Yahoo Finance Johnson's last-minute bid to save the union can't undo years of neglect
The potential breakup of Britain has crept up on Boris Johnson in plain sight. Cavalier inattention in Downing Street to the souring political mood towards Whitehall in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as in parts of northern England, has been increasingly reckless. It may already be impossible for the Conservatives to retrieve the situation and keep the United Kingdom together much longer.
Nevertheless, although it is late in the day, and in spite of the fact that ministers are arming themselves with policy responses that may prove ineffective, the Johnson government now claims to be on full alert over the threat to the union. As it finally faces up to this country’s potential breakup, the government is preparing a counterattack that may prove too little and too late, and may fail. Yet it unquestionably marks a distinct change of approach after years of complacency.
This week Johnson heads to Scotland to launch what was described on Monday as “an all-out bid to save the United Kingdom” and, rather less plausibly, “a charm offensive”. My understanding is that key ministers, and Johnson himself, are determined to move the constitutional debate away from the increasingly bitter polarisation between the status quo on the one hand and independence on the other. The new approach involves carving a third way between the two extremes, based on the principle of the UK adding value to the devolved settlement, as well as launching an all-UK strategy that could involve new and wider devolution and a more federal structure to the UK’s constitutional arrangements, potentially extending to reform of the House of Lords.
One minister tells me the plan is for Johnson to announce that he considers the UK’s existing constitutional architecture is not working. Whether these issues are to be remitted to a constitutional commission of some kind, perhaps similar to the one proposed by the Labour leader Keir Starmer in December, will soon be made clear. These discussions are described as “very live”. But the target audience is clear: the voters whom ministers describe as the majority of the electorate in all four parts of the UK who do not have a passion for breaking up Britain.
The problem facing the UK government is that the reform ship may already have sailed while the government’s attention was focused elsewhere. It is just about possible to excuse some of the neglect and delay of the post-general election period. Covid has, after all, absorbed the lion’s share of ministerial attention for almost a year.
Other aspects of the neglect, though, are less easily excused. This government’s entire original raison d’etre was to get Brexit done. This was bound to place it in fundamental opposition to majority opinion in Scotland and to a narrower majority in Northern Ireland. The overwhelming impression since 2019 has been that senior Tories did not really care about that and that the pro-Europeans had to lump it.
Brexit also marked the Johnson government as emotionally English-centred – unable to display much feeling for the other parts of the UK. This is a trait that Johnson himself embodies in a particularly southern English way, as Theresa May had also done, though without the toxic sense of entitlement that Johnson exudes. While Dominic Cummings ruled in Downing Street, the government also exhibited raw contempt for opponents and for inherited institutions, including devolution. Its unionism was unapologetically centralist as well as English, not pluralist or based on arts of compromise or reform.
The upshot has been the disunited Britain to which many London-based politicians and commentators have only recently woken up – if indeed they yet have. Its features were usefully summarised in the weekend Sunday Times surveys that found British identity disintegrating across these islands in favour of English, Welsh, Scottish and two kinds of Irish identities. Border polls now have narrow majority backing in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and unprecedented support from a third of Wales.
That such findings come as a shock to many is itself shocking. Anyone who has followed these arguments and movements for the past decade and more is familiar with the strength and importance of the process and a direction of travel towards UK fragmentation that can often seem unstoppable. Yet the mindset of “devolve and forget” still clings on, even as the days of reckoning for the UK draw nearer.
More recently, differences of approach to Covid have thrust the UK’s complex political diversity into English minds as nothing else in the 20-plus years since the Blair government’s devolution settlement. Reporting from Scotland, in particular, has become better and more common than before on the BBC and in parts of the press. An entire academic and publishing industry has grown up around these issues too. Just this week, the latest example, a book titled Englishness: The Political Force Transforming Britain” landed on my desk.
Whether or not that claim about Englishness is true, the immediate battleground is without doubt Scotland. There are several reasons. The most important is the continuing ascendancy of the SNP. The May 2021 Holyrood elections have long been earmarked as the moment at which Nicola Sturgeon will seek a mandate to initiate a second referendum on independence. Polls in Scotland show steady majorities for separation. The polling expert John Curtice said at the weekend that the SNP is on course for a landslide.
Until recently, the Johnson government’s policy towards all this was to just say no. But that is changing now. There is panic and realism in the new approach. The SNP is formidable but not unbeatable. Divisions between reformists and ultras – between Sturgeon and Alex Salmond and their respective backers – may change the mood. If Sturgeon or any successor is pushed into calling an illegal referendum, it would trigger a widespread boycott that could open the way for different politics.
Scotland is very much the catalyst for the new approach. But the policy holds big implications for other parts of the UK. Get Scotland wrong and Wales becomes more fractious, including for the Tory party internally. Any change to Northern Ireland’s future necessarily involves the Irish Republic and the EU. And the elephant in the room in any debate about a new UK order is always England, which has 85% of the whole population and has no national self-government at all.
Gordon Brown argued on Monday that reform is now the only alternative to UK state failure. Many ministers have come, with varying degrees of willingness, to a similar conclusion. Whether the Labour and other reformers can or should work with Conservatives – or vice versa – on these issues is fraught. There are big egos involved and conflicting interests. The SNP is licking its lips. But if the two pro-union traditions spend all their time squabbling, who benefits there except the nationalists?
Ministers say they recognise the immensely delicate issues involved. The Tory mind instinctively fears this is a Pandora’s box that could empower separatists from Caithness to Cornwall. But the Tory bottom line is also that they would now lose a zero-sum contest. They cannot appear as if they are arrogant colonial masters, says one minister. So the reform path, however difficult, must be followed. It is an enormous risk, and time is running out fast.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
