Badandgood

Many of us will accept Eric Melvin’s justification on historical evidence that the 1707 union was no voluntary union; after all, neither Scotland nor England then was a democracy as we understand the term.

But over 300 years later, and like many others – including a majority of voting Scots only eight years ago – I query the relevance now of that flawed union process and believe that the UK has on balance been beneficial to both parties. It led inter alia to the Industrial Revolution (also a “warts and all” development) and to the Scottish Enlightenment, based on the flowering of our then superior education system, which succeeded the appalling theocratic diktats of the 17th century as described in Arthur Herman’s compulsive and stimulating book of that title and subtitled “The Scots’ invention of the modern world”.

It also led to the British Empire in which Scots played a disproportionate part, no doubt both positively and negatively, and which, also arguably, was on balance a beneficial global development (as the Roman Empire probably was too) despite its obvious brutality and criminality in some respects.

It must also be judged in relation to the certain or probable alternatives – in Africa, King Leopold’s Belgium and militaristic Prussia/germany, whose record in their few colonies was unequivocally bad; and in Asia, particularly India, the totalitarian Russian/soviet Empires, on which I trust no further comment is necessary.

Finally, on an allied topic, I make no defence of our “Christian” participation in the slave trade, but it is high time that those like the Barbados prime minister (who may be the next UN Secretary General) demanding reparations from the UK publicly recognised that the trade depended almost entirely on the local West African chieftains and kings selling their captives to the traders, and thereby benefiting financially. So will reparations also be demanded from their descendants?

JOHN BIRKETT

St Andrews, Fife