Part Four
21
Identity gods and centralist demons
Most of the world’s armed conflicts at the end of the twentieth century were internal to states, generated by the same issues of centralised authority, subnational identity and devolution that I have discussed in this book. Boundaries fixed since the Second World War had begun to fray. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 saw old borders re-emerge and new nationalisms take shape. Within Europe, the EU’s march towards ‘ever closer union’ lost its magnetism. The splintering of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the partition of Czechoslovakia in 1993 echoed the historian Norman Davies’s recall of Europe’s Vanished Kingdoms, of Aragon, Burgundy, Etruria and Celtic-speaking Galicia and Strathclyde.
New regional parties sprang to life in Spain, Italy, France and Germany, adept at exploiting identities and grievances long thought dead. Separatist voices were heard from Basques, Catalans, Corsicans, Montenegrins and Kosovans. Many sought to follow in the steps of Luxembourg, Andorra and Monaco into micro-statehood. To the EU’s twenty-four official languages – including Irish – another sixty minority tongues stepped forward to demand recognition. France alone registered twenty-five languages and Poland eight.
Amid this swirl of identities, ‘Celt’ nowhere featured. Terms such as ‘Celtic fringe’ and ‘Celtic politics’ did occur as a shorthand for what was still a declining 13 per cent of the United Kingdom’s population. In the conservative realm of soccer, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland retained ‘national’ status denied to Basques or Bavarians, but no one thought of forming a Celtic team. This did not prevent argument over whether a ‘united’ Olympics team should be called TeamGB or TeamUK. To its credit, Irish rugby football operated on an all-Ireland basis.
With the end of the twentieth century, the surviving nations of the United Kingdom lost some of their glue. The early signs were modest. In Wales, the creation of Plaid Cymru in the 1920s had been all but stillborn, the party surviving after the war as a small Welsh-speaking association. In 1966 its leader, Gwynfor Evans, won a by-election in Carmarthen, largely in reaction to the flooding of a Gwynedd village, Tryweryn, for a Liverpool reservoir. His party went on to win a scattering of local council seats and for a while gain control of Merthyr Tydfil. In Scotland, the SNP had won a by-election in 1945 but remained equally inconspicuous. In 1967 the maverick Winnie Ewing won a by-election in Hamilton on an independence platform. ‘Stop the world,’ she declared, ‘Scotland wants to get on.’
These by-elections did produce a nervous twitch in the two main parties. At the 1970 general election, Labour went so far as to promise the Welsh and Scots their own devolved assemblies. The party lost the election but the victorious Tories took the message and set up a commission on the constitutional status of the two countries. The Kilbrandon Commission reported in 1973 with a mish-mash of options and minority reports, proposing referendums on the new assemblies.
The Kilbrandon Report was a damp squib, not helped by the prime minister and MP for Cardiff in 1976, Jim Callaghan, clearly opposing any devolution to Wales. He took what his biographer, Kenneth Morgan, called ‘the traditional Labour view of endorsing a nationwide approach to social and economic planning and regarding devolution as a dangerous concession to parochial Celtic nationalism’. Callaghan was firmly in the twentieth-century tradition of left-wing political unionism.
Devolution was duly put to referendums in March 1979. Scotland voted in favour of a new assembly but failed to reach the requisite 40 per cent of the electorate, a requirement inserted at the last minute in the referendum bill by Labour unionists. The Welsh rejected an assembly outright, by a million votes to just a quarter of a million. Evans declared Wales to be ‘degraded in the sight of the world and humiliated in the eyes of its own people’. The failure of the 1979 referendums was greeted at Westminster with a sigh of relief. The 1970s rank as a low point in Welsh and Scottish nationalist zeal.
Labour breaks with its past
One thing achieved by the debate over Kilbrandon was to disinter interest in home rule as such. In Wales, Plaid Cymru’s poll share rose from insignificant to between 5 and 10 per cent in the 1980s, while in Scotland the SNP rose to over 20 per cent. Both movements were fuelled by a burst of bureaucratic centralisation by Conservative governments under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, in power from 1979 to 1997. Local government boundaries were redrawn and renamed for administrative convenience. Local tax-raising powers were curbed and budgets capped. Schools, housing policy and planning were brought under Whitehall control. Decentralised democracy was demoted, dismissed as a back door for socialism if not anarchy. Britain was rated among the most centralised states in Europe.
There were occasional concessions to Welsh and Scottish sensibilities. When in 1982 Gwynfor Evans threatened a hunger strike if Thatcher did not fund a Welsh language television channel, she capitulated. The resulting S4C achieved barely 2 per cent of the Welsh audience. A south Welsh MP told me its replacement of the English-speaking Channel 4 evoked more local anger even than Thatcher’s closure of the coal mines.
In Scotland in 1989 a convention of fifty-eight of Scotland’s seventy-two MPs met and reasserted the ancient Arbroath declaration on Scottish autonomy. They affirmed ‘the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine a form of government best suited to their needs’. Thatcher’s response came to be seen as her moment of madness. Against the pleadings of her colleagues she decided to replace Britain’s progressive property tax with a flat-rate poll tax, deciding to ‘pilot’ it first in Scotland.
The impact of the poll tax on Tory support in Scotland and Wales was devastating. In Scotland the party slumped from twenty-two MPs in 1979 to none by 1997, at which election Wales also failed to return a single Tory MP. The Conservatives entered the twenty-first century as emphatically the party of England. Meanwhile, Major desperately tried to recover, abolishing the poll tax in 1992 and offering the Welsh language official status in 1993. A Scottish white paper declared that ‘no nation could be held irrevocably in a union against its will’. But Major’s government continued with the direct rule of both Scotland and Wales, largely through politically appointed boards and corporations devoid of local accountability. They came to be known as the ‘quangocracy’.
Tory suppression of localism was a gift to Labour and its new leader in 1994, Tony Blair. He pledged that ‘a sovereign Westminster Parliament will devolve power to Scotland and Wales’, such that ‘the union will be strengthened and the threat of separatism removed’. Scotland would get a parliament with law-making powers, but with limited scope to vary taxes. A less powerful Welsh assembly would provide a forum of democratic accountability for existing Welsh Office functions. Both institutions would be led by a first minister.
That Blair had seen fit even to breathe the word separatism was remarkable. Interviewing him at the time, I sensed that he saw devolution – including to elected city mayors – largely as a means of eroding the power of local Labour oligarchies, opponents of his New Labour project. But he and the British Parliament were taking a risk. They were proposing a new tier of democratic institutions within a British state that had not seen them for two centuries. John Major at the 1997 election strongly opposed the idea. He declared that devolution would be ‘the end of the union … Wake up, my fellow countrymen, before it is too late!’
Referendums on the new devolved assemblies were held soon after Labour came to power, undoubtedly benefiting from Blair’s current electoral popularity. Scotland’s new parliament, the first since the Stuarts, was approved overwhelmingly. Wales’s proposed Senedd Cymru, passed only by a whisker – 50.3 to 49.7 per cent – with serious opposition from counties along the border with England. But 50 per cent support was a huge advance on the 20 per cent of 1979. It was Wales’s first ever assembly, at least since Glyndwr. The Welsh writer Jan Morris reflected that Wales had come within a percentage point of being virtually abolished. Had it voted against devolution, ‘no passion of patriots, no ecstasy of linguists, no reasoning of history or ideology would persuade the English state that Wales was really a nation at all’. But a majority was a majority.
Two years later, the Queen opened new assemblies in Edinburgh and Cardiff amid much rejoicing. On 12 May 1999, Winnie Ewing marked the former with the words, ‘The Scottish Parliament, prorogued on the twenty-fifth day of March 1707, is hereby reconvened.’ For the first time in Great Britain, Westminster had diluted its democratic monopoly. In the words of a Welsh Tory devolutionist, David Melding, devolution was ‘a common characteristic of modern European government’ and one that had at last made Wales ‘a political nation … Never again would the Conservative Party win in Wales and Scotland only by winning in England.’
The remits of the new assemblies expanded over time. They came to include health, education, housing, transport, farming, industry, employment and culture. The Scottish Parliament also had responsibility for justice. The assemblies could not, at least initially, raise their own taxes or exceed Treasury guidelines on borrowing or spending. Though some fiscal discretion was later granted, all three assemblies ran large budget deficits and had to rely on what were called Barnett subventions from London, determined by a formula of needs and resources. But the devolution in the case of Scotland was extensive, and in the case of Wales at least substantial.
Devolution bears fruit
The immediate effect of these innovations was to confirm Major’s warning. It gave nationalist politics a legitimacy and status from which it swiftly drew strength. For two decades Scotland and Wales had been ruled from afar by Conservative politicians, for almost none of whom the Scottish or Welsh peoples had voted. What was intriguing was that Blair’s Labour Party attracted no gratitude for the reform. Labour’s traditional base in the working-class Scottish Lowlands and the Welsh valleys steadily diminished in favour of nationalist parties.
British subnationalism, unlike that in many parts of Europe, was predominantly left wing. The SNP under its charismatic leader Alex Salmond carefully positioned itself to the left of Labour. In the first election to the Scottish Parliament in 1999, Labour won fifty-six seats and the SNP thirty-five, Labour forming Scotland’s first ruling executive, but by 2007 the nationalists had supplanted Labour as Scotland’s largest party and formed its minority government. The SNP has retained power in Edinburgh ever since. The party also held an overwhelming majority of the fifty-nine Scottish seats at Westminster. In 2007 Labour was reduced to barely 20 per cent of the Scottish electorate, its worst performance since 1910.
Despite the SNP’s electoral supremacy it remained strangely unable to convince a majority of Scottish electors to support its central goal, independence. When put to a referendum in 2014, independence was rejected by 53 per cent to 44 per cent, its cause eroded by a slew of new devolved powers offered to the Scots by the then prime minister, David Cameron. Salmond had played into Cameron’s hands by rejecting his offer of a ‘second question’, on enhanced home rule known as ‘devomax’. This might have given the Scots almost full control of their economy and taxation and was widely supported in opinion polls. Salmond preferred to pitch for total independence or nothing. He got nothing.
In Wales, as in Scotland, Labour won the first 1999 assembly election, by twenty-eight seats, and took power in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. But there was a surge in Plaid Cymru support, the party coming second with fourteen seats and making deep inroads into the Welsh Labour vote, notably in its south Welsh valley homeland. Plaid’s chief handicap was its continued, divisive obsession with the Welsh language. The party’s leader in 2012, Leanne Wood (described as ‘Welsh-learning’ not Welsh-speaking), was spotted wearing translation headphones at her own party conference. By 2011 Welsh devolution had become sufficiently accepted for a further referendum, on giving the Senedd law-making powers in twenty areas of government, to pass with 64 per cent support.
A Welsh ‘non-party’ lobby group for independence, YesCymru, emerged in 2014 at a time when support for independence hovered around 10–15 per cent. Five polls between 2019 and 2021 now showed support rising to between 27 and an impressive 35 per cent. Though this may have reflected younger Welsh voters described as ‘indy-curious’, or, to some cynics, ‘vanity secessionists’, the Welsh trajectory was similar to that of the SNP a decade earlier. Welsh independence, whatever it might mean, was no long unmentionable or unthinkable.
Even in long-dormant Cornwall the ghosts of home rule asserted themselves. The Liberal Democrats pledged a Cornish assembly, while Labour now offered support for regional governments across England. A small Cornish independence movement, Mebyon Kernow, demanded the customary status symbols of nationalism: Cornish road signs, Cornish teaching in school and, in 2001, ‘Cornish’ as a declared nationality on the census form. While these were not all granted, the party won five local council seats and a mayoralty, that of Camborne. Its support within the county as a whole never rose above 5 per cent of the poll.
Devolution coloured orange
The one place where devolution had never died, though it often needed life-support, was Northern Ireland. The 1980s saw no diminution in the IRA’s campaign of violence, including on the British mainland. An attempt was made on the life of the prime minister Margaret Thatcher in a bomb attack on a Brighton hotel in 1984. Another bomb in 1992 caused immense damage to the City of London. The British government was no longer indolent. Thatcher had built a working relationship with the liberal Irish prime minister Garret FitzGerald, despite having declared Northern Ireland ‘as British as Finchley’. A hesitant Anglo-Irish ‘agreement’ was reached in 1985 between London and Dublin and continued under John Major, designed to calm relations between Ireland’s north and south.
Then came a breakthrough, the so-called Good Friday Agreement reached in Belfast in 1998 under the government of Tony Blair. This achieved two goals. It acknowledged that self-determination by the people of the north should be the sole basis for any Irish reunion and it established a new devolved executive with power shared by both Protestant and Catholic communities. This approach won their joint agreement and ceasefires were declared by their militant wings. Inter-communal violence abated and a rough-and-ready acceptance of Protestant majority rule was ameliorated by a Catholic cabinet veto. When a year later a dissident-IRA bomb at Omagh killed twenty-nine people, it was condemned outright by the Sinn Féin leadership.
The ‘official’ unionist, David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist Party, became first minister, with the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party’s Seamus Mallon as his deputy. But hovering over the shoulders of both were the DUP’s Paisley, who rejected the agreement, and Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams. It was a nervous start to a new sort of home rule. An ominous sign was Blair’s banality that ‘the hand of history is upon our shoulders’. People asked which history and how firm was its grip.
The Good Friday Agreement undoubtedly laid the precondition for a more robust form of power-sharing. Protestants and Catholics were sitting round the same cabinet table and talking, not shouting at each other. Yet division was ingrained. The new assembly found itself suspended four times over the next decade as local politics reverted to the extremes. By 2007 the DUP and Sinn Féin had usurped the moderate ‘official’ unionists and the SDLP. The only refreshing note was that Paisley and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness shook hands and served together as first minister and deputy respectively.
This coming together of opposites was the north’s one opportunity. In the south after 1922, independence had forced enemies to come together and rule by compromise. In the north, British direct rule had relieved them of any such need. Responsibility for tough decisions could always be shuffled onto a London minister. For a while the coming together worked, lubricated with London money. But Paisley retired in 2008 and McGuinness in 2017, and a new generation of leaders untutored in compromise took over.
Power-sharing degenerated into sleaze. A vast sum of £490 million was lost on what appeared to be a corrupt renewable energy project under the aegis of the DUP enterprise minister and party leader from 2015 to 2021, Arlene Foster. Periodic breakdowns in power-sharing resumed, with London always ready expensively to pick up the pieces. One in 2017 concerned a Sinn Féin demand that Irish be recognised as an official language in the north, to which the Unionists demanded equality for their dialect of Scots-Irish, Ullans. Foster resigned in 2021 to be replaced by two successors in a matter of weeks. Northern Ireland was looking like a banana republic.
Enter Brexit
Two events now occurred that were to traumatise relations between London and the devolved assemblies in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. The first was the decision in 2015 of David Cameron’s Tory government in London to hold a referendum the following year on the UK’s membership of the EU. Wales conformed to the English balance of opinion in favour of Brexit, both voting 53 per cent to 47 per cent to leave the EU. But Scotland and Northern Ireland voted 62 and 56 per cent respectively to remain. The union was divided.
The Brexit victory saw a variety of interpretations. It was a vote of provincial Britain against the metropolitan establishment in London. It was a reassertion of neglected English regions facing the persistent drift of jobs, wealth and talent to the south-east. It was also a vote against excessive immigration. The leave vote was heavily biased towards non-graduates, over-forty-fives, the rural population and the poor. Scotland’s strong wish to remain in the EU further distanced its voters from English opinion, tilting Scotland further in the direction of independence.
In Northern Ireland opinion was more complex. London’s drastic post-referendum decision not just to leave the EU but also to withdraw from the European single market transformed a political move into a severe impediment to the all-Ireland trading economy and to low-wage employment. Those affected included farming, fishing, tourism, care homes, and industries with complex continental supply lines. It also raised doubts about Northern Ireland’s border with the south, a border which now divided Britain from the entirety of the European economy. This divide clearly broke the terms of the Good Friday Agreement stipulating an economic union across the whole island of Ireland. The only solution was a protocol whereby the province remained inside the EU single market while a new barrier was declared ‘down the Irish Sea’ between the north and Britain. This entailed customs checks on goods moving through Belfast port checks that were both disruptive and politically toxic to northern unionists. In 2019 the British prime minister Boris Johnson told those unionists that any such barrier would be ‘over my dead body’, then promptly agreed it.
This was precisely the crisis unionists most feared at the time of partition. They called it ‘British treachery’. Easily resolved short-term conflicts yield knotty long-term problems. Irish nationalists were exultant that the logic of history was undermining partition. Protestant rioters took to the streets of Belfast in 2021, shortly before the first minister Arlene Foster’s resignation. Northern Ireland’s capacity to destabilise the union was undimmed.
A Pandemic devolved
Even as the trauma of Brexit was being absorbed, the British Isles, along with the rest of the world, was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. As various lockdowns were introduced during 2020, London decided that what might be drastic curbs on personal freedom would be more acceptable locally if administered by the devolved executives. It was a stark acknowledgement of the virtue of localism when obedience to authority was critical. It seemed odd that ‘the science’ might be read differently in Bristol than in Cardiff, or in Newcastle than in Glasgow, but so-called ‘national’ first ministers were vested with unprecedented powers and used them eagerly. Every week there would be news of pandemic regulations varying between ‘the four nations’, of border checks, families migrating, newly prominent health officials declaring policy changes of considerable economic significance. Differences between the nations were on display every evening on the television news.
The result was that the three first ministers were often taking stances on lockdown divergent from those of the Johnson government in London, giving each newfound exposure. The nations were seen to have definable leaders making decisions on their peoples’ behalf rather than taking orders from London. The result was undeniable. The 2021 ‘vaccine’ elections to the devolved assemblies saw Wales’s first minister, Mark Drakeford, score highly even against the run of his own Labour Party. As one Welsh interviewee in Merthyr told the BBC, ‘I don’t mind being told what I can and cannot do, so long as I am told it in Wales.’ Such attitudes undoubtedly fed traditional anti-English hostilities. There were roadblocks on routes into and out of Wales and reports of local Welsh police waking up holidaymakers at night and ordering them ‘back to England’.
In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon likewise scored a steady 75 per cent approval rating against Johnson’s 20 per cent. At the 2021 poll she was re-elected as first minister. Though she did not recover the SNP’s overall majority, her coalition with the Green Party ensured a majority for another independence referendum.
While there was some evidence that Brexit and Covid had solidified the independence cause, Scotland did clearly remain in two minds. Though one 2020 poll at the height of lockdown showed support for independence peaking at 58 per cent, most polls hovered in the region of 50:50. Scottish voters under thirty-five were two-thirds in favour and only over-fifty-fives were for continued union, so it could therefore be said that independence was only a matter of time. But that time was not yet. The SNP’s electoral dominance was not on the scale of Sinn Féin’s in 1918 Ireland, when independence support reached 70 per cent.
Blair’s 1999 devolutions had undoubtedly met the desire of the Scots and Welsh for more control over their domestic affairs. This desire for greater autonomy was shared by parts of England, such as the mayoralties of London and Manchester and the county of Yorkshire, where a One Yorkshire ‘nationalist’ movement emerged. Devolution, Brexit and lockdown were in their different ways all manifestations of a popular upsurge against over-centralised government.
An eerie sign of constitutional strain did appear just before Brexit when the so-called ‘West Lothian question’ raised its head. This concerned the anomaly – bluntly the unfairness – that English MPs under devolution had no say in the domestic affairs of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, while MPs from those nations could debate and vote on the domestic affairs of the English. Why should forty-five SNP MPs have a vote on a road programme in Kent when Kent MPs had no say over one in Strathclyde?
In 2015 the Cameron government sought to resolve this asymmetry with a Commons protocol whereby only English MPs would vote on bills on English matters. This was known as English votes for English laws or EVEL. This ostensibly fair arrangement succeeded in enraging Scottish MPs by suggesting that they were less than full members of the Westminster Parliament. In the event, the protocol proved complex to apply to ‘hybrid’ bills and was almost never used. EVEL was abolished in 2021 and the West Lothian question remained unresolved.
British politics passed through a period of near unprecedented turbulence in the six years following the Brexit decision in 2016, years that saw the Conservative Party enjoy three leaders in succession, Labour two and the Liberal Democrats four. One outcome of that turbulence was that the issue of devolution, supposedly settled in 1999, was still very much alive. Forces at play across Europe were generating pressures of group identity and populist leadership that called for possibly radical constitutional reform. Of all the countries of Europe, the one that should have needed least warning of this was the United Kingdom. It has already lost Ireland and now faced a crisis in that country’s relationship with its northern neighbour. And it had Scotland clearly on the brink of possible departure from the union. As for a solution, champions of that union had none.