Britain is Scottish: a truth from history that's still true today

The Herald Scotland

07-06-2025

A couple of examples. James Boswell's diaries for Sunday 21 November 1762 describe his meeting with a fellow Scot Walter Macfarlane who was 'keenly interested in the reigning contests between Scots & English'. Boswell says this of Macfarlane: 'He talked much against the Union. He said we were perfect underlings, that our riches were carried out of the country and that many others were hurt by it.' Switch the date from 1762 to 2025 and some of the language but not much of it, and this is very familiar stuff.
Another example. There's been a bit of a fad of late for books about James VI, focusing mostly on what his sexuality might have been, but I quite enjoyed The Wisest Fool by Steven Veerapen and, as with Boswell, there are striking familiarities with now. In the bookstalls of London and Edinburgh in the early years of James's reign, there were pamphlets explaining why unionism was a wonderful idea and pamphlets explaining why unionism was a terrible idea. There were also Brexit-style arguments over what kind of union Scotland and England should have; was the best idea some kind of loose federation or should the countries go for a much closer, Wales-style deal instead? So ancient, so modern.
On top of all that, there's now a new piece of work that suggests a more surprising historic take on the relationship between Scotland and Britain. It's by the Glasgow University Professor Dauvit Broun and it concludes that medieval Scottish historians and scholars regarded the Scottish kingdom as equivalent to Britain; Britain as fundamentally Scottish in fact. 'Scotland as Britain can be detected quite clearly in histories of the Scottish kingdom written in Latin and read by Scots between the 1380s and 1520s,' says the professor.
Professor Broun says this idea of Britain as fundamentally Scottish will be provocative in today's polarised debates about national identity and I can see what he means. There are some Scots today who think one of the big problems in the debate about national identity is that there are English people who project their sense of nationhood on to Scotland, do not appear to respect the separate Scottish identity, or actually conflate England and Britain. I don't think this happens as much as we think, but when it does, it's irritating.
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However, what makes the idea of the English projecting their sense of nationhood onto Scotland more interesting is Professor Broun's idea that it's happened the other way around as well and there are Scots who conflated Britain and Scotland. The professor quotes John Mair, sometimes called the father of Scottish unionism, and says Mair's vision was essentially of a Scottish kingdom expanded to include England. Mair assumed a Scottish king would come to rule Britain which is indeed what happened in the end.
As we know, the king that did it, James VI and I, was certainly of the Better Together persuasion; 'this kingdom was divided into seven little kingdoms,' he said in an address to parliament, 'Is it not the stronger by their union?' But a Scottish king projecting his sense of self, and nation, and union, onto England wasn't the beginning or the end of it. Indeed, the extent of the Scottish projection or influence on England and the UK makes me wonder how surprising and provocative the idea of Britain as Scottish really is. It seems to me that it still underlines the way the United Kingdom works. Britain was Scottish and still is.
Obviously, England remains the dominant partner constitutionally and politically, but even politically Britain has often been Scottish. One of the history books I've opened recently is The Wild Men by my former colleague David Torrance, which relates how Scottish the first Labour government was, but it's continued ever since with Scots often at the top of British government, and not always when it's Labour in power. The history books also tell us it was bigger than that: much of the British Empire is covered with Scottish fingerprints so not only is Britain Scottish, the British Empire is Scottish too.
James VI and I (Image: Free)
The signs of Scotland as Britain are more permanent as well; they're built in stone. I did a walk round Glasgow recently with Colin Drysdale, the author of Glasgow Uncovered, a book on the city's architecture, and many of the architects we talked about went way beyond Scotland and had a massive influence on England and Britain too. John James Burnet, for example, designed Glasgow's Charing Cross Mansions and lots of other fine buildings in the city. But he also worked on British icons like Selfridges and the British Museum. Visit London and look at the buildings and a lot of what you're looking at is Scottish.
The projection of Scotland onto Britain is everywhere else as well, once you start to look for it. Business and trade (the vast majority of our exports are to England). Population: there are more Scots living in England than there are in any single Scottish city. And music, culture, the arts, food, drink, technology. And Lulu of course.
All of it, as well as our influence on politics and government – and a Royal family that's arguably more Scottish than English – says to me that the idea of Britain as Scotland is not surprising at all. Professor Broun says it raises fundamental questions about the nature of British identity, so let me suggest an answer. The concept of Britain as Scottish isn't a distant idea in the minds of medieval scholars. It still exists, it's still real, and it's still proving how interconnected we are. And of course, it raises the eternal question, the one that bugged us then and bugs us now: how much would it cost to unravel it all?