What the United Kingdom is good for

Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, offers a personal perspective on what the Union is good for.

He writes: One of the most dismaying features of the campaign leading up to the September 2014 referendum on Scottish independence
referendum on Scottish independence was the faltering inarticulacy of unionists in explaining what the United Kingdom is good for, and therefore why some kinds of independence would be bad for everyone, including the Scots.

In retrospect, this was a symptom, not of the Union’s intellectual bankruptcy, but rather of the natural difficulty of describing the very ground upon which we have long been standing. One of the benefits of the referendum was that it provoked unionists like me to lift up our feet, look down, and contemplate what it is that supports us.

What I discovered is that the UK is good for three things:

+ the greater external security of liberal democracy
+ a depth of multinational solidarity of which the European Union can still only dream
+ and the upholding of a humane international order.

And all of that will remain true, whether or not Brexit comes to pass.