Brexit, sovereignty and Conservative unionism in Scotland

Abstract

The results of the June 2016 European referendum have presented the United Kingdom with a number of significant political and legal conundrums which question both its Constitution and the integrity of the British Union. Although little was made of the territorial dimension of the UK Constitution during the referendum campaign, the complexities involved by the constitutional changes brought by devolution in the late 1990s were immediately exposed. Brexit also laid bare the differences between a unitary understanding of the Union in Westminster and a plurinational understanding of the Union in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, which have been further reinforced by Boris Johnson’s centralist approach to the Constitution. Yet, faced with the rising salience of the Scottish Government’s proposals for a second independence referendum after the SNP obtained a majority of seats in the May 2021 Scottish Parliament election, the UK Government will have to make a convincing case for the British Union if it is to secure its future. This paper thus seeks to explore the shifts in the nature of Conservative unionism since the introduction of devolution and discuss to what extent they have undergirded the Conservatives’ response to Scotland’s constitutional position after the European referendum of 2016.