Why Britain is going to end with a whimper not a bang

The report, published on Friday by the IPPR provides the first detailed analysis of the 2021 State of the Union survey, led by Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cardiff.

For defenders and critics of the Union, it makes for some interesting reading.

Rather than expose deep divisions and rifts, the report rather shows a pervasive ambivalence. The introduction suggests “it not only revealed different attitudes within and between the UK’s constituent units towards the European Union but it also revealed the ambivalence of attitudes towards the union of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”.

Henderson, a professor of political science at the University of Edinburgh who was co-author of the report, said the findings showed there was an “ambivalent Union” where fewer than half of voters in the four home nations view maintaining the UK in its current form as a priority.

Three big issues stand out.

First, “muscular Unionism” – the sort of snarling we saw from Penny Mordaunt last week – is an approach to devolution that risks backfiring across the UK, according to the report.

According to Wyn Jones: “A growing rhetorical commitment to the Union, particularly one that is unreformed, is out of step with people across the four nations of the UK who are far more ambivalent about its future.

“Support in England, for the Union in its current form, is relaxed, and there is low concern in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland about others of them going their separate ways.”

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Taking a “muscular Unionism” approach in the aftermath of both the Scottish independence and Brexit referendums has led to the UK national government excluding governments of devolved nations from key areas they expected to control after Brexit.

This risks fuelling resentment and undermining the merely “ambivalent” support for the UK as a single state, the report says – resembling an attempt to govern on the basis of “to the victors the spoils”.

This is one of the reasons why Brexit continues to be a major driver for people to come to independence. The “muscular Unionism” approach has been characterised by the brittle and contemptuous attitude under Boris Johnson and Alister Jack, but in truth, both pre and post-dates them.

Wyn Jones, director of Cardiff University’s Wales Governance Centre and co-author of the report, said: “Given the constant appeals to ‘Britishness’ in the rhetoric of the two main UK-wide political parties, it’s perhaps surprising how little research has been undertaken into the values and attitudes that, in reality, align with British national identity.

“This new analysis suggests the idea that there is a single understanding of Britishness, held and cherished across all four constituent territories of the UK, is a myth.

“Instead, there are multiple, territorially differentiated versions of British identity that stand in a very uneasy – even contradictory – relationship with each other. This suggests in turn that attempts by recent UK governments to champion a single version of Britishness, to buttress what some have termed ‘the precious Union’, are not only doomed to failure but are likely to be self-defeating.”

“Britain” has been “liberated” from Europe, but in doing so, it has broken itself irrevocably, not just in an economic sense, but in a cultural and constitutional one too. Who knew that the break-up of Britain would happen not out of passion but out of mass indifference, split apart not with a great cry but a casual shrug.

The second, and perhaps most striking finding to emerge from the report, is the existence of positive support for Irish unity in every part of the state except for Northern Ireland itself. This should be a wake-up call for those who – in rejoicing at the SNP’s apparent demise – believe that “everything will go back to normal now”. It won’t and can’t.

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The third, and possibly the most insightful area of the report is what it tells us about English political identity which the authors summarise as “related to both Euroscepticism and devo-anxiety”. As the authors have written previously: “Englishness may now be considered a politicised identity that is changing British politics.”

The report suggests deep unease and frustration at the current Union – but very little appetite for comparative change, or English devolution. But that “devo-anxiety” leads to some amazing figures, not least that a full one-third of the English electorate believes that no Scottish MP should ever sit in government.

That’s not very Uniony, is it?

This rise in English political identity has ramifications, not least of all Brexit itself, but wider ones too, The Tories have done well precisely because they are perceived to be a party that stands up for England, but this makes them permanently unelectable north of the Border.

The authors suggest that there is a deep disconnect revealed by their report. On the one hand, you have the ascent of the Union to an almost mythical status, and the increasingly snarling presentation of comms and policy – and on the other you have the reality of Ambivalent Britain.

As Henderson writes: “This ambivalence is entirely out of kilter with current government pronouncements about the precious Union, with post-Brexit efforts to double down on a ‘take it, you can’t leave it’ state. “This tough love approach is part of why support for independence in Scotland now routinely touches 50%. And yet, the available public opinion suggests that the perceived alternative – efforts to appease Scotland – would only further annoy an English electorate that has a deeply ambivalent attitude to the Union and an unambiguous dislike for Scottish spending and influence.

“The UK Government is caught between a love-bombing rock and a muscular Unionist hard place, with seemingly zero-sum choices over which electorate they seek to annoy/appease.”

In a sense, none of this is very surprising. As the report lays out, even among those who apparently support the continuation of the Union in its current form, much of that support is conditional rather than intrinsic.

British institutions have been hollowed out and sold off. Westminster has been exposed and ridiculed, the monarchy has been irretrievably tarnished and Britain’s national assets have been sold off.

Devolution has left the English resentful but unwilling to reform in any meaningful way and we have the dismal prospectus of a Starmer government-in-waiting promising (weekly) “No change”.