The Balkanisation of Britain?

The historian Tristram Hunt uses the by-election in Glasgow East as a peg to comment in The Guardian on the future of the United Kingdom: "Rather than stopping nationalism dead in its tracks, the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly have only intensified cross-party calls for the Balkanisation of Britain. ... Here's the nightmare scenario: a Scottish National party administration holds on to Holyrood and seeks to move towards a referendum on independence. Meanwhile, a Tory government in Westminster, elected into office without a single Scottish seat, sees no reason why it should fight to preserve a system that delivers 39 Scottish Labour MPs to the House of Commons. Post-2010, the two governing parties in Edinburgh and London look to their own electoral interests and signal the evisceration of the union. ... It has been left to Gordon Brown to re-weld the union with his lofty talk of liberty, the rule of law, and the British way of life.The awful truth is that the tide of history is flowing in the other direction. From Slovakia to Kosovo to the nation formerly known as Belgium, the trend is for smaller, ethnically codified national entities at the expense of broader civic federations."

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