Scotland’s day of reckoning - Another terrible beauty born?

Tomorrow the people of Scotland will vote on those most powerful and seductive ideas — the freedom to manage their own affairs and the intoxicating prospect of ending a relationship with a once-brutal and dominant neighbour that Scottish nationalists have, for centuries, described as exploitative, limiting, outdated, unwelcome, and a tarnished relic of a kind of Rudyard Kipling imperialism no longer acceptable, in Europe at least.

That something around half of Scots are prepared to break a link that has shaped their society, character, and history — and offered the kind of security a small country can only aspire to — shows how very strongly the idea of national independence, whatever that really means in this globalised 21st century, beats north of the Tweed.

That just as many Scots seem to prefer the devil they know to an untested and unproven future is testimony to the stability and prosperity many of them have enjoyed under Westminster’s rule. Even if the security offered by sterling and European Union membership influences enough Scots to vote to stay within the United Kingdom-accelerated devolution seems inevitable — and from a neutral standpoint it is hard not to think that this outcome represents the best of both worlds. Whatever the decision, a Rubicon has been crossed and bridges burnt to cinders. The ties that bind — or at least bound — England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have been loosened in a way never before contemplated much less seen. There has not been a challenge to the unity of what the BBC once routinely described as the “Home Countries” since we secured, or as some would have it, asserted our independence nearly a century ago.