REFRAMING THE UNION: A TIME FOR RENEWAL
24 September 2018
On 14th September, These Islands and the University of Cambridge Forum on Geopolitics hosted a one-day conference: Reframing the Union, at Magdalene College, Cambridge. This is the programme for the day, followed by the rapporteur’s personal reflections on the proceedings. Further publications will feature some of the speakers’ detailed remarks.
Reframing the Union: Conference Programme
Over the past few years, Brexit and the possibility of Scottish independence have left the United Kingdom and the European Union in flux. History shows that we have been here before, albeit in different ways and different contexts. The purpose of this mini-conference organised by the University of Cambridge Forum on Geopolitics and These Islands is to take a fresh look at what the past might tell us about the present, in order to inform the interlinked debates about the future of the nations within the United Kingdom, and of the UK and the European Union.
The panels will look at the local, national and international factors driving the creation of the UK; the implementation of the Union; and its costs and benefits over the past three hundred years.
Each panel will have a chair and three or four speakers for 15 minutes each. The main part of the conference will end with a ten minute summary by the rapporteur, followed by a brief discussion. The keynote lecture will be delivered by Sir Malcolm Rifkind.
Welcome, 9am
I. Unionism Before The Union, 9:30–11am
Why did the people of these islands want union? What were the different ‘models’ discussed. What were the arguments against? What was the balance of internal, three kingdom and geopolitical factors? What was the process of concluding union?
Dauvit Broun (University of Glasgow)
Keith Brown (University of Manchester)
Clare Jackson (University of Cambridge)
Tom Holland (Chair – representing These Islands)
II. Implementing The Union, 11.30am–1pm
How was the Union ‘bedded down’ in the first three decades or so after its achievement. Were there attempts to reverse it? Why did these fail?
John Robertson (University of Cambridge)
John Bew (King’s College London)
Andrew Thompson (University of Cambridge)
Julie Smith (Chair – University of Cambridge)
Lunch, 1–2pm
III. Auditing Union, 2–3:30pm
What were the political, economic and strategic benefits that England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland gained from the Union, and what were the costs?
Eugenio Biagini (University of Cambridge)
Michael Kenny (University of Cambridge)
Michael Keating (University of Aberdeen)
Mary Daly (University College Dublin)
John Denham (Chair – University of Winchester)
Coffee, 3:30pm–4pm
IV. Four Nations and One Union, 4–5pm
James Stafford (Bielefeld)
Ali Ansari (Chair – representing These Islands)
V. Rapporteur and overall discussion, 5–5:30pm
Daniel Robinson (University of Oxford)
VI. Keynote, 6-7pm
Sir Malcolm Rifkind
Reframing the Union: D.H. Robinson (Rapporteur) Closing Remarks
These remarks are Daniel Robinson’s personal reflections on the day.
I’d like to take this opportunity on behalf of all of today’s speakers to thank the organisers: Brendan Simms and everyone at COGGS, everyone from These Islands, and Kaitlin Ball.
I’m aware this has been long a day. So I’ll get on with it. How am I going to bring all of this together?
Well, I have an anecdote.
It was the beginning of 2017 – February or March – when I was senior policy adviser on the Union and devolution matters in the Cabinet Office.
And Mrs Sturgeon asked for a second referendum on Scottish independence. And the decision was taken that now was not the time. For a wealth of reasons I’m not going to get bogged down in.
But as you can imagine this caused some excitement.
So myself and Ben Gummer, who was the minister at the time, worked up a set of talking points about the importance of the Union. And, appropriately enough for this conference, we were determined to ground them in historical reality.
We went right back to the union debate in the seventeenth century. And as we heard this morning, from Keith Brown and Clare Jackson, this was a choice – loosely – between three options.
-
The incorporation of Scotland into England;
-
the union of the two countries in a confederal league;
-
the creation of a single body politic, but an irregular one, preserving regional variances.
It was the third option that won out.
As we’ve heard it was a Janus-like state: centralised when it came to foreign policy and taxation.
But as John Robertson sketched out, preserving a large sphere of Scottish autonomy – in law, in education, in religion: the things that would have been lost by English conquest or incorporation. And above all in administration, which remained in the hands of Scottish civil society well into the twentieth century.
Lindsay Paterson has gone so far as to say that this amounted to a form of ‘informal statehood’. There were important respects in which this system was closer to the mediaeval world of Dauvit Broun, than today. We are reminded of the supreme importance of his point about not conflating independence with sovereignty. And also that the kind of asymmetric government discussed by Michael Kenny, is deeply rooted in the British state.
Michael Keating has told us about the replacement of this system with a new form of Scottish politics from the 1940s onwards, a narrative traditionally dated from Thomas Johnston’s arrival in the Scottish Office.
But I wonder if we risk ignoring the frustration that social welfare and technocracy unleashed, as they eroded the forms of local administration through which Scottish autonomy had persisted. Anger which the Tory party harnessed effectively at times in post-war decades: like Labour in the 80s and 90s, the Conservatives were not averse to playing the nationalist card when it suited them.
And then there was the double-failure of Scottish Thatcherism. A failure because rugged individualism was hardly a guarantee of self-government to a nation of five million in democratic union with a nation of fifty.
A double failure because it left Scotland, with its ever deepening deficit, trapped in a system of redistribution that required the very forms of centralisation which subordinated Scotland, far more than during the pre-war era, to the whims of Westminster. RDAs aside.
How much room is there for a reframed union? If you’re into grand constitutional redesign, probably not a lot. As long as the deficit remains, any serious form of fiscal devolution, let alone fiscal federalism, to match Holyrood’s expansive legislative competencies will be out of the question. And as long as that remains the case Holyrood will remain, nominally independent or not, like its pre-union predecessor: closer to the Estates of Burgundy than the Parliament of Westminster.
And at the other side of the equation – something we’ve touched on several times – is how far the English will be willing to go.
The Irish experience, as we’ve heard from John Bew, Eugenio Biagini, Mary Daly, and James Stafford was different. To simplify somewhat. There was more meddling and more condescension, fewer concessions, and Irish society itself acted against the export of the Anglo-Scots model, if such a thing was indeed attempted.
But Anglo-Irish relations during the last century offers a test case for putative Anglo-Scottish relations. Britain has been willing to shoulder the cost of defending the Republic, in its own interest. And this is without considering the British taxpayer’s central role in the Troubles. As 2008 demonstrated, it does not extend to finance. Scotland was the site of the largest bank bailout in history, which resulted in no loss of autonomy for Scottish institutions. The same cannot be said of the Republic of Ireland.
However, there is a great deal of scope for municipal devolution. Schemes like the Aberdeen city-region deal, like the borderlands growth deal, and this, I submit, probably point us to the best way forward – constitutionally – for unionism. Devolution and localism, perhaps even underpinned by some federal principles, but not federalism itself.
Of course devolution itself this is only half of the equation, and I’d like to conclude my remarks by turning to the other half: the international context.
Which brings me back to my anecdote.
Unionists have not, traditionally, confined themselves to talking about the benefits for individual nations. They have spoken to the collective interest, and in this respect, they tended to make three arguments for a strong union: it would be best able to safeguard national security, manage domestic commerce, and benefit from economic opportunities overseas.
And here was the funny thing: all of the research that the Cabinet Office had been undertaking in Scotland and Wales revealed that national security in a dangerous world, economic security within the union, and the greater strength that the UK wields in world trade, still resonated most strongly with voters.
The polling and the focus groups were unanimous on two points: firstly, the strongest arguments for the Union were the old ones. National security, economic security, collective security. Not the politics of multiculturalism and identity.
Secondly, no one knew them. We found that for most – and for almost everyone in Scotland – asking for positive reasons for the United Kingdom without prompting answers elicited only blank stares. Whilst people responded very well to the reasons why we should be united, they did not know what those reasons were without very strong suggestion.
Thus was the legacy of two decades of ‘devolve and forget’, by governments red and blue.
This is why forums like These Islands, and conferences such as this one are so important.
All the more so since all the categories of knowledge we have been discussing today seem utterly alien to our civil service.
But I want to make a final point.
National security, economic security, clout in world trade. Where else have I heard that argument?
We heard Eugenio Biagini describe what I call the ‘dance of DeV’ – the Irish Republic’s path from independence in the Commonwealth, through the Second World War, and finally, to limited sovereignty within the EU.
Scottish nationalism followed a similar course. From the imperial federalism of John MacCormick and his followers through to the 50s, from the SNP’s flirtation with Nazism under Douglas Young, and then to ‘independence in Europe’, touted by the likes of Tom Nairn in the 70s, embraced by much of the SNP since the 80s.
The Brexit referendum causes problems for unionists. But if we set aside the customary neuralgia on the issue, the status quo ante wasn’t exactly propitious to the union either.
Consider the Constitutional Convention of the early 90s, the works of Liberals and Socialists, not the Nationalists, which presumed that the role of the residual Scottish Office would be gradually absorbed by European institutions.
And true to form Donald Dewar’s Scotland Act simply neglected to mention those powers that were already being exercised by the EU Council of Ministers. An oversight which has caused no end of problems in the writing of the EU Withdrawal Bill since June 2016.
The broader point is this. For thirty years, most unionists have been making the case for the British union with a hand tied behind their back, defending simultaneously another union, which nationalists have skilfully used to make independence appear costless.
I subscribe to the view that Gordon Brown may well have won the 2014 referendum, but if he did, it was with the Five Tests fifteen years earlier, not the speech in Maryhill, without which the No campaign would not have been able to pose the decisive currency question with anything like as much force as it did.
I am not saying that Unionists should need to embrace Brexit, but I am saying that the future of the Union may well be tethered to the success of Brexit more closely than its reversal.
Please log in to create your comment