Editorial: How to unite the kingdom

Is this the last summer of the United Kingdom? In three months’ time, the UK may surrender half its territory, with not even a whimper. It would be too generous to credit the Better Together campaign, alternately complacent and tentative, with even that level of decibels; even its name captures its diffidence (what was wrong with “Best Together”?). The television news will airbrush Scotland out of the nightly weather charts, as it comically now does for the Republic of Ireland. And the UK will finally have found a way to make real to the world—and itself—its shrunken influence and power.

Perhaps that is part of the reason for the quiet assent south of the border, not just to the referendum but to the lack of campaigning for the Union. If so, it perhaps also springs from a likeable national trait: a lack of grandiosity or of claiming more than is fair. Or perhaps it is simple lack of interest, a shrug of indifference—if our friends in the north want to go their own way, then let them.

Even so, it conveys a baffling passivity about the outcome. In agreeing to the referendum, David Cameron was right that the pressure for independence was not going to go away. But he was wrong to assume that the case for staying united was so clear that it did not need to be made at all. And then, the ambiguity of his own party strangled any clear message: torn between the humiliation of presiding over the dissolution of the union on one hand, and on the other, the unspoken, siren lure of the natural Conservative majority in Westminster that would follow.

What should the government have said—and what should it say in the next three months? That there is a way to rewrite how the UK runs itself that does not amount to granting full independence to its constituent parts—by constructing a more federal system to link them together. This is the case that David Marquand, historian and former Labour MP, makes here (p24). It would be a misshapen federal system, as he acknowledges, with the English giant sitting amidst the far less populous Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But a nation pragmatic enough to run itself for so long under its unique constitutional arrangements could do that, if it wanted.

And if it cared. There is a strong case for keeping the Union together, making the offer to the regions that David Marquand has made. But it needed from the start to have been driven by more passion—and have aimed to stir up more anger, fear and desire to keep the UK united—than the Better Together campaign has ever managed. If, after a campaign of strong advocacy, Scotland still voted for independence, there would at least be more reason to say with calm acceptance, “Fine, that’s what they chose.” As it is, if the Yes vote wins, it will look more like carelessness than courage on Cameron’s part—and a lost chance to redraw and improve the Union for the coming centuries.