Some numbers and some history to explain why the union is stuffed
Google can be terribly cruel. If you ask it for a quantity that can be presented as a graph to show change over time, it will often provide one, unbidden, including extra data it thinks you might like to compare it to. I was searching for the population of Scotland, for reasons we’ll come to below, and the graph Google generated also showed me the populations of Wales and... London. Not England, you note, merely its capital. Look.
The reason for this, I imagine, is that including England too would render the graph unreadable. And this, conveniently, goes straight to the heart of today’s sermon.
We all know, I think, that of the four nations of the UK England is quite a bit bigger than the others. But I don’t think we always grasp quite how much bigger: so much so that the population of the other three combined is only slightly bigger than London on some measures, and actually slightly smaller on others. The union is out of balance, and we are now seeing the effects.
The union has always been out of balance, of course – England has the most land, the most good growing land, the most temperate climate, and the best connections to the continent. By all rights, you’d expect it to be the most populated, and so far as we can tell it always has been.
