It is often rightly claimed that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is determined not to lead the UK out of the EU only to preside over Britain’s own breakup.
Johnson is not as indifferent to the kingdom’s survival as some around him. The problem is that his chosen UK-survival strategy is increasingly having the opposite effect. It is threatening to aid the breakup of the UK, not to prevent it.
The problem goes far beyond Johnson’s “Marmite” personality. It even goes beyond the facts that he is the leader of the Conservative Party and led the break with Europe. Johnson’s centrifugal destructiveness to the UK rests increasingly on the particular kind of unionism he embraces and on the measures that he takes to promote it.
The latest and most remarkable evidence for this comes from Wales.
Last week, Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford, a Labour Party leader who measures his words and wants the union of the UK’s nations to work, accused Johnson of refusing to engage with the devolved nations and of promoting a hostile form of unionism that aims to roll back devolution across the UK.
As political plain speaking goes, it could hardly have been plainer.
Johnson has form here. In November last year, he told Conservative British lawmakers that devolution to Scotland had been former British prime minister Tony Blair’s “biggest mistake” and was a “disaster.”
The Downing Street spin machine quickly denied that this was really Johnson’s view.
However, the evidence suggests otherwise, and this latest charge from the Welsh first minister is not easily dismissed.
Drakeford told the Welsh Affairs Select Committee: “For the first time since devolution, we are dealing with a UK government who are aggressively unilateral in the way they make these decisions. There is outright hostility to the fact of devolution at the heart of the government. At the heart of the government there is a belief that the best way to deal with [devolution] is to bypass it, to marginalize it, to act as though devolution did not exist.”
Drakeford was not finished.
“While there is a mindset of that sort at the center of the government, the breakup of the union comes closer every day,” he said later in the session. “We have to create a new union. We have to be able to demonstrate to people how we can recraft the United Kingdom in a way that recognizes it as a voluntary association of four nations in which we choose to pool our sovereignty for common purposes and for common benefits.”
These are serious remarks, and there is a lengthening charge sheet to support them.
Johnson’s UK Internal Market Bill — which created international outrage because of what it said about Northern Ireland — is pivotal evidence.
It restricts the devolved nations’ right to create commercial boundaries within the UK. By doing so, it drives a coach and horses through intergovernmental devolution.
Its legality is being challenged in the courts.
There is more. The UK’s post-Brexit shared prosperity fund and the leveling-up agenda in this year’s budget are seen in Scotland and Wales as London forcing its way into the devolution space. Issues like fishing and free ports are controlled from Whitehall and the UK Treasury, rather than through devolution and consultation.
This week’s announcements about a replacement for the Erasmus international study program and about future travel links within the UK were made unilaterally.
This is a clear pattern. Ever since the Brexit vote, the future of the union has been more uncertain, partly because the referendum results were different across the UK, and partly because the repatriation of EU powers involved deciding what powers should be retained at UK level and what devolved.
The emergence of what Michael Kenny, a political scientist at the University of Cambridge, dubs “hyper-unionism” — a more assertive and muscular unionism in place of the more pragmatic intergovernmentalism that preceded it — took place under former British prime minister Theresa May, who was conflicted about the issues.
Johnson is turbocharging it.
Michael Keating, a political scientist at the University of Aberdeen, argues that traditional unionism was never uniform.
Scotland retains its education and legal systems from 1707. Wales has distinctive religious and linguistic cultures which were not overridden. Northern Ireland was given self-government (of a kind) for nearly 80 years before Scotland and Wales won theirs. England has never had self-government.
Keating argues in a book to be published next month that the UK “did not require a single people, a single purpose and a single understanding of the constitution.”
Britishness was various, flexible and adaptable, not a rigid set of beliefs and institutions.
Johnson’s foot-on-the-floor drive toward unitarism is a defiance of all of this.
He is, of course, sometimes inconsistent. The Northern Ireland Protocol of the Brexit withdrawal agreement, which he in 2019 agreed, is the embodiment of flexibility, not uniformity. If he backtracks from it, he would do so because of force majeure, not because he believes that the protocol is right or wrong.
It is also important to acknowledge that part of the drive to unitarism is a response to militant separatism, especially in Scotland.
The Scottish National Party (SNP) does not want to make the union work well, as Drakeford does.
It wants to end it.
Publicly at least, the SNP treats any and every suggestion that the UK has a part to play in governing Scotland as a “power grab” by the Conservative government in London.
A senior Scottish Conservative Party official this week argued to me that the British government’s role under Scottish devolution has never been allowed to take root, because — unlike in Wales or Northern Ireland — there has never been a period in which rival pro-union parties ruled in London and Edinburgh.
From 1999 until 2007, Labour ruled in both places, and from 2007 the SNP formed its first government.
Pragmatic give-and-take has rarely been viable.
Is there space for a third way? In principle, yes.
In the Welsh parliament, lawmaker Mick Antoniw of the Labour Party recently penned a case for radical federalism in the UK. Drakeford is a supporter.
The same idea has also been promoted by former British prime minister Gordon Brown, who will shortly be confirmed as chairman of Labour’s new constitutional commission, and by Labour Leader Keir Starmer.
Some Tories are open to it, including the constitution reform group of British House of Lords member Robert Gascoyne-Cecil and some lawmakers close to Johnson.
More conciliatory Tories like British Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove undoubtedly favor more pragmatic engagement.
House of Lords member Andrew Dunlop’s review of the British government’s union capability, submitted to Johnson, but not yet published, proposes the creation of “resilient architecture” to manage relations between the devolved governments and cooperation funds to promote joint working.
Approaches of this kind are currently sidelined, as elections in Scotland and Wales scheduled for May take center stage.
The “federalism ship” might simply have sailed already anyway. Few Conservatives have any real sympathy for the subtler kind of unionism that the party once embodied. Much will depend on the results in May, especially in Scotland.
However, the UK model is breaking, as Drakeford said. It will need fixing, whoever wins the elections, if the break is not to become permanent.
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