Complacency before a fall

The British state is essentially stable. It has lasted for many years, centuries even, as a continuous political entity and today is no greater challenge than it has faced in the past. Sure, we had a hiccup over the last few years since the referendum, but look, there is now a large majority in Parliament behind a single party and a single leader. Regardless of the merit of the policies, we will have certainty over the direction of the country because there is now a clear authority in charge and this will guarantee the stability of the country for the next five years.

Such is the consensus view in nearly all of the British elite, whether political, economic or academic, ranging across the political spectrum. This appears to be a deeply complacent view of the challenges that actually face the UK as a viable state. It is essentially a political view, driven by a focus on what is happening in Westminster. So long as there is a clear central power, the assumption is that the UK can basically muddle through whatever problems it may have. It is driven by a view that the last few years of Wesminster uncertainty was the cause of instability in the UK. This is, unfortunately, the wrong way round. The 2016 and 2017 votes, and the disorder they produced, were the product of structural instability in the UK, not their cause. Thanks to our voting system, we now have a Westminster authority that is only loosely representative of the country - the unity at the centre is therefore not a reflection of unity in the country, but rather an accident of an antiquated democratic system, papering over the cracks and disguising hard truths under the guise of strong leadership and single-party rule.

The danger, however, is that this strength and unity in Westminster will not only give cover for the growing instability and fracturing of the UK as a union-state but will actually exacerbate it. Look, maybe people will forget about the Brexit issue and focus on other, more traditional questions, softening some of the divides in the country (after all, on other measures like gay marriage, the country is closer together now than it was five years ago). But, would it not be responsible to at least entertain the idea that having invested so much into this debate, a primal question of identity, that people may not let go of it so quickly? Sure, Brexit will have happened come the end of January, but what is to stop the resistance of the last few years mutating into deep resentment and hostility? What if it turns out that the overwhelming majority of economists who said this would be bad for the country actually had a point? We know that most of our economy is services and that there is almost no hope for any agreement on services with the EU by the end of 2020. As we go into 2021, there is a decent chance that companies will need to make cuts, that investment will slow down - even advocates admit that it won't be all sunny in the first few years. Are we certain that the basic pact of any democratic state, that we are willing to pay for each other's hardship and to take collective responsibility for our decisions, will hold up in this scenario? Or will we instead see an explosion of blame and resentment? We talk a lot about Scotland as a comparison for Catalonia but perhaps London would be the better fit. In Catalonia the basic rupture is that many feel it is unfair that they have to pay for the weakness of other regions in Spain - London, as the undisputed power house of the UK but also a region that is increasingly far away from the political ideals which currently dominate Wesminster, could fall into the same trap.

And, of course, this new economic settlement won't affect everywhere equally. Northern Ireland, already one of the poorest regions in the UK, is always the worst hit by any economic slump. This will be softened by the backstop but the damage will be impossible to prevent completely, simply due to the region's reliance on the UK economy overall. As outcomes worsen and the Republic of Ireland continues to become wealthier, just how many more will start to question whether the UK is a lifeline or a drain for Northern Ireland? Because let's not forget, once the Withdrawal Agreement truly kicks in, the growing distance between Northern Ireland and the UK will move from being mostly an imagined concept, to a hard reality. The total rejection of alignment between the UK and the EU currently emanating from Westminster will mean more stringent controls between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Very simply, the more the UK diverges, the harder the border in the Irish Sea. With unionism as a political force weakening and Stormont still in deadlock, there are two possible outcomes from this. The first, a psychological impact, will be forcing people to reassess whether they really are British, as they see the UK state man border controls dividing the Northern Irish from the rest of the UK. The second, will be the danger of provoking a backlash from loyalist factions who, like anyone who has been cornered, may resort to desperate measures as they feel they have been sold out by Westminster.

But if only a breakdown of the social pact between English regions and a growing divide with Northern Ireland were the only things that would hit the UK in 2021. Because, both impacted by and feeding these events, will be a new reckoning for the cause of Scottish nationalism. In early 2021, the Scottish Parliament will hold fresh elections and, for now at least, these look likely to produce another majority for pro-independence parties, led overwhelmingly by the SNP. The SNP will then once again move onto the public stage, claiming a double mandate from both the 2019 and 2021 Holyrood elections, demanding that permission be given for a new independence referendum. Now we know what the likely answer from Westminster will be: no. But is that really such a foolproof plan? The very real risk is that rejecting this request will only escalate the situation and make the rift and antagonism between Scotland and England even bigger. It will animate arguments made in Scotland that the UK is not a partnership of equals (unlike, for example, the EU) and that Scotland will never be able to act in its own interests whilst it remains a part of the union. Most likely variants of the same emotional arguments that were deployed by the Brexit campaign will find their way into the mouths of Scottish independence campaigners ('take back control of our fisheries' and so on). And in a situation where the UK is out of the EU and where the voice of the freshly elected Scottish Parliament is overruled, those emotional arguments will likely have more pull than ever with Scottish voters. And the political links between the two sides will also be weaker than ever. Scottish Labour is distancing itself from London and beginning to talk about the merits of independence, while the Conservatives are relatively weak in Scotland and have a political centre of gravity that is very far from what Scottish voters have asked for over the past five years. It is not obvious that a quick political campaign can fix these issues if they are allowed to keep growing.

And so with all these factors converging, how is the UK's elite thinking about these issues and working to prevent a collapse of the country? As I set out at the start, largely they are not doing anything. The dominant view is that there's nothing really to worry about and that things will sort themselves out. Worse, it's not obvious that even if these issues are acknowledged, that anyone is really willing to do much about it. In this sense, both elite and mass opinion in England seems to be already post-union - if the UK is to end, then so be it, this outcome appears preferable then a scenario where Westminster had to share power. Yet this attitude somewhat misses the point. If in the past, Westminster has been able to maintain its state and international power through raw strength from the centre, it is because it was directing a powerful country that commanded authority. But over the last century cracks have been appearing. It started with the revolution in Ireland and the creation of an independent Republic of Ireland. This fundamentally broke the UK and challenged the inevitability of British power as it had existed up to then but is generally glossed over, if mentioned at all, in British tellings of history. The Second World War, Suez, Iraq, Lybia - as time has moved on, the UK has played less and less of a leading role and been less and less successful in its international ventures. The hard truth is that Westminster no longer rules the waves and instead the UK is a state, like many others, that is fundamentally shaped and directed by outside forces. The presence of a confident leader with a big majority breaking out of the trade-offs of EU membership is then a salve, an illusion of control for a country that is not reconciled to its new position in the world.

The UK still has strengths. This piece is not to say that the UK is weak and incapable. But rather that there is a middle ground between Luxembourg and China and that we sit somewhere in that middle group of wealthy democracies whose individual power and influence is only moderate and who ultimately have to do unfavourable bargains with the superpowers (US, China, EU) in order to survive. It also means that while we can still muddle through one issue or another, our ability to cope with multiple simultaneous crises is severely limited. The EU has been much criticised in the UK for its handling of the financial crisis, eurozone debt crisis and then migration crisis, but in the end it has in fact survived, disproving many of its detractors. Are we so sure that the UK will fare substantially better if it is faced with a similar convergence of structural faultlines? The current complacency makes that difficult to believe. This issues aren't insurmountable but they will require the centre to value the British union enough that it will give more than it takes - without that shift in attitude, the outlook for 2024 seems fairly pessimistic.


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