British Prime Minister David Cameron just came close to losing a 314-year-old union the same way historian John Robert Seeley once said Britain acquired its empire: “in a fit of absence of mind.” Cameron assumed Scotland’s referendum would attract the roughly one-quarter of Scots who have long wanted independence. He should have recognized long before the final days of the campaign that this would also be a protest vote.

The protest was against Cameron’s Conservative Party, hated north of the border, and the austerity programs run from London that have hit Scotland’s public-sector workforce, which still accounts for about a fifth of Scottish employment. Yet this kind of protest is hardly unique to Scotland.

In England, immigrants and the flawed European Union are the targets of popular ire. In Spain, Catalonia is pushing to secede. In France, Greece, parts of central Europe and even Sweden, repolished neo-Nazi demagogues are gaining support.

It is, of course, a fantasy to think that splitting countries, leaving the EU, keeping out immigrants or scapegoating dark-skinned foreigners will boost wages and the quality of life for those left behind in increasingly unequal societies. But governments’ failure to address valid complaints leaves the field dangerously open to such populism.

It’s not enough – as Cameron surely now knows – to respond to crises. Elected officials need to act first to make the economic and fiscal reforms that give their countries a better chance to compete and their citizens a better chance to succeed.


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