It dug coal, milled steel, built ships; it put the phone in your hall, brought you electricity that lit your home and the gas you cooked with. If you were a miner in Fife, you were part of a community of shared interest and identity with miners in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire and South Wales. The same was true if you worked in steel or ship-building. The great nationalised industries of post-war Britain were part of a commonly-held pan-British enterprise - socio-economic bedrocks of a shared Britishness.
But much of that inheritance was swept away in the s and 90s and with every year that passes the memory of it recedes into the middle distance of collective memory. When I came back to Scotland to report on the independence referendum campaign, I found to my surprise that many of my old friends though by no means all had decided to vote Yes to independence, though often they insisted that this did not make them "Nationalists" with a capital N.
When I asked them why, they offered many reasons and, almost always, high on this list was what they perceived to have happened to politics in England: their sense of shared enterprise, of being part of a community of interest and values shared with the rest of the UK, had been eroded.
I came to believe that what had happened in Scotland in the 30 years I'd been away was not so much a rise of Scottish national identity, but a falling away of much of what it had meant to be British, as well as Scottish. It is also consistent across socio-economic classes; and there's little difference between those who voted Leave and those who voted Remain in the EU referendum. And it falls to just over half for those aged 49 and under. Contrast that with Wales, which went through a similar socio-economic shock with the loss of its heavy industry.
But what distinguishes Scotland and Wales most noticeably from their neighbours in England is this: that in England there is a strong nostalgic sense of something lost, a belief that the country is not as good as it used to be.
That is the prevailing view in England; not so in Scotland or Wales, where significantly more people said they believed their country's best days lie ahead of it, rather than behind it.
Mary was abducted by the Earl of Bothwell, and then married him in May that year. But she couldn't last long, and abdicated later in the year, in favour of her son, James. Eventually, Mary fled south to try to get help from her cousin, Elizabeth. Elizabeth seized the opportunity and had Mary arrested. After a personal reign of just six years, Mary was to spend the next twenty years under house arrest in England, before finally being beheaded in When Elizabeth died, childless and without having named a successor, this left the English parliament in a rather unfortunate position, since the closest person in line for her throne was James -- the son of Elizabeth's cousin Mary, and the King of Scotland, whose personal reign had begun in The English invited James to take the throne of England, and so saw the Union of the Crowns ; a single monarch over both England and Scotland, still two separate countries.
Notice, by the way, that this is after Elizabeth I. As far as Scotland, or Britain, is concerned, she's only Elizabeth I. This caused a certain amount of upset in Scotland when she came to the throne. Things get a little confusing after that, since James' son, Charles I, had a little trouble with a guy called Oliver Cromwell. Confusion and dispute during the Restoration--and in particular the English parliament's offer of the throne to William of Orange in order to secure a Protestant succession--led to a succession of Jacobite claimants to the throne, living in France, from where two Scottish rebellions were subsequently to be organised in and However, in , during the reign of William's daughter, Anne, legislation was finally enacted to unify the kingdoms.
And so, a little over years after the Union of the Crowns, the two countries saw the Union of the Parliaments in , and became member nations of a United Kingdom of Great Britain. In , the southern region became the sovereign nation of Ireland or the Republic of Ireland. It joined the European Union in and is still a member nation today. This took the form of activism, violent conflict and the formation of political parties that emphasized independence from the U.
In December , discussions about Scottish independence and Irish reunification increased after an election ensured Conservative party leader Boris Johnson would remain U. Brexit was much less popular in Scotland and Northern Ireland than in England. One way for both states to remain in the E. Scotland already held an independence referendum in , in which it voted by 55 percent to remain in the U.
But a lot has changed since then. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History.
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