How Alistair Darling rescued Scotland

Few modern politicians can claim to have changed their country, and fewer still can claim to have saved it. One who can is the late Alistair Darling.

This is not a reference to his role as Chancellor of the Exchequer during the 2008/09 global financial crisis, but rather his role as the political leader of the Better Together campaign during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. With a relentless focus on the economic risks of independence, it was Darling, perhaps more than anyone else, who shaped the arguments that would, ultimately, keep the United Kingdom together. 

Of course, Darling’s opposition to Scottish independence was multifaceted. Like all his politics, it came from his deep-rooted belief that collective action was the only solution to the social injustice he so passionately opposed. Indeed, he firmly believed, in the words of the Labour Party membership card he would carry for five decades, that it was ‘by the strength of our common endeavour that we achieve more than we achieve alone’.