Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Kingdom to Come: Thoughts on the Union before and after the Scottish Independence Referendum
    The Kingdom to Come: Thoughts on the Union before and after the Scottish Independence Referendum
    The Kingdom to Come: Thoughts on the Union before and after the Scottish Independence Referendum
    Ebook142 pages2 hours

    The Kingdom to Come: Thoughts on the Union before and after the Scottish Independence Referendum

    By Peter Hennessy

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Despite the “No” vote in the Scottish Independence Referendum of September 2014, the issue of potential Scottish secession from the United Kingdom has likely only just begun. The Kingdom to Come is the first book-length look at the consequences and implications of this momentous event.

    Peter Hennessy discusses the run-up to the Scottish Independence Referendum and its immediate aftermath, as well as the constitutional issues the referendum opened for the entire United Kingdom. This book includes Hennessy’s personal impressions of recent questioning of the Acts of Union that created Great Britain and describes when he, as the top expert on Britain’s unwritten constitution, became an important voice in what might happen next. The Kingdom to Come also offers a valuable examination of the possible agenda for remaking the constitution in both the medium and long term.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHaus Publishing
    Release dateMay 1, 2015
    ISBN9781910376232
    The Kingdom to Come: Thoughts on the Union before and after the Scottish Independence Referendum

    Read more from Peter Hennessy

    Related to The Kingdom to Come

    Related ebooks

    World Politics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Hot Seat

      Apr 15, 2021

      The Hot Seat
      9 min read

    • Article

      Who Rules: Judges Or Parliament?

      Oct 26, 2023

      AMERE SIX MONTHS AGO, almost the entirety of Britain’s legal commentariat welcomed with glee the death of Dominic Raab’s ill-starred British Bill of Rights which, despite its lofty short title, was essentially a tweaked version of the Human Rights Ac

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Ridge Too Far

      Apr 13, 2021

      A Ridge Too Far
      10 min read

    • Article

      No End of Appeasement

      Nov 2, 2022

      Whatever the other consequences, Britain’s policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany has spawned no shortage of literature. Churchill’s authorised biographer Martin Gilbert began his career with The Appeasers, and Churchill’s role opposing first app

      2 min read

    • Article

      War Between Friends

      Sep 2, 2021

      War Between Friends
      4 min read

    • Article

      World-class Snob, First-class Diarist

      Mar 25, 2021

      THE BEST DIARISTS ARE flawed individuals who exist on the fringe of great events and are natural observers and acerbic wits. Snobbery helps too. Think Samuel Pepys, James Boswell, Alan Clark. Henry “Chips” Channon (1897-1958) has long been seen as on

      5 min read

    • Article

      Going to Pieces

      Nov 1, 2021

      Going to Pieces
      3 min read

    • Article

      Fight Things That Really Matter

      Apr 1, 2022

      THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY faculty’s library is called “the Seeley”. It has been in its current, James Stirling-designed building since 1968, and named after the eponymous Sir John (an eminent Victorian) since 1897. You will not be surprised to learn that

      8 min read

    • Article

      A Royal Fogey Reassessed

      Nov 26, 2020

      OVER THE PAST SIX YEARS, Penguin have been publishing their excellent Monarchs series in which a leading historian writes a 30,000-word book on a king or queen from Athelstan to Elizabeth II. There are now 45 of them (including David Horspool on Oliv

      4 min read

    • Article

      Cromwell, Warts And All

      Feb 20, 2022

      Cromwell, Warts And All
      5 min read

    • Article

      Rugger’s Buggered

      Jul 28, 2022

      DOWN THE YEARS Twickenham’s attraction has altered. The last time I went (and the time before and the time before that) the best of the day was the car park picnic. Picnics in drizzly car parks ought to be miserable. However, should the dishes have b

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Country That Went To The Wall

      Apr 27, 2023

      I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH TO CATCH the twilight years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). As a Financial Times correspondent, based in Bonn, I made many trips to East Germany in 1988 and even more in 1989 as the Wall crumbled. It was easy, then, to pit

      4 min read

    • Article

      Resistance Assassins

      Mar 19, 2020

      Resistance Assassins
      4 min read

    • Article

      Australia First

      Sep 30, 2021

      AFTER THE PEOPLE HAD SPOKEN, much of the opposition to Brexit was process-based. This opposition could take legal form — thus the Supreme Court deciding it knew when Parliament was prorogued or not. But mostly it was rhetorical and moral: the wrong t

      3 min read

    • Article

      The First Post-modern War

      Apr 1, 2022

      The First Post-modern War
      5 min read

    • Article

      Confessions Of A MoneyMan

      Feb 7, 2020

      Confessions Of A MoneyMan
      3 min read

    • Article

      Editor’s Letter

      Jun 17, 2021

      WRITING ABOUT MOANA PASIFIKA’S POTENTIAL inclusion in Super Rugby next year sent me off on a wonderful timing-wasting tangent of picking various Pacific Island XVs. There are so many permutations. Polynesian players who played for the All Blacks; pla

      6 min read

    • Article

      J’accuse: The Case That Never Closes

      May 25, 2023

      WE CAN SPEND ALL OF OUR lives paying for some decisions. In the case of a nation, the process of coming to terms with such decisions and taking responsibility for their consequences is the work of generations, and requires eternal vigilance. This is

      4 min read

    • Article

      Get Hooked

      Jul 7, 2021

      Richard J Evans’s three-volume history – The Coming of the Third Reich(2004),The Third Reich in Power (2005) and The Third Reich at War (2008) – offers a definitive account of the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. The much-acclaimed series explores Hitl

      1 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Kingdom to Come

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Kingdom to Come - Peter Hennessy

      mind

      Introduction: Thoughts from South Ronaldsay: Hope, anxiety and the shadow of Orwell

      I am writing these opening words overlooking Scapa Flow and surrounded by the gentle rim of the Orkney Islands in the last days of July 2014. Exactly a century ago Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, despatched swiftly and secretly what was to become the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet from its Dorset base in Portland to its forward base for a Great Power War, in the waters of this huge natural harbour north of the turbulent Pentland Firth where the North Sea meets the Atlantic.

      In his vivid account in The World Crisis 1911–1915, first published in 1923, Churchill allied a brilliant imagination to a pen as punchy as any Dreadnought:

      We may now picture this great Fleet, with its flotillas and cruisers, steaming slowly out of Portland Harbour, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought …

      If war should come no one would know where to look for the British Fleet. Somewhere in that enormous waste of waters to the north of our islands … shrouded in storms and mists, dwelt this mighty organization.¹

      A hundred years ago the waters before me became the geopolitical centre of the world. From here the mightiest seaborne force the world had ever seen would operate what was confidently, though erroneously, expected to be a war-shortening economic blockade against Imperial Germany. From here the King’s Dreadnoughts and battle cruisers would sail if there was to be, as was also expected, a great day of reckoning with the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet, steaming out with their accompanying flotillas of escorts through the narrow Hoxa Sound between the islands of South Ronaldsay and Flotta – as they later did in May 1916, on their way to the Battle of Jutland off Denmark.

      The serene waters in front of me this calm summer morning inspire hope. No visitor to Orkney would, unless well primed, have any sense of this place’s significance in both the great conflicts of the twentieth century, at least until their cars and coaches took them past old gun emplacements at the entrances to the Flow or carried them across the Churchill Barriers, thrown up in haste after a U-boat crept in and sank the Royal Oak in the opening weeks of World War II. In the depths, too, are thousands of tons of finest Kaiser-commissioned steel, deposited there in June 1919 by a German Admiral ordering a Grand Scuttle of the incarcerated High Seas Fleet.

      For all the calm, the blissful sense of temporary escape, there lurks in my mind a sense of anxiety mingled with hope, as we are less than two months away from a referendum on Scottish Independence which could rupture the United Kingdom I’ve called home since my first conscious memories at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s. The referendum could alter its very configuration for ever.

      In no way could any Brit on Armistice Day 1918 have foreseen the circumstances in which the Union of 1707 might be reversed. The preoccupation then was Ireland. The foundation of the Scottish National Party – through a merger of the National Party of Scotland and the Scottish Party – was 15 years in the future.

      My own individual sense of Scotland began to form in the 1950s. Napoleon liked to remark that if you wished to understand a man or woman, you needed to appreciate the world as it was when they were 20.² In my case it’s earlier than that. It’s between the ages of six and ten – Coronation Year 1953 and my first visit to Scotland in 1957.

      It’s hard to recapture the moods and mentalities of early post-war Britain or even the party system in which they were played out, despite the main political groupings carrying much the same labels as they do today, though the Tories were firmly known as the Conservative and Unionist Party and the Liberals had yet to acquire the word ‘Democrat’. There was no equivalent of the United Kingdom Independence Party, though there was, on the rightist fringe, the League of Empire Loyalists, who wanted to remain territorially intimate with large parts of the world rather than wishing, like UKIP, for the opposite.

      Family conversations often began in those days with either ‘before the war’, ‘during the war’, or ‘after the war’. The Second World War was the pivot, the shared experience above all others, the creator of the emotional geography of the nation and its politics – and that nation was very definitely a united kingdom. We had stood firm alone on our own after the fall of France in June 1940 until Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941. With our allies, we had eventually prevailed in 1945 as Brits. It was the last time we acted powerfully and collectively together as a union over a sustained period. The fleeting moments we have done so since – the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953; the Falklands War of 1982; the London Olympics of 2012 – have served, particularly over the last 30 years, only to emphasise the leaching away of the sentiments derived from shared experiences over the decades since 1939–45.

      One mustn’t overdo what that remarkable social historian, Peter Laslett, called ‘The World We Have Lost’.³ Though we may not always feel it, there is much more of that early post-war world that runs through to today than one might think. It is not a matter of the occasional faint pulsar getting through from a long-faded political, economic and social solar system. The National Health Service remains the emblem of that era – of institutionalised altruism, pooled risk and a level of social solidarity. Right from the start, in July 1948, it has been a bond and a talisman of shared citizenship, with its services taxpayer-funded and free at the point of delivery. And the NHS was a UK-wide phenomenon. Its bonding effect was just as powerful in Scotland as it was in England. Above all, it was a national service regionally and locally

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1