The closer Boris Johnson forces the union together, the more likely it will fall apart
It is often rightly claimed that Boris Johnson is determined not to lead the United Kingdom out of the European Union only to preside over the UK’s own breakup. Johnson is not as indifferent to the UK’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 a Conservative 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, the Welsh first minister Mark Drakeford, a Labour leader who measures his words and who wants the UK union 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. Last November, he told Conservative MPs that devolution to Scotland had been Tony Blair’s “biggest mistake” and was a “disaster”. The Downing Street spin machine quickly denied that this was really the prime minister’s view. But 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 marginalise it, to act as though devolution did not exist.”
And Drakeford was not finished. “While there is a mindset of that sort at the centre of the government,” he said later in the session, “the breakup of the union comes closer every day.” Drakeford ended by saying: “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 recognises 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 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 now being challenged in the courts.
There is more. The UK’s post-Brexit shared prosperity fund and the levelling up agenda in the 2021 budget are seen in Scotland and Wales as London forcing its way into the devolution space. Issues like fishing and freeports are being controlled from Whitehall and the Treasury, rather than through devolution and consultation. This week’s announcements about the replacement for the Erasmus international study programme and about future internal UK travel links were both 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 the Cambridge political scientist Michael Kenny dubs “hyper-unionism” – a more assertive and muscular unionism in place of the more pragmatic intergovernmentalism that preceded it – took place under Theresa May, who was conflicted about the issues. Johnson is now turbocharging it.
Another political scientist, Aberdeen’s Michael Keating, argues that traditional unionism was never uniform. Scotland retained its own education and legal systems from 1707.
Wales had 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. The United Kingdom, Keating argues in a book due to be published next month, “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 towards UK unitarism is a defiance of all of this. He is, of course, sometimes inconsistent himself. The Northern Ireland Brexit protocol which he agreed in 2019 is the embodiment of flexibility not uniformity. If he backtracks from it he will do so because of Northern Ireland force majeure, not because he believes 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 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 “Tory power grab”.
A senior Scottish Tory argued to me this week that the UK 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 both London and Edinburgh. From 1999 until 2007, Labour ruled in both places and from 2007 the SNP formed its first government. Pragmatic giveand-take has rarely been viable.
Is there space for a third way? In principle, yes. In Wales, the Labour Senedd member Mick Antoniw recently penned a case for radical federalism in the UK. Drakeford is a supporter. The same idea has also been promoted by Gordon Brown, who will shortly be confirmed as chair of Labour’s new constitutional commission, and by Keir Starmer. Some Tories are open to it, including Lord Salisbury’s constitution reform group, and some MPs close to Johnson.
More conciliatory UK Tories like Michael Gove undoubtedly favour more pragmatic engagement. Lord Dunlop’s review of UK government union capability, submitted to Johnson but not yet published, proposes the creation of “resilient architecture” to manage intergovernmental relations and cooperation funds to promote joint working.
Approaches of this kind are currently sidelined, as the May elections in Scotland and Wales take centre stage. The federalism ship may 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. But the UK model is breaking, as Drakeford said. It will need fixing, whoever wins the elections, if the break is not to become permanent.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
ANew York Times article is claiming the unthinkable: that California bagels are better than their counterparts in the five boroughs. The headline – The Best Bagels Are in California (Sorry, New York), was an affront to the newspaper’s own home town, and sparked an east coast-west coast flame war the San Francisco Chronicle called “the perfect storm of internet drama”. “Yeah, absolutely not,” wrote New York’s mayor, Bill De Blasio, on Twitter. Brooklyn’s borough president called the claim “madness”. The owner of one of the California shops in question, Berkeley’s Boichik Bagels, told NBC Bay Area she “basically fell over” when she heard the news.
As an east coast transplant to the west, I feel it’s my duty to add more fuel to the fire. Here are five other things California does better than New York:
Pizza. New York pizza is amazing. But California-style pizza is borderline gourmet stuff, good enough to spawn a stunningly mediocre national chain. There’s a reason it’s called California Pizza Kitchen and not New York Slice Shack. California pizza is a thin-crusted delicacy that features bread, cheese, and literally anything else in the kitchen thrown on top, whether it’s tortilla chips and ranch dressing, barbecue chicken, or shrimp scampi – none of this snowflake “Oh, it has to taste good” nonsense you get on the east coast. And you can have it on a cauliflower crust, since even looking at gluten was recently classified as a felony in the state.
Monuments. Sure, the Statue of Liberty may be America’s most recognizable symbol. But it doesn’t hold a candle – or a torch – to the Golden Gate Bridge. After all, what does a statue actually do? Yes, she’s got a good, pro-immigration message: “Give me your tired, your poor.” But like so many Upper West Side limousine liberals, she’s all talk and no action. While the statue welcomes people to her city, the bridge actually offers them a way in.
Fast food. This is so obvious I shouldn’t even have to write it, but when it comes to a quick meal, there is nowhere better than In-N-Out. Eating the fries always feels like an epiphany, and not just because of the Bible verse lovingly inscribed under the grease at the bottom of the cardboard tray. Normally such proselytizing would make me uncomfortable, but there is no doubt that this is God’s favorite drivethrough establishment.
Insufferable egomaniacs. Yes, New
York is the birthplace of America’s high priest of malevolent narcissism, but when it comes to sheer numbers, California wins. We have two entire industries built on megalomania. LA, of course, is home to more celebrities per square foot than anywhere else in the world. Their need for global worship is rivaled only by the rulers of Silicon Valley in the north, who, when they’re not promoting fad diets and appropriated religious practices, spend most of their time destroying democracy.
Self-importance. This one is close. It’s true that New Yorkers believe they live in the center of the world; they refer to their home simply as “the city” even when they’re hundreds of miles away. There are countless songs about it, countless films, countless books. But New Yorkers also love to complain about New York. Californians’ obsession with their home, on the other hand, is the subject of almost religious fervor. Case in point: I could not tell you what a New York flag looks like. But walk down the street in California and you’ll see the hulking image of a bear and a red star everywhere you look. From the Beach Boys to Tupac, we have developed a self-regard, a sense of legendary consequence – call it “statetriotism” – nowhere else in this country, or perhaps the world, can match.
Guam has taken a significant step toward restoring abortion access, after the ACLU scored a victory in a lawsuit that seeks to ensure residents of the US territory can turn to remote healthcare providers for abortion medication.
Getting an abortion on Guam has been impossible since 2018, when the last abortion doctor retired and moved off the island. Before then, at least 200 abortions occurred on Guam every year. Today, accessing the closest legal abortion clinic requires a flight to Hawai ځ i, an expensive and difficult undertaking especially during a pandemic.
Telemedicine medication abortions, which allow doctors to remotely prescribe the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol to patients up to 10 weeks pregnant, would be an obvious solution, if it were not for a 1978 Guam law that says abortions must be “performed” in a “medical clinic or hospital”. The ACLU lawsuit is fighting, in part, to block that law from being enforced.
“We know that many people have reached out to physicians in Hawai ځ i about accessing abortions and that not all of them have been able to overcome the enormous financial and logistical obstacles to traveling several thousand miles,” said Vanessa Williams, a Guam lawyer working with the ACLU.
Historically, it has not been easy to access abortions on Guam despite them being legal, due to stigma and past restrictive laws. In the 1990s, the mostly Catholic US territory, where 165,000 people live, passed a law that prohibited abortion except when the mother’s life was endangered. Eventually, the US ninth district court of appeals struck down the law, citing Roe v Wade.
“There are very polarizing points of view within our small community on this emotionally charged issue,” said Williams.
Along with the vocal anti-abortionists, there has also been a local movement for abortion rights led by CHamoru women, the Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands, which include Guam. The island was colonized by Spain in the 17th century, when Catholicism was introduced, and was ceded to the US in 1899.
Dr Michael Lujan Bevacqua, a CHamoru scholar and the son of Rita Lujan Bevacqua, a nurse who fought for abortion access in the 1990s, says abortion rights align with ancient CHamoru values and that CHamoru women were empowered to make choices for themselves.
TelAbortion, a pilot project in Hawai ځ i and 12 other states, allows certified doctors to provide abortion consultations via videochat and mail the medications directly to patients. But two ambiguous laws in Guam, one of which is the 1978 law, have made medical professionals unsure how to proceed, prompting the ACLU and two