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Research Article
The meaning of Brexit and the future of the Union
David Reynolds*†
djr17@cam.ac.uk
Abstract
The referendum of 23 June 2016 on the UK’s continued membership of the European Union produced a narrow but clear majority for ‘Leave’. But the campaign’s organisers had no clear idea of how to proceed, throwing the country and the governing Conservative party into chronic confusion. Between June 2016 and July 2024, the UK had five Tory prime ministers. Drawing on recent books and articles, the first section of this essay shows how ‘Brexit’ was a slogan in search of a strategy, with the Tories unable to agree on major issues such as the ‘control of borders’ and the maintenance of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland. The second section explores the struggle over the unity of the United Kingdom between Tory centralisers and the devolved governments who wanted the powers repatriated from Brussels to be returned to them. This article arises from the Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture, delivered 14 November 2023.
Keywords
BrexitbordersEuropean UnionNorthern IrelandUnited KingdomIntroduction
The first Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture was delivered in 1996, following an appeal from the British Academy to endow a lecture series in memory of one of its distinguished Fellows who had died four years earlier. The lectures are to be given on the history of either Europe or the Middle East. Kedourie was best known for his works on nationalism, starting with England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1921, published in 1956. In this and other writings he denounced the attempts of Britain at state-building in the region after the Ottoman collapse, especially its indulgence of despotic clients by pandering to their claims as Arab nationalists. He argued that the general Western promotion of radical nationalism helped transform the Middle East into ‘a wilderness of tigers’ (Kramer 1999: 637–8).
Although Kedourie spent most of his academic life at the LSE, he was born in 1926 to Jewish parents in Baghdad. This personal background was hugely significant. His intellectual work was rooted in anger generated in Iraq during the 1920s and 1930s as King Faisal and the Hashemites imposed their family rule, and also Sunni Islam, on a mixed population, while also struggling to displace British hegemony. In both mind and heart, Kedourie understood what it was like to be a member of an ethno-religious minority within a polity wracked by nationalist state-building. He developed his arguments into a wider philosophical critique, entitled Nationalism, first published in 1960. As an epigraph on the title page he printed three lines from William Butler Yeats’ poem ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’:
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
(Kedourie 1993: title page)
That was Kedourie’s take on the grand designs of nationalists, presenting them as the product of petty but vicious squabbles – ‘weasels fighting in a hole’.
I shall return to those words at the end of this article. All that needs to be said now is that Kedourie’s allusion to Ireland after the Great War seems entirely apt. Because those years saw the attenuated crisis over Home Rule reaching its bloody climax in the war of independence, the civil war and partition – showing that the British government was clearly also engaged in frantic state-building (one might say state jerry-building) much closer to home than in the Middle East. Its actions, and the assumptions behind them, have cast long shadows over Great Britain and the island of Ireland during the 20th century and right up to the present day.
In October 2019 I published a book entitled Island Stories: Britain and its History in the Age of Brexit. Its aim was to show how the Brexit debate highlighted several ways that British politicians, mostly English, have distorted the country’s past. In my exploration of four main topics – Decline, Europe, Empire, and Britain – one recurrent theme was London’s persistent failure to take seriously the rest of the United Kingdom and especially the presence of two islands, not one, in the story: Britain and Ireland. I was originally supposed to deliver this Kedourie Lecture in Belfast in 2021, but Covid and other issues intervened. The delay has, however, provided a longer perspective and fuller documentation on the tortuous – indeed tortured – process by which successive Tory governments pulled the UK from the EU and then tried to pick up the pieces. Inside or outside the process of European integration, the UK has been the persistent ‘Awkward Partner’ (George 2018).
Yet Brexit is also a recent manifestation of a longer struggle over what constitutes the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The signification of that word ‘United’ changed profoundly at the end of the 1990s. The Good Friday agreement of 1998 ended three decades of paramilitary violence and opened up the militarised border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. The following year, after referenda in Scotland and Wales, devolved administrations with their own parliaments were established in Edinburgh and Cardiff. Yet Brexit and its aftermath have now raised deep questions about the continuance of devolution and the future of the Union. I shall offer some thoughts about those themes in the second part of this essay. But, first, some observations about the meaning of Brexit.
A slogan in search of a strategy
On 11 July 2016, on the eve of becoming prime minister, Theresa May declared: ‘Brexit means Brexit and we’re going to make a success of it’ (May 2016a). Her Delphic tautology was presumably intended to gain time, sound clever, and convince ardent ‘Leavers’ that she was now one of them. But May didn’t have any clear idea of what Brexit should mean. Nor did anyone else in Whitehall or Westminster. To be blunt, from all that we now know, it is clear that ‘Brexit’ was – and indeed remains – a slogan in search of a strategy. There is no space here to go into the reasons for Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to hold a referendum, his conduct of the campaign, and the success of Vote Leave on 23 June 2016, beyond noting that he was and remains insistent that it was essential to defuse resentment about the EU that threatened the Tory party from the right. That was his reading of the political mood. Equally noteworthy, however, is that his Chancellor of the Exchequer and closest political ally, George Osborne, was and remains equally firm in his conviction that Cameron could have toughed it out (Shipman 2016: 3–4, 592; Cameron 2019: xiv–xv, 700–1).
Suffice it now to say that the narrow but clear margin for Brexit (51.9% to 48.1%) was due in large measure to the combination of Boris Johnson, a charismatic showman, and Dominic Cummings, a ruthless political operator. More on this dynamic duo when I discuss Johnson’s premiership. What matters for the moment is Johnson’s panic on the morning of 24 June: ‘Oh s**t, we’ve got no plan. We haven’t thought about it. I didn’t think it would happen. Holy crap, what will we do?’ (Cameron 2019: 685–6; Seldon & Newell 2023: 27–8). The ballot paper itself offered no clue about what Brexit should mean. It simply asked voters whether they wanted to Remain or Leave, without offering any options for the relationship Britain might have with the EU if it did vote to break away. Cameron had banned any serious contingency planning, lest this suggest a lack of confidence about victory, and Johnson and his colleagues feared that any attempt to sketch a future relationship would fragment their own uneasy coalition.
The sequence of events thereafter is familiar. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, leaders of the victorious Leave coalition, assumed that Cameron would honour his pledge and stay on to implement the people’s choice (Cameron 2016). Hence their consternation when he abruptly resigned early on 24 June. Initially it looked as if Johnson would take over as PM, with his Vote Leave partner as Chancellor. But on 30 June Gove, who had regularly denied leadership ambitions in the past, suddenly declared that, having ‘come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead, I have therefore decided to put my name forward for the leadership.’ Shocked by this stab in the back, Johnson dropped out – a loss of nerve that he later bitterly regretted (Shipman 2017: 538; Seldon with Newell 2019: 561). Gove then duly paid the price for his betrayal and, out of the ensuing Tory scrum, May emerged as party leader and therefore Cameron’s successor as PM.
May was a Home Secretary in more than name. That was the only major office of state she had previously held. She had no ministerial experience of foreign affairs or economics. Her passionate devotion to the Union was rooted in the Home Counties where she had been brought up as a vicar’s daughter. She knew little about the history of Britain as a whole, or about how the EU operated, while Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement were barely on her radar. These blind spots were also typical, to varying degrees, of her predecessor and her successors.
Her now notorious mantra ‘Brexit means Brexit’ was coined by Nick Timothy – the Home Office special adviser who, with his colleague Fiona (Cunningham) Hill, groomed May (and themselves as her Joint Chiefs of Staff) for power in Number 10. During the Brexit referendum May supported Remain but Timothy, an ardent Brexiteer, persuaded her to keep a low profile – what critics dubbed a ‘submarine strategy’ – to maximise her political options. After she became PM, it was he who drafted her speech to the Tory party conference on 2 October announcing that the UK would invoke Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union ‘no later than the end of March’ 2017 – thereby initiating withdrawal negotiations which, under the Treaty, had to be completed within two years. She also stated that Britain would not adopt some half-in, half-out relationship like Norway or Switzerland: ‘It is going to be an agreement between an independent, sovereign United Kingdom and the European Union’ (May 2016b).
The words came from Timothy but the sentiments were genuinely May’s. She regularly told advisers that, as the fifth largest economy in the world, Britain did not have to take third-party options off the peg. ‘We will go for a bespoke, ambitious model designed around British interests and British needs.’ She radiated confidence about her ability to do so, telling embarrassed colleagues: ‘Look, I did negotiations as Home Secretary. I did negotiations in the Bank of England. I know how to negotiate’ (Seldon with Newell 2019: 116, 100 respectively). And so, after very little consultation with the Cabinet, May and Timothy committed Britain to a two-year timetable for leaving the EU and crafting a new relationship, but without having any clear idea of what form that relationship should take. Her own Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, was as surprised as anyone on 2 October by her speech to the Tory conference (Riley-Smith 2023: 131). But, given her Remainer background, she considered it vital to show those who had voted Leave that she was serious about Brexit – not least because disgruntled ‘Remoaners’ were challenging the result and even demanding a new referendum. Politics not policy were dictating the pace and direction of the search to turn slogan into strategy. This would happen again and again.
The fierce impatience of an unprepared government to rush through Brexit was reinforced by a set of flawed assumptions about the EU. Some Brexiteers wanted and even expected that the EU would collapse after Brexit. Most of them believed the 27 would be keen to have the closest possible trading relations with the UK, so that a deal on London’s terms would be relatively easy. In the jargon of the day, sovereign UK would be a ‘rule giver’ not a ‘rule taker’. This breezy arrogance was encapsulated in the statement on BBC Radio 4 by Liam Fox, an ardent Brexiteer whom May put in charge of the new Department of International Trade. He insisted that concluding a free trade agreement with the EU should be ‘one of the easiest in human history’ because ‘our rules and our laws are already exactly the same’, adding that ‘the only reason we wouldn’t come to a free and open agreement is because politics gets in the way of economics’ (Fox 2017).
Fox was being doubly disingenuous. First, in what international negotiation does politics not play a decisive part? And, second, the UK wouldn’t be negotiating as a member of the club, but as an outsider seeking ‘market access’ into what was now ‘their market’, governed by supranational laws and courts of which the UK was no longer a part. The outcome was sure to be a less advantageous trading situation than before. Politically, Britain could no longer play its old game of EU à la carte. Brussels would set the menu, and also the prices (Rogers 2019: 14, 18).
May and her colleagues were slow to recognise that the EU countries regarded Brexit as a mortal threat to the whole European project. From the very start Brussels stated that there would be ‘no negotiation without notification’ – meaning no serious discussion until the UK had formally stated its intention to leave. Also ruled out were any bilateral deals between the British government and individual member states: the 27 would act as a single unit through Michel Barnier, the European Commission’s authorised negotiator. The EU insisted on treating its ‘four freedoms’ as an integrated whole – the free movement of goods, capital, services, and people – rather than allowing London to cherry-pick the bits it liked. In other words, the Leave campaign’s anti-migrant mantra about ‘controlling our borders’ could not be achieved without eroding the scope for ‘frictionless trade’. As Stefaan De Rynck, Barnier’s senior adviser, has observed ‘the EU acted as a united club while Westminster tore itself apart’ (De Rynck 2023: 1).
There is neither space nor need to follow in detail what the Sunday Times journalist Tim Shipman has aptly called the ‘Mayhem’ of 2016–19. The PM, under Timothy’s tutelage, had set the government’s course in those first months – provoking push-back from Brussels, protests from Tory hardliners in the European Research Group (ERG) and Parliament’s successful insistence that constitutionally it had to be involved in the negotiations. Seeking more political room, May suddenly called a snap election on 8 June 2017 but the campaign highlighted her woodenness in public – so much so that her team decided they could not risk her entering a TV debate with other party leaders. ‘The first rule of leadership’, declared Caroline Lucas of the Green Party scathingly, ‘is to show up’. Under relentless personal scrutiny for the first time in her political career, May became depressed and ever more stilted – earning herself a nickname that stuck: ‘the Maybot’. As one Tory special adviser observed glumly: ‘The manifesto didn’t cost us the election, the person did. She didn’t connect’ (Shipman 2017: 345, 353).
The crucial consequence of the 2017 election is that May lost a small but serviceable majority of 17 seats in the Commons. Henceforth the Tories could only continue to govern thanks to a ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement with the 10 MPs from the | Democratic Unionist Party. This gave the DUP immense leverage, from a position that was both fervently pro-Brexit and also highly sceptical about the Good Friday Agreement – in double contrast with majority opinion across Northern Ireland.
The Irish dimension was another of the blind-spots in the mentality of English Brexiteers, who had given little thought to the implications of a vote to Leave for the United Kingdom as a whole. Belatedly entering the debate about future options was what became known as the Irish Trilemma. Its three prongs were (1) an exit from the EU Single Market and Customs Union; (2) an exit for the whole of the UK; and (3) no border on the island of Ireland (Springford 2018). It soon became clear that London could have only two of the trio, and May opted for 1 and 3.
The result was the notorious Backstop enunciated on 8 December 2017 in paragraph 49 of the EU-UK Joint Report about progress in the withdrawal negotiations. This stated that in the last resort, until other ways of a reaching agreement could be found, the UK would remain within the EU’s Internal Market and the Customs Union (EU-UK 2017; para. 49). The Backstop sparked furious protests from the DUP, which spread through the Tory party during 2018 as MPs gradually woke up to the Irish dimension of Brexit. May’s conviction that Northern Ireland must not be separated from the rest of the UK – even if that prejudiced a clean, hard Brexit – became her red line with ardent Brexiteers. Unlike them, she came to realise that acquiescence in the Union among the minority nationalist community depended on safeguarding the Good Friday Agreement. After talks with community leaders in Belfast in February 2019, she quoted the comment of one moderate nationalist: ‘It’s not the borders on the land but the borders in our mind that you need to worry about, and that’s what the Good Friday Agreement was about’ (Barwell 2021: 129–31; Seldon with Newell 2019: 553–4). Here was a direct echo of the celebrated German phrase Die Mauer im Kopf – ‘the wall in the head’ – about how difficult it was to bridge the continuing divide between West Germans and East Germans despite the Fall of the Berlin Wall and official unification.
Embattled against a united EU, a phalanx of Brexit ‘Spartans’ in the ERG and also an increasingly assertive House of Commons aided by Speaker John Bercow, May could not complete the negotiations within two years of their start on 29 March 2017. Humiliated, she had to beg an extension until 31 October 2019. In desperation she then opened up, for the first time, by talking to Labour and to her four predecessors as PM – further signs of how bunkered her mentality had been. But it was now too late: after failing three times to secure a Commons majority for her withdrawal agreement, she tearfully announced her resignation. ‘A Sphinx without a riddle’, in the damning words of one aide. ‘She’s brilliant at learning a script’, said another, but ‘less good when she has to improvise’ (Shipman 2017: 534). A conscientious and considerate MP, May was not a PM. What couldn’t be denied was her courage and sense of duty after such a humiliation in returning to the backbenches for another five years. Many remarked on the contrast between Theresa May and David Cameron.
It was Boris Johnson, her successor from 24 July 2019, who finally got Britain out of the EU – but at immense cost to the country and lasting damage to the conduct of public affairs. Crucial to both the exit and the damage was his double act with Dominic Cummings, reprising their performance during the 2016 referendum. The political guru Isaac Levido called Johnson ‘a force of nature ... the most talented campaigner and communicator that I’ve ever worked with’ (Riley-Smith 2023: 204). But, except in moments of acute crisis, Johnson was indolent, disorganised and indecisive. Three days before becoming PM he told Cummings: ‘The whole thing is a total mess. I don’t know what I’m doing. Someone needs to galvanize Brexit’ (Seldon & Newell 2023: 262). It was Cummings who provided the ruthless organisational brain. One aide called him ‘a political terrorist’. Another dubbed him Johnson’s ‘Rottweiler’ (Seldon & Newell 2023: 73; Riley-Smith 2023: 194).
Knowing his boss’s elasticity about promises, Cummings had forced Johnson to accept a written set of terms and conditions, which became known as the ‘terror memorandum’. This included a huge increase in spending on science and technology – one of Cummings’ obsessions in order to modernise the country – and making the political special advisers of ministers report to him, not to the PM. In February 2020 he forced the resignation of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid, over this issue to show off his power and send a warning to the whole of Whitehall.
Cummings’ intense focus and brutal methods – both of which had been essential to Vote Leave’s victory in 2016 – were even more important in achieving Johnson’s mantra ‘Get Brexit Done’ during the gridlock of 2019. Unlike May, he prioritised the first two prongs of the Irish trilemma – an exit from the EU Single Market and Customs Union and an exit for the whole of the UK – regardless of the impact on the island of Ireland. Like Cummings, Johnson had an essentially English vision, caring little for the rest of the UK. In any case his political survival was now at stake. He therefore insisted that the Backstop had to go, and a meeting with Irish premier Leo Varadkar on 10 October 2019 proved vital in achieving that. Varadkar – openly gay and with an Indian father – had found Theresa May stiff and awkward, but he hit it off with Johnson, another colourful maverick. Their 90-minute talk laid the basis for a deal on a new Northern Ireland Protocol which their aides gradually fleshed out. The EU and UK eventually signed a new withdrawal agreement on 17 October but it was then bogged down in arguments in the Commons between the Government and the Opposition parties. Again, Ireland was the crucial issue.
Varadkar had conceded a ‘consent mechanism’ under which the Northern Ireland Assembly would be allowed to vote after four years on renewing the Protocol. Less acceptable to the DUP – indeed utterly objectionable – was Johnson’s agreement to move the de facto customs border to the Irish Sea, in order to protect the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. This May had rejected, as indeed had Johnson on 24 November 2018, a few months after he resigned as May’s Foreign Secretary, when he flew over specially to the DUP’s annual conference and told cheering Unionists that ‘no British Conservative government could or should sign up to any such arrangement.’ In October 2019, the DUP were therefore furious at Johnson’s blatant betrayal but the PM bluffed it out, repeatedly denying that he had signed up to an Irish Sea border that would effectively separate Britain from Northern Ireland. Most observers judge that, despite Johnson’s notorious indifference to detail, he knew exactly what he was doing – perhaps believing, in the usual Borisian way, that he could fix things later while brazenly denying in public what he had done.
On Johnson’s first day as PM, Cummings had told Number 10 staff: ‘We are leaving by any means necessary’ (Seldon & Newell 2023: 73–4). He insisted that Brexit must be their ‘sole objective’ until achieved and that staff had to work around the clock, following his orders. ‘Any means necessary’ included the notorious request that the Queen prorogue Parliament in September 2019, which had the effect of closing down all debate for five key weeks. The prorogation, later judged illegal by the Supreme Court, stymied opposition MPs but also put Buckingham Palace in a politicised position that was deeply embarrassing. Cummings didn’t care. His ‘terror’ tactics also embraced the threat of leaving without a deal, to intimidate the EU. Many middle-of-the-road Tory MPs disliked all this but went along with it because Labour was now moving towards the idea of a second referendum and Number 10’s approach seemed the only way to honour the verdict of June 2016. Johnson-Cummings didn’t hit the 31 October deadline but on that date the parliamentary deadlock was finally broken because over-confident Opposition parties agreed to a December election and the bill received royal assent. Brussels had conceded a second extension until 31 January 2020.
The election campaign was the perfect stage for Johnson’s showman skills, especially when pitted against a Labour leftwinger, Jeremy Corbyn, whom many voters could simply not imagine as a prime minister. The Tories also offered a clear slogan – ‘Get Brexit Done’ – whereas Labour proposed renegotiation of the withdrawal agreement and then a new referendum, prolonging the national agony. The turn of 2019–20 was Johnson’s Everest moment. On 12 December he won an eighty-seat Tory majority – the biggest since 1987. Seats that had voted Labour for decades deserted the party as the so-called Red Wall collapsed. On 31 January 2020, the UK’s exit from the EU allowed him to claim that he had indeed ‘got Brexit done.’ There was heady talk of a second term, even a third, but that soon evaporated. What ensued was described by one Treasury mandarin as ‘an eighty-seat majority looking for a purpose’ (Riley-Smith 2023: 234).
Of course, the Covid pandemic, which hospitalised Johnson himself for a week, proved a massive diversion. But it had become clear that the feuding Tory factions could not agree about what they wanted post-Brexit. Equally evident was that the Prime Minister – now deprived of Cummings by the increasing dominance of the third Mrs Johnson (Carrie Symonds) – lacked the drive, focus, and organisational skills to forge a policy or even keep order. Under Johnson, Brexit meant Breakout – but then Breakdown. The coup de grace for the Johnson premiership was his persistent and blatant disregard in Number 10 of Covid rules to restrict partying during the pandemic, despite the fact that those rules were being zealously enforced on the general public by the police. Against all the evidence, Johnson kept insisting that the guidance and the rules were ‘followed at all times’ at Number 10 but an eventual inquiry by the Metropolitan Police found this statement to be untrue in relation to at least 126 incidents (Riley-Smith 2023: 244–5). Johnson lost the trust of much of his Cabinet. After nearly 60 Tory ministers and government appointees had resigned, he finally bowed to the inevitable on 7 July 2022 ( Spectator 2022).
On the face of it, his successor, Liz Truss had little to do with Brexit. Of course, she didn’t have much time during her 49 days in Number 10: the shortest premiership in British history. The almost manic intensity with which she and her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, set about their dash for growth typified the fevered atmosphere that her predecessors had fostered – especially contempt towards civil service advice and also that signature Brexit motif of acting on impulse. Truss and Kwarteng had not properly costed their tax cuts and refused to run their financial package past the Office of Budget Responsibility. The ensuing financial meltdown, according to the Resolution Foundation, cost the country around £30 billion (Bell 2022). Derided as ‘KamiKwasi’ economics, this was irresponsibility on a scale that eclipsed May-Timothy and even Johnson-Cummings.
On 25 October 2022 Rishi Sunak became the UK’s third premier of 2022, and the fifth since June 2016. Not only did these frequent changes at the top disrupt policy coherence, but they also had knock-on effects throughout Whitehall. The consequential reshuffles, driven by political arguments and personal vendettas, unsettled continuity of government on a day-to-day basis, which was then transmitted to the country at large. Consider a few examples. Between June 2016 and October 2022, the UK had seven Chancellors of the Exchequer, seven Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland, and nine Education Secretaries. Each newcomer had to forge a team, learn the essentials of their unfamiliar job, and connect with other ministers before they could have much impact.
Sunak was the UK’s first non-white premier of a country that was struggling to come to terms with its post-imperial multinational identity. Initially he created some much needed stability – trying, unlike Truss, to bring the warring Tory tribes together in his new Cabinet, preaching a stark message: ‘Unite or Die.’ Although a staunch Brexiteer, Sunak also rebuilt bridges with the EU, especially over the Northern Ireland Protocol. His ‘Windsor Framework,’ agreed in February 2023, established ‘Green’ and ‘Red’ lanes to ensure a lighter touch for goods from Britain that would stay in Northern Ireland, compared with the fuller checks and controls imposed on goods intended for the Republic. From October 2023, ‘Not for EU’ labels began appearing in Northern Ireland shops to designate products that should not enter the single market.
The Windsor Framework reflected a markedly different tone from the confrontational tactics of Johnson and his principal negotiator Lord David Frost – a former diplomat with big chips on his shoulders about the Foreign Office and the EU. By contrast, Sunak and his team went out of their way to get on with Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, finalising the Framework at a hotel in Windsor Great Park after which von der Leyen, an Anglophile who had studied at the LSE, was invited to tea with King Charles at Windsor Castle. The agreement was a clever piece of traditional diplomacy – deftly rebranding the ‘Protocol’ (an abhorrent word for Unionists), signalling a wish for friendlier relations with EU, and hinting with the name ‘Windsor’ at the seal of royal approval.
At one point in the talks Sunak briefly took time out to present von der Leyen’s Chef de Cabinet, Stéphanie Riso, with a small birthday gift. Riso, who was moving on and up in the European Commission after six years handling Brexit, was ‘said by those present to have been visibly moved that the prime minister had both known and then chosen to mark the moment’ (Crerar & Elgot 2023). Sunak’s knowledge was, presumably, due to staff at the British Mission to the EU but it was he who chose to act upon it. By contrast Frost, who resigned in December 2021, had ‘made himself an extraordinarily unpopular figure in Brussels and in EU capitals’ (Grant 2021), while Johnson always enjoyed making ‘Fourth Reich digs’ about the EU. Even his comments about ‘Our European Friends’ often displayed a peculiar ability to weaponise the word ‘friends’.
Behind the new UK-EU cosiness, however, there was no immediate easing of Northern Ireland’s political deadlock. The DUP had brought down power-sharing in February 2022 in protest at Johnson’s Northern Ireland Protocol, against which it enunciated ‘Seven Tests’. These were rooted in the Act of Union (1800) that had designated all parts of the new United Kingdom equal in commercial matters and therefore ruled out any separate trading arrangements for Northern Ireland, such as the de facto border in the Irish Sea that Johnson, despite his blustering, had clearly constructed. The Windsor Framework did offer scope (carefully circumscribed) for a ‘Stormont Brake’ on some ‘significant’ changes in EU rules, but this would only apply if the Assembly were back in session. The DUP continued to block that throughout 2023 – well aware that, as a result of the May 2022 Assembly election, the Nationalists would be the largest party and would therefore take the post of First Minister.
A breakthrough finally came in early 2024. In return for a funding package of £3.3 billion from London and assurances about Northern Ireland’s place within the Union, the DUP dropped its resistance to power-sharing. The deal was announced on 31 January, the fourth anniversary of the UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement, and a new Northern Ireland Executive was formed on 3 February, two years to the day since the DUP pulled out of power-sharing. The party’s change of heart was not clearly explained – its seven tests had certainly not been met and there were vocal protests from some hardline Unionists – but the DUP claimed that most of the routine checks and customs paperwork on goods passing through the green channel would now be scrapped, thereby avoiding Northern Ireland being singled out from the rest of the UK. However, the appearance of equal treatment also reflected the fact that increasing regulation was quietly being imposed on England, Scotland, and Wales. From October 2024, it was planned that ‘Not for EU’ labelling would be extended to all agri-food sold in shops across Britain. Unlike labels in Northern Ireland, this was not required under the Framework but was being done to appease Unionists. The Chief Executive of the UK Food and Drink Federation complained about holding ‘quite insubstantial’ discussions with the government for months about what was a ‘very complicated and expensive way’ of ensuring that the full array of British products were sold in Northern Ireland. She claimed the requirement would cost the industry about £250 million a year and would inevitably lead to price rises for consumers ( Guardian 2024a). Given Brexiteers’ declarations that voting ‘Leave’ would reduce EU paperwork, it was ironic that more regulation was now being imposed on Britain by the Tory government as its latest contortion in turning a slogan into a strategy.
Nevertheless the Windsor Framework had made a difference, given the mess inherited from Johnson. It was an example of what one might call Sunak’s ‘patch and mend’ strategy: improving working relations with the EU on a piecemeal (and costly) basis while continuing to trumpet the virtues of Brexit and celebrating British exceptionalism. These tactics were also on display in another palsy Rishi and Ursula deal announced by Downing Street with much fanfare in September 2023, granting the UK an association agreement with the ‘Horizon Europe’ programme of scientific research. The government, a spokesman proclaimed, ‘has negotiated a bespoke deal in the UK’s national interest, which means that UK researchers and businesses can participate confidently in the world’s largest programme of research cooperation, worth more than £80 billion.’ But, contrary to what might be inferred, the £80 billion plus was the value of the total project funding, not the UK’s share. What’s more, Horizon Europe had been running since 2021 and will end in 2027; the agreement’s pledge that the UK would be able to claw back money if it pays 16% more into the scheme than it gets out would only result in a refund if and when the UK joined a successor programme ( Science/Business Net 2023).
Nor was there much sign of Johnson’s ‘bright shining uplands’ outside the EU’s ‘bondage’. In April 2022 he returned from a visit to India predicting a free trade agreement by Diwali, but when the Hindu festival of lights began on 24 October, the treaty not been concluded and not only Johnson but also Truss were history. Sunak, despite being a practising Hindu, proved no more successful during his visit to Delhi in September 2023. As trade analyst Sam Lowe observes: ‘In the UK discourse, it is the big UK negotiating with little India. But India is on course to be one of the biggest economies in the world – we are talking about a country that is huge and doesn’t feel the need to cut a deal’ ( Guardian 2023).1
Similarly, the much vaunted ‘special relationship’ with the United States had yet to deliver a bonanza Free Trade Agreement. Just before Christmas 2023 the media were quietly told that negotiations had been shelved until after the US presidential vote in November 2024. Sunak was left seeking ‘memorandums of understanding’ with individual US states to reduce regulatory barriers and boost market access. Seven of these understandings had been reached by the end of November 2023, but none of them could reduce tariffs because that is the constitutional preserve of the Federal Government. With the US, as with India, Brexit created new asymmetries of power. Britain had enjoyed far greater leverage as a member of the second largest economic bloc in the world than it could hope for as a lone ranger. The glory days of the Raj and of Churchill’s wartime partnership with Roosevelt were long gone.
So, patch and mend was proving very patchy, but it will probably be the only way forward for years to come. Even though trade with Europe has fallen in recent years, in 2020 the EU accounted for 42% of the UK’s exports of goods and services and 50% of UK imports (Ward 2021). In terms of people movements the EU is also the UK’s most significant neighbour, with a highly sensitive land border cutting through the island of Ireland and a major sea border along the Channel which was becoming ever harder to police against the thousands of asylum-seeking illegal migrants trying to cross the Channel each year in flimsy boats, often victims of avaricious people-traffickers. This was a Europe-wide problem, reflecting economic collapse and climate crisis across much of Africa but, post-Brexit, the UK was outside the EU’s own (creaky) migration policy framework and British cooperation with France was limited. Although Sunak had made significant progress over Ireland, the Channel became a nightmare for him in 2023–4.
Sunak inherited Johnson’s Migration and Economic Development Partnership (MEDP) with the East African state of Rwanda, launched with the usual Borisian panache in April 2022 as ‘a world-leading asylum offer’ by the UK and Rwanda, ‘driven [by] our shared humanitarian impulse and made possible by Brexit freedoms’, to take control of the UK’s borders. Instead of being housed in expensive hotel accommodation in the UK, would-be migrants would be flown to Rwanda (4,000 miles away in East Africa) and, if their claims for asylum were upheld, would then be ‘given the opportunity to build a new life in that dynamic country, supported by the funding we are providing.’ And, Johnson declared, ‘let’s be clear, Rwanda is one of the safest countries in the world, globally recognised for its record on welcoming and integrating migrants’ (2022). Yet the whole point of the policy was deterrence: the threat of being sent to Rwanda was, supposedly, the way to ‘Stop the Boats’.
Here was another example of a slogan in search of a strategy, as the often ludicrous detail makes clear. Soon after Johnson’s announcement, the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, responsible for implementing immigration controls, stated in public: ‘I do not believe sufficient evidence can be obtained to demonstrate that the policy will have a deterrent effect significant enough to make the policy value for money’ (Rycroft 2022). The government took no notice, but its efforts to push ahead were frustrated by legal challenges in the UK. Then, on 14 June 2022, the European Court of Human Rights halted the first flight – on a plane containing seven refugees, chartered at an estimated cost of £500,000 – because the UK courts had not yet scrutinised conditions in Rwanda (BBC News 2022b).
When Sunak became PM in July 2022, he not only inherited the Rwanda MDEP but made ‘Stop the Boats’ his flagship policy. But on 15 November 2023 the UK Supreme Court ruled that the memorandum of understanding with Rwanda, on which the policy had been based, was illegal under international human rights law. So the government negotiated a full treaty with Rwanda, signed by Home Secretary James Cleverly at a cost to the taxpayer of £165,000 for his day return ticket to Rwanda by private jet ( Guardian 2024b). It then tried to rush a new ‘Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill’ through Parliament. To get around one of the Supreme Court’s main objections, the bill belligerently asserted parliamentary sovereignty by seeking to legislate ‘the judgment of Parliament that the Republic of Rwanda is a safe country’. This meant that ‘every decision-maker’, including government ministers, immigration officials, courts and tribunals, ‘must conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country’ (regardless of the abundant factual evidence to the contrary). Indeed the Home Secretary, when presenting the draft bill to Parliament, admitted that he was ‘unable to make a statement that, in my view’ the provisions of the bill were compatible with basic provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights (Safety of Rwanda Bill 2023). Labour MP Stephen Kinnock mocked the farcical abuse of parliamentary sovereignty in decreeing that Rwanda was safe: ‘We cannot legislate for the sky to be green and the grass to be blue . . . [P]utting this kind of absurd legislation before us is frankly turning our institutions into a laughing stock’ (House of Commons 2024, 747: 670). It was derided as the ‘post-truth bill’.
Dissident members of the House of Lords fought the government on issues of principle, putting down dozens of amendments. The escalating costs also caused an outcry. In April 2022, Johnson had spoken airily of a total of £120 million (BBC News 2022a), but at the end of May 2024, the House of Commons library reported that ‘the UK is providing £370 million in development funding to Rwanda, plus another £120 million once 300 people have been relocated. The UK will also pay up to £171,000 per person relocated’. The interparty Commons Accounts committee condemned the Home Office for having ‘continually failed to be transparent with Parliament about how many people will be relocated, and the potential costs of the programme’ (Gower et al. 2024: 4; House of Commons, Committee of Public Accounts 2024: 3).
The Government took no notice. After five rounds of parliamentary ‘ping-pong’ between Lords and Commons, opposition peers capitulated and the Tories finally got the bill signed into law on 22 April 2024, but further legal challenges prevented the first flight from taking off. Attacked from one side of his party for breaching international law and from the other for not ending all subservience to the European courts, Sunak pushed on with a project that he would have probably have dismissed with derision when a businessman in Silicon Valley. Rwanda had become a fig-leaf to cover the nakedness of his position as PM. Sending even one asylum seeker there, whatever the cost, apparently seemed vital in his desperate efforts to show his party and the electorate that he was a true Brexiteer, taking back control of Britain’s borders.
By now, however, the Tories were floundering twenty points behind Labour in the opinion polls, and Sunak faced open criticism and even outright contempt from his MPs. The Tory party was pulling itself apart. On Wednesday 22 May, apparently fearing that things could only get worse, Sunak suddenly announced that a general election would be held on 4 July. It had been assumed he would opt for October – the month favoured by his election guru, Isaac Levido – and his statement surprised not only the country but many of his own Cabinet. Even the Tory political machine seemed wrong-footed and it was unable to get some of Sunak’s legacy projects, such as the ban on youth smoking, onto the statute book before the parliamentary session reached its abrupt conclusion at the end of that week. Sunak also admitted that no asylum seekers would be flown to Rwanda before the election. Labour described the whole policy as a ‘con’ and said that Sunak had called the early election before it was found out (Reuters 2024).
Two vignettes sum up the impression of a premier and a party in disarray. On 22 May, Sunak marched out of Number 10 to announce the election during a torrential downpour, standing there without an umbrella in a suit that became totally sodden, as all TV viewers could see. Reports that the suit had cost a couple of thousand pounds added to the impression of a politician totally out of touch with ‘ordinary people’. Then on 6 June, during commemorations in Normandy with veterans and other Western leaders for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Sunak flew home early to record an election broadcast with ITV. Media images highlighted the gaffe by showing the Presidents of the US and France and the Chancellor of Germany standing with the British Foreign Secretary. Amid an outcry, Sunak apologised, and Number 10 claimed lamely that it had long been planned that he would leave early. The public relations debacles of 22 May and 6 June suggested to many that Sunak was a leader who lacked political judgment and even common sense. And on 4 July the Tories went down to their worst ever electoral defeat, with only 121 seats (365 in 2019), against Labour's 412 (202 in 2019).
The fourth man in those images on 6 June was none other than David Cameron, architect of the Brexit referendum, who had left not only the premiership but also parliament in 2016 and then became a noted figure on the international lecture circuit. In November 2023, however, Sunak suddenly appointed him to the Foreign Secretaryship (and to a life peerage). This reincarnation as Lord Cameron of Chipping Camden was presumably aimed at wavering Tory voters who might be seduced by Old Etonian style, but it must have brought back unpleasant memories for many EU leaders.
It seems appropriate to leave a last word on the ‘meaning of Brexit’ to the man who instigated the referendum. In April 2017, just over a week after Theresa May had dropped her own bombshell announcement of a sudden election, Cameron offered some reflections on the British vote to leave the EU. ‘Obviously I regret the personal consequences for me’, he told a tourism conference in Bangkok, ‘but I think it was the right thing. The lack of a referendum was poisoning British politics and so I put that right’, adding that the Tory party had ‘accepted the referendum result and got on with the process and responsibly delivering it’. This showed, said Cameron, that ‘it is probably the most healthy mainstream political party anywhere in western Europe’ (Cameron 2017).
The future of the Union
The 2016 referendum was not just about the UK’s relationship with continental Europe and its place in the wider world. It was also an issue of ‘identity politics’: how, and indeed how far, the four polities the UK understood their collective identity as the United Kingdom. At stake is the future of devolved government.
It is often forgotten that ‘the UK’s first example of devolution’ was the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 (Walker & Greer 2023: 48). At the time, this seemed an aberration. The accepted constitutional dogma was that the UK was a ‘unitary state’, grounded in the unfettered sovereignty of the Westminster parliament. An alternative view is that the UK has been a ‘union State’ (since 1707) or even ‘a state of Unions’ (since parliamentary governments were restored to Scotland and Wales in 1999). But as scholar James Mitchell has observed: ‘If the unitary state understanding of the UK is inadequate because it only described the English polity, the union state understanding is inadequate’ because it failed to account for ‘the absence of either an English Parliament separate from Westminster’ or of ‘directly elected English regional government’ (Mitchell 2009: 6, 225).
Writing in 2009, Mitchell speculated on the likely future for the UK as a union in the era of devolution. Across the Channel, the proclaimed objective of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 was ‘Ever Closer Union’ – a dream for European federalists, a bogeyman for those who depicted the EU as the ‘Fourth Reich’. Johnson played on this in his notorious May 2016 interview with the Telegraph, headlined by the paper ‘Boris Johnson: The EU wants a superstate, just as Hitler did’ (Ross 2016). However, ‘Ever Closer Union’ was never a detailed road map; more a general direction of travel, along which the EU moved erratically in fits and starts. Picking up on this, Mitchell observed that ‘ever looser union, as imprecise as ever closer union, might not be the aim of devolution but may prove to be its consequence’ (Mitchell 2009: 226).
In 2019–20, however, a decade after those words were written, things looked very different. From 31 January 2020, the UK was no longer legally a member of the EU and substantial powers were soon to be repatriated from Brussels. Theresa May had allowed 21 months for this transitional process to be sorted out, including a new trade and cooperation act, but Johnson – desperate for the freedom to negotiate other trade deals – cut it down to 11 months and then in April 2020, from his Covid sick bed, told aides that he wanted out by the end of the year. The result was the UK Internal Market Act (UKIMA), passed on 17 December 2020, which has not received in England the attention it deserves, in contrast with the cacophony it aroused in both Scotland (which voted Remain in 2016) and Wales (which voted Leave). In both these countries, there was an outcry. To quote the SNP government in Scotland, ‘since the EU referendum, “taking back control” has come increasingly to mean wresting control and autonomy from the devolved institutions’ (Scottish Government 2021: 3).
That claim was not mere Celtic paranoia. There was indeed a clear Tory rollback strategy, although it probably developed as opportunism by some Number 10 aides. The Act was drafted by David Frost’s deputy, Oliver Lewis, working closely with Michael Gove and backed in principle by Johnson. But Cummings kept the PM at arm’s length – claiming that he didn’t understand the details, would not read the papers, and kept shifting position. Cummings even asserts that it was not until 25 September 2019 that Johnson really grasped the magnitude of the change that would ensue when the UK left the Customs Union. Two senior ministers who definitely did understand were the Attorney General, Sir Geoffrey Cox, and the Northern Ireland Secretary, Julian Smith – who knew full well the fragility of the situation there – but they were sacked in the February 2020 reshuffle in favour of a hardliner as Attorney General (Suella Braverman) and a more pliable figure for Northern Ireland (Brandon Lewis). After the event, Frost and Lewis have been bullish about what they were up to. ‘Like prorogation’, says Frost, the Act ‘was intended to show we meant business, and there were only certain arrangements we would agree to.’ It prevented internal trade barriers between the four countries of UK and restricted various legislative powers of the devolved administrations. According to Lewis, UKIMA ‘stopped the trend since Blair’s late 1990s reforms of devolving power, reassessing parliamentary authority with a bigger role for Westminster going forwards.’2 He added: ‘I was very proud of it’ (Seldon & Newell 2023: 400–3). In the usual Brexit manner, consultation was minimal: the bill was published on 9 September, having been shared with the devolved governments only late on the previous evening (Scottish Government 2021: 18).
Aside from the considerable implications for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, critics denounced the draft bill as a breach of international law. Under repeated attack in the Commons, Brandon Lewis eventually conceded: ‘I would say to my hon. friend that yes, this does break international law in a very specific and limited way’ (House of Commons 2020, 679: 509). These weasel words infuriated Theresa May: ‘how can the Government reassure future international partners that the UK can be trusted to abide by the legal obligations in the agreements it signs?’ (House of Commons 2020, 679: 499). Even blunter was the former Tory party leader, Michael Howard – a lifelong Eurosceptic. Appalled by ‘words that I never thought I would hear from a British Minister, far less a Conservative Minister’, Howard asked: ‘How can we reproach Russia, China or Iran when their conduct falls below internationally accepted standards, when we are showing such scant regard for our treaty obligations?’ (House of Lords 2020, 805: 920). In the face of persistent criticism from Parliament and the legal profession, the government removed a few of the most inflammatory provisions to ensure that the bill became law.
Also concluded in December 2020 was the related Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) hastily negotiated with the EU. The diplomatic pyrotechnics along the way were often episodes of sound and fury rather than substance, intended to show off Brexit Britain’s new virility. According to political scientist Simon Usherwood, ‘[t]he overall pattern of these flashpoints is one of the UK being driven to secure symbolically significant concessions, even at the price of economic efficiency’. This exercise in smoke and mirrors reflects what has been called the government’s desire for ‘performative divergence’ to mask the reality that it would continue to follow EU rules and procedures in key areas. ‘At most,’ Usherwood argues, ‘the final treaty took the harder edges off the EU’s preferences, while still tying the UK into a system of governance and dispute settlement that could have major effects’ – which the EU had insisted on because of its underlying ‘concern about the UK’s “good faith.”’ An additional deficiency of the TCA was Frost and Lewis’ decision to go for a small deal, in the interests of time, which meant that the Agreement had little to say about cooperation on foreign policy, external security, and defence, despite an international climate in which the countries of the West needed, more than ever, to hang together rather than flaunt their differences. ‘For the UK, the persistent issue’, concluded Usherwood, was the ‘lack of a strategic purpose to leaving the EU’ (Usherwood 2021: 119, 120, 121).
The political imperatives underlying the UKIMA and the TCA were equally evident to constitutional lawyers. While the UK was a member of the EU, all four component countries were part of the European internal market. Now that the UK had left the EU, argues law professor Thomas Horsley, 10 Downing Street was engaging in a piece of ‘legal transplantation’ to create ‘something new and distinctive: the concept of an internal market as a shared regulatory space that cuts across the respective competences of the UK and devolved administrations.’ Yet this was ‘a regulatory framework that is incomplete, coercive and, mirroring existing constitutional arrangements, highly asymmetrical. Rather than innovate to bring together the UK and devolved governments voluntarily as partners in the management of the UK internal market’, the UKIMA ‘instead ultimately privileges, by imposition, the institutional role of the UK government (and UK Parliament) in future market-management.’ What’s more it introduced ‘a new domestic legal commitment to the principles of a liberal market economy.’ That commitment, transplanted from ‘the EU legal order to restrain the exercise of legislative and administrative policy-making post-Brexit’, had previously been ‘absent from the UK’s domestic constitutional arrangements’ (Horsley 2022: 1145).
Against the Tories’ coercive unionism, the Labour party offered a radical alternative in the December 2022 report of its Commission on the UK’s Future, chaired by former PM Gordon Brown. ‘Brexit has not delivered the control people were promised,’ the report declared. ‘Britain hasn’t taken back control – Westminster and Whitehall have.’ This had exacerbated the UK’s ‘unreformed, over-centralised way of governing’ which was ‘undermining our ability to deliver growth and prosperity for the whole country.’ The Brown Commission argued that the concept of the UK as ‘a Union of Nations’ which, it claimed, ‘the overwhelming majority of people in the country already accept’, should be ‘laid out in a new constitutional statute guiding how political power country should be shared within it.’ The ‘current undemocratic House of Lords’ should be replaced by ‘a smaller, more representative, and thus more legitimate and trusted second chamber – a democratic Assembly of the Nations and Regions.’ Doing this would ‘entrench the constitutional status of self-government across the nations of the UK’ and also give the cities and regions of England ‘a permanent voice’ in the second chamber. Mindful of the chaotic patchwork of health regulations across the UK during the Covid pandemic, the Commission also proposed that greater devolution be balanced by better ‘institutions of shared government’ through a Council of the Nations and the Regions, supported by departmental committees (Labour Party 2022: 2, 7, 11–14).
The aim of the Brown Commission was to do what Blair’s government had not achieved at the end of the 1990s. The proposals made sense in principle, but they were only an outline. No Tory government was likely to touch them, and it was hard to imagine that Labour, when returned to power, could afford to expend the immense amount of time, energy, and political capital needed to implement them. The members of the Brown Commission knew this and the report may well have had an essentially political purpose: to woo back Scottish voters whom Labour had lost in recent years by assuring them that the party was taking seriously nationalist concerns about a dictatorial union.
Within months of the Brown Commission report appearing, however, Scottish politics was transformed. On 15 February 2023 Nicola Sturgeon announced her intention to resign as Scotland’s first minister and SNP party leader – positions that she had held since November 2014. The reasons for this abrupt announcement were unclear – Sturgeon alluded to the pressures of the job – but the party’s finances had been under scrutiny for some time and soon after Sturgeon’s resignation both she and her husband were arrested by police. Although then released, he was formally charged on 18 April with embezzling party funds. Sturgeon’s successor, Humza Yousaf, sworn in on 29 March, was the first Scottish Asian and Muslim to hold the office of First Minister but, unlike Sturgeon, he was not a commanding figure and her sudden fall undermined the SNP’s campaign for second independence referendum.
Although the “indyref2” issue is legally controversial, it is widely accepted that the Scottish Parliament does not have the competence to hold a second independence referendum without the consent of the UK Parliament. This left Yousaf lamely parroting Sturgeon’s claim that an SNP victory in the next election would be a de facto vote for independence. The SNP’s concept of independence seemed equally hollow: the British monarch remaining as head of state, retaining the pound sterling for the foreseeable future, no rigid border between Scotland and England, and continued reliance on UK armed forces for Scotland’s defence. On the other hand, opinion polls since Yousaf took powerindicated that the clear decline in support for the SNP - confirmed by the Labour landslide on 4 July 2024, which reduced the SNP from 48 Westminster seats to nine - was not, however, significantly denting popular support for Scottish independence, fairly steady at around 47-48% (Curtice 2023;
Statista
2024). This was an expression of identity politics – like Brexit.On 15 January 2024, the Independent Commission on the Future of Wales added its voice to the debate. This cross-party group had been taking evidence for two years. Rather than advocating any particular course of action, it saw its role as educative. The Commission’s final report set out the risks and potential benefits of three constitutional options: enhanced devolution, a federal UK, and full independence. With regard to the first, it wanted the Westminster Parliament to establish ‘inter-governmental mechanisms so as to secure a duty of co-operation and parity of esteem between the governments of the UK.’ It also wanted Westminster to enshrine in legislation the Sewel Convention that ‘the consent of the devolved institutions is required for any change to the devolved powers, except when required for reasons to be agreed between them, such as: international obligations, defence, national security or macroeconomic policy.’ This convention had been tossed on one side by the Tories when driving through the Internal Market Act, and their cavalier attitude infuriated all the devolved administrations. Commenting on the idea of a federal UK – a ‘middle way’ between devolution and independence – the Commission saw little prospect of this, given attitudes in the other three countries. As for Welsh independence, this ‘could offer potential for long term positive change by having the powers to make significant improvements in the economy’, but it was also noted that ‘most commentators agree that in the short to medium term Wales could be significantly worse off, with substantial risks in relation to government finances, currency and the border.’ At a more basic level, the Commission found – to its deep disquiet – that ‘people’s understanding of government structures’ at all levels was ‘low’ and urged a programme of civic education. But it did conclude that ‘most people in Wales support devolution and would favour greater autonomy, in some form’ (Wales 2024: 120–04).
This generalisation probably applied to Scotland and Northern Ireland as well, but the Tory government had no time for such talk. The Commission’s work was mocked by Sunak’s Secretary of State for Wales, David T.C. Davies, a staunch Brexiteer. He declared that the Welsh Parliament had ‘got enough powers as it is’ – over areas such as health, education and transport – and also 20% more money per head to spend on these areas than is spent in England. Despite this largesse, he added, the Welsh government (Labour, with Plaid Cymru support) was ‘manifestly failing’ and needed to ‘address the reasons for these failures before asking for further powers to do better’ (Davies 2024).
Davies expressed a rooted Tory mindset: dislike of constitutional devolution, contempt for the devolved governments (none of them Tory), and insistence on the absolute ‘sovereignty’ of the Westminster parliament. Nor did the Tories have much interest in reforming the House of Lords, where their phalanx of peers in the 2019 parliament considerably outnumbered that of Labour (275 to 171). They did, however, push through the Cities and Local Government Act of 2016, which created directly-elected mayors in combined local authorities in some of England major conurbations – such as Greater Manchester, West Midlands, South Yorkshire, and Liverpool City Region – with a patchwork of devolved powers varying from area to area. The powers of these metro-mayors were negotiated on a case-by-case basis but usually included transport, housing and skills, while excluding significant financial devolution, which could facilitate economic growth. But they were sensitive to the resentment against the metropolitan/international elite that had fuelled the 2016 vote for Brexit. Their election manifesto in 2019 featured the concept of ‘levelling up’, which became a slogan of Boris Johnson. In October 2023 the Sunak government pushed through a Levelling Up and Regeneration Act in October 2023, but this was criticised by Labour as ‘a strange mish-mash of a bill’, jumbling up together major issues such as planning and devolution, and making it into ‘a Christmas tree bill, one that anybody can hang anything on.’ The draft legislation attracted over 500 Lords amendments ( Politics Home 2024), and after the revised bill became law, such funding as was proffered came from central grants. The Tories remained determined to retain London’s firm control of the purse strings.
The most devolved part of the UK remained Northern Ireland, dating back to the partition settlement of 1920. The agreement between the DUP and the Sunak government on 31 January 2024 ended the party’s two-year boycott of power sharing. On 3 February Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Fein was sworn in as Northern Ireland’s First Minister, with Emma Little-Pengelly of the DUP as her deputy. The challenges that they faced were enormous. Two years of government by civil servants had kept Northern Ireland running at a basic level, but the power vacuum had prevented decisions on most major issues, especially health services, energy waste, fuel poverty, and public sector pay. The DUP’s tough negotiating tactics had pushed the UK government into a much higher financial package than offered two months earlier (£3.3 billion instead of £2.5 billion) but most commentators doubted that this amount would prove sufficient.
At a deeper level, questions were now being asked about the constitutional framework for power sharing, rooted in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 as modified in 2006. This was predicated on the assumption that power would be shared between the DUP and Sinn Fein as the two largest parties in Northern Ireland elections, which represented, respectively, Protestant Unionism and Republican Nationalism. But in the Assembly elections in May 2022, Sinn Fein won 27 seats and the DUP slipped from 28 to 25, and in the General Election of July 2024 the DUP lost three seats, reducing it to five MPs compared to Sinn Fein's eight, even though the Nationalists traditionally did not take up their seats at Westminster. The other striking feature of 2022 was the Alliance gain of nine seats to a total of 17, making it the third largest party in the Assembly. Its ethos was non-sectarian and its constitutional stance neither unionist nor nationalist. As historian Colin Kidd has noted, ‘the rise of the Alliance undermines the binary assumptions’ on which power sharing was predicated back in 1998 and, he argued, there were now ‘sound reasons for having another look at Northern Ireland’s constitutional arrangements’ (Kidd 2023: 12).
The DUP’s costly two-year boycott of power sharing shows the dangers of handing the largest party on either side of the sectarian conflict a veto power over the operational existence of devolved government, not least because the demography of the country is in flux. ‘Census 2021’ data, published in September 2022, showed that, for the first time, Catholics outnumbered Protestants (45.7% of the population as against 43.5%) ( Census 2021 2022: 2). When the six counties were partitioned from Ireland in 1921 as a Protestant-majority statelet, this was based on 1911 census data that left Protestants in almost a 2 to 1 majority. Yet, a century later, a Catholic woman pledged to the goal of a united Ireland had become Northern Ireland’s First Minister. Another striking feature of the 2021 census was the growing proportion of voters who self-identified as non-religious: 19% as against 13.9% in 2001. This increased secularisation helps explain the increased attraction of non-sectarian politics. While a range of opinion polls indicate continued support for a devolved Northern Ireland within the UK, they also showed increasing interest in a united Ireland. More people expected this to come about over the next twenty years than believed the United Kingdom would then still exist (45% to 38%) (NILT 2022: 5).
These statistics matter because the Good Friday Agreement stated that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland should direct the holding of a referendum ‘if at any time it appeared likely to him that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland’ (Belfast Agreement 1998: 3, Annex A Cmd 3883). This wording was (deliberately) slippery. On what evidence should the Northern Ireland Secretary base his decision? Would a referendum majority of just one vote be deemed sufficient? Would the citizens of the Irish Republic have their own say on uniting the two polities? And how would the rights of Protestants be protected within a new united Ireland? These questions were and are political dynamite. But the essential point, looking into the future, is that Northern Ireland seems the weakest link in the United Kingdom.
Concluding thoughts
There can be no ‘conclusion’ to an essay like this. I have been writing Zeitgeschichte – contemporary history – about a moving past at its turbulent interface with present and future. But I have argued that, when Vote Leave won the 2016 referendum, its advocates had no clear idea what ‘Brexit’ meant. Trying to turn a slogan into a strategy frustrated four successive Tory prime ministers and tore their party apart. The essay has also demonstrated that the hard Brexiteers’ mantra ‘Take Back Control’ was intended to function in two dimensions: taking back control from the EU and taking back a significant degree of control within the UK from the devolved administrations. Brexit was a battle about two unions, not one.
Both battles are ongoing. Even after the UK formally left the EU on 31 January 2020, Tory governments struggled to find a workable relationship with the European Union, Britain’s nearest neighbour and most significant trading partner. The two sharpest points of friction in that relationship – cross-Channel migrants and the Irish border – showed that Brexit has not solved the UK’s underlying problem: how to live with the Europeans, whether inside or outside the EU. The expensive Rwandan make-believe dramatised in tragic farce the challenge of dealing with a Europe-wide problem when a country is operating on its own. Ireland highlights the difficulty of ‘taking back control’ when a part of the UK has a land border with a member state of the EU – a border whose openness is integral to the peace, stability, and prosperity of Northern Ireland.
Looking to the future, even the change of government will be no panacea. Under Labour, Rwanda removals would stop but any people who had been transported there would not be brought back. Patch and mend will probably be given new impetus and direction in relations with the EU. Devolved government would be reaffirmed, with more of a cooperative network linking the four polities of the UK. But there is little chance that a Labour victory will see the realisation of grand designs such as the Brown’s Commission’s blueprint for a new upper chamber to serve as ‘a democratic Assembly of the Nations and the Regions’. Labour, like the Tories, can expect to be operating with an economy around 3 to 5% smaller than before, as long as the UK remains outside the EU customs union and the EU single market that was one of Margaret Thatcher’s signal achievements (Foster 2023: 168). Yet those exclusions can be addressed only by reopening the toxic Brexit debate.
The political scientist Michael Kenny observes that we are unlikely to see either ‘a recentralisation of authority’ of the UK or else its ‘federalised reconstitution’. Instead of these extremes, much more likely is a continuation of the current ‘dissensus’ within a working but frequently dysfunctional union. This means, says Kenny, ‘accepting that tensions and conflicts are endemic in the UK’s model of territorial government, and require skills and structures to enable their management and mitigation’ (Kenny 2024: 300–01). Such acceptance will demand levels of political sensitivity and diplomatic finesse that have been conspicuously absent in the years since the Brexit referendum as the Tory party tore itself apart. I return again to the words of W.B. Yeats, quoted at the start of this essay, about the fractious nationalists who ‘planned to bring the world under a rule’ yet were ‘but weasels fighting in a hole.’ (Kedourie 1993: title page).
A deeper realism is needed. Remoaners should stop hankering after the post-1973 narrative about ‘losing an empire and finding a role’. The Europe of the EEC was never a good fit because, due to hangovers from the age of empire and also from our ‘finest hour’ against Hitler, we joined late, after key institutions and practices had set hard, and then spent forty years as the ‘awkward partner’ (George 2018: title) demanding opt-outs and special deals before finally crashing out. The days for role play have passed. That applies even more to Brexiteer fantasies about picking up from where we were so rudely interrupted in 1973 – those Borisian fables about being ‘a great European power’ that is also ‘truly global in our range and ambition.’ Fixations with absolute sovereignty and British exceptionalism need to be replaced by a recognition that, in the 21st century, Great Britain lacks the power, position, and wealth that it commanded when Britannia ruled the waves and waived the rules. Living in the age of Brexit will require honest strategy, not dishonest slogans, working with allies rather than abusing them, and effective leadership instead of political feuding.
On both sides of the political divide, the Brexit blame-game has proved a huge distraction from existential problems at home. Among the long list are acute regional inequalities, the political and economic dominance of London, the defunding of education and public services, chronic under-investment in infrastructure and skills, neglect of defence in the face of Russia and China, and the R&D imbalance between brilliant research and weak development. What’s more, while Brexit Britain got stuck down its weasel hole, other countries were moving on, modernising their productive economies and constructing new strategic alliances in which this country is not centrally involved. ‘As a midsize power with undoubted soft-power credentials, the UK can thrive as a global convenor of talent and enterprise, but only by building on international relationships of trust’ (Foster 2023: 175). Trust has been one of the biggest casualties of the Brexit botch. The UK has been aptly dubbed the ‘Untied Kingdom’ – untied at home and abroad (Ward 2023: title). Restoring constructive relationships across the board is one of the most urgent tasks facing our future leaders.
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to the Vice-Chancellor and staff of Queen’s University, Belfast, for hosting the British Academy Lecture on which this essay is based. Particular thanks to Prof. Graham Walker for chairing the event and to those who attended a follow-up seminar next day, especially Prof. Katy Hayward. The visit to Belfast helped me understand more clearly and vividly the centrality of Irish questions to the Brexit imbroglio. This text is an expansion of the lecture, taking account of developments between November 2023 and July 2024.
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1
In mid-2023 India, with 1.43 billion people, edged past China as the world’s most populous country.
2
The word ‘reassessing’ is perhaps a typo for ‘reasserting’.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a26
Published on: 12 July 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 203
Article download count: 7
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© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Reynolds, D. (2024), ‘The meaning of Brexit and the future of the Union’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(3): a26 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a26Crossref
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