London
On Wednesday, March 29, Theresa May formally invoked Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty and notified the European Council of Britain’s intention to withdraw from the European Union. The treaty requires its signatories to complete withdrawal negotiations within two years. That gives Britain and the 27 other EU states until March 29, 2019, to unpick 41 years of treaties and arrive at an amicable separation.
EU law stipulates that the divorce agreement be approved by at least 20 member states, containing at least 65 percent of the EU’s population, and ratified by the EU parliament. If no agreement is reached after two years, the extension of negotiations requires the consent of all 28 states. If there is no consensus, then Britain could leave without an agreement.
Not that the British agreed about leaving in the first place. In the nationwide referendum of June 2016, 51.8 percent of Britons voted for Brexit and 48.2 percent to Remain. But the British nation is really four nations. And two of them want to Remain. The English voted for Brexit by 53.4 to 46.6 percent, and the Welsh voted for Brexit by 52.5 to 47.5 percent. But the Scots voted to Remain by 62 to 38 percent, and the people of Northern Ireland voted to Remain by 55.8 to 44.2 percent.
A national vote on Britain’s common future has exposed deep differences of opinion not just on the future of British policy, but on the future of the British polity. On Tuesday night, hours before Prime Minister May triggered Article 50, the Scottish Parliament endorsed a bill for a referendum on independence. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister and leader of the Scottish National party, wants to hold that referendum in late 2018 or early 2019, before the terms of Brexit have been finalized. Will Scotland exit Britain when Britain exits the EU?
A pause for some history and geography. The British Isles is the geographical name for the large island of Great Britain, the smaller island of Ireland, and a host of even smaller islands largely inhabited by fishermen, sheep, and tax exiles. The island of Great Britain is divided among the countries of England, Wales, and Scotland.
In 1543, Henry VIII subordinated Wales to England. In 1603, James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne from his cousin Elizabeth I. As James I of England, he joined the crown of Scotland to those of England and Ireland, but the English Parliament, fearing Scottish rule, refused to accept union with Scotland. In 1707, the English, abetted by the Scottish nobility, imposed the Act of Union on the Scots, forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
The English and Scots already ruled Ireland, but the English only incorporated Ireland into the union in 1801, to dissuade the Irish from rebelling for Napoleon. In 1916, the Irish rebelled against the English. In 1921, the island of Ireland was partitioned. Most of it became an independent Irish state. The six Protestant-dominated counties of northeastern Ireland went with Great Britain. Since then, the British polity has been called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the British Isles have contained four peoples in five states.
Many Americans call the U.K. of GB and NI “England.” This infuriates many non-English members of the U.K. and is a source of quiet satisfaction to many of the English. Americans call the U.K. “England” because English is the common language of the British Isles. That is because the English forced the others to speak it. Before the British Empire spread all over the world, the English Empire spread over the British Isles. The Scots and the Irish have not forgotten the expulsions and expropriations, and the sieges and starvations, on which the English Empire was built.
The United Kingdom arose over centuries. It appears to be slowly disintegrating, in the final unraveling of empire. The union began when Elizabeth I was in her first decade. If Nicola Sturgeon has her way, the U.K. will end when Elizabeth II is in her tenth decade.
In Britain, only politicians and the queen talk about the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Everyone else, including military personnel, identifies as a member of one of the four nations, or even an inhabitant of their home city. Sport, like politics, is local too.
The U.K. competes collectively in the Olympics as “Team GB.” Occasionally, a collective rugby team called the British and Irish Lions makes a drinking tour of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. But in every other sporting endeavor, the national teams kick lumps out of each other before baying mobs of supporters. And while the two Irish states field two soccer teams, one for the Republic and the other for Northern Ireland, they have always fielded one rugby team.
Legally, the Six Counties of Northern Ireland are as much a part of the United Kingdom as the garden of Buckingham Palace. But geography, family ties, and the threat of IRA terrorism have slowly drawn the Six Counties back to Ireland. The separation between the Irish republic and Northern Ireland was never total. The two states remained linked by family and economy. For years, the only motorway on the island of Ireland linked the Irish capital, Dublin, with the Northern Irish capital, Belfast. The border remained open, if heavily policed, even during the Troubles, when the IRA used the Republic as a base for attacks in the North.
Since the ending of the Troubles in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, ties between the two Irish states have thickened. The agreement devolved power from Westminster to Belfast and identified areas of common sovereignty between the Republic and the North. And while the Irish government recognized Northern Ireland as part of the U.K. for the first time, the U.K. government accepted terms for ceding Northern Ireland to the Republic. The 1998 agreement established that Northern Ireland will remain British until a majority of people in both the Republic and the North want a united Ireland.
That was before Brexit. Now, the two Irish states face the prospect of a strictly policed border between the EU territory of the Republic and the non-EU territory of Northern Ireland—despite the people of Northern Ireland having voted to Remain. In March, pro-republican voters expressed their anger in Northern Ireland’s elections. The Catholic nationalists of Sinn Fein—historically the political wing of the IRA—won 27 seats, only 1 fewer than the Protestant and pro-British Democratic Unionists. Two days before Theresa May invoked Article 50, Sinn Fein walked out of talks for creating the “power-sharing” government required by the Good Friday Agreement.
“Brexit will be a disaster for the economy, and a disaster for the people of Ireland,” Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Fein’s newly elected leader, announced in mid-March. “A referendum on Irish unity has to happen as soon as possible.”
In the most recent poll, taken September 2016, only 22 percent of the Northern Irish wanted to join the Republic. Yet in June 2016, 55.8 percent of the Northern Irish voted to stay in the EU. May wants to negotiate an open border between Brexit Britain and EU Ireland. If she fails, then the Northern Irish can only retain the perceived advantages of EU membership if they join the Irish republic. And the Good Friday Agreement makes provision for an Irish referendum.
The Good Friday Agreement was only one element of Tony Blair’s program for devolving power to the Irish, Scots, and Welsh. In 1999, a year after the Northern Ireland Assembly opened, the Scots convened their first Parliament since 1707. The National Assembly for Wales created in 1998 was that country’s first national parliament.
Labour won votes in the 1997 election with a manifesto of commitment to devolution. But devolution, apart from harming the integrity of the U.K., has harmed Labour too, and especially in Scotland. When Prime Minister Blair and his successor Gordon Brown turned Labour into a London-fixated, welfare-cutting centrist party, they undermined the Scottish Labour party. This allowed the Scottish National party to position itself as the defender of Scotland’s welfare state against the southern capitalists—and to use the new Scottish Parliament to prove that the “Scots Nats” could be more than a party of historical grievance.
From the 1970s through the 1990s, the Scottish National party struggled to win, at most, a third of Scottish votes. In the 2007 elections, however, they won 47 seats in the Scottish Parliament, 1 more than Scottish Labour. Their leader Alex Salmond became first minister of Scotland. In the 2011 election, the Scots Nats campaigned for a referendum on Scottish independence and won a majority in the assembly. In the referendum of September 2014, Scottish voters decided to remain in the U.K., by 55.3 to 44.7 percent.
Again, that was before Brexit. In 2014, David Cameron’s government included a clause in regulations for the Scottish referendum that permitted a second referendum if circumstances changed. Brexit is that change: The Scots, like the Northern Irish, are leaving the EU against their will.
Since June 2016’s Brexit vote, Salmond’s successor Nicola Sturgeon has been calling for a second referendum. She has also attempted to gather support among the national governments of the EU member states and the EU government in Brussels for the entry into the EU of an independent Scotland. The diplomatic overtures have failed: The Spanish government, troubled by its own Catalan independence movement, was particularly blunt in its insistence that Scotland’s status would not be on the table until the completion of Brexit negotiations.
The economic winds are against Sturgeon. Over the last year, the Scottish economy has grown by 0.7 percent, while the overall U.K. economy has grown by 2.4 percent. In the fiscal year 2016-17, Scotland ran up a deficit of £13 billion ($16.3 billion). In mid-March, a report concluded that the deficit is expected to be at least £11 billion for the next four fiscal years. To make up this deficit, an independent Scotland would have to impose massive tax increases and severe cuts to public services, and borrow heavily too.
In this uncertain climate, Scottish voters are losing their enthusiasm for independence. At the time of the Brexit referendum in June 2016, 47 percent of Scots wished to leave the U.K. and 41 percent wished to remain. Now, only 37 percent wish to leave the U.K. and 48 percent wish to remain.
Still, Sturgeon’s party is impregnable in the Edinburgh Parliament, with 63 seats to the Conservatives’ 31 and Labour’s 24. It remains the voice of Scotland in the London Parliament too, with 56 of the 59 Scottish seats. One day, English schoolchildren may be told that the charge of the Royal Scots Greys at Waterloo was not one of the glories of British history, but an intervention by a foreign army, like the late arrival of the Prussians. Once again, everything depends on whether Theresa May can achieve the right Brexit deal.
Down south, it’s a different story. In June 2016, the voters in England and Wales overruled Prime Minister David Cameron, his chancellor George Osborne, and Mark Carney, the head of the Bank of England. All predicted economic disaster if the U.K. voted for Brexit. The pound would collapse, house prices would fall, and unemployment and inflation would rise. Yet the worst has failed to happen.
Admittedly, inflation has risen to 2.3 percent, its highest rate in three and a half years. Also, the pound dropped sharply after the Brexit referendum, and is still down some 15 percent against the U.S. dollar and 10 percent against the euro. But Britain’s unemployment rate is 4.8 percent, the lowest in 11 years. House price increases have slowed slightly, but are still at 7.4 percent a year. The British economy grew 1.8 percent in 2016; among G7 economies, only Germany’s, with 1.9 percent growth, did better.
The English and the Welsh want the Scots and the Northern Irish to remain in the United Kingdom. But the devolutions of 1998 took the decision out of their hands, and the Brexit referendum has split the four nations of the U.K. This has changed the internal dynamics of English politics. And England is both the most populous and most powerful element of the U.K. The Brexit campaign and result were watersheds in the emergence of a distinctly English nationalism. For the last decade, a consistent majority of English voters have wanted a devolved national assembly, like those in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Theresa May is insisting that a Scottish referendum must wait until Brexit has been tested “in the real world.” But the political reality of the U.K. is already riven by bitterness over Brexit. National identity is an emotional question, discussed in political terms. Already, London and its environs feel like a country apart—a sixth state for the four peoples of the British Isles. The origins of the U.K. in the English Empire mean that the English will be the last to leave the United Kingdom. The outcome of the Brexit negotiations may also mean that the English will be the last to be left.
Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is a frequent contributor.
