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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores personifications of nationhood during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, focusing on the overused metaphor of marriage - analogy for the union between England and Scotland. I unpack this crude theory of (strained) kin relations to consider the 'state' of 'Britain' today.

Paper long abstract:

'Divorce is an Expensive Business' has been an anti-independence cliché in local Labour Party campaigning literature since 1999, when the Scottish Parliament opened. However, metaphors of marriage, households and persons estranged found fresh resonance during the campaign for the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.

On one hand, 'Better Together' campaigners argued against the break up of Britain, warning that in times of austerity, nations - like married couples - should only contemplate constitutional separation (divorce) if they can be sure of balancing their 'household' budgets on their own - like a newly-single divorcee. Meanwhile, Scottish Nationalists caricatured this logic, claiming it appropriated tough economic times as a misguided rationale for binding unhappy and longsuffering bedfellows together, likening Scotland to the abused spouse in a bad marriage.

Following the referendum, these debates gave way to new talk of persons estranged. Many considered the two-year debate over Scotland's constitutional future divisive and as having fuelled sometimes-bitter splits within families. I argue that the consequences of these divisions are still finding new and unstable forms in the dramatic political shifts that have taken place in subsequent Scottish elections.

Drawing on recent anthropological and sociological scholarship on Britain, nationalism and personhood, I provides an account of the uses (and abuses?) of the overused metaphor of marriage, as an analogy for the union between Scotland and England (with 'Britain' constituting the conjugal 'household'). I unpack this crude, and deceptively superficial, theory of (strained) kin relations to interrogate the shifting state of Britain and 'Britishness' today.