Philip Sargent
May 09, 1999
Now that Scotland has a parliament again, and even though the SNP currently is the largest opposition party rather than being in control, it would be prudent to make plans for some long term possibilities.
If and when Scotland gains independence from the rest of the United Kingdom, it leaves the remainder with a naming problem. Scotland has an obvious and universally acceptable name, but what about the rest of us ?
Scotland may retain the monarchy (as Australia now) or may become a republic (as Australia may do in the future), but this has little effect on the names for the rest of us.
Those of us in England and Wales will no longer be able to use the abbreviation "UK" on our letters and we will require a new DNS national top level domain to replace ".uk". Scotland will presumably simply use ".sa" or ".sn" or whatever is not already taken. (Sierra Leone is .sl, Seychelles is .sc, Somailia is .so, Sudan is .sd, Slovakia is .sk).
"Great Britain" is the name of the island of England, Wales and Scotland. So without Scotland, we cannot even put "GB" stickers on our cars when we go abroad. We can't use ".gb" as our DNS top-level domain.
The nation state of the UK at the moment is already fairly complicated: We are the Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are not (and they have their own domain names already: ".gg", ".je", ".im").
The most obvious new name would be the Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland which could be abbreviated to KEW at the expense of upsetting the Northern Irish: KEWNI is too long. The top-level domain could conceivably be ".kew" but current rules require that national domain names be the same as the official ISO 3166 two-letter abbreviations. (Except for international organizations, e.g. http://www.europa.eu.int .)
While the official name (as appearing on passports and the like) will presumably be KEWNI, in usual speech we might be able to use "Kingdom of Britain", which would be unambiguous if Scotland became a republic. This gives the useful abbreviation "KB" (or "BK") and top-level domain ".kb".
Technically, "Britain" is Brittany ("little" Britain) but common usage over the last few hundred years has applied it to Great Britain instead. The original need for the word "Great" having been largely forgotten.
This really is difficult. Scotland has no problems with the cross of St.Andrew (white diagonal cross on blue background) but the Union Jack without the Scottish component would be a feeble combination of the crosses of St. George and St. Patrick. This omits the Welsh (they've been left out since 1132) and the Northern Irish who presumably would much prefer the Red Hand of Ulster to St.Patrick. Eire would probably also prefer us not to lay implicit claim to the whole of Ireland any more and so St.Patrick looks as if he has to go.
A St.George's cross with a Green Dragon in the top left quadrant and a Red Hand in the top right would fulfill the basic requirements, but it's not going to win any prizes as a national symbol of identity. Alternatively we could replace the Scottish blue background with a Welsh green, and remove all the diagonal elements, which would have the merit of visually resembling the Union Jack from a distance.
The simplest thing would be to hope that we might be able to get away without a flag, but that would create diplomatic difficulties.
We will probably have a national competition to design a completely new flag for "New Britain", perhaps along the lines of Jamaica's black, green and gold rather than the traditional red, white and blue (because those were the only good dyes centuries ago). Would New Labour like to begin one now, after all it could take 20 years to find a good one?
The Union Jack appears in many other flags around the world: Australia, New Zealand, most UK overseas territories and even some American States. These are historical relics and do not need to be changed to match a new flag.
It might all become much more difficult: what if regional English assemblies are created and the North East or Cornwall also opt for independence ? What if Cornwall declares the Prince of Wales as its King ? Obvious unambiguous names based on geography would become almost impossible and we would be forced to use something like "The British Kingdom" and drop the list of territories from the official titles.