Comedy writer Stuart Lee beat me to this one in an excellent piece for the Guardian some weeks back, but I think it’s important enough to include in any list of reasons to stay in the Union. It is the likelihood, in the event of the separation of Scotland from England, of there never being a Labour Government in Westminster again.

The electoral arithmetic of recent decades in the UK  determines that the formation of Labour governments has required the active support of northern Britain, and Scotland in particular. Without it, and assuming the continuation of current voting patterns down south, what’s left of Britain would be permanently Right. As Lee put it in his piece, by withdrawing from the UK parliamentary process we Scots would be condemning the English (and the Welsh, and the Northern Irish) to perpetual Tory domination.

So what, the Scottish nationalist will say. That’s their problem. And so it would be, except that it is one we Scots will have created, for better or worse, by walking away from Westminster, with no regard to the fact that we share a deep common interest with the working people of these islands.

The SNP has been in its not too distant history, and could well become again, a conservative, right-of-centre party. That’s no surprise, focused as it is on the single issue of nationalism. Maybe that’s what Scotland needs to shake it out of its welfare dependency and cultural cringe – a good dose of free market nationalism, as Rupert Murdoch tweeted last week.

The majority of Scots, though, feel attachment to the hard won achievements of the British welfare state, and of the social democratic consensus which has bound all parties since world war II to some basic principles, such as an NHS free at the point of need. Underpinning that consensus, north and south of the border, has been a Labour Party capable of, and comfortable with, government. Labour governments have come and gone, and when the latter has happened, as in 2010, we’ve always known that there is a reasonable prospect of their return to power in a future election. That has constrained the Tories in office, and constrains the Coalition now. There is an alternative, and that puts limits on what a wrecking ball right-of-centre government of the type led by David Cameron can do. You think they’re damaging the country with their policies on health, disability, university education? Imagine what they’d be doing if there was no Labour Party sitting in the wings, waiting for its chance at a comeback?

The end of the union will end that possibility, at least for the foreseeable future, and usher in a period of permanent right-of-centre government south of the border which would inevitably shape how Scotland developed. The SNP might well, in those circumstances, and with no credible Labour opposition to encourage its leftist elements, rediscover its tartan tory tendencies.

Maybe that’s what we need, to repeat, and in any case, it would be for the Scots to determine, in future elections. Personally, I would miss the possibility of left-of-centre social democratic government which the Union provides, to all the working people of these islands. As the ravages of the Coalition continue, and voters who abandoned Labour in 2010 begin to understand what they unleashed, let’s remember what has made Labour government possible in Britain – the participation of Scotland in a Union of working people bound together by something bigger and more inclusive than nationalism.

It was curious, if encouraging, to see the First Minister state that, as the Scotsman put it, “Scotland would still be part of the United Kingdom even after independence”. But these are early days, so let’s carry on with some more reasons why the Union has been and remains valuable to Scotland.

I’ve been on holiday in Australia, where I’ve lived and worked since September 2010. On the road from my base in Brisbane to the Whitsunday Islands in the north of Queensland I was struck, and not for the first time in my travels down under, by the evidence of Scottish influence. We drove out of the city past Edinburgh Castle Road, and north up the coast through towns such as Mackay, Strathdickie, Kenilworth. Through these isolated spots decades and centuries ago came Scots migrants, naming the places where they settled after the places in the country they’d left behind.

There were people already in Australia, of course, when the Scots along with English, Welsh and Irish migrants arrived. They did not ‘civilise’ the lands they colonised, as much as exterminate the local indigenous people and destroy their culture to make way for the anglo-saxon/celtic invasion. The Scots were among the most violent and vicious of colonisers in Australia, as they were in the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere in the British Empire. They were not coerced into imperialism and colonialism by sassenachs, but took to the task with relish.

I wrote in the Sunday Herald some years ago of a woman I met in Queensland on another holiday – the owner of a caravan park were we stopped for the night – who spoke with some pride of how her grandfather from Dundee used to shoot aborigines who strayed onto his land. I’m still shocked when I think about the casual manner in which this individual described the violent deaths of native Australians, less than a century ago.

My point, then, is not that the Scots always did good when they participated in colonialism as part of the Union, and then as the advance guard of the British Empire. Merely that, as a small nation within a larger, but still quite small nation in comparison with many others, they achieved a global presence and visibility which to this day strikes any Scot who travels as remarkable. In Colorado there’s a town of Montrose (as there is in Australia – at least one), and in Oregon a whole town full of McNairs who made their way across the Oregon trail in the nineteenth century (no relation, as far as I could ascertain).In Hong Kong there is a district named Aberdeen. In the south island of New Zealand is Dunedin (the old name for Edinburgh), where bag pipers are commonplace and Scottish influence is everywhere. In the north island I visited the town of Hamilton.

Back in Brisbane, I live in a suburb called Kelvin Grove, which is why I gave my blog that name. Having studied at Glasgow University in the original Kelvin Grove, it seemed fated. They came here from Glasgow a long time ago, it seems, and used names – I live in Dunsmore Street – to make this part of the sub-tropical capital of Queensland at least a little bit more familiar.

We can debate as to the impact of the Scots global presence. Arthur Herman makes a convincing case for the significant and positive influence of Scottish philosophy and ideas on democracy, universal education, universities and so on. Others note with shame the bloody history of the Scots in imperial adventures.

Maybe we Scots would not have developed such a warlike and murderous streak had we developed on our own, apart from the UK. Who knows, though the tribes of northern Europe, from the Picts to the Vikings, were never exactly slouches when it came to rape, pillage and slaughter. I tend to follow the Herman narrative and believe that, on balance and overall, as a result of our role in the Enlightenment, Scotland has been a civilising force on humanity’s evolution, and that this contribution is inseparable from our status as part of the Union. We have hit above our weight these last three centuries, and mostly for good. As a Scot I value this contribution, and regard it as part of my national identity. I wish to see it continue in the decades and centuries to come, which is why I want to stay part of the Union which made it possible.

A couple of summers ago I took a road trip to the place where I was born. Thurso sits at the very tip of Scotland, just about as far north as you can go without getting your feet wet. It’s beautiful country, though bleak and forbidding – flat and windswept, harsh and unforgiving, in contrast to the lushness of the west coast. The North Sea and the arctic winds that blow from the east keep it cold, and remind you that this is the top of the world . In mainland terms it’s as far away from England as you can get and still be in the UK.

It’s quite a way from Glasgow too, which has been home for most of my life, and from where my folks came to Caithness in the late 1950s to spend three years working at the experimental nuclear reactor in Dounreay. After that they moved on, first to Weymouth in Devon, then back north to Barrhead, then into Glasgow, where they have stayed ever since. So Thurso was a brief interlude for them, but my origin, and those three years are lodged in my child’s memory to this day – images of the beach, the sea, the ice on the windows of our house, the Cuban missile crisis on the black and white TV. I see it now, half a century later, clear as day. We returned that summer, all of us, to reconnect.

Thurso is an Old Norse name – like Oslo and Tromso – and the Caithness region is shaped by the influence of the Nordic settlers who came there centuries before we Weegies ever set foot in the place. Before it was Scotland, this part of Scotland was in effect Scandinavia, and the echoes are everywhere, in the language, the ruins and the runes, the names of shops like Gunns in the Thurso town centre. What this part of Scotland is now, is what the Norse invaders made it, mixed up with all those other migrations before and since, including that of the McNairs from Glasgow, come up all the way from Govan and the Clyde where the ships that powered the empire were built, and my grandfathers toiled.

Glasgow and the central west, on the other hand, are as Irish as the north east of Scotland is Nordic. Three of my four grandparents were born in Ireland. My grandfather was an IRA quartermaster in the old days, and a union man on the railways. When he died I inherited his collection of left wing writings – The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist, something by Connolly. On Dad’s side they were boiler- makers in the shipyards, the essence of industrial age proletarian. They built and maintained the ships that defeated the nazis. In return the nazis dropped bombs on their Govan tenements, and nearly killed my Dad. The people of Govan, and Scotland, fought to the death alongside the English, Welsh and Northern Irish in a war of survival that made us what and who we are today.

And maybe this is a big part of the reason why I’ve always experienced my Scottishness as something which has nothing to do with, is indeed suspicious of nationalism in the narrow, exclusive, ethnically pure sense; which transcends tribalism and the mythology of Caledonia and instead looks out to the world beyond. I’ve experienced Scotland as a country formed of many tribes, from east and west of our shores. And south, of course, from England. I, like millions of my countrymen and women, am the product of a multi-ethnic, migratory history which continues to this day, and which the Union, as a multination state hugely stronger than the sum of its parts, encapsulates. It has protected us, within living memory, from extinction at the hands of the most extreme and genocidal nationalism the world has ever seen, while providing a stable political context for the multicultural mingling that has always been our way. The Union is part of our Scottishness, and we should defend it with pride.

A Norwegian acquaintance who stayed in Scotland for a few months told me how much she enjoyed reading our press – its dynamism, irreverence, breadth of coverage. She particularly enjoyed the red top tabloids. Norwegian newspapers were by comparison rather insular, narrowly focused on the business of a small country of five million people. That observation stuck with me.

We are fortunate in Scotland to have such a rich media culture, comprising not just the BBC and broadcasting (see Part Of the Union, #2) but an unrivalled print sector (forget for a moment the debate about the future of newspapers – all countries face that challenge).

As a key centre of the European Enlightenment, and part of the Union, Scotland gave birth to some of the world’s oldest newspaper titles, servicing one of the world’s most literate and educated publics – the Herald (1783), the Scotsman (1815), the Press & Journal (1747), the Daily Record (1895). There are many more scattered across the land, forming what is recognised the world over as an exceptionally well-endowed Scottish public sphere.

But Scotland is part of the Union, and so we also include as part of ‘our’ press the Guardian, the Times, the Daily Mail, the Express, the Sun, the Telegraph. Many of these have substantial editorial operations north of the border, and despite their London bases make real efforts to give Scottish affairs the weight of coverage required for a Scottish audience. They have to, because we have choices in what is possibly the most competitive newspaper market in the world.

The Scottish newspaper reader may access not just our indigenous titles, then, but upwards of sixteen UK-wide publications, all of which cover Scotland to some degree. I personally read on a regular basis the Guardian and the Sunday Times, the Telegraph and the Observer, in addition to my Herald/Sunday Herald and Scotsman/Scotland On Sunday. I read them all because I believe they are relevant to me, as a Scot living in a Union of nations. They address, in combination, and from different ideological perspectives, the issues affecting me at the various levels of governance and society on which I must function – the city of Glasgow; the central west of Scotland, the north of Britain, the outer edge of the European Union.

The newspapers I read (increasingly online, it should be said) all address these different dimensions of my identity as a Scot, and that’s the way I like it. It makes me feel part of something much bigger and more interesting – more challenging in many ways – than the territory and culture and politics of Scotland alone, beautiful and unique and precious as they are.

I don’t think I’m alone in valuing this sense of being part of a larger, more cosmopolitan whole. Many indeed have relied on it. Thousands of our young people, down the years, have moved to London to start their careers, and gone on to achieve distinction in UK and global industries. Some of them have returned to live and work in Scotland in due course. Those who stayed down south have enhanced the Scottish presence within the UK, acting as cultural ambassadors. But all have benefitted, I’d venture, from their access to the bigger pond that is Great Britain. Speaking of the media in particular, one thinks of such as Andrew Marr, Andrew Neil, Eileen Gallagher, Andrew O’Hagan, Kirsty Wark, Stuart Cosgrove, Kirsty Young, Liam Hamilton – I could go on for hours just listing the names of Scots in the media who have, through their association with the UK and its professional networks, successfully tapped into a vastly richer set of opportunities than would have been available were they living in, say, Norway or Ireland with their much smaller industries.

For those of us who consume but don’t produce media, the richness of our media culture is a hugely valuable asset that we would miss if we broke that link with Westminster and the UK; if we no longer needed to worry too much about anything other than ourselves and our local concerns north of the border. In that event, most of the content of the UK news media would become redundant to us.

Of course citizens of an independent Scotland could still be able to read the Guardian or the Mail, as they might still be able to access the BBC, but a key part of the reason for doing so would have gone. We might persevere, but we would no longer feel as if these media belonged to us in the way they do now. We would inevitably drift away from the richness and complexity of UK culture to something much less interesting – to put it crudely, but realistically, not as much happens in a country of five million, as does in a country of 60 million, and that will be reflected in the media.

The Union is not just a political structure, but an integrated, interconnected culture, formed over three centuries of co-operation, and sometimes competition with our larger partner. We see it in the texture and multi-layered richness of our newspapers, our TV and our radio, our sport and our entertainment (on which more later). We’d miss it if it were gone.

‘You won’t get me I’m part of the union, won’t get me I’m part of the union, you won’t get me I’m part of the union, till the day I die, till the day I die!’

Or until a properly representative referendum, backed up by a majority in the Scottish parliament and another, constitutionally decisive one in Westminster, says otherwise.

And here’s the first reason why, prompted by an article written by Polly Toynbee in a recent issue of the Guardian. She was on about the BBC, and why it should be more assertive, nay aggressive, in defending itself against the predations of Sky. The BBC has always been high on my list of reasons not to leave the Union, but Toynbee’s piece was a timely reminder of just how good, and how important it is.

The BBC, as I wrote in the Guardian in 2007 when the SNP were proposing to abolish the corporation north of the border in favour of a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation, is the crowning cultural achievement of the United Kingdom; the very best of British, if you like, a key public service at home, and a cultural ambassador for the UK the world over. We’d miss it if it were gone.

I miss it now, here in Australia, where they have an Australian Broadcasting Corporation very much modeled on the BBC. The ABC produces a great deal of excellent TV and radio, but viewers down here concede that much of the best stuff is what they import from the UK – Winterbottom’s The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden, Neil Oliver’s History Of Scotland, Grand Designs, The Graham Norton Show. British TV as a whole is highly regarded overseas, but the BBC’s reputation is supreme. And not just in Australia. Travel to the Nordic countries, or Ireland, elsewhere in Europe, or north America, and you soon realize why they all look to the BBC as a byword for broadcasting excellence.

When the SNP were proposing to dump it in 2007, on the grounds that it was too English, I argued in the Guardian that Scots like John Reith made the BBC, and have played a key role in all aspects of its development for nearly a century. All over the world the term ‘Reithian’ is understood to mean the particular approach to public service broadcasting that has made the BBC what it is. The BBC is not something that was done to us Scots by cultural imperialists down south, in short, but something we created, uniquely on the planet, alongside the English, the Welsh and the northern Irish. Rather than whinge about the ‘English Broadcasting Corporation’ we should be taking pride in that achievement, and building on it.

Today it gives us access to a 60 million strong pool of creative talent, on which the BBC’s quality is premised. Cut adrift from that pool, we’d be like Norway, Denmark, Finland, Australia. No disrespect to those countries, whose public service broadcasters do a good job with much less resource than is available to the BBC. But that’s the point. As part of the Union, the BBC is Scottish culture, or a big component of it. We are 5 million, but benefit from the creativity and investment available to a country of 60 million.

The BBC’s global reputation is a major asset to Scottish culture. The corporation acts like a portal for Scottish talent – actors, writers, producers and directors from north of the border gain access not just to a UK but a global audience through the BBC brand, raising Scotland’s creative profile for beyond what a small country of 5 million on the north west fringes of Europe might have been expected to achieve had it been making TV and radio on its own these last fifty years.

Scots could still be active in the BBC after separation, of course. Many talented people would be drawn south just for the opportunity to be part of it, setting off a creative brain drain north of the border. But as Scots audiences cut adrift from the BBC network we would receive no benefit from their involvement. No doubt an SBC would negotiate to import some BBC and other UK-produced content, but it would be piecemeal and subject to local management whim. Look at the rumpus when STV refused to show the first series of ITV’s Downtown Abbey. That’s a glimpse of the future in a Scotland which had cut itself off from the BBC – disputes, boycotts, squabbles over rights and revenue shares. Who needs it?

The BBC isn’t perfect, and there’s always room for improvement in Scotland’s relationship to what is, we know, a London-based organization (all the UK regions share this challenge, and let’s concede that with investments in Pacific Quay, Salford and elsewhere, the BBC is trying to move away from metrocentrism).

This isn’t the place for a detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the Reithian model, or the performances of the current BBC and BBC Scotland. All I’d say is this: we in Scotland, in partnership with our fellow Britishers on these islands, have the best broadcasting culture in the world at our fingertips. Oh yes, we’d miss it if it were gone.