No 10’s ‘union unit’ is doomed to fail until it stops conflating unionism and nationalism
The union unit at No 10 has lost a second director in a matter of weeks. There is to be a new “union strategy committee”. These are the latest moves in a frenzied campaign to shore up the UK as it faces its most serious challenge in 100 years. A recent YouGov poll showed that around half of Scots are in favour of independence, while the goal of Irish unity gathers momentum in Northern Ireland and there is increasing interest in the idea of independence in Wales. Leave voters in England, according to surveys, would have accepted the secession of both Scotland and Northern Ireland as an acceptable price for Brexit. It is easy to attribute this to rising nationalism in the constituent nations, but there is a deeper and more powerful cause: the failure of unionists in Westminster to understand what the UK is.
The problem is that British unionism has transformed into a nationalism in its own right. Historically, unionism was not a single ideology but a complex set of practices across these islands. There were multiple ways of being British, all of them carrying different meanings and emotive charges, from the Orange parade in Ballymena to Conservative garden parties in the home counties, to patriotic Scottish unionism that is fiercely protective of local traditions and rights. And that’s not to mention the Britishness of the Commonwealth, which brought many people from south Asia and the Caribbean to these islands in the postwar period. Yet this diversity was subject to the absolute sovereignty and supremacy of the monarch in parliament.
