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I Don't know about Scotland, but in England and Wales, you are allowed to use 'reasonable force' to defend yourself, either in the street or at home. Basically, you are allowed to use violence against an intruder in your house or a mugger in the streets and you will not face charges (you may be arrested as scotsman has said until the facts have been ascertained). What you aren't allowed is to use excessive force (i.e. caving someone's skull in for calling your mum nasty names) or to use violence to punish an offender once they no longer prevent a threat. This is a perfectly reasonable intention.

WRT weapons, in addition to guns and knives, you are, unfortunately, not allowed to carry any object in public for the specific purpose for using it as a weapon. This isn't to say you can't carry something that can't be used as a weapon, but you would have to justify having it on you for another reason (I carry an unbreakable umbrella for example (google it). I can justify this, because it is an actual umbrella, it just happens to be a very robust one that won't break if I had to use it on an assailant's head.

However, walking around with a baseball bat would be difficult to justify.

In the home, there are restrictions on owning firearms or explosives, but you can own anything sharp or heavy, or buy a crossbow, and use them if need be, although because of the grey area regarding what is 'reasonable force' you might end up having to try and convince a jury that you aren't a violent nutcase for having a collection of exotic weaponry spread all over the house...

In America, the standard derives from the British standard, but the two may have diverged a good bit. In the United States, there are generally only two classes of force, physical force and deadly force. You can use physical force against unlawful physical force and deadly force against unlawful deadly force (which is a subclass of physical force). The key is what the person using the force knew at the time they knew it and what they reasonably believed.

So, much becomes subjective, in the sense that you must convince a judge that what you knew could justify what you did. Here is an example: I know that numerous people have been killed by a single blow of a closed fist to the head. In any case, a fist to the head can easily render a person unconscious, and make you completely helpless to the adversary who hit you. Because I have that knowledge and can articulate it, I can use deadly force to prevent someone attempting to hit me with a fist, because they in fact are threatening me with deadly force if they threaten it. Would it be possible to do the same in the UK? Could a person in the UK use a cane, or walking stick, or any weapon against a strong young person who threatens them with fisticuffs?

For a number of years, the courts have restricted the use of force to prevent crime, but much of that has been by judicial decisions rather than by legislation. For about a decade the trend has been the opposite, giving more leeway and protection to the legitimate use of deadly force in the prevention of crime. There can be significant variations, in the American federal system, by State. In Texas, for example, you can use deadly force to protect property at night. In Arizona, if you use deadly force to prevent rape or kidnapping, it is assumed to be reasonable.

My small understanding of British law has been that the trend has been the opposite until recently, making the use of deadly force much more restrictive than it used to be, say 75 years ago, with some reversals toward more leniency in the last decade or so.

Any clarifications of the above view from across the pond would be appreciated.