A Union of Hearts? Republican Social Democracy and Scottish Nationalism

A union of hearts? Republican social democracy and Scottish nationalism 1 Ben Jackson Faculty of History & University College, Oxford University [email protected] Published in H. Schattle and J. Nuttall (eds.), Making Social Democrats: Citizens, Mindsets, Realities: Essays for David Marquand (Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 161-73 The movement of opinion in favour of Scottish nationalism registered by the 2014 Scottish independence referendum has catapulted the case for a separate Scottish state to the heart of British political debate. Yet the resulting argument is often an unsatisfactory one, hobbled by the readiness of both sides to impute bad faith to the other and simply to ignore the stronger points put forward by the opposing camp. For the defenders of the Anglo-Scottish Union in particular, a much more in-depth and forensic engagement with the ideas of Scottish nationalism is badly needed. The advocates of Scottish independence have by necessity already spent a long time scrutinising the case for the Union, whatever else might be said about the quality of their political thought. By contrast, many of their opponents have not reckoned with the fact that Scottish nationalist ideas are in fact now highly sophisticated and, crucially, designed to resonate with important beliefs held by the broader British left. These ideas are also too often misunderstood or even caricatured by the critics of Scottish 1 An earlier and much shorter version of this chapter was first published as my contribution to G. Hassan, B. Jackson, A. Ramsay, and D. Torrance, ‘Roundtable on the Scottish independence referendum: What happened and what next?’, Renewal, 23 (2015), pp. 68-71. I am grateful to Jeremy Nuttall and Hans Schattle for their comments on a draft of the chapter. 1 nationalism, who tend to attack it as a more ethnic and nativist tradition than it actually is, with correspondingly diminishing returns in terms of rebutting its key claims. The main aim of this chapter is to consider how far it is possible to distinguish this progressive strand of Scottish nationalist thinking that coalesced in the 1980s and 1990s from the similar discourse of constitutional reform at the British level associated with movements such as Charter 88 and their leading intellectual advocates such as David Marquand, Paul Hirst and Will Hutton. This latter body of opinion was in the 1980s and 1990s generally indifferent or hostile to Scottish nationalism, but it has become harder in recent years to formulate a hard and fast distinction between them. Should those committed to a more democratic and pluralist British constitutional settlement such as David Marquand in fact ‘logically’ favour Scottish independence as part of such wide-ranging reform? Towards a republican social democracy My answer to this question begins with John Mackintosh, the great Scottish Labour MP and advocate for constitutional reform (and also a close colleague and friend of David Marquand). On the threshold of the Donald Dewar Room of the Scottish Parliament, some words from Mackintosh are cut into the stone. They read: ‘People in Scotland want a degree of government for themselves. It is not beyond the wit of man to devise the institutions to meet these demands’ (quoted in Walker, 2013, p. 557). These words were spoken by Mackintosh during the House of Commons debate on the Scotland and Wales Act 1976, and they express the classic case for Scottish devolution espoused by Mackintosh and indeed Donald Dewar himself. Scots, Mackintosh famously argued, have a dual identity, partly Scottish and partly British, and the political institutions that govern Britain should therefore 2 reflect that dual identity by creating a devolved Scottish parliament to operate within the context of the United Kingdom. But we should note that Mackintosh’s notion of dual identity was more complex than this bald summary suggests. Mackintosh’s point was also that at different times one side of Scots’ dual identity assumes greater importance than the other. In the context of the Scottish nationalist surge of the 1970s, Mackintosh observed that the hold of Britishness had been loosened first by the change in Britain’s status in the world after 1945 and then by the poor performance of the British economy and government in the late 1960s and 1970s. This left many Scots feeling that the Scottish pole of their dual identity offered a more satisfactory expression of national pride than the British one. Ultimately, Mackintosh argued that a successful British response to the rise of Scottish nationalism would require not just devolution to Scotland but also a period of successful British government, one that would give Scots the feeling that Britain was, as he put it, ‘a successful, worthwhile country to belong to for those who do have other places where they can go and other traditions and titles to which they can turn’ (Mackintosh, 1974; see also Mackintosh, 1982). I think there is still something to be said for this as a reply to Scottish nationalism, although I want to reformulate slightly Mackintosh’s prescription. Before I turn to that, however, I will first consider why modern Scottish nationalism presents such a searching challenge to the reforming republican social democracy that authors such as David Marquand delineated during the 1980s and 1990s. Over the last thirty years or so, Marquand, along with colleagues such as the late Paul Hirst and Will Hutton, have eloquently set out the connection between a programme of constitutional reform designed to make the British state more democratic and a programme of economic reform designed to make the British economy more stable and socially just. They have argued that, in order to tackle the pathologies of a short-termist, financialised British capitalism, a more open, 3 pluralist and decentralised British state and political culture will have to be nourished. The creation of a politically durable economic model in which power is shared between labour and capital, and resources pooled more equally between social classes, would in turn require a new British constitution characterised by power-sharing and negotiation rather than classical Westminster majoritarianism (see O’Neill and White, 2014, and Stuart White’s chapter in this book, for valuable discussions of these ideas). Marquand argued in his influential 1988 book, The Unprincipled Society, that British economic underperformance in the post-war period could be traced to the failure of the British state to become an effective developmental state, capable of managing the modernisation of the British economy in the way that other leading nations had undertaken successful state-led economic reform programmes. Marquand connected the absence of a suitably dynamic British state to wider pathologies in British public culture and ultimately to the dominance of an inherited ideology and ethos of classical liberal individualism, which, Marquand continued, should be displaced by a politics of ‘mutual education’ that prioritises a republican commitment to the common good. More precisely, Marquand argued that modern British political and economic culture is organised around an ideal of absolute sovereignty. Politically, he claimed, the absolute legislative sovereignty of parliament is complemented by its economic counterpart, a belief in the untrammelled rights of a managerial or entrepreneurial class to control the firm. Both are hostile to the notion of power-sharing or division, so that federalism and consensus-building seem alien. Yet in Marquand’s view, for Britain to undergo a successful period of economic adjustment and reform – as opposed to the dysfunctional corporatism or Thatcherite shock therapy that had dominated British politics after 1945 – consensus-building and power-sharing was precisely the approach that would have to be taken (Marquand, 1988, pp. 241-2). Indeed, Marquand further remarked that he thought the classical notion of the sovereign European nation state was ‘obsolescent’ 4 because of the need for economic co-operation and decision-making at a supranational level (Marquand, 1988, p. 244). But while some powers would have to be transferred upwards to an international level, it was also necessary to devolve powers downwards ‘to create neocorporatist institutions in the regions’, effectively creating ‘a number of developmental states, region by region’, which would be able to respond with greater flexibility than a centralised state to economic change (Marquand, 1988, p. 243; for Marquand’s later reflections and expansions on these arguments, see Marquand, 1997, especially pp. 25-9). These arguments were an important conceptual breakthrough for the British left, since they postulated a close connection between a revived republican constitutionalism and a fairer and more productive economic settlement. Such ideas were also articulated around the same time as Marquand by Paul Hirst, who sought to resuscitate the pluralism of earlier socialist thinkers such as Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole in a fully-fledged doctrine of ‘associationalism’. Hirst followed Marquand in suggesting that the creation of a new culture of social dialogue and bargaining would be critical in shaping a more dynamic and inclusive model of British capitalism. Such a culture could only be created through wide-ranging constitutional reform designed to abolish single-party rule and untrammelled executive power and inculcate instead new norms of power-sharing and coalition-building. As a starting point, Hirst (and Marquand) had in mind such measures as the introduction of proportional representation, a written constitution with entrenched individual rights, a democratised second chamber, and some form of federalism, although Hirst ultimately advocated a more radical programme of economic democratisation and decentralisation designed to make capitalist institutions more accountable and efficient (Hirst, 1989, pp. 39-81, 197-204; Hirst, 1994, pp. 112-57). Hirst saw the cultivation of local political and economic institutions as critical to reviving British industry, since it was at this local level that the most informed economic and social decision-making could take place. Local government and economic 5 actors would collaborate on service provision, industrial innovation, and the management of new local investment agencies (Hirst, 1989, p. 219). The ideas developed by Marquand and Hirst achieved a significant impact on high political argument when they were synthesised and popularised by Will Hutton in The State We’re In (1995). Hutton foregrounded the European parallels present in the works of Marquand and Hirst, demonstrating that it was something like the West German (or possibly Scandinavian) model of capitalism – with its longer time horizons, integration between industry and finance, and consensual, federalised political culture – that could serve as a practical example of the sort of polity that Britain should aspire to become. Hutton’s book was widely read and debated, and even for a brief period thought to offer an intellectual framework for the incoming policies of Tony Blair’s New Labour government. But, as Hutton himself would have been the first to acknowledge, the intellectual core of the book drew on the connection between democratic and economic reform first established by Marquand: ‘the semi-modern nature of the British state is a fundamental cause of Britain’s economic and social problems’ (Hutton, 1995, pp. xi-xii; for his debt to Marquand, see Hutton, 2000, pp. 59-60). In Britain, Hutton argued, ‘parliament and the firm are sovereign; individuals are subjects and workers. They have no formal stake in the society and economy of which they are alleged to be part’ (Hutton, 1995, p. 287). Hutton therefore proposed a shift towards a republican political and economic settlement of the sort adumbrated by Marquand and Hirst a few years earlier. It is significant that Marquand, Hirst and Hutton all played leading roles in Charter 88, the pressure group that campaigned for constitutional reform in Britain during the run-up to Labour’s return to office in 1997 (Hirst chaired the Charter 88 executive committee, Marquand served as a member of the executive and Hutton on its council). Charter 88 is rightly credited with placing systematic reform of the British constitution back on the 6 political agenda and with winning over a section of the British political elite to the cause of a more democratic polity (see Erdos, 2009). Charter 88’s success in promoting debate about the British constitution meant that many of the concrete democratic reforms advocated by figures such as Marquand achieved much greater attention than would otherwise have been the case. However, Charter 88’s energies were, for understandable reasons, chiefly directed at the reform of the central British state. The question of the relationship between the nations and regions of the United Kingdom was given less attention – although the example of the Scottish Constitutional Convention and the wider debate over Scottish devolution was undoubtedly a powerful influence on Charter 88’s work. The Charter itself referred to Scotland as being ‘governed like a province from Whitehall’ and demanded that any new constitutional settlement should ‘guarantee an equitable distribution of power between local, regional and national government’ (reprinted in Facey, Rigby and Runswick, 2008, pp. 316, 319). The phrasing here was vague, although it seems clear that it was generally understood to entail a commitment to devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the creation of a much more robust – possibly federal – decentralisation of power throughout the United Kingdom. At any rate, the possibility that Scottish independence might be one desirable outcome of such a process was given short shrift by key figures within the organisation and Scottish nationalists were not generally included within the parameters of the imagined progressive alliance of Labour and the Liberal Democrats that was thought to be the most plausible political vehicle for the realisation of Charter 88’s goals (although this was also because the SNP chose to absent itself from the Scottish Constitutional Convention, thus maintaining a hostile stance towards devolutionary proposals). From the perspective of post2014 political developments, both of these assumptions now look less easily defensible than they did in the 1990s. 7 The Scottish nationalist challenge At one level the challenge that is posed to a British republican social democracy by the rise of Scottish nationalism is simply to question the assumption that the appropriate territorial unit for this sort of political project is Britain. But it also runs deeper than that, because the claim of the most articulate exponents of Scottish independence is in essence that, if we take the case made by thinkers such as Marquand, Hutton and Hirst seriously, then we ought in fact to support the dissolution of the Anglo-Scottish Union. How exactly do Scottish nationalists seek to recruit such leading figures of the British left to the ranks of the SNP? They do so by drawing on two strands of argument that are indebted to the constitutional reform discourse of the 1980s and 1990s (for a more detailed analysis of the political ideas of Scottish nationalism, on which the following account draws, see Jackson, 2014). First, the Scottish nationalist critique of the British state is broadly similar to the one in, say, The Unprincipled Society, The State We’re In, or the discourse of Charter 88. The British state is depicted as in essence pre-democratic and imperial, the product of an idiosyncratic historical path that thwarted a thorough-going bourgeois democratic revolution. Britain is thus an antiquated relic, dominated by the interests of the City of London, and unreformable except by a radical constitutional break, in this case the secession of Scotland. The intellectual provenance of the version of these arguments articulated by Scottish nationalists is more directly indebted to New Left thinkers such as Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson than to Marquand or Hutton, but they ultimately take roughly the same shape (and in any case the latter were to some extent also directly and indirectly influenced by the former’s pioneering analysis). Anderson and Nairn famously argued that Britain’s unique historical trajectory was determined by the capacity of the aristocracy and the middle class to form a social alliance that staved off a bourgeois revolution, excluding the working class 8 from significant political power. This alliance was cemented by the rise of the British empire and the creation of what became an imperial British state. The British state of the late twentieth century was thus, on this account, the creature of a long and inescapable history of aristocratic power politics, empire, and ultimately post-imperial economic stagnation (Anderson 1964; Nairn 1964a; Nairn 1964b). These ‘Anderson-Nairn theses’, as they were later dubbed, formed a set of arguments about the nature of Britain that were subsequently very influential on Scottish nationalist thought and which arrive at a diagnosis of Britain as fundamentally undemocratic that has many affinities with the analysis sponsored by Marquand and his colleagues in Charter 88. Indeed, Anthony Barnett, the first Director of Charter 88, was himself a former member of the Editorial Committee of Perry Anderson’s New Left Review and a close colleague of Nairn’s (see for example Nairn’s warm tribute to Barnett in Nairn, 2000, p. ix). The key difference between the Scottish nationalist analysis of Britain and its counterpart in the writings of Marquand, Hirst and Hutton is the more pessimistic conclusions of the former, namely the Scottish nationalist view is that the regressive character of the contemporary British state is so tied to specifically English hierarchies and inequalities that it won’t be possible for Scotland or England to achieve a more democratic and egalitarian settlement while still part of the same political union (see Nairn, 1977, for the most influential statement along these lines). For the advocates of Scottish independence, a developmental state and economy can only be created separately first by Scotland and then subsequently by the rest of the UK, which will, so the argument goes, have been shocked by the secession of Scotland into a fundamental constitutional and economic reappraisal. Second, the Scottish nationalist understanding of the concept of sovereignty is, like that of Marquand and Hirst, a pluralist one. Scottish nationalists have learned over the years that a claim for undivided Scottish sovereignty is not credible or convincing as an account of 9 what Scottish independence would look like. Rather than making a claim for Scottish autarchy, Scottish nationalists have elaborated a sophisticated account of how an independent Scotland could simultaneously enjoy self-determination in certain respects but in other respects share institutions, laws, and society with foreign nations. Contemporary Scottish nationalism has therefore been deeply influenced by a pluralist view that envisages a diffusion of power across different levels of government and society. For Scottish nationalists, this approach to sovereignty was developed most fully in the writings of the late Neil MacCormick, the legal theorist and sometime SNP MEP (1999-2004), who advanced the case for what he called the ‘post-sovereign state’. MacCormick observed that his own ‘diffusionist’ theories pointed back towards earlier ideas about associational autonomy associated with figures such as the German jurist and historian Otto von Gierke and the French jurist and sociologist Maurice Hauriou, who had rejected the ‘undue pretensions of the state to total mastery of a territory’ and were concerned about ‘the independence and vitality of the manifold communities, guilds, associations, and corporations to be found in civil society’ (MacCormick, 1999, p. 77). MacCormick argued that European integration had replaced the absolute sovereignty previously exercised by EU member states with a more pluralistic arrangement in which new rules bind together these states at the European level, removing certain of the powers previously exercised nationally. At the same time, the doctrine of subsidiarity – that decisions should be taken at the lowest possible level – mandated that powers should also be decentralised from the state towards regional authorities or even to newly-created national institutions that break away from existing large multinational states. On MacCormick’s account, the demise of the traditional model of absolute state sovereignty invites Scotland to participate in a new era in which Scottish institutions can take over some important powers previously held at Westminster, while in other domains 10 simultaneously remaining subject to institutions at a European and perhaps even British level (MacCormick 1999, pp. 137-56). In some respects MacCormick’s analysis left tantalisingly indeterminate how far it would indeed be desirable on these grounds for Scotland to secure independence rather than some form of advanced home rule (Walker, 2012, pp. 163-90). But MacCormick’s case was ultimately that a British federalism, because of the disproportionate size of England, could never work, and that asymmetric devolution to Scotland along the lines undertaken in 1999 would ultimately prove to be an unstable settlement, since it would expose the anomalous role of Scottish MPs in determining public policy in England but not in Scotland. Even were England to be divided into regional assemblies, MacCormick noted, this would not tackle the central difficulty of the legislative powers held by the Scottish parliament. It seemed to MacCormick highly unlikely that English law-making powers of the kind exercised in Edinburgh would or could be split between different English regions (for example by splitting up the English NHS into regional units). A similar, although more sovereigntist, argument about the instability of devolution was also made by Tom Nairn in 1997. Nairn predicted that once Scottish popular sovereignty was given an institutional form in the Scottish Parliament it would inevitably conflict with the parliamentary sovereignty of the British state. Nairn perceptively noted that the key fact about the new Scottish Parliament would not be the precise policy domains or fiscal powers it had, but rather its embodiment for the first time of a distinctively Scottish democratic will which would, inevitably, be able to address ‘whether to try to alter the conditions of UK affiliation’ (Nairn, 1997, p. 223). While conversant with the increasing salience of debates about federal and ‘post-sovereign’ powersharing arrangements between states and regions, Nairn’s view was that in the British case there was simply no chance of such a comprehensive recasting of British constitutional practice. 11 Both MacCormick and Nairn therefore argued that the most promising solution to this impasse was an independent Scotland as a member of the EU, complemented by an intergovernmental Council of the Isles to deal with issues specific to the British archipelago. With these arrangements in place, Scotland would secure a relationship of equality with the rest of the UK, and other European states, as an equal member of the European confederation (MacCormick, 1999, pp. 61-2, 193-9; Nairn, 2000, pp. 223-78). After the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, this argument is clearly in need of significant renovation. Indeed, it may even have been rendered irrelevant to current policy debates, since it seems that a more fundamental and irrevocable choice between Scotland’s membership of either a European or a British union will now be pressed on Scottish nationalists. But if that is the case, then the republican social democracy associated with David Marquand also faces serious challenges, since this is also ultimately grounded on a vision of shared sovereignty between Brussels, London and Edinburgh (Marquand, 2011). The difference between the two once again hinges on the more pessimistic assessment of the prospects for British federalism on the part of Scottish nationalists. Responding to the challenge The extent to which Scottish nationalism has assimilated both the democratic critique of the British state and a pluralist conception of sovereignty is testament to the sophistication of the current campaign for Scottish independence and the skill with which Scottish nationalists have managed to disorientate their unionist opponents. The argument for Scottish nationalism is now in short that it is the logical culmination of the British left’s arguments about constitutional and economic reform developed over the last three decades. 12 How might those sympathetic to the creation of a more federal British settlement respond to this colonisation of their arguments? One pragmatic view, which tempted a number of English progressives during the 2014 referendum campaign, was simply to concede that, since serious constitutional reform is frozen at the British level and British politics is now dominated by the right, the appropriate response is to wish Scottish nationalists good luck, support Scotland in going its own way, and observe with interest if it can do any better than the rest of the UK in advancing democracy and social justice. This argument has likely gained a number of new adherents in the wake of the 2016 EU referendum. A second response, also espoused by some figures on the left in England, would go even further and argue that in fact Scottish independence is not simply the least worst option available now, but rather a positively desirable outcome of the agenda first set out in the 1980s and 1990s by Charter 88 and other constitutional reformers. This line of argument accepts that the Scottish nationalist use of the ideas I have discussed is in fact correct. This was not the view initially taken by the advocates of constitutional change when Labour took office in 1997. Anthony Barnett, for example, replied to Tom Nairn’s scepticism with an optimistic view of the radical constitutional possibilities opened up by the Blair government, although Barnett also stressed that in the absence of any wider rethinking of British constitutional structures Scottish independence would inevitably command greater credibility (Barnett, 1997a; Barnett, 1997b, pp. 186-93). A third option, of course, would be to resist the Scottish nationalist conclusion by suggesting that a more federal and decentralised British state remains, in spite of the scepticism of Neil MacCormick and Tom Nairn, an achievable and desirable political goal. And this takes us back to John Mackintosh. I noted earlier that Mackintosh’s insight was that it was not enough simply to grant devolution to Scotland; there also had to be something more positive and attractive to say about what Britain stood for, an attempt by unionists to 13 activate and amplify the British element of Scots’ dual nationality. If such a strategy to avert Scottish independence is to succeed, then part of such an effort to revivify Britishness will indeed be constitutional; it will rest on creating a more democratic and inclusive British political system, featuring proportional representation, a new second chamber, and so on. It will also face the testing task of resolving the difficult imbalances and anomalies identified by Neil MacCormick as severe obstacles to the creation of a successful British federalism. But I would add that this strategy cannot only be constitutional; it also has to encompass political economy. Just as, say, The Unprincipled Society spelled out the connections between constitutional reform and the reform of Britain’s political economy, the revised case for Britain must also have a socio-economic dimension. This point has some similarities to the case for the Anglo-Scottish union articulated by Gordon Brown during the 2014 independence referendum campaign (see Jackson, 2016 for a fuller discussion of this point, which the following account draws on). While in office between 1997 and 2010, Brown perceived that Labour’s failure to create a new British civic patriotism to accompany Labour’s constitutional reforms was a problem, but he failed to articulate an account of Britishness capable of achieving any substantial political or social resonance, instead invoking an impressionistic collection of historical episodes and political values that were collectively said to add up to a progressive British tradition. Until the Scottish independence referendum, few within the Labour Party regarded this failure as a serious problem. Brown’s own attention to Britishness tended to be dismissed by allies and opponents alike as chiefly motivated by his need to present a Scottish MP as a legitimate British Prime Minister. But during the hectic spring and summer of 2014, Labour’s profound inarticulacy on British identity was clearly revealed. It proved surprisingly difficult for leading Labour figures to give a compelling positive account of British identity to go alongside the ferocious economic critique of Scottish independence. The main exception to 14 this was Gordon Brown, who succeeded in refining his ideas about Britishness to the point where they at last had a significant political cutting edge. Brown’s concept of the union as about risk-sharing and resource-pooling between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland was a fertile one, which offered a distinctively social democratic characterisation of British institutions and traditions. The best argument for the Union, Brown said, was that it had provided the framework for the creation of ‘social and economic rights that the citizens of the four nations have built up and share in common throughout the United Kingdom’, including social insurance, the NHS, and pensions. In the United Kingdom, ‘it is not nationality that decides who benefits, it is need’ (Brown, 2014, pp. 231, 227). The weakness of Brown’s analysis, as Scottish nationalists pointed out, is that postThatcher the ‘pooling and sharing’ case for British institutions is harder to make. After rapid deindustrialisation, growing economic inequality, a period of relatively right-wing Labour government, and then Westminster-sponsored austerity, the argument that Britain stands for egalitarian collective action unsurprisingly proved difficult to land with some long-standing Scottish Labour voters. While Brown could point to a number of powerful individual examples of British risk-sharing and resource-pooling that nonetheless persisted even after the Thatcher years, it was undeniable that levels of inequality and poverty remain unacceptably high in Britain in the twenty-first century, even though New Labour in office had made a creditable and effective start on improving them. Campaigners for the AngloScottish Union were therefore left with the uninspiring line of argument that the fiscal and monetary constraints on an independent Scotland would leave a new Scottish state with few options to improve on Britain’s dismal record and were indeed likely to make matters worse. This argument was just about politically effective in 2014, but it is hard to see it recreating among Scots the sort of stronger positive affinity for Britain that John Mackintosh recommended as necessary for ultimately diminishing support for Scottish independence. 15 This places left-wing defenders of the Anglo-Scottish Union in a bind that can probably only be broken by a successful period of left-of-centre government in Westminster. The best way to meet the arguments for Scottish independence is to show through concrete and effective policy action that a new, pluralist British state can also be a state in which poverty, economic insecurity, and material inequality will all be lower than under our present constitutional order. So although there has been a lot of discussion about how to renew the case for the Union in the wake of the 2014 independence referendum (and some limited subsequent action), in fact one important way of capturing the initiative from Scottish nationalism would be for a government in Westminster to undertake serious reform to Britain’s economic model. Until such a period of (presumably) non-Conservative government can be engineered, the dual identity of many Scots will continue listing to the Scottish side, and the question of Scottish independence will accordingly be a pressing issue of debate for years to come. References Anderson, P. (1964) ‘Origins of the present crisis’, New Left Review, No. 23, pp. 26-53. Barnett, A. (1997a) ‘Constitutional Possibilities’, Political Quarterly, 68 (4), pp. 361-71. Barnett, A. (1997b) This Time: Our Constitutional Revolution, London, Vintage. Brown, G. (2014) My Scotland, Our Britain: A Future Worth Sharing, London, Simon & Schuster. 16 Erdos, D. 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