davidson today is in the position today of fighting not one, but two pantomime monsters: it’s reduction of euroscepticism and Brexit to a parody of English nationalism is so complete that it has almost fallen into the lap of the first monster it created.

It is a major error to see the 1707 union in terms of a settled popular consensus and then an increasing erosion of it from the 1970s onwards. Labour also persist in this mistake, and so lay sole blame for a rise of separatism on Thatcher and Conservatism. What we have actually had here in Scotland are two identifiable trajectories with a much longer evolution.

Scotland lost it’s autonomy, as it was almost always bound to, when the means of retaining that were military and economic. But the rise of universal suffrage and the idea of using it as a means of restorative justice gave new means to regain it and retain it. It did so at a time when external events, WW1/WW2 were forging a genuine, popular British political identity more and more. Nothing really changed here to divert these two conflicting trajectories. The separatists became more urgent about, and more adept at fighting their cause via the ballot box as fewer and fewer Scots felt drawn to real independence. The SNP policy shift that disguised the losing trajectory to an extent was Sillars’ Independence in Europe.

In the end, a changing Europe became the means of refusing settlement and reconciling conflicting trajectories within the UK itself . The idea that a major material change such as EU membership could invalidate the 2014 referendum result was grasped by the SNP, and pro EU forces encouraged this as leverage against Brexit. UK EU loyalty as a whole then became emblematic in the SNP. In a very real sense, the SNP are no longer just about Scotland, or even just about the UK. They are about the EU.

So the position we are in today is one of Scotland torn in two halves, but with a Yes voting half that is highly unstable because it cannot agree on what it is saying Yes to. Scotland’s most fanatical pro EU and anti EU factions are now contained within that Yes. Once the outer pressure of a UK government is removed they will descend into vicious, internecine conflict, and this will be a proxy conflict for the larger actors outwith Scotland. There will be no Denmarks anywhere here for a long time.

What is the answer to this bleak mess? In my view the SNP needs to be damaged, badly beyond repair before Scots vote en masse for them again, and my suggestion would be to use their own doctrine of ‘material change’ to do this. Ordinary people actually respond to ideas more than political parties often understand, and the SNP need to be hit at this fundamental level. Without committing to a second referendum the UK government could still state that a condition of one would be agreement in principle to a third vote prior to EU accession. In the event of this material change, the choice of actual independence disappearing within, say 5 years of being voted for , a frank choice between two unions ought to be offered. This will act on the SNP like a depth charge. The huge damage will not be evident on the surface immediately, but it will surface with irreparable damage. If the SNP agree in principle when this is aired, they will anger the EU revanchists within them who will fear EU membership is not quite in the bag. If they don’t agree, their core support, the real Scottish sovereigntists, will threaten a split. If they don’t answer the question, either of these sides will fill in the blank themselves. There is no way they can maintain unity with the simple asking of this question.

In concert with this we also need to replace what is broken with something that is not. We need a new kind of British unionism. The half of Scotland that cried genuine tears in 2014 and is now willing to stand with the rest of the UK outside the EU regardless of how it voted in 2016, is something stronger to build on for the future than an independence movement that keeps grasping at everything and anything, even it’s complete inversion towards a new EU unionism and widespread chaos, to refuse loss.