In the run-up to this September’s historic referendum on whether Scotland was to remain part of the United Kingdom, the British political establishment practically pleaded with Scottish people not to quit United Kingdom, to which their nation has belonged since 1707.

With polls indicating that the referendum was on a knife-edge, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, in common with other leading British politicians, was palpably alarmed that shorn of Scotland, the UK — otherwise composed of England, Wales and Northern Ireland — would be hugely diminished. That it has survived in its existing form, with 55 percent of Scottish people opting to keep their country in it, owed something to the impassioned, last minute intervention of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is himself Scottish. In concert with Cameron, Brown assured his compatriots that they could have significantly more political autonomy within the UK without running the risk of full-blown independence.

Where meanwhile was Tony Blair, from whom Brown took over as British prime minister in 2007? Blair’s absence from the pro-union campaign was especially notable because of his own close ties with Scotland. Educated in Edinburgh, he came to prominence in the 1990s as part of a group of young Scottish Labour politicians, including Brown and Robin Smith, mentored by the Scottish Labour Party leader, John Smith. Smith’s pet project was to devolve power to his native land but he died in 1994 before he could accomplish it. When, as UK prime minister in the late 1990s, Blair endorsed the establishment of a Scottish Parliament, he was honoring Smith’s memory.

The truth is that Blair’s direct involvement in the referendum campaign would have been a gift to the independence movement. Blair is widely seen in Scotland as the personification of the London-centric, free market-dominated British state that has sold out ordinary people. Nowhere in the United Kingdom, moreover, are the British military actions that he instigated in Afghanistan and Iraq viewed with greater disfavor. Many Scots applauded the decision of Robin Cook to resign from the British Cabinet over the Iraq war. Cook, who died in 2005, might have led an anti-war movement among which Scottish people outraged that they had been made party to Anglo-US aggression would have bulked large.

Blair’s presence in Scotland would have brought into sharp prominence the whole issue of the part played by the country in British defense policy. For it is at the Scottish naval base of Faslane that, much to the resentment of Scottish nationalists, the nuclear submarines are birthed that underpin the United Kingdom’s residual credibility as a leading military power. It was the declared intention of the leader of the Scottish National Party, Scotland First Minister Alex Salmond, if his campaign for independence prevailed, to seek the removal of a nuclear arsenal regarded by many Scots as a financially wasteful British virility symbol.

An independent Scotland could have plunged the UK into crisis over its defense arrangements, compromising its status as a dependable ally of the United States. Yet if the old UK national security state remains intact, it does so largely because Blair’s prime ministerial successors, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, went to extravagant lengths to convince the people of Scotland that by remaining part of the United Kingdom, they can enjoy the best of both worlds.

The trouble is that their precipitate pledge has left many in England, Wales and Northern Ireland feeling that Scotland is receiving preferential treatment. In pre-empting Scottish separatism, they have inflamed English nationalism. Indeed, though Brown and Cameron may have plugged one hole in the UK’s dam wall, another threatens to burst open. And with 45 percent of Scottish people, including Scotland’s biggest city Glasgow, having voted for independence, it remains to be seen how permanently they have fixed the first hole.

What further complicates the picture is that not a few English people want to vote in favor of ending UK membership of the European Union that is highly congenial to great numbers of Scots.

Posterity will gasp that the UK political elite vaunted its nation-building role in foreign lands at a time when affairs on its own doorstep were in such spectacular disarray.

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