The front page of yesterday’s Irish News carried the sort of headline guaranteed to cause palpitations across sections of unionism and loyalism: 'Unionists in Britain should back Irish unity, say Brexiteers'.
Mind you, bearing in mind that it was Conservative MPs and ERG members who endorsed the NI Protocol and Windsor Framework – rattling unionism in a way it hasn’t been rattled since the prorogation of the NI Parliament in March 1972, or the Anglo-Irish Agreement in November 1985 – there would also be a section of unionism who would have noticed the headline and thought: “Well, haven’t Brexiteers been supporting stuff which has helped the pro-Irish unity lobby for years?”
But yesterday’s story came at Brexit from a very different angle. A new book, Taking Control – Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit (written by a group of left-leaning academics who have long-standing concerns about the ‘fundamentally anti-democratic’ nature of the EU), argues that Northern Ireland’s membership of the UK is standing in the way of the UK emerging, post-EU membership, as a properly sovereign state.
In other words, the need for a protocol and the particular granny-flat status of NI has prevented the UK as a whole from leaving the EU, meaning that it cannot be considered a sovereign, independent state.
The authors’ solution is that Ireland should unite, leaving Great Britain as a sovereign state in its own right.
Peter Ramsey, a law professor at the London School of Economics and one of the authors, believes Irish unity is in Britain’s interests: ‘Not only will we strengthen our collective room for manoeuvre as a nation – the British nation – but we have the opportunity to reset relations between Britain and Ireland, which seems to me just a huge historic opportunity, not just for Ireland, but for Britain as well. The two countries inevitably are very, very closely enmeshed… If British political parties and the British political class were to begin to act on the sentiment of its own population and the national interest, then that would change the game in Northern Ireland because it would make clear to unionism what the lay of the land was.”
The difficulty with this line of analysis is that it seems to begin with the assumption that there is such a thing as a British identity. I’m not sure that there is.
What Tony Blair’s ‘great devolution experiment’ of 1997 revealed – although I don’t think it was a huge secret –was that the United Kingdom was composed of a group of competing identities and nationalities. The new assemblies in Northern Ireland and Wales and the Scottish Parliament encouraged the growth of local nationalisms, as well as nationalist parties which prioritised differences rather than common bonds.
Brexit had an even bigger impact on the political/electoral/identity dynamics, because it led to the regeneration of a specifically ‘English’ (rather than broader ‘British’) identity and populism, along with the emergence of far-right electoral vehicles which, in the past, had been confined to the minnow fringes of the National Front and British National Party. New parties, like UKIP, Brexit, Reform and Reclaim, are now in the mainstream and attracting votes from both the middle and working classes.
Worryingly, especially for those who have been searching for what might be defined as a wider, deeper, pro-UK identity, there is a disturbing antipathy towards the ‘Celtic fringes’ from elements of new English nationalism; who seem to take a pretty similar view to subsidising them as they did to being a net contributor to the EU.
When Ramsay writes of the ‘British nation’ I’m genuinely not sure what he means. Even if Northern Ireland is removed from the constitutional equation, you’re still left with a Welsh assembly, a Scottish parliament and a national parliament at Westminster which will remain overwhelmingly English in make-up. The SNP may be having difficulties right now, but I think that’s more of a problem with the political brand (along with ego clashes and personality differences) rather than with the nationalistic demand for Scottish independence.
Also, I don’t think the Brexit issue is going to disappear any time soon. There remains a significant minority (and a majority in Scotland, of course) across Great Britian which favours Remain and will, I think, continue to map out a way back in.
Against that background how do you build a new Great Britain as a sovereign state: it will remain divided on EU membership, the clash between competing nationalisms will continue and there will be three sources of competing power in the three countries making up the union. The key to sovereignty, surely, is a single source of sovereign authority?
The irony, of course – although I don’t think the book has noted it – is that the very sovereignty which the authors suggest is missing because of the NI problem is the very sovereignty which inflicted (the favoured word of the DUP at the moment) the protocol and framework on Northern Ireland in the first place. In other words, the UK parliament (certainly the Conservative Party element of it) seems to have damaged its hope for a return to full sovereignty by leaving part of the UK in the EU.
Like everything else in this dreadful mess, the fault can and should be laid on the doorstep of the political party which turned the ‘Midas touch’ into the ‘laxative touch', thus ensuring that everything it has contact with turns to poop.
And that party is the Conservative Party: a party which has no emotional attachment to Northern Ireland or ‘Ulster’ unionism and would, I suspect, sacrifice both, if its own political/electoral interests required it.
