The Partnership That Never Was

by Michael Dee

IT’S A CRACKING question, the one you see doing the rounds online: “How can they possibly call it a voluntary union when there is no discernible route to leave it?” It has the brilliant, satisfying clang of common sense. If you join a club, you should be able to leave it. If you enter a partnership, you should be able to dissolve it. Simple, logical, valid. And yet, while it’s an excellent question, it rather misses the real, altogether more grubby point. The reason there’s no exit door isn’t some constitutional oversight; it’s because we were never in a partnership to begin with.

The Official Story

Let’s start with the official story, the one trotted out by Whitehall and, bafflingly, even echoed by our own government in Holyrood. It’s the tale of Scotland “voluntarily entering the union with England as a partner and not as a dependency.” This line comes from the British government’s own Royal Commission report in the 1950s. Now, pause there. Why, in the middle of a global wave of decolonisation, did they feel the need to specify that Scotland was not a ‘dependency’? The sheer force of the denial is what raises suspicion. The lady, as they say, doth protest too much. They needed to draw a line in the sand for the rest of the world, to distinguish between the colonies they were reluctantly letting go of and the one they were determined to keep, dressed up in the finery of a willing participant.