Playing with independence: Brexit is driving Scotland’s constitutional stand-off

The preoccupation with Scottish independence obscures the potential for meaningful constitutional reform in Scotland. As Ben Wray and James Foley wryly observe in their recent book Scotland After Britain, ‘…conflict over independence, real or imagined, serves to distract from the absence of other disagreements, and the absence of electoral choice’. For Scotland’s political establishment, the ‘independence question’ has long served as an ideological safe space, a form of performative contestation, that has allowed both Unionist and Nationalist elites to isolate themselves from the demos and negate the demand for meaningful democratic change.