After the Union?

A genuinely intriguing nugget of information in the IT from Paul Goodman of – bear with me – ConservativeHome on a survey they did with the University of Winchester. It appears that Tories are not really very unionist.

Twenty-nine per cent said that the break-up of the union would “finally end the unreasonable demands on England to provide ever-greater financial and political concessions to Scotland”.
If one added those who believe that this development would “have no real significance for the remaining parts of the UK” and those who think that “any problems could be managed”, that total rises to 66 per cent. Only 33 per cent of respondents said that it “would inflict serious damage on the power, influence and well-being of the remaining parts of the UK”.

And:

In other words, two in three of those Conservative Party members are sanguine about the end of the union. And more than one in four seem happy for it to happen.

It’s not a huge surprise but it is useful to see it outlined in such detail. Goodman offers some potential scenarios as to the future – and for a Tory is open about the problems that lie ahead, one might even say realistically pessimistic, which is refreshing.

And he makes one incontrovertible point:

It is deeply unfashionable to suggest that politicians should take the lead about anything, anywhere. But the fact remains that the mechanisms of Anglo-Irish relations are in the hands of the politicians – the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, which links the two governments; the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, which brings together politicians from throughout the islands; and, above all perhaps, the British-Irish Council, at which the heads of Britain’s devolved administrations sit on the same basis as the prime minister and the Taoiseach. In the wake of article 50 being implemented and the Brexit talks beginning, the British government needs to start giving the conference and the council some real priority.

And there’s something in the following too:

Perhaps the latter’s heads of government should meet more frequently, to probe the economic and political unknowns that are consequences of Brexit, and to try to chart a way forward. The strains on this co-operative structure will become even more testing if Scotland moves towards a second referendum on independence. But its survival and development are now an imperative. We are moving from a world in which the relationship between Britain and Ireland was contained within a common Europe-wide structure. Both countries and all parts of these islands urgently need a replacement.

The problem is that three parts of these islands want to retain the EU link and two do not. So even in the context of the islands that is a fissure that runs through everything. Indeed it is striking how Brexit has functioned in such a divisive way, and in a way that has brought into play dynamics that were thought near extinct. After all, a year and a half ago who could have predicted that Scottish independence would be back on the table once more so recently after a lost referendum or that a range of entities on this island would be talking seriously about Irish unity. And what of England (and Wales to an extent)? The centripetal forces at work there are such as to isolate it even more so than one might have expected Brexit to do, not just from Europe, but from Scotland. And Northern Ireland, what of it?