AHC: Scottish Secession Crisis During the Blitz

The challenge is to get Scotland to attempt to secede, whether successfully or not, sometime after the Fall of France (1940) but before Stalingrad (1942).
Depending how you describe it happens, how would it effect the British war effort between those years?
 
The only way I can see this happening would be if there was a groundswell of fascism in Scotland during the Great Depression. There could be riots during the Abdication Crisis, owing to the King being pro-Hitler. Then when France falls, and Britain is facing invasion, a group of revolutionaries seize control of Edinburgh and declare Scotland independent and join the Axis powers.

Would this work? Not even remotely. The BEF may have lost most of their equipment on the continent, but they're still more organized and better equipped than whatever force the rebel Scots can put together. It would be expensive, but Britain can fight the Battle of Britain and reconquer Scotland at the same time.
 
A few decades worth of persecution ought to do the trick. The problem is bringing such a situation into being (not to mention not butterflying the entire history of post-WWI into hell). Maybe a worse version of the battle of George Square?
 
Quoted in Fry's The Scottish Empire, the exchange between a census taker in 1861 and an old woman of Skye;

"Where are all the menfolk? This is an island of women and the elderly, where are all your young men?"

"Away running the Empire."

Looking at the details, it's true- Scotland produced an enormously disproportionate share of the military and civilian leadership of the British Empire, did very well out of it, and the Scottish upper class knew it.

Scottish radicalism comes from the working class who are not getting any proportionate share of the pie, or who feel let down by the total failure of the governing class to maintain pie, and tends overwhelmingly to the left;

there were a few xenophobic nutters who took the enemy of my enemy bit far too far, so anti- London as to be prepared to be pro- Nazi, but they (Hugh McDiarmuid being one) had the sense to keep their heads down.

It's like communist Middle America; it just isn't temperamentally possible, the place just doesn't turn out people like that.
 
Was this an actual thing? It makes sense if there was in retrospect to the time period were talking about it.
As far as I'm aware it never really happened. IIRC before Mussolini swung to the right fascism was seen by many as rather left-wing, so perhaps if a charismatic young leader were to come to the fore you might be able to have it develop as an alternative to socialism for some.
 
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