ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide a concomitant debilitating ‘wind of change’ blowing through Tory fortunes as a direct consequence of the disengagement from empire. It examines the influence of ‘empire’ which gave support to those Unionist pillars. If devolution and independence are wrapped in the thistle and the saltire, Unionism it is argued was associated with equally powerful symbols of Scottish culture, the Union Jack, militarism, and the British Empire. The imagery which coalesced Protestantism and British military tradition is nowhere more evident than in the pages of the official Church of Scotland journal, Life and Work, of the late fifties and early sixties. Scottish Nationalist antipathy for the British state and the consequent equation of ‘British’ with ‘English’ in contemporary Scottish society, leaves a strong impression in today’s Scottish society that any British identification necessarily dilutes one’s Scottishness. But this successful Nationalist political agenda only dates as far back as the second half of the 1960s.
