The breakup of Britain would be a hammer blow for the West  

The most important question in UK politics, bigger even than addressing the economic fallout from Covid-19 or Brexit, is an existential one. Will Britain continue to exist as a political

unit or will it, like so many nations before, become something you read about in history books? Nations tend to look resolute and secure until suddenly they’re not. The Soviet Union and

Yugoslavia, seemingly fixed players in world affairs just a few decades back, exist now as memories. Britain, unless we’re prepared to fight for it, could be on its way to joining them.

You need only glance at the polls to see how late the hour is getting. A Panelbase survey released last month found that 54 per cent of Scots favour breaking from the UK, a figure that

increases significantly as you move down the age groups. The same poll placed the SNP on track for an increased majority at the May 2021 Scottish Parliament elections, winning 74 seats

versus 46 for the three main unionist parties combined (with the pro-separation Greens grabbing another nine).

The UK Government says it will refuse to sanction a second referendum — it does have a point. Senior SNP figures, including Nicola Sturgeon, repeatedly insisted ahead of the 2014 referendum

that it would be a “once in a generation” vote. Alas the species they had in mind must have been the pigeon. Less than two years after the original poll, the SNP entered the 2016 Scottish

Parliament elections demanding a second vote if there was “clear and sustained evidence” they could win it. Quite clearly, if allowed, they will keep rolling the dice. At this point,

naturally, the dice will have spoken and nobody will be allowed to question its decision.

But a durable unionism must be based on more than pointing back to 2014 and smirking. Denying a second referendum, as a tactic, will only have democratic legitimacy for so long. Longer-term

we must resolve the issue by winning the argument. Because Britain, I’ve come to believe, matters a good deal more than most people either inside or outside the country realise.

At this point I could wax lyrically about the shared history and culture of the four British nations, or ask what it says about our species if two peoples as objectively similar as the

English and Scots can’t share a state. Alternatively I could weaponise spreadsheets and talk about the economic benefits of the union, or question how independent a country can be if, as in

2014, the SNP plans to have their monetary policy dictated by what would become a foreign power. All of that would be valid, indeed necessary, but also insufficient. The man reason I think

British unity matters, hard though it is to craft into a campaign slogan, is geopolitical.

The story of world politics over the past decade has been the realisation, first gradual but now increasingly sudden, that the era of barely contested liberal-democratic hegemony is ending.

The spectacular rise of China, which since 1979 has been doubling its GDP roughly every eight years, has torpedoed the notion that economic competence and political freedoms are

intrinsically linked. Ironically the global Covid-19 crisis, caused in part by Beijing’s initial mismanagement, looks set to intensify this trend. The success of China’s ruthless, even

brutal, policy of suppression means the country is one of only a handful in the world projected to see its total economy grow this year.

China’s authoritarian state-capitalist model, which is being adopted at least in part by a number of other countries, poses the first serious ideological challenge to western liberal

democracy since the end of the Cold War. Indeed it may well turn out to be the greater challenge because, unlike the USSR, Beijing hasn’t insisted on chaining itself to a barely functional

economic system.

Already liberal democracy is losing its grip on nations such as Turkey and Hungary, as authoritarian nationalism surges from Brazil to the Philippines. Even in its North American and West

European heartlands liberal democracy is facing challenges. The American president, a man who has spoken about how he “fell in love” with one of the world’s most brutal dictators, is

currently refusing to say whether he will concede if defeated in the November election. Of the major states of western Europe, only the UK and Portugal lack functional and electorally

significant parties of the far-right.

When debating whether a nation deserves to survive we should think in terms of decades or centuries, not electoral cycles, which brings us to the ongoing technological revolution. Advances

in artificial intelligence, in particular, look set to transform the human experience well within this century. As AI matches, or surpasses, human capabilities in a growing number of areas

the opportunities for authoritarian regimes are immense. Currently even the most hated dictatorships require the acquiescence of a significant minority of the population to survive, though

this may only be through fear. Radical improvements in AI have the potential to break this connection. In China, with its social credit system and stated desire to achieve global AI

supremacy by 2030, we can see a nascent techno-authoritarian state.

You may very well be wondering, seeing as I’m clearly a few lines from rambling about killer robots, what all this has to do with the British union. The answer is that if, like me, you

expect liberal democracy to face novel and potentially unprecedented challenges over the next half century, the free world needs all its strongest players on the field. Britain, with its

long democratic tradition and still potent military and intelligence capabilities, is undoubtably one of those players.

Our rivals know this — the Kremlin-funded news channel “RT” isn’t giving Alex Salmond a show out of charity. Truthfully, many of the western nations, including some quite large ones,

maintain skeleton militaries. The regional stability they enjoy is provided by the decency of others; primarily the United States but also the likes of Britain and France. Kick out the main

pillars of the liberal-democratic world, as the disintegration of Britain would help to do, and you may be surprised by how much else falls away.

Scottish nationalism, if we’re being generous, is an ideology that had some validity in the heady days of western hegemony between 1991 and some point in the mid-2010s. But that golden age,

during which the collapse of a major non-US western power would have been containable, is over.

This isn’t an argument about British nationalism or patriotism. I frankly don’t care whether you see the union jack as a symbol of pride or the butcher’s apron. Rather, it’s the realisation

that, in an increasingly contested world, the fall of a key liberal-democratic power would only aid the forces of tyranny.

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