Letters on Liberty: Disunited Kingdom – the end of the Union?

This session is part of Buxton Battle of Ideas festival. Find out more here.

During the pandemic, public life came to a standstill. But long before lockdowns and viruses threatened the freedoms that we hold dear, there has been a problem with our belief in liberty.

Open debate has been suffocated by today’s censorious climate and there is little cultural support for freedom as a foundational value. What we need is rowdy, good-natured disagreement and people prepared to experiment with what freedom might mean today. Faced with this challenge, the Academy of Ideas decided to launch Letters on Liberty – a radical public pamphleteering campaign aimed at reimagining arguments for freedom in the 21st century.

In his Letter – The Scottish Question – Alastair Donald looks at how age-old questions have re-emerged related to liberty, democracy and sovereignty in Scotland – but with a modern twist. Political divisions have often moved beyond left and right; and changing attitudes to nationalism and nation states complicate the matter. Alastair argues that many of the shifts in contemporary thinking around nationhood and identity are due, in part, because there is little substance to contemporary Unionism.

Join Alastair and respondents to re-examine the case for independence – not just in Scotland, but across the four nations of the UK. Can Unionism survive or has it become a hollowed-out political ideal? Does independence become contradictory when devolved governments always seem to be in favour of constraints on freedom? Does the potential break-up of the Union signal a progressive shift, or a break-down in cross-border solidarity?