From a Welsh garden shed comes news about a potential united Ireland
FROM his Covid 19-isolated garden shed the Welsh First Minister, Mark Drakeford, surprisingly said something rather seismic. His remarks have big implications for Ireland north and south. The Welsh Labour Party leader, who is also a committed supporter of the United Kingdom, said last Thursday that he believed Brexit and Covid-19 showed that the UK as currently constituted is finished – even though he was pleading for fundamental reforms – not Welsh independence from London.
“We have to recognise that the union as it is, is over. We have to create a new union,” he said via a video link to the Welsh affairs committee in London.
The England-Wales relationship is far more complex and interwoven than that of English relationships with Ireland and Scotland among the four nations sharing these two contiguous islands. We only have to remember that the de facto union of England and Wales dates from the late 13th century, and the old links have often been a two-way street from the Tudors, who originated not far from what is the modern port of Holyhead, to Lloyd George, to Neil Kinnock.
Supporters of Welsh nationalism more usually talk about more autonomy for its home-rule Cardiff parliament within the UK. This contrasts with the more ardent movement for Scottish independence which continues to gather pace.
But the thrust of what Drakeford had to say was Brexit and Covid had stoked frustration in Wales and largely polarised the community. There was surprise last week when a poll in Wales showed almost four out of 10 people backing the notion of Welsh independence.
It is true that in the 2016 Brexit referendum, Wales had the self-same Leave vote of 52pc which turned out to be the UK overall average. This contrasted with the 62pc and 56pc remain in Scotland and Northern Ireland respectively. But the outcome in Wales, which used to get the highest per-capita level of EU grant aid within the UK structures, was born as much of frustration with London as anything else.
Received wisdom among those who try to keep an overview of the complex political landscape of the islands of Britain and Ireland would always rate prospects of Scottish independence, and a united Ireland, far ahead of a Welsh breakaway from the UK. Yet we live in strange and changing times.
Everywhere we look these days, we see evidence of potential great changes. From the growing numbers who support a reconfiguration, or a total break-up of the UK, there is frequently a reference to what a boon Boris Johnson really is.
Even discounting the Welsh first minister’s Labour credentials, he made a rather good point on this very issue in Thursday’s contribution. He took aim directly at the UK prime minister, who he said he had only once met one-on-one, despite holding office in Cardiff for a year before Johnson was elected PM in July 2019.
“If I have an anxiety about the lack of regular engagement between the prime minister and other parts of the UK, it is more that I think without that then the security of the future of the UK becomes more difficult. Without the prime minster playing his part in all of that, I think it undermines the efforts of those of us – and I include myself certainly in this – who want to craft a successful future for the UK,” Drakeford summed up.
Scottish National Party supporters have been saying something similar for quite some time, albeit in different and more gleeful terms. Johnson’s comments about his previous lack of confidence in Scottish devolution were manna from heaven for the SNP as have his other gaffe-prone forays into matters Scottish.
The one cloud on the SNP horizon is the bitter feud between the two big characters of the party, the former leader Alex Salmond and his successor Nicola Sturgeon, over the circumstances of a trial which saw Salmond acquitted on serious charges of sexual assault. But even with potential damage arising from this, the odds are still short on a 2022 referendum reversing the Scottish vote in 2014 which saw independence rejected by 55pc to 45pc.
The Brexit fallout has given rise to huge speculation about the future of the UK. Among other things this has led to the appearance of a large crop of books on all such related subjects.
One of the most readable is by BBC journalist Gavin Esler, a Scot with an Ulster unionist background. He is, like the First Minister of Wales, a supporter of maintaining the UK. Yet his book is prophetically called How Britain Ends and is subtitled English Nationalism and the Rebirth of Four Nations.
Esler insists he wants to be alternatively “Scottish, British or European” depending on the occasion – and often he sees no problem with being these all at once. It is a sentiment voiced by many people all across the European Union who see European allegiance as no bar to love of country and/or region.
But Esler acknowledges that fewer Scots are comfortable these days with the dual Scottish-British identity. It is also, he argues, that the surge of a distinctive English nationalism is diluting England’s sense of Britishness.
In calmer times there could be an overdue re-examination leading to a reasonable realisation that the terms “English and British – England and Britain” – are not identical and interchangeable. Such a realisation would help reappraise the UK structures along the lines suggested by the Welsh leader. You could be looking at some form of federal or confederal United Kingdom.
But the atmosphere of our current times is not calm, and one reason for this is the extreme form of Brexit chosen by the Johnson government. This has soured relations between England and both Scotland and Northern Ireland, the two distinct parts of the UK which voted Remain.
All of that suggests big changes.
Brexit and Covid had stoked frustration in Wales and largely polarised the community