Why Westminster needs to think differently about devolution

0:02Sky News, the full story first.

0:11The rise of nationalist parties in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland needs acknowledging by Westminster. And this is why.

0:23I'm Sam Coates from Sky News. And I'm Anne McElvoy from Politico. Downing Street drama, leadership battles and policy U-turns. We're on it before it breaks. We take you straight into the rooms where the real political conversations are happening. Smart Insight, clear analysis in your feeds by 7.45am. So you start your morning fully brief for the day ahead in British politics. Hit follow and listen to Politics at Sam & Anne's wherever you get your podcasts.

0:57Hi everyone, Neil here, and as it's a bank holiday weekend, we thought we'd slow things down a little and reflect on the current state of politics. Because something rather interesting is going on, or perhaps worrying, depending on your thoughts on the United Kingdom. Recent elections mean that currently, in the devolved parts of the country, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, nationalist parties are in charge. Basically, politicians who want to see the breakup of the UK are running their bit of it, which has huge implications. and we're going to try and work out what those are with a professor of political science shortly.

1:30But first let's hear what's been going on and we're going to start in Wales. Here's Sky's Hannah Woodward. Wales is for the first time no longer led by the Labour Party but led by Plaid Cymru, a pro-independence party. Though they'd be keen to point out that they are ruling out an independence referendum in this Senedd term. So what does Plaid want from power? Well, more powers and a settlement closer to Scotland's. That includes control over justice, transport and the Crown of State. So can it achieve that? Well, the Prime Minister and the First Minister of Wales actually spoke last week and Keir Starmer was reportedly open to discussions on further devolution.

2:10Plaid's message to Labour? Well, they say UK Labour can either punish Wales for voting them out of power or reflect on how they can better serve Wales. Thanks, Hannah. Some proper history made there. We're off to Scotland now. Here's political strategist Andy McIver. So on the face of it, the picture at the Scottish Parliament looks pretty similar to how it looked before in that you've got a very strong SNP minority government and weak opposition. I think the difference is what might happen next because a John Swinney mandate looks very different from a Nicola Sturgeon mandate. that makes a significant difference potentially to the picture for independence.

2:48Because actually all that the independence campaign needs to give it a real acceleration is A, for John Swinney and the SNP government to perform better in government. They need another thing to happen, which is Nigel Farage becoming Prime Minister. That's very good news for the SNP and for sentiment towards the independence campaign. The third thing, they need the decision for Nigel Farage to grant a referendum because that is the one thing that is missing at the moment and the one thing Labour and the Tories say they won't do. Thanks, Andy. Last, Northern Ireland. We asked the host of Stormont Sources, David McCann, what's been going on there.

3:22In 2022, Sinn Féin became the largest party in the Northern Assembly for the first time ever. This led to Michelle O 'Neill becoming the first minister of Northern Ireland in February 2024, when devolution returned. The success of Sinn Féin in recent elections has fuelled their desire and belief that a referendum on Irish unification is just round the corner. The current UK government have said they have no interest in holding a referendum on Irish unification anytime soon. But the election of Plaid in Wales and the re-election of the SNP in Scotland has been seized upon by Sinn Féin as a renewed attempt to be able to hold a referendum on Northern Ireland's constitutional future.

4:02OK, so what does all this mean? Michael Keating is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Aberdeen. As we've just been hearing, I mean, this is clearly a moment for the different constituent parts of the United Kingdom. But I'm wondering, historically, is it that unusual? Or has Britain always contained more nationalist sentiment than Westminster would have us believe? The United Kingdom has always been a multinational state, but that hasn't always taken on a political expression. It's been about culture. It's about different ways of doing things. It's about football and so on. But now it's very much about politics.

4:38And we have really very different political systems because we have nationalist parties in Scotland, in government, and Wales in government. Nationalism has always been around in Northern Ireland, but for a long time it was suppressed. Now it's in government. So this creates difficulties for what is, according to people in England and down in Westminster, think it's a unicry state. Well, it's not a unicry state. It has very different politics in the different nations. Are we actually looking at a kind of a general political trend or are we making a mistake by grouping together nationalism in Scotland, in Wales, in Northern Ireland?

5:15They're all part of a general trend which is happening right across Europe and across the world, which is a loss of face in established political parties in the nation state, a lack of capacity of the big nation states to face up to the significant social and economic problems. That being said, they take different forms in different places, and even within the United Kingdom, the situation in Northern Ireland is quite different from the situation in Scotland. which is why it's so difficult to get a single solution to deal with them all. Just explain the different, I suppose you'd call them flavours of nationalism then, that we're experiencing in the constituent parts of the UK.

5:55Well, to start with Scotland, there's a long-standing nationalism, which previously was in favour of home rule or devolution, which is what we got at the end of the 20th century, and is now taking a stronger form of independence. And Wales has had a nationalist movement for a long time. that was largely about language and culture. Now it's much more about politics and government and about power. And for the first time, people in Wales are starting to talk about independence. They're not yet committed. And in Northern Ireland, of course, we have a very different situation, which is there are two communities within Northern Ireland, one of which wants to unite with the rest of Ireland, and the other one wants to stay within the United Kingdom.

6:37And the settlement they've got there is just a compromise between these two very different positions. Are we perhaps making a category error when we think of voters for Plot, for Sinn Féin, for the SNP, as taking those votes for the parties as a vote for independence? Well, absolutely. We know that historically there's been a fairly loose association between voting for the SNP and voting for independence. But at the time of the referendum in 2014, those lined up pretty well. Now that's started to loosen again. At the last general election, there was rather a poor connection. And even at these elections, the SNP, yes, it won, but it only got about a third of the vote.

7:18Whereas we know that about 50 % of the population are in favor of independence. It's a mistake to say support for independence and support for the SNP are the same thing. Northern Ireland is more complicated because there's been a tendency for Catholics to be pro-nationalist and for Protestants to be pro-unionists. That is still the case. but there's a growing number of people in Northern Ireland who say we don't want to be nationalist and we don't want to be unionist either because we don't think that is the most important issue. And if we go to Wales, roughly, yes, there's growing support for independence, but it's not quite clear exactly what they mean by independence other than getting a bit more power for Wales because it means something rather different from what it means in Scotland.

8:01If we take these elections to be symptoms, what is the illness? What has perhaps changed about the democratic arrangements in the United Kingdom over the past 10, 15 years that has seen nationalist parties as, at the very least, the largest party in each of the parts of the country? There's been a dramatic loss of faith in the conventional political parties. The Conservative Party more or less destroyed itself over Europe. The Labour Party seems to be destroying itself over other things, some of which don't seem to be terribly important, but they are tearing themselves apart. and there's a loss of faith.

8:35So people are looking for alternatives. They're not convinced of the performance of British government generally. And in Scotland and in Wales, nationalism is there. It's available as another opportunity. And then there's the growing feeling that the British state generally is not working. There are longer term trends, such as the decline in feeling Britishness. People felt British because they were proud of the British forces in the Second World War. or there was the empire, there was the monarchy. None of these things have that power to hold the country together in the way they did in the past.

9:08And so we're seeing a shift in people's identities, but more important, a shift in what they mean by these identities. If you think about it, the UK is in some ways a very artificial political unit created over centuries. Even in England, there's a growing sense that something is wrong. We don't quite know what the question in England is, let alone the answer. But there's a lot of discontent about politics there and they're searching for something else. An international trend, certainly, but we've mentioned devolution a few times here and I'm wondering what effect devolution itself had on nationalism in the UK.

9:44Look, I'm old enough and enough possessed of a Scottish accent to remember a time where people thought, you know, devolution would put to an end the question of Scottish independence. And for a while it seemed to have done this. revolution was a compromise between the unionists who didn't want any Scottish parliament at all and the nationalists who wanted independence. And it was always going to evolve. And the way it did evolve is that people started looking to the Scottish parliament as their primary reference point for politics. If you go around Scotland, you don't see the British government very much.

10:18It's not there. The education system was already totally Scottish, the legal system. now some of your social security all of your planning decisions all of your decisions about local government the health service it's all got a scottish label on it and that has meant that people feel naturally that is the primary level of government the same thing has happened in wales does that portend support for independence well yes there's a feeling now that scotland could be independent there's more confidence in i'm not saying there's total confidence in independence because there's not, but it feels more of a thinkable prospect than it was, say, 40 or 50 years ago, and hardly anybody really believed that it was serious.

11:02And even more dramatically, we're seeing that process in Wales because, remember, the Welsh barely voted for even devolution, and now about 30 % of them are saying, we might come all the way to independence.

11:18I'm Sam Coates from Sky News. And I'm Anne McElvoy from Politico. Downing Street drama, leadership battles and policy U-turns. We're on it before it breaks. We take you straight into the rooms where the real political conversations are happening. Smart Insight, clear analysis in your feeds by 7.45am. So you start your morning fully brief for the day ahead in British politics. Hit follow and listen to Politics at Sam & Anne's wherever you get your podcasts.

11:51What role does Brexit play in the nationalistic tendencies that we're seeing? It plays a big role, especially in Scotland and in Northern Ireland. People in London didn't seem to realise that the whole of the Northern Ireland peace settlement and the constitutional settlement there was dependent on us being within the European Union, because within the European Union there was not a border with the Republic of Ireland, and having left, there is. And it did lead to an increase in support for Irish unity amongst nationalists. It didn't persuade any unionists, but the nationalists became more persuaded.

12:28And in Scotland, of course, some of the same thing happened because the devolution settlement was also underpinned by the European Union. But the big thing, of course, is that Scots voted by a large majority to remain. And that gave a small boost to the independence movement, not as much as you might have expected, but to the disappointment of the nationalists. It didn't cause such a grievance that support for independence shot up. And young people are both committed to Europe and committed to independence. So in the long run, that is the way things seem to be going. What role does England play in all of this?

13:06Whether or not we are seeing a concomitant rise in English nationalism, in inverted commas. and what effect the kind of the, I don't want to call it, dominance of the political system, but certainly the geographic location of power, how much that has influenced independent thought, nationalistic thought in other parts of the UK? Well, that's where the future of the Union will be decided. The English decided they wanted to be independent of the United Kingdom and that would be decisive. There'd be no argument about can you or can you not do it? Well, that's not going to happen. But there is a grievance in England about not having a place within the Union.

13:41We might think they dominate most of the MPs and most of the Cabinet and Ministers, but they somehow feel that they've lost out because Scotland has its parliament, Wales has its parliament, Northern Ireland has its assembly, and they don't have anything distinctly for England. Now, as I say, some people say, you've got the United Kingdom, you run it, what's your problem? But they don't see it that way. So where does the country go next? Does the democratic settlement that we've got at the moment and this rise of nationalist parties and the component parts of the United Kingdom, does that inevitably lead to breakup?

14:15It depends on a lot of things. We've done some survey work on this, by the way. In the last three elections, there's surveys asking about what the Scots mean by independence and what they really want. We asked them who should have the decision on independence for Scotland and on Brexit. And in between, there's a huge number of people who say, well, it depends on what the issue is. But then we pro-dead even further, and we asked those people who said, well, Scotland should decide everything. We asked them, well, do you want your own currency? Most of them said, no. Do you want your own head of state?

14:48Well, no. And then we asked the unionists, the people who want everything done by Britain, do you really think the UK should legislate against the will over the Scottish Parliament? And they say, no, we don't want that. So it's much more complicated than you think. and people in Scotland generally are happy living in a complex multi-level system which some things are done at European level, some things are done maybe at UK level or maybe the British Isles and some things are done at the Scottish level and some things are done at local level. My next question then might be unanswerable given what you have just said but when it comes to those who have lent their votes to a nationalist party, is this identity politics or is it everyday politics i mean shorthand you know it's an expression of i'm welsh i'm scottish i am irish or is it just like could you guys get on with fixing the potholes and making sure that i can get an appointment with my gp it's both and it's very difficult to separate those i know it's tempting to say well it's identity politics or the politics of potholes but those are really closely connected you take the economic question people will tend to say, I'm in favor of independence, and then retrofit the economic arguments to that.

16:01Or they may start out with the economic arguments, but it's very difficult in the mind of one individual to disentangle these things. But what we do know now is that Scottish identity is more closely connected to wanting independence. The strength of Scottish identity has something to do with it, because in Scotland, as we know, everybody's Scots, but not everybody is a nationalist. As if we didn't have enough going on in politics right now, I am wondering if what we are seeing in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, and of course England, if that means we are now entering a period where constitutional questions about the future of the union are going to be a part of everyday politics.

16:43Well, they are. That's exactly it. And the British political system has got to get used to that. Whereas we were talking about at Westminster a little while ago, a lot has changed at the periphery of the UK. Huge changes in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. There's absolutely nothing that's changed in Westminster, and nothing whatsoever. We are a unitary state. We control all the power, and the nationalists are just outside the system. We won't have anything to do with them. Whereas in a plurinational state, something like a federal state, which you should become, that should be part of politics at Westminster as well.

17:19In fact, even before devolution, it was Scottish politics was there, it was present. Now they just say, well, you look after your stuff in Scotland and we'll look after the UK things and just don't bother us. And they have to learn. Every few years, I'm invited down to Westminster for their devolution week. And they say, well, you've got to tell these white civil servants about devolution because it's so marginal and peripheral to them. They don't pay a great deal of attention until you get a nationalist government in Wales or you get a Scottish referendum or you get Brexit. Suddenly they realise this is a very complicated state.

17:56So it's lopsided in the sense that Westminster has so much of the power and always has the last word, but also in the sense that we spend a lot of time talking about these things. And down in Westminster, they just don't. And every successive government comes in and they have to learn it all over again, including the present government when they came in, they had very little to say about Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Is the real danger for the union that people actively want to leave? Or is it that more and more people just simply don't feel enough of a reason to stay, enough of a connection to the other parts of the United Kingdom that would make independence unthinkable?

18:36I've been talking to a lot of journalists in the last couple of weeks since the election, foreign journalists, and they say, well, why do some people in Scotland want to leave? And I say that's the wrong question. The question in Scotland is why do some people want to stay? What is the reason for staying? Not the reason for leaving. The reason for staying because we're a nation, we could become independent. Why do we want to stay? And that's where the unionists have failed because the unionist side have failed to convince people that the union is really offering them something. Now while respecting their own identity now, I should say the nationalists have also failed because they failed to persuade people in Scotland that they should be independent.

19:15So that both sides in this argument have failed because the world has changed and they haven't changed. They're still sticking to the very old fashioned notions of what is the nation, what is sovereignty and what is independent in a changing world. And people just don't understand it anymore. Michael, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thanks so much for your time. Thanks very much for listening. Do remember, you can always get in touch with your thoughts on today's episode and your suggestions for future topics we might want to cover. Why at sky.uk is the email. We're back again tomorrow.

20:08by 7.45am, so you start your morning fully brief for the day ahead in British politics. Hit follow and listen to Politics at Sam & Anz wherever you get your podcasts.