Pierre Trudeau, the former prime minister of Canada, once noted that his country’s relationship with the United States was akin to finding oneself in bed with an elephant. This might be a strange arrangement but so long as the elephant behaved itself, it need not be an uncomfortable one. If the elephant starts to thrash around, however, everyone else risks being squashed.
Well, England is the United Kingdom’s elephant and Brexit is the moment it chose to remind its bedmates that even pachyderms must from time to time be permitted to exercise their prerogatives. If that made life less comfortable for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, then so be it. The littler nations would just have to lump it.
There is a logic there but while certain choices may be made on a UK-wide basis their consequences are not necessarily shared equitably. Brexit set new constitutional fires blazing in Scotland and Northern Ireland while also introducing fresh tensions between London and Cardiff. Many of these problems had a common origin: the sense that the voices of the smaller nations were ignored.
In England, however, a different narrative has taken hold. England’s rights must be respected and it is past time that the devolved administrations were put in their place. A new, more muscular “unionism” is emerging that is intensely suspicious of the devolved administrations. This is a very English form of “unionism”, largely alien to unionists in Scotland or Northern Ireland or even Wales. Few unionists elsewhere either recognise it or want any part of it.
David Cameron once bemoaned Whitehall’s tendency to “devolve and forget” but this is a second-order offence far less important than the primary inability to understand the realities of multinational, indeed multicultural, Britain. In the year of the virus, the true nature of the UK’s constitution has spawned some hard learning. Often Boris Johnson has, in effect, been relegated to the status of prime minister of England.
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As a new report published today by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge makes clear, the co-operation between the UK’s various governments that was a feature of the initial response to the pandemic slowly broke down. Mark Drakeford, first minister of Wales, had only one conversation with the prime minister between May and September last year.
Titled “Union at the Crossroads: can the British state handle the challenges of devolution?”, the report asks a question to which the implied answer is “not as presently constituted”. With considerable understatement, it observes that there is an “absence of a deep and strategic capability within British government in the field of territorial relations”. Too often Whitehall exhibits what the report deems an “imperious disregard” for the prerogatives of the other parts of the UK. It concludes, “The pandemic has shone a harsh, unforgiving light upon the poorly developed, and often mistrustful, relationships between the devolved and UK governments”.
Some of this is a question of status: Nicola Sturgeon wishes to be seen as Johnson’s equal; he naturally bridles at any such suggestion. Yet inconveniently, in many aspects of the day-to-day management of the emergency she, first minister of Scotland, is the equal of a prime minister whose responsibilities are often confined to England.
Despite this, differences in the approach taken to virus-management prove devolution’s success, not its failure. If the UK has a future, it requires a clearer acceptance of the differences between its constituent parts. It is a United Kingdom but not a unitary one. Differences in policy or approach are no guarantee of success, but they do serve as a proof of concept.
For if the UK is not capacious, it is liable to be nothing at all. A revanchist unionism of the sort preferred by the prime minister when he suggests devolution is a “disaster”, or Jacob Rees-Mogg when he says anything at all, is a unionism that betrays its own traditions. It is not a question of being Scottish or British but of being both. Unionism is a plural identity, which means it requires a plural politics too. Devolution and what, to borrow from Northern Ireland, we might deem “parity of esteem” should be a feature, not a bug.
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Even if you think the devolved parliaments are subordinate, it would be wiser never to actually say so in public. Parliaments are easily conflated with the people they serve, and a slight on Holyrood, Cardiff Bay or Stormont is swiftly perceived as a slight on the smaller nations. If this signals a certain prickliness on their part, it should also remind the elephant to remember his manners. The precise detail of constitutional authority matters much less than a perception that the smaller nations are overlooked, ignored and not afforded the respect they are due. Again, it is a question of sensibility and of tact.
The UK is not formally a federal entity but de facto, and even in the absence of a codified constitution, it possesses many of the features of a federal state anyway. It is a country of surprising, if often unrecognised, diversity in which unitary institutions are rarer than many people, including many MPs, think. It has no single education system, no single system of law, no pan-UK established church; even the NHS, notionally that great symbol of British unity, is actually organised along national lines.
Renewal will require tact and modesty and a certain generosity of spirit too. The SNP cannot be expected to give up on independence but responding to its constant and increasingly tiresome provocations by waving the Union flag ever more vigorously is counterproductive. If the argument is framed as Britain against Scotland, Britain will lose every time.
Much of the time Downing Street’s ambitions run no further than doing what it can to stymie the SNP. A “Union unit” is succeeded by a “Union taskforce” and the government is forever promising to put the Union “at the heart” of everything it does. Yet, despite this, nothing ever happens and no progress is ever made.
Dishing the Nats is an entertaining pastime but it is, unavoidably, a reactive one. As such, it addresses the symptoms of the tensions threatening the Union but never the causes. Downing Street is fond of clever-clever manoeuvres that will, it is claimed, thwart Sturgeon’s ambitions, but only rarely, if ever, addresses itself to questions of how the UK might work better.
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The real challenge is persuading Scots that independence is unnecessary, not merely undesirable. That in turn requires a British government that understands, and works with, the realities of the UK as it is, not as it mistakenly imagines it once was or might be again.