Experts flag up end of union jack if Scotland votes for independence

It is possible that within days the UK might look very different, but what about its flag? Four centuries after the union jack was created following the uniting of the English and Scottish crowns, the prospect of a Scottish exit has suddenly focused minds on what it might look like if the country were to depart, taking its blue-and-white St Andrew's cross with it.

What would happen in the event of a Scottish yes vote is not clear. Constitutional experts suggest that the remainder of the UK would not necessarily be required to abandon the current flag, although Lord West, the deputy chairman of the parliamentary flags and heraldry committee, suggested last week that it was "nonsense" to imagine the St Andrew's blue could remain.

Downing Street insists that it has made no preparations for a yes vote, not even on the question of the national symbol. "We haven't made any contingency plans for that," a spokesman said.

The College of Arms, the official register for flags, coats of arms and pedigrees for the Crown, which was responsible for the design of the current flag in 1606, similarly declined to be drawn.

Peter O'Donoghue, who goes by the title of York Herald, said that such a dramatic change "would be discussed by the Garter King of Arms [the most senior officer at the College] with the government and the palace".

Pressed over whose final responsibility it would be to choose the design, he acknowledged it was a grey area, saying there was no automatic legal bar on the current red, white and blue flag, and no established mechanism for changing it. It is not, after all, something that comes up very often.

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Part of the problem, according to Charles Ashburner, the chief executive of the Flag Institute, is that the current flag "fell into use" rather than ever being formally adopted, so "nobody controls the union flag". Successive governments have declined to sort out the constitutional anomaly, he said, meaning that "potentially on Friday morning in the post-apocalyptic nightmare that Scotland is going to have after a yes vote, all these questions are going to come home to roost".

The head of "the world's leading research and documentation centre for flags and flag information" describes the constitutional confusion surrounding the current union jack – which was amended in 1801 at the College of Arms to incorporate the red diagonals of the Irish cross of St Patrick – as "a dog's dinner". Wales, he notes, is not represented at all.

According to some constitutional experts, because the current flag technically represents a union of crowns rather than nations, and the Queen would be likely to remain monarch of an independent Scotland, there would be no legal or constitutional reason to stop flying the current flag.

Ashburner thinks it more likely that Britain would eventually be represented by two flags: the union jack abroad and another which "represents the rest of the UK as it then exists.

"If Scotland is not in the UK any more, can it really be OK that Wales is not represented in the flag and Scotland is?" Prepare for the red, white and green?