Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland in Historical,
Sociological and Economic Perspective
This paper examines the structural, historical, and economic contradictions inherent in the United Kingdom’s constitutional settlement as it pertains to Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Drawing on political theory, economic data, historical sociology, and comparative constitutional studies, it argues that the current devolution framework, while representing a partial acknowledgement of national distinctiveness, remains fundamentally inadequate as a vehicle for genuine self-governance. The paper traces the historical processes by which each nation was incorporated into the British state — processes marked by conquest, treaty, and legislative imposition rather than consensual integration — before analysing the economic asymmetries perpetuated by the Westminster-centric fiscal model. It further examines the sociological dimensions of national identity, democratic deficit, and the limits of devolution as currently constituted. The expanded edition includes a detailed analysis of the Irish unity provision of the Good Friday Agreement, and step-by-step constitutional roadmaps for Scottish and Welsh independence, including pathways to European Union membership and monetary integration. The paper concludes that full national independence, whether with bespoke currencies or through integration with the European monetary and trading framework, represents the most coherent pathway toward genuine democratic self-determination for these nations.
The Unwritten Constitution and Its Discontents
The United Kingdom is one of the few liberal democracies in the world to operate without a codified, written constitution. While proponents of this tradition celebrate its flexibility and evolutionary character — what the constitutional historian A.V. Dicey identified as the sovereignty of Parliament as the supreme constitutional principle — critics have long argued that this very flexibility enables the concentration of power in a small political centre, insulated from meaningful legal challenge and structurally biased toward the interests of the dominant national component: England, and within England, London (Dicey, 1885; Bogdanor, 2009).
The implications of this absence are profound. Unlike federal states such as Germany, Canada, or the United States, where sub-national units enjoy constitutionally entrenched rights and guaranteed spheres of autonomous authority, the devolved administrations of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland exist entirely at the pleasure of the Westminster Parliament. The Scotland Act 1998, the Government of Wales Act 1998 (and its successor, the Government of Wales Act 2006), and the Northern Ireland Act 1998 — all products of the Blair government’s constitutional reform programme — created legislatures and executives for these nations, but crucially did not and could not limit Parliament’s ultimate supremacy. Westminster retains the legal right to legislate on any matter, in any part of the UK, at any time, and may amend or abolish devolved institutions without the consent of the populations they serve (McHarg & Mullen, 2015).
This paper contends that the resulting constitutional architecture is not merely technically imperfect but is structurally unjust. It systematically subordinates three distinct nations — each with their own histories, languages, legal traditions, and cultures — to a political system in which their collective voices are chronically and structurally marginalised. The argument proceeds historically, sociologically, and economically, before turning to the question of independence and the monetary and trading frameworks that might best serve newly sovereign nations.
Historical Foundations: Conquest, Treaty, and Coercion. Wales: The First Colonised Nation
Wales holds the distinction of being the first nation formally incorporated into the English state through legislative conquest. The Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542, enacted under Henry VIII, formally annexed Wales to England and imposed English law, English language requirements for public office, and English administrative structures upon a Welsh-speaking population that had maintained distinct political and cultural identities for centuries. The Acts were explicitly assimilationist in intent: the preamble to the 1535 Act spoke of Wales being ‘incorporated, united and annexed to and with this his realm of England’ and of bringing Welsh subjects into ‘perfect order, notice and knowledge of his laws’ (Statute of Rhuddlan, cited in Williams, 1985).
Crucially, this incorporation preceded any meaningful Welsh consent. The Welsh had no representative voice in the English Parliament that legislated their absorption, and the Acts effectively criminalised the use of Welsh in official contexts — a form of cultural suppression that linguists and sociologists have identified as a key mechanism of colonial domination (Gruffudd, 1994). The subsequent centuries saw continued erosion of Welsh distinctiveness through the education system, most notoriously in the form of the ‘Welsh Not’ — a wooden board hung around the necks of children caught speaking Welsh in schools — and through industrial exploitation that extracted vast coal and slate wealth from Welsh soil while concentrating ownership and profits in English and Anglo-Welsh capitalist hands (Jones, 1992).
The nineteenth century saw a partial cultural revival through Nonconformist religion and the eisteddfod tradition, but also the catastrophic coal disaster years that claimed thousands of Welsh lives in poorly regulated pits owned by absentee landlords. The Aberfan disaster of 1966, in which a colliery spoil tip collapsed onto a primary school killing 116 children and 28 adults, became a defining symbol of the relationship between Wales and an indifferent central state: the tribunal report found that the National Coal Board had ignored repeated warnings and that the disaster was ‘a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude by many men charged with tasks for which they were totally unfitted’ (The Aberfan Disaster Report, 1967).
Scotland: Union by Parliamentary Manipulation
Scotland’s incorporation into the United Kingdom followed a markedly different, though no less contested, historical pathway. The Acts of Union of 1707, which merged the parliaments of Scotland and England into the Parliament of Great Britain, have been the subject of sustained historical debate regarding the extent to which they represented genuine political will or elite manipulation facilitated by economic coercion and bribery. The background to the Union included Scotland’s catastrophic Darien Scheme — an ill-fated colonial venture in Panama that ruined a significant portion of Scotland’s merchant class — and the subsequent Alien Act of 1705, by which the English Parliament threatened to treat Scottish subjects as aliens and embargo Scottish goods unless Scotland entered into union negotiations (Whatley, 2001).
Daniel Defoe, employed as an English intelligence agent in Edinburgh during the union negotiations, reported widespread popular opposition to the proposed merger. The Scottish Parliament’s debates were accompanied by popular riots in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and other towns. The historian Christopher Whatley has documented that many Scottish parliamentarians received financial inducements — ‘Scots bought and sold for English gold,’ in Robert Burns’s formulation — to support the union (Whatley, 2001). Whatever the precise weight of these factors, the union was not achieved through a popular referendum or any equivalent mechanism of democratic consent.
The closure of Scotland’s shipyards, steel works, and coal mines during the Thatcher era (1979–1990) was experienced not merely as economic disruption but as political punishment — the imposition of a radically free-market economic ideology on a population that had returned a clear anti-Conservative majority at every election since the 1950s (McCrone, 1992).
Northern Ireland: Partition, Conflict, and the Legacy of Empire
Northern Ireland’s relationship with the British state is the most complex and violent of the three nations considered here. The island of Ireland was subjected to centuries of English and later British colonial rule, marked by plantation policies that created a deeply divided society in which ethnic, religious, and class identities became entangled (Foster, 1988). The Great Famine of 1845–1852, during which approximately one million people died of starvation and a further million emigrated, while British policy maintained food exports from Ireland, constitutes one of the most contested episodes in Anglo-Irish relations (Ó Gráda, 1999).
The partition of Ireland in 1921, which created Northern Ireland as a devolved region of the United Kingdom, was itself a product of political crisis and threatened Ulster Unionist violence rather than any principled constitutional settlement. The resulting entity was a sectarian state in which the Catholic nationalist minority was systematically excluded from political power, economic opportunity, and civic life through discrimination in housing, employment, and electoral practices (Cameron Report, 1969). The Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement) of 1998 ended the armed conflict and created the current power-sharing arrangements, explicitly acknowledging the legitimacy of Irish unity as a potential democratic outcome.
The Devolution Settlement: Partial Autonomy and Structural Subordination
The devolution reforms of 1997–1999 created the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales (later reconstituted as the Senedd Cymru), and the Northern Ireland Assembly. These institutions represented a genuine, if incomplete, recognition that the nations of the UK had distinct needs and legitimate claims to self-governance. Scotland received the most extensive powers, including primary legislative competence across a wide range of policy areas and significant tax-varying powers from 2016.
Yet the fundamental architecture of devolution contains structural contradictions that limit its capacity to deliver genuine self-governance. Monetary policy is exclusively reserved — the devolved governments have no control over interest rates, the money supply, or the exchange rate. Macroeconomic fiscal policy is centrally determined. Social security and welfare, which constitute enormous proportions of public expenditure and are the primary instruments for addressing poverty and inequality, are almost entirely reserved (Keating, 2009).
The fiscal consequences are profound. The devolved governments receive their funding principally through block grants determined by the Barnett Formula — a mechanism devised in 1978 as a temporary administrative convenience. The formula does not attempt to allocate resources based on need, and Wales in particular has long argued that it systematically underfunds the nation relative to assessed need, an argument supported by the Holtham Commission’s findings in 2010. The Barnett Formula’s structural inadequacy is compounded by the Barnett ‘squeeze’ — a long-run tendency for the formula to reduce per capita expenditure in devolved nations relative to England (Bell & Christie, 2001).
Economic Asymmetries and the Westminster-London Nexus, The Geography of UK Economic Power
One of the most robust findings of UK regional economics is the extraordinary degree of economic concentration in London and the South East of England. London’s GVA per head is approximately 170% of the UK average, while Wales languishes at approximately 73%, Scotland at around 99%, and Northern Ireland at approximately 80% (ONS Regional GVA Statistics, 2023). The UK’s transport infrastructure exemplifies this bias: HS2 has been successively scaled back in ways that concentrated benefits on the London-Birmingham corridor while abandoning extensions that might have provided connectivity to Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.
Scotland’s Economic Capacity and the Resource Question
Scotland has a population of approximately 5.5 million, comparable to Norway, Denmark, or Finland — all successful independent nations — and possesses a diverse economic base including financial services, whisky exports, technology, higher education, tourism, food and drink, and North Sea oil and gas. Including geographic shares of North Sea revenues, Scotland’s fiscal position has historically been stronger than the UK’s as a whole during periods of high oil prices (GERS, various years). The debate around the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland document is genuine, but what is clear is that GERS describes Scotland’s fiscal position within the UK, not what it would be as an independent state with control over its own macroeconomic policy and industrial strategy.
Wales: Chronic Underdevelopment and Structural Dependency
Wales consistently qualifies for the EU’s ‘less developed regions’ funding under Cohesion Policy. West Wales and the Valleys remain one of the poorest regions in Western Europe by standard measures (Eurostat, 2023). This chronic underdevelopment is not a natural fact but a historically produced condition. The extraction of coal wealth enriched investors and the British state while leaving communities with disproportionate rates of industrial disease, premature death, and cultural trauma. The deindustrialisation of the 1980s completed the destruction of the economic base without providing credible replacements.
Northern Ireland: The Peace Dividend and Its Limits
Northern Ireland remains the poorest part of the UK by most measures, with a comparatively small private sector, high levels of public sector dependency, and significant structural weaknesses in productivity and innovation (Birnie & Brownlow, 2010). The Brexit process and its resolution through the Windsor Framework have created a distinctive situation in which Northern Ireland simultaneously remains part of the UK’s internal market and aligns with EU single market rules for goods — a ‘dual access’ arrangement with economic advantages but significant political complexity.
The Sociological Dimensions: National Identity, Democratic Deficit, and Political Marginalisation
Survey data consistently shows that Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish identities have strengthened relative to British identity, with each successive generation showing higher levels of national identification and lower levels of attachment to a unifying British identity (McCrone & Bechhofer, 2015). The Brexit referendum provides perhaps the clearest illustration of the democratic deficit: Scotland voted 62% to remain in the European Union; Northern Ireland voted 55.8% to remain. The fact that two of the four nations voted clearly for Remain, yet were taken out of the EU without their consent, encapsulates the structural democratic deficit of the UK’s constitutional arrangement (Henderson et al., 2016).
Hechter’s influential ‘internal colonialism’ thesis argued that the Celtic periphery had been subjected to a form of internal colonialism in which the cultural division of labour systematically relegated Celtic populations to subordinate economic and social positions while their regions served as resource suppliers for English industrial capitalism (Hechter, 1975). While Hechter’s original formulation has been critiqued and refined, its core insight — that peripheral nationalism in the UK is partly a response to structural economic and cultural subordination — retains considerable explanatory power.
The Case for Independence: Theoretical and Practical Grounds. The Principle of National Self-Determination
The case for Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish independence rests first on the democratic principle of national self-determination — the right of peoples to determine their own governance arrangements — enshrined in the United Nations Charter (1945) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966). Polling consistently shows independence support in Scotland running at between 45–50% or above. Wales’s independence movement has grown significantly, particularly among younger generations; polls in 2021 showed support reaching 30–40% among certain demographics.
As currently constituted, the devolved governments lack the tools to address the structural economic weaknesses of their territories. They cannot set macroeconomic policy, cannot borrow freely for investment, cannot set immigration policy, cannot negotiate independent trade agreements, and cannot design welfare systems genuinely tailored to their citizens’ needs. The evidence from comparable small European nations — Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland — suggests that small nations with strong institutions and coherent economic strategies can achieve excellent outcomes for their citizens, often superior to those achieved by larger states (Katzenstein, 1985).
The EU Dimension and Brexit’s Acceleration of Independence Pressures
Brexit has substantially altered the calculus of independence for Scotland and Northern Ireland. For Scotland, it is now independence that offers the clearest path back to EU membership, while remaining in the UK guarantees continued exclusion from the single market. An independent Scotland applying for EU membership would face the standard accession process, but Scotland’s existing institutions and regulatory alignment with EU norms would likely facilitate a relatively smooth process.
Currency and Monetary Sovereignty: Options for Independent Nations
The question of currency arrangements for newly independent nations is frequently presented as a technical obstacle to independence but is better understood as a political choice with economic consequences that depend heavily on the specific arrangements adopted. Three principal options have been discussed: retaining sterling informally or by formal currency union, establishing a new national currency, or joining the euro. The SNP’s Growth Commission recommended that an independent Scotland should initially continue using sterling informally before transitioning to a Scottish pound, with EU membership and potentially the euro as a longer-term horizon (Sustainable Growth Commission, 2018).
The Euro as a Framework for Small Nation Monetary Policy
The eurozone offers an established monetary and trading framework with distinct advantages for small nations. The experience of the Irish Republic is instructive: EU membership from 1973 and adoption of the euro in 1999, combined with an outward-oriented industrial policy and strategic use of EU structural funds, transformed Ireland from one of the poorest countries in Western Europe to one of the richest. Ireland’s GDP per capita now substantially exceeds the UK’s (Barry, 2003; Ó Riain, 2014). Some independence advocates have argued for a genuinely sovereign national currency that would permit the full range of macroeconomic management instruments. Drawing on post-Keynesian and Modern Monetary Theory traditions, proponents argue that a currency-issuing government faces fundamentally different constraints from one dependent on bond markets (Mitchell et al., 2019). A hybrid approach — establishing a national currency pegged initially to sterling or the euro, building institutional capacity, then transitioning to a floating exchange rate — may offer the most pragmatic pathway.
The economic viability objection holds that Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are fiscally dependent on transfers from the UK as a whole. This objection has genuine weight in the short term but proves too much: it would equally argue against the independence of any nation beginning its existence in fiscal imbalance, yet Ireland, the Baltic states, and many post-colonial nations have successfully built viable economies over time. The relevant question is not whether independence involves challenges, but whether the long-run gains from full democratic and economic sovereignty outweigh those costs.
The ‘border’ objection holds that Scottish independence would create a damaging hard border. This depends critically on arrangements negotiated between Scotland and the UK. Common travel area arrangements and customs agreements could substantially mitigate frictions. The social solidarity objection holds that redistribution within the UK constitutes a form of solidarity that independence would dissolve — but the UK’s record of regional redistribution has not succeeded in eliminating disparities over many decades, and Ireland demonstrates that an independent nation with full policy control may achieve better outcomes than one dependent on centralised redistributive formulae.
Towards a New Constitutional Settlement
This paper has argued, on historical, sociological, and economic grounds, that the current constitutional settlement of the United Kingdom is structurally unjust and practically inadequate for the needs of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The historical processes by which these nations were incorporated into the British state were marked by conquest, coercion, and manipulation rather than consensual democratic union. The devolution settlement falls far short of genuine self-governance and leaves the devolved nations structurally dependent on decisions made at Westminster, where their political weight is insufficient to determine outcomes on matters of fundamental importance to their citizens.
The economic evidence demonstrates that the Westminster-centric political economy has failed to deliver comparable prosperity to the peripheral nations. The concentration of economic power and public investment in London and the South East has been reproduced across decades of governments of different political colours, suggesting that it reflects structural features of the UK political economy rather than the choices of particular administrations.
Full independence, whether pursued immediately or through a phased transition, offers the prospect of genuine democratic self-determination. The experience of comparable small European nations demonstrates that this prospect is practically achievable. The question is ultimately a democratic one: the people of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland have the right to determine their constitutional futures through free and fair democratic processes, and the arguments advanced in this paper suggest that the case for independence is strong, resting on principled, historical, and practical foundations.
The Irish Unity Provision of the Good Friday Agreement: Democratic Legitimacy and the Path to Reunification, The Good Friday Agreement as a Constitutional Instrument
The Belfast Agreement of 10 April 1998 — known universally as the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) — is not merely a peace settlement. It is, in constitutional terms, a treaty with the force of international law, registered with the United Nations, and given domestic legal effect through two parallel statutes: the Northern Ireland Act 1998 in the United Kingdom and the Nineteenth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, which was approved by referendum in the Republic of Ireland on 22 May 1998 with a historic 94.4% majority. This double legislative and constitutional foundation gives the GFA a degree of juridical durability that is entirely absent from the ordinary devolution legislation governing Scotland and Wales. Neither the UK Parliament acting alone, nor any future Westminster government, can lawfully modify the GFA’s core provisions without the agreement of the Irish government — and, where those provisions involve constitutional change, without the consent of the Northern Irish people themselves expressed through referendum.
The constitutional significance of this architecture cannot be overstated. For the first time in the history of Northern Ireland’s existence as a political entity, the GFA formally institutionalised the principle that the existing constitutional arrangement — Northern Ireland’s position within the United Kingdom — is contingent rather than settled. It is contingent on the continuing democratic consent of the population, and explicitly acknowledges that a different constitutional outcome — Irish unity — is equally legitimate provided it is achieved through democratic means. This is a radical departure from the traditional unionist and indeed Westminster constitutional position, which had treated Northern Ireland’s British identity as a fixed constitutional fact rather than a democratically revisable arrangement.
The Specific Provisions: The Border Poll Mechanism
The principal vehicle through which the GFA provides for potential Irish reunification is the border poll mechanism, set out in Schedule 1 to the Northern Ireland Act 1998. This provision states that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland must hold a referendum on Irish unity if ‘at any time it appears likely to him [or her] that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland.’ Furthermore, the provision stipulates that if such a referendum is held and produces a majority for Irish unity, the Secretary of State must hold a further referendum within seven years if ‘it appears likely’ that a majority would again favour unity. A successful second referendum would then legally oblige the UK and Irish governments to implement Irish unification through the legislative and constitutional processes that the Agreement itself contemplates.
Two aspects of this provision deserve particular emphasis. First, the decision to call a border poll rests formally with the Secretary of State — a UK government minister — rather than with an independent electoral commission, the Northern Ireland Assembly, or any other body not subject to Westminster political control. This has been a source of sustained criticism: critics argue that a UK government politically opposed to Irish unity has an inherent conflict of interest in determining whether the threshold for a poll has been met (Harvey, 2020). Second, the Agreement is silent on the criteria by which the Secretary of State should assess whether a majority for unity is ‘likely’ — there is no prescribed polling threshold, demographic indicator, or electoral trigger. This ambiguity, deliberate at the time of drafting to achieve the breadth of political agreement necessary for the Agreement’s success, has become a significant source of constitutional tension as the prospect of a border poll has moved from theoretical to concrete.
The Irish government, legal scholars, and nationalist political parties have argued that the Secretary of State’s discretion is not unlimited and that there is a legal duty to call a poll when the evidence of likely majority support is sufficiently strong and sustained. The Good Friday Agreement’s International Implementation Body and various academic and legal opinions have supported this interpretation. The UK government’s position — that the poll is a matter of ministerial discretion exercisable according to unspecified criteria — has been challenged in the courts, and the legal landscape around the trigger mechanism remains an active area of constitutional litigation and political argument.
Demographic Change and the Shifting Political Landscape
The demographic foundations of Northern Ireland’s political arithmetic are changing at a pace that makes the border poll question increasingly immediate rather than long-term. The 2021 Census of Northern Ireland, published in September 2022, produced results that received enormous political attention: for the first time since Northern Ireland’s creation in 1921, those identifying as Catholic or of a Catholic background (45.7%) outnumbered those identifying as Protestant or of a Protestant background (43.5%). Sinn Féin became the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly elections of May 2022, entitling it to nominate the First Minister — another historic first. These developments do not automatically translate into a majority for Irish unity, since identity and constitutional preference do not map perfectly onto religious background, and a significant and growing cohort of Northern Irish people identify as neither unionist nor nationalist. Nevertheless, they signal a fundamental transformation in the political sociology of Northern Ireland that creates a plausible near-term pathway to a border poll.
Polling evidence is mixed but trending. Surveys conducted by LucidTalk for the Sunday Times and other outlets throughout the 2020s have shown that support for Irish unity — while below a simple majority on most measures — is within striking distance and highly sensitive to question framing, economic context, and the nature of the unity model being presented. Crucially, younger voters show substantially higher support for unity than older generations, creating a demographic momentum that operates independently of any particular political event. The Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, which has tracked political attitudes longitudinally, shows a consistent increase in the proportion of people who neither strongly identify as unionist nor strongly identify as nationalist — the so-called ‘middle ground’ — whose preferences will be decisive in any future referendum (NILT Survey, 2022).
The impact of Brexit has been profound. Northern Ireland voted 55.8% to remain in the European Union — a clear majority that was disregarded by the UK-wide result. The subsequent difficulties of Brexit negotiations, the Northern Ireland Protocol, the Windsor Framework, and the ongoing political and logistical complications of Northern Ireland’s position as a territory that is both in the UK and aligned with EU single market rules for goods, have significantly altered the political calculus. For many voters in the pragmatic centre, the question of Irish unity has been reframed from a constitutional-identity question to a practical question about economic arrangements, EU membership, and which constitutional framework best serves Northern Ireland’s interests. Given that the Republic of Ireland is a prosperous, dynamic EU member state with a GDP per capita that substantially exceeds Northern Ireland’s, this reframing does not obviously favour the union.
The Constitutional and Legislative Pathway to Irish Unity
The Good Friday Agreement anticipated that Irish unification, if democratically approved, would be implemented through agreed legislative and constitutional processes in both jurisdictions. In the UK, this would require an Act of Parliament amending or repealing the relevant provisions of the Government of Ireland Act 1920 (as amended), the Northern Ireland Act 1998, and other statutory instruments that establish Northern Ireland’s position within the UK. In Ireland, it would require a referendum under Article 46 of the Irish Constitution to amend the constitutional provisions relating to the national territory — the existing Articles 2 and 3, already amended in 1999 following the GFA to remove the territorial claim over Northern Ireland, would need to be further amended to provide a constitutional framework for a unified state. The constitutional form of a united Ireland — a unitary state, a federal or confederal arrangement, or some other model — would itself require democratic agreement, and several academic and political bodies (most notably the Citizens’ Assembly on a United Ireland, established by the Irish Parliament in 2023) have been engaged in deliberative processes to develop models of unity that might be broadly acceptable across Northern Ireland’s communities.
The legal scholars Colin Harvey and John Coakley, among others, have argued that the Irish government has both a legal obligation under the GFA and a moral obligation to its citizens to engage seriously in preparation for a border poll — not to advocate for a particular outcome, but to ensure that voters are fully and accurately informed about what constitutional unity would mean in practice (Harvey & Coakley, 2021). This ‘planning for unity’ argument mirrors the approach taken in Scotland where, regardless of one’s view on independence, there is a democratic obligation to provide citizens with a genuine understanding of the prospective arrangements. The establishment of the Citizens’ Assembly on a United Ireland by the Irish Oireachtas in 2023 represents a significant step in this direction, and its deliberations — modelled on the successful citizens’ assemblies that preceded the abortion and marriage equality referendums in Ireland — are generating substantive policy proposals around health, education, identity accommodation, and economic integration that are beginning to give the unity concept tangible constitutional shape.
The GFA’s Unity Provision as an Expression of Democratic Will
A fundamental point that is sometimes obscured in debates about Northern Ireland’s constitutional future is that the border poll provision of the Good Friday Agreement is not a concession reluctantly granted by the British state, or a mechanism inserted solely to manage republican political pressures. It is, in constitutional terms, an acknowledgement that the people of Northern Ireland — all of them, including those of unionist and loyalist identity — have a democratic right to determine their own constitutional future. This right was affirmed by the people of Northern Ireland in the 1998 referendum on the Agreement, in which 71.1% voted Yes. When Northern Irish voters ratified the GFA, they ratified not merely its power-sharing provisions and its human rights framework, but also its constitutional provisions — including the explicit acknowledgement that Irish unity, achieved through democratic consent, is a fully legitimate and legally provided-for outcome.
It follows that the question of a border poll is not whether such a poll would be ‘destabilising’ — an argument sometimes deployed to delay or resist the prospect — but when and under what conditions democratic principle requires that the population be given the opportunity to exercise the right the Agreement confers. The principle of democratic self-determination, embedded in the GFA with the force of international treaty law, means that the border poll provision represents not a threat to peace or stability but an expression of the democratic legitimacy upon which the peace settlement itself is founded. To resist indefinitely a poll for which there is substantial and growing democratic demand would itself represent a violation of the Agreement’s spirit and, potentially, its letter.
Scottish Independence: A Step-by-Step Legislative and Constitutional Roadmap, Legal and Constitutional Framework
Scottish independence would represent one of the most significant constitutional changes in British history, but it is not constitutionally uncharted territory. The Edinburgh Agreement of 2012, by which the UK and Scottish governments agreed the terms of the 2014 independence referendum, established important precedents: that a referendum could be conducted with the agreement of both governments; that the result would be binding in political if not strictly legal terms; and that the primary legislative vehicle for authorising a referendum in Scotland was a Section 30 Order under the Scotland Act 1998, which temporarily modifies the Scotland Act to grant the Scottish Parliament competence over a reserved matter — in this case, the constitutional question. The Supreme Court’s ruling in November 2022, in the reference brought by the Lord Advocate, confirmed that the Scottish Parliament does not have the unilateral power to legislate for an independence referendum without Westminster approval — making clear that any legally unimpeachable route to a referendum requires either a Section 30 Order or primary Westminster legislation.
This legal constraint does not, however, mean that Westminster holds an absolute veto over Scottish independence in perpetuity. The democratic and political dynamics are such that a sustained, clear, and consistent majority for independence in Scotland — demonstrated through Assembly elections, Westminster elections, and polling — would create political conditions under which continued refusal of a Section 30 Order would be democratically unsustainable. The international community, the European Union, and Scotland’s future trade and treaty partners would take note of such a democratic expression, and the UK government’s international standing would be substantially damaged by the perception that it was suppressing a democratic mandate. The Canadian Supreme Court’s 1998 reference on Quebec secession, while not binding in the UK context, established the internationally influential principle that where a clear question produces a clear majority for independence, there is a constitutional obligation on both parties to negotiate in good faith — an obligation that is fundamentally political and democratic in character, not merely legal.
The Step-by-Step Process: Securing a Democratic Endorsement
The Scottish Government must demonstrate a clear, sustained, and unambiguous democratic mandate for a second independence referendum. This requires more than a single favourable poll: it requires consistent majority support for independence across multiple credible surveys over a sustained period, combined with a specific electoral mandate — a Scottish Parliament or Westminster election fought explicitly on the platform of delivering an independence referendum, resulting in a pro-independence majority. The SNP and Scottish Greens’ joint programme for government in the current parliamentary term represents an existing mandate of this kind, and any future Scottish Government seeking a referendum would need to refresh and reinforce this mandate through elections. The strength and clarity of the mandate is a political resource: the stronger and more sustained it is, the harder it becomes for Westminster to maintain politically credible resistance to a Section 30 Order.
Securing Westminster Agreement or Pursuing Alternative I.C.J. Mechanisms
The legally cleanest route to an independence referendum is a Section 30 Order — a statutory instrument made under the Scotland Act 1998, agreed between the Scottish and UK governments, and laid before both parliaments. This requires UK government consent, which in the current political environment cannot be assumed. If a Section 30 Order is refused, the Scottish Government has several potential responses: it could treat a Scottish Parliament election as a de facto referendum, arguing that a majority of seats won on an explicit independence mandate constitutes a democratic expression of will (though this approach has significant weaknesses in terms of legal effect and international recognition); it could pursue primary legislation at Holyrood and challenge a blocking Order in Council through the courts; or it could engage in sustained international diplomatic activity to build recognition of the democratic legitimacy of its mandate and pressure on the UK government. The most constructive resolution would be a political agreement — analogous to the Edinburgh Agreement — between Scottish and UK governments on the terms and timing of a referendum, triggered by the political unsustainability of continued refusal in the face of clear democratic demand.
Legislation for the Referendum
Once agreement on a referendum is reached, the Scottish Parliament would pass a Referendum (Scotland) Act setting out the question, the franchise, the campaign period, the spending limits, the conduct rules, and the threshold (if any) for the result to be operative. The Electoral Commission would be engaged to advise on and test the question for clarity and neutrality, as it was in 2012 (producing the revised ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ formulation). The franchise question — whether 16 and 17-year-olds and EU residents should vote — would itself be a matter for political negotiation and parliamentary decision. The campaign would be regulated by the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 (PPERA) framework, with designated Yes and No campaigns subject to spending controls. A minimum campaign period of 16 weeks, comparable to the 2014 referendum, would allow for full public deliberation on the prospectus for independence.
The Independence White Paper and Economic Prospectus
In parallel with the legislative process, the Scottish Government would be expected to publish a comprehensive independence white paper — a detailed policy document setting out the proposed constitutional, economic, fiscal, social, and international arrangements for an independent Scotland. The 2013 White Paper ‘Scotland’s Future’ ran to 670 pages and represented an unprecedented exercise in government policy elaboration. A future white paper would need to address the lessons of 2014 and subsequent years: the currency question, the fiscal position at the point of independence and the path to fiscal sustainability, the terms of EU membership, the arrangements for shared services and border management with the remainder of the UK, the future of Trident nuclear weapons based at Faslane, pension obligations, and the transition arrangements for public sector workers. The white paper’s credibility and comprehensiveness will be a critical determinant of the referendum outcome, and external independent economic analysis and scrutiny will be essential to its credibility.
The Referendum Campaign and Vote
The referendum campaign itself would be conducted according to agreed rules, with PPERA-regulated spending limits applied to designated campaigns on each side. The experience of 2014 demonstrated that independence referendums generate extraordinary levels of civic engagement: turnout was 84.6%, the highest recorded for any election or referendum in Scottish history. A second referendum would likely be equally or more intensely contested, with international attention and significant business, civil society, and political mobilisation on both sides. The result, to be politically operative, would ideally exceed a simple majority on a high turnout — a result that could be characterised as narrow or achieved on low turnout would create political difficulties for the implementation process, as the Brexit experience demonstrated.
Negotiations Between Scotland and the Remainder of the UK
A Yes vote would trigger a period of negotiations between the Scottish Government and the UK government to agree the terms of independence — the ‘divorce settlement’ that would partition assets, liabilities, public sector pension obligations, shared infrastructure, and regulatory frameworks. Both sides would be bound by democratic mandates and international scrutiny to negotiate in good faith. The negotiations would need to address the allocation of the UK national debt (Scotland would be expected to assume a population share, though this is negotiable); the status of UK-wide institutions such as the BBC, the DVLA, and HMRC and their Scottish equivalents; the future of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, based primarily in Scotland at HMRC Clyde; defence arrangements; the currency transition; cross-border social security entitlements; the status of EU citizens; and the terms of the common travel area. A negotiating period of 18–24 months from the referendum result to formal independence day is typically discussed, though the complexity of negotiations might require more time, and a transitional arrangement might operate for some functions.
At formal independence, Scotland would require a written constitution — the absence of which in the UK is one of the structural deficiencies this paper has identified. The Scottish Government’s 2014 proposals envisaged an interim constitution establishing the basic framework of the independent state, followed by a constitutional convention process to develop a permanent constitution reflecting Scotland’s democratic and civic traditions. A permanent constitution would enshrine the fundamental rights of Scottish citizens, the structure of government, the separation of powers, the role of the courts, and the protection of the Gaelic language and culture. The act of constitutional foundation would be one of the most significant democratic exercises in Scottish history and could itself be the subject of a constitutional referendum.
Scotland and the European Union: Pathways to Membership
Scotland’s relationship with the EU following independence is one of the most politically significant and legally complex questions in the independence debate. As a newly independent state, Scotland would not automatically inherit the UK’s former EU membership: the legal position, established by the withdrawal of the UK under Article 50 TEU, is that Scotland would need to apply for membership as a new state under Article 49 TEU, the standard accession procedure. This would require Scotland to meet the Copenhagen criteria for EU membership — democratic governance, rule of law, respect for human rights, and a functioning market economy capable of operating within the competitive pressures of the single market — and to negotiate the specific terms of its accession, including contributions to the EU budget, the chapter-by-chapter alignment of Scots law with the EU acquis communautaire, and the terms of participation in EU institutions.
The political dynamics of Scottish accession are more favourable than a strictly procedural reading might suggest. Scotland’s existing regulatory and legal framework is already deeply aligned with EU standards, having been part of the EU until January 2020. Scottish higher education, research institutions, and professional qualifications have extensive existing relationships with European counterparts. Scotland’s democratic institutions, rule of law traditions, and human rights framework meet or exceed Copenhagen criteria standards. The primary practical challenges are fiscal — Scotland would need to demonstrate that its public finances are sustainable and that it can meet the obligations of EU budget contributions — and institutional, in developing the full range of central state functions that EU membership requires, including a treasury, a foreign ministry, and the domestic agencies responsible for implementing EU legislation.
Sympathetic EU member states — particularly Ireland, which has strong cultural and historical ties with Scotland, and the Nordic states, with which Scotland has longstanding connections — might be expected to support Scotland’s accession bid. Spain’s historical concern about precedent — the fear that Scottish independence might encourage Catalan separatism — was a complicating factor in 2014 debates, but Spain’s own political evolution on the Catalan question and the distinct legal and democratic character of Scotland’s independence process (conducted with the agreement of the UK government through a lawful referendum, unlike Catalonia’s unilateral 2017 referendum) may make this less acute in a future scenario. The EU itself has significant institutional and political incentives to welcome Scotland: it would bring a population of 5.5 million, significant fishing resources, offshore energy potential, strong higher education and financial services sectors, and a strategic geographic location to the union.
In the period between independence and full EU membership — which might take several years — Scotland would seek to maintain maximum economic continuity with both its principal trading partners: the EU and the remainder of the UK. Interim arrangements might include participation in the European Economic Area (EEA) as a stepping-stone to full membership, bilateral mutual recognition agreements with the EU, and a UK-Scotland trade agreement minimising barriers on the existing heavily integrated cross-border economy. The experience of countries navigating accession — Finland, Sweden, and Austria in 1995; the 2004 and 2007 enlargements; more recently, the Western Balkans accession process — provides technical and political precedents that Scottish government planners could draw upon.
Should EU membership prove unachievable within a politically acceptable timeframe, or should Scottish democratic opinion prove divided on EU membership (a genuine possibility, given that Scotland’s 2016 Remain majority, while clear, was not overwhelming), an alternative pathway would be membership of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and participation in the European Economic Area. Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein participate in the EU’s single market through the EEA without being EU members, accepting the free movement of goods, services, capital, and persons, and implementing EU single market legislation, in exchange for access to the single market. This arrangement would provide Scotland with the trading continuity of single market access while allowing somewhat more flexibility in external trade policy and avoiding the political complexities of full EU membership.
The Norwegian model has its limitations — EFTA/EEA members have no vote in EU institutions whose decisions they are nonetheless required to implement, a democratic deficit sometimes called the ‘fax democracy’ problem — but it represents a credible and tested intermediate arrangement that several highly successful small nations have chosen as a permanent constitutional position rather than merely a transitional one. Switzerland’s bilateral agreements with the EU offer an even more bespoke alternative, though the increasingly fraught history of Swiss-EU relations since the rejection of the EEA in 1992 makes this a less straightforward model.
Welsh Independence: Building the Case, the Process, and European Integration. The Distinctive Context of Welsh Independence
The Welsh independence movement — represented most prominently by Plaid Cymru and the broader YesCymru civic movement — operates in a different political context from its Scottish counterpart. Support for Welsh independence, while growing significantly, particularly since 2019, remains lower than in Scotland, and Wales faces more acute economic challenges that would need to be addressed in any independence prospectus. Unlike Scotland, Wales does not have its own distinct legal system (Welsh law was subsumed into English law by the Tudor Acts of Union, and the partial divergence through devolved legislation is recent and incomplete), does not have significant natural resources such as North Sea oil, and has a structural fiscal deficit that is larger relative to its economy than Scotland’s. These differences mean that the case for Welsh independence must be constructed somewhat differently — as a long-term project of institution-building and economic transformation rather than as an immediately executable constitutional change, though proponents of independence argue that the transformative economic possibilities of full self-governance are precisely the reason to pursue it. Wales also has a distinctive asset that Scotland lacks: the Welsh language. Approximately 900,000 people in Wales — around 29% of the population — speak Welsh, and the language has remarkable resilience and cultural vitality for a minority language of its size, sustained by Welsh-medium education, S4C television, Radio Cymru, and a vigorous literary and musical culture. The Welsh language is both a marker of national distinctiveness that gives Welsh independence its particular cultural urgency and a practical consideration for any independent state’s language policy. An independent Wales would need to be a bilingual state in a genuine rather than merely ceremonial sense, with Welsh enjoying co-official status and practical equality with English across government, law, and public services.
Building Democratic Support: The Senedd and the Electoral Pathway, Developing Senedd Electoral Capacity and Legitimacy
The Senedd Cymru — the Welsh Parliament — was reformed under the Senedd and Elections (Wales) Act 2020, which extended the franchise to 16 and 17-year-olds and to qualifying foreign nationals. A further reform, the Senedd Cymru (Members and Elections) Act 2024, increased the number of Senedd members from 60 to 96 and moved to a proportional closed-list electoral system. These reforms strengthen the Senedd’s democratic legitimacy and representativeness, creating a stronger institutional foundation for any future independence mandate. A pro-independence majority in a reformed, more legitimate Senedd, elected explicitly on a platform of pursuing independence, would be the essential first step in establishing the democratic mandate necessary to demand a referendum from Westminster. This requires Plaid Cymru and potentially the Welsh Greens and other forces to build and sustain a coalition capable of forming a government — a significantly more challenging task than in Scotland, where the SNP has governed continuously since 2007.
The Welsh Independence White Paper and Economic Prospectus
Given Wales’s particular economic challenges, the development of a credible and detailed independence economic prospectus is even more critical in the Welsh case than in the Scottish one. The Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research (WISERD), Cardiff University’s Wales Governance Centre, and various independent economists have begun the work of modelling what independent Welsh public finances would look like, what the fiscal challenges of independence would be, and what economic policies might credibly address structural weaknesses (Ifan & Poole, 2020). Key questions include: the scale of the fiscal gap between Welsh revenues and expenditure under current arrangements; the extent to which this gap reflects genuine structural economic weakness versus the attribution of UK-wide costs; the economic growth potential of full policy autonomy; the implications of different currency arrangements; and the trajectory of fiscal sustainability over a 10–20 year horizon. A credible white paper would need to engage honestly with these challenges while making the case that the long-run benefits of self-governance outweigh the transitional costs.
Step 3: Negotiating a Referendum Agreement with Westminster
As in the Scottish case, a Welsh independence referendum without Westminster agreement would face significant legal and political obstacles. The Welsh Government does not currently have referendum-calling powers on reserved constitutional matters, and the Senedd would need equivalent statutory authorisation to the Section 30 Order mechanism — either through primary Westminster legislation specifically for Wales, or through a more general devolution of referendum-calling powers. The political case for the Westminster agreement rests on the same democratic argument as in Scotland: that sustained, clear democratic demand for a referendum cannot be permanently resisted without damaging the UK government’s democratic legitimacy and international standing. The pathway to agreement would involve sustained political pressure, electoral mandates, and potentially international engagement with sympathetic EU partners and international bodies.
The Referendum and Constitutional Convention
A Welsh independence referendum, conducted along similar lines to Scotland’s 2014 experience, would be followed — in the event of a Yes majority — by a constitutional convention process of exceptional importance given the particular complexity of Wales’s legal and constitutional situation. Wales would need to develop from relatively limited foundations: a distinct Welsh legal system (the Courts of Wales currently administer English and Welsh law as a single jurisdiction), a full range of state institutions including a civil service capable of managing international relations, defence (at least in principle), social security, and macroeconomic functions, a central bank or equivalent monetary authority, and the full apparatus of a sovereign state. This institution-building process would require sustained investment, careful sequencing, and international assistance — the EU accession process itself, with its extensive technical assistance programmes, could play a constructive role.
A transitional period of potentially greater length than in the Scottish case would likely be necessary to manage Wales’s economic and institutional development toward full independence. During this transition, continuing close economic integration with the remainder of the UK would be essential to managing adjustment costs, and a UK-Wales trade agreement minimising border frictions — comparable to the arrangements within the Good Friday Agreement framework for the Irish border — would be a high priority. International recognition would follow from democratic legitimacy: a Yes vote in a fairly conducted referendum, implemented according to agreed constitutional processes, would command recognition from the international community, including the European Union and the United Nations, and would entitle Wales to pursue applications for membership of international organisations on its own account.
Wales and European Integration: A Phased Approach
Wales’s pathway to EU membership would necessarily be phased and might require a longer transitional period than Scotland’s, given the greater degree of institutional development required and the greater fiscal challenges involved. However, the EU has a range of pre-accession instruments — the Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA), technical assistance programmes, trade and association agreements — that could be deployed to support Wales’s preparation for membership and to maintain preferential trading relationships during the transitional period. An EU-Wales association agreement, negotiated in parallel with institution-building and legal alignment, could provide access to EU markets, participation in EU programmes including Erasmus+, Horizon Europe, and structural funds (from which Wales as an independent state would potentially qualify for substantial cohesion funding given its economic position), and a framework for progressive integration without requiring immediate full membership.
Wales’s existing economic relationships with the EU are significant: as a major exporter of steel, agricultural products, automotive components, and services, Wales has substantial trade ties with EU member states that Brexit has disrupted. An independent Wales pursuing EU membership would immediately begin restoring those relationships through the preferential access that candidate and associated status provides. Welsh universities, already deeply embedded in European research networks through pre-Brexit Horizon Europe participation, would benefit from restored full programme access, which has significant implications for the research funding and international student recruitment that are economically important to Welsh higher education institutions.
The euro question for Wales would be approached most pragmatically through the same phased model discussed in Section 7 of this paper: an initial period continuing to use sterling informally or through a managed peg, followed by the establishment of a Welsh central bank and currency, and eventual entry into the eurozone upon meeting the Maastricht convergence criteria. The convergence criteria — inflation, long-term interest rates, exchange rate stability, fiscal deficit, and government debt — set specific numerical thresholds for eurozone entry, and an independent Wales would need to meet these over time. The fiscal discipline implied by the Maastricht criteria would require careful management of the transition from a high-transfer-dependency position, but the EU accession process itself provides a framework of external fiscal and economic discipline that has historically served as a useful anchor for acceding states’ macroeconomic reforms.
Preferential Access: The Interim European Options
In the period before full EU membership — which might realistically take a decade or more from independence for Wales — several interim arrangements could provide meaningful European economic integration. First, participation in the European Economic Area as an EFTA member would provide full single market access, allowing Welsh businesses to trade with the EU’s 450 million consumers on equal terms with EU businesses, restoring the free movement of persons that enables Welsh citizens to live and work across Europe, and providing access to EU research and education programmes. Second, a series of bilateral mutual recognition agreements with the EU covering professional qualifications, product standards, and services would reduce non-tariff barriers and facilitate the continued integration of Welsh and EU economies during the pre-membership period. Third, targeted agreements on specific Welsh economic strengths — agriculture, steel, and creative industries — could provide sector-specific preferential arrangements that mitigate adjustment costs while full accession preparations proceed.
The precedent of the Western Balkans accession process, while imperfect, demonstrates that the EU has the institutional capacity to manage the progressive integration of smaller economies at varying stages of preparedness. The EU has strong incentives — geopolitical, economic, and symbolic — to welcome a democratically independent Wales, as it does Scotland. Enlarging to include two British successor states would represent a significant geopolitical reorientation of the European project and a notable consequence of the UK’s post-Brexit trajectory, with implications for the EU’s international standing and its relationships with the English-speaking world.
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