In a Britain recently awash with Ukip-inspired talk of political tremors and seismic shifts it is easy to forget that even before a vote has been cast in September's referendum, Scotland has already changed Britain for ever. Westminster's claim to undivided authority over the country? Dead and buried. The constitutional fiction that parliament, or the Queen in parliament, rather than the people, are sovereign? Gone for ever.
While Ukip has yet to change one domestic law or author one act of parliament, the Scots have already sunk without trace the old idea of Britain as a unitary state. Constitutional lawyers used to comfort themselves that the British constitution worked in theory but not in practice. Now it works neither in theory nor in practice. But more is to come. If Britain does not change of its own volition, Scotland will demand, at a minimum, "home rule within the UK", and could force upon the whole country a system of government as close to federalism as you can have in a nation where one part forms 85% of the population. But what is now at stake is more serious than even that: the nationalists would consign the very idea of the "United" Kingdom and of "Great" Britain to the past.
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