ORDINARILY, I would now be writing this from Myanmar (or Burma, as it used to be known – and still is by those who regard the name-change imposed by the former ruling military junta as illegitimate).

Those plans have been thwarted by Covid-19. So here I am in my study, thinking about – in Kipling’s words – “them spicy garlic smells, and the sunshine an’ the palm-trees and the tinkly temple-bells”.

Burma was once known as “the Scottish colony”. Its trade in teak, tea, jade and jute was sustained by Scottish merchants, and even the “paddles chunking from Rangoon to Mandalay” were Glasgow-owned.

Burma’s loss of political independence – sealed by the third Anglo-Burmese war of 1885 – was not widely lamented. The rule of the Burmese kings, like that of the later Stuarts, had been corrupt, extractive and negligent.

In the words of Maung Maung, who later became chief justice and briefly president of the country, British rule brought to Burma “law and order and liberal ideas”. Although aloof, it was not “completely devoid of human warmth”.

The Burmese villagers discovered to their surprise that the British – unlike previous rulers – “did not kill and plunder at random” and that the ordinary British bureaucrat “had been taught as a boy that he must not steal, must not rob, must not tell lies”.

Sadly, in light of recent events, it seems that British standards have since slipped.

With the Government of Burma Act 1935, the country achieved what might be described as a form of “devolution”, with a mostly elected Burmese legislature and a Burmese government having control over most aspects of internal and domestic policy.

Yet even a relatively decent and discreet foreign administration cannot compensate in the long run for the absence of independence. A brief period of Japanese occupation during the Second World War convinced the Burmese that the British, although the lesser of two evils, had to go. The original plan had been for a gradual transition to independence by the mid-1950s, but that was untenable. Burma became independent, somewhat at the rush, in 1947.

It did so as a diverse country, encompassing not only the Burmese majority but also several other nationalities, including the Shan, Kachin and Karen. There were Christian and Muslim minorities as well as the dominant Buddhists.

The Burmese constitution of 1947 was in many ways typical of mid-20th century Westminster-influenced constitutions; in its detailed particulars, such as the mechanism for appointing a prime minister and the rules for the dissolution of parliament, it owed much to the Irish constitution.

In how it dealt with diversity, however, it was unusual. It had a rare form of federalism in which the members of the Union Parliament elected from each state also formed the state legislature for that state. So, all the members representing, say, Shan State in both houses of the Union Parliament would form the Shan State Council, with legislative powers over state matters. There would be a minister for the Shan State in the Union Government, who would also be head of the Shan State.

In one of those curious constitutional coincidences, this arrangement was – according to Maung Maung – deliberately modelled on Scotland. This is a remarkable thing. We think of devolution as starting in 1999, but those crafting the Burmese constitution in the 1940s believed that Scotland already had devolution.

They thought that the Secretary of State for Scotland was as much “Scotland’s man in the Cabinet” as “the Cabinet’s man in Scotland”, and that in running his little empire from St Andrew’s House the Secretary of State for Scotland was running a devolved Scottish national administration in respect of matters such as agriculture, education, health, justice, policing, transport, and so forth.

They also believed – presumably not without justification – that the Scottish MPs at Westminster formed “a legislature within the legislature” and that no legislation of importance relating to these matters in Scotland would be passed without the approval of the Scottish members.

A crucial part of Burma’s constitutional settlement was that each state had the right, by a two-thirds majority in its state council, followed by a referendum, to achieve independence – just as it was informally recognised that Scotland’s place within the Union ultimately rested on consent.

The Burmese probably over-estimated the degree of Scottish self-rule, or at least underestimated the difference that writing it down in a constitution makes. If Scotland did enjoy such autonomy and self-determination, it did so only by permission, by benign neglect, by convention and by expediency; there was nothing guaranteed about it.

Nevertheless, these borrowings reveal something very important about how the British system was understood at the time: the UK was not a “unitary state”, but a “Union state”, in which Scotland was recognized as a distinct nation, with real if limited autonomy, whose membership of the Union was in the final analysis voluntary.

The question to Unionist parties is whether they still intend to honour these principles.

This column welcomes questions from readers