Start the Week Folgen

The Acts of Union 1707 brought together England and Scotland, ‘United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain’. But the historian Karin Bowie tells Andrew Marr that in the years preceding a growing number of pamphlets and demonstrations showed that many people were divided on the issue. In ‘Public Opinion in Early Modern Scotland c.1560–1707’ Bowie charts the growing debate across society. The failure of Scotland’s trading ambitions in the Darien Scheme also hit the country hard, both financially and emotionally.However the idea of an independent Scotland emerged surprisingly recently into public debate, according to academic Ben Jackson. In his book The Case for Scottish Independence he argues that an influential Scottish nationalism only began to take shape from the 1970s onwards. It was at heart a political project, born out of opposition to the Thatcher government. Ruth Wishart is a pro-independence journalist who has written about Scottish affairs for many decades. As s columnist for The National she is following every twist and turn as Scottish nationalists agitate for a second independence referendum to follow the Scottish Parliament election in May. The political scientist Ailsa Henderson will be watching the coming elections closely too as she’s an expert on voting behaviour and attitudes to both Scottish and English nationalism. A number of Scots felt a deep sense of grievance against their neighbours at the formation of the Union. Now more than three hundred years later Henderson shows, in her forthcoming book Englishness – co-written with Richard Wyn Jones – that English nationalism contains a strain of grievance about England’s place within the United Kingdom.Producer: Katy Hickman

2020 has been disastrous for the arts in Britain and many people have lost their jobs as Covid-19 has swept through the country. Sir Nicholas Hytner has been working in the theatre for nearly four decades and he tells Andrew Marr about the unprecedented challenges that now face his industry. Hytner made his name and fortune in the 1990s with the musical Miss Saigon. Further successes came with theatre and film productions of The Madness of King George and The History Boys, and the sell-out One Man, Two Guvnors.He ran the National Theatre for twelve years before setting up his own commercial venture – with his business partner Nick Starr – the Bridge Theatre. During the year of the pandemic Hytner has sought to keep the theatre afloat with performances of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, and a specially adapted, socially distanced, but joyful, version of A Christmas Carol.Producer: Katy Hickman Photographer: Helen Maybanks

As the 850th anniversary of the murder of Thomas Becket approaches Andrew Marr explores the dynamic between church and state and what happens when the most powerful political friendships turn sour. The academic Laura Ashe explains the background to the murder in the cathedral on 29th December 1170. King Henry II had promoted the lowly born Thomas Becket to the highest positions in the land – first Lord Chancellor, then Archbishop of Canterbury. But their growing animosity and conflict over the rights and privileges of the church led to his infamous assassination by four of the King’s knights. In recent years the former librarian Christopher de Hamel has succeeded in identifying the Anglo-Saxon Psalter which Becket cherished in his lifetime and may even have been holding when he died. In The Book in the Cathedral: The Last Relic of Thomas Becket, de Hamel looks at what this book reveals about the life of Becket. He also compares the veneration for relics of the saints in the Middle Ages, with our relationship today with historical artefacts.In Britain the Anglican Church still has an establishment role within the state, with Bishops in the House of Lords and the monarch regarded as ‘defender of the faith’. But across the Channel in France a formal separation of church and state, laïcité, was enshrined in French law in 1905. The cultural historian Andrew Hussey, who is based in Paris, looks at the devastating fault lines that have emerged in 2020 in the country’s secularist ideals. Producer: Katy Hickman