Boris Johnson looks increasingly like the prime
minister of England alone
Martin
Kettle
There have been cracks in the United Kingdom for many
years. Coronavirus has prised them wide open
@martinkettle
Wed 13 May
2020 15.23 BSTLast modified on Wed 13 May 2020 18.02 BST
As Boris
Johnson finished his televised address on Sunday evening, many viewers were
confused by what he had just said. One thing about his message, though, had
been strikingly clear. To the surprise of many of those watching, and perhaps
even to Johnson himself, it turned out that the coronavirus outbreak has
changed the prime minister of the United Kingdom into the prime minister of
England.
Over the
past two months we have all become familiar with the fact that Covid-19 wreaks its
most powerful effects on those individuals who are said to suffer from “serious
underlying conditions”. What is only just becoming clear is that the virus can
have a similarly destructive effect on nation states and societies which suffer
from their own serious underlying conditions too.
In the June
issue of the Atlantic, the writer George Packer delivers a searing polemic in
these terms against the United States’ response to the pandemic. “Chronic ills
– a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a
divided and distracted public – had gone untreated for years. We had learned to
live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms,” he writes. Britain shares some of
America’s untreated symptoms too, though fortunately not all of them. But it
also has plenty of untreated symptoms all of its own, in particular those
associated with the weakening of the British state, the tolerance of widening
inequality, the delusions of Brexit, and the refusal to see Donald Trump’s
America for the threat that it is.
One of
these underlying conditions is the broken governance of the United Kingdom. A
few of us have been banging on about this for a long time now. Our concerns are
routinely waved away by those who claim to be more worldly wise as not being
mainstream issues, or ones that do not come up on the doorstep. Even when
Scotland has been run for 13 years by a party whose entire purpose is to break up
the UK, we are still often met with a shrug of the shoulders. This is as true
on the right, where there is too often an indifference to anything that is not
English, and on the left, which is too often soft in the head about any
nationalism except the English variety, which it detests.
When health
policy was devolved in 1999, few anticipated an effect like the one that became
clear this week, as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all decided to
maintain the lockdown strategy that Johnson started to loosen in England. As
long as differences in health policy were confined – as they have been for the
past 20 or so years – to approaches to issues such as spending, prescription
charges and social care, the differences between the nations, although
significant, remained politically manageable at the UK level.
But when,
as this week, it became effectively illegal for English people to cross the
Scottish or Welsh borders to do what they are now permitted – wrongly, in my
view – to do in England a significant political line has been crossed. It would
be interesting to see if historians can identify the last time that English
people were barred from Scotland or Wales. But we must be talking centuries. In
such circumstances, it is harder than ever to know what “one nation”
Conservatism now means. Which nation? And what United Kingdom?
The
loosening of the UK’s bonds is a process. The context is constantly evolving.
The dynamics of the relationship between England on the one hand, and Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland on the other – one might even include the Irish
Republic at this point – are different in each case. There are push factors,
like the general overcentralisation of an often deeply inefficient British
state, and pull factors, the most effective of which is the SNP’s determination
to break up Britain.
Covid-19
inserted itself into this argument in unforeseen ways. Early on, the pandemic
worked as a centripetal factor. When the UK government, with its deep pockets,
placed itself firmly behind the self-interest of businesses and workers across
the UK, it provided a potent reminder of the protective reach of the British
state. But as the lifting of the lockdown loomed, the pandemic’s effect has
become increasingly centrifugal. Johnson’s wish, partly under pressure from the
Tory party’s right wing, to encourage renewed economic activity in spite of the
continuing pandemic, has encouraged the devolved nations to move more
cautiously and to differentiate themselves more sharply from Johnson and from
England. But it is not all Johnson’s fault.
The result
is a curious and still only tentative UK form of what Lenin once called “dual
power”. But it is growing and it is significant. It became much more obvious
with this week’s divergences on lifting the lockdown. It has nevertheless been
there all along, germinating throughout the last two months, as first Scotland
and then Wales sought small ways of asserting their power to act differently in
response to the common Covid-19 threat, with Northern Ireland’s power-sharing
authority following eventually in their wake.
It does not
yet add up to a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain. It may
indeed have reached its zenith this week, because the Scottish, Welsh and
Northern Irish authorities will eventually lift their lockdowns in ways that
bring them closer to England’s more permissive approach. Note also that Nicola
Sturgeon faces increasing challenges to her authority from other nationalist opponents
and that her record in handling the pandemic is far from spotless either.
Nevertheless,
Covid-19 is proving to be a wake-up call about serious defects in the UK’s
constitutional order and its sense of itself that it would be reckless to
ignore. Things could get more confrontational, not less. The case for a more
truly federalised UK, with equal degrees of local self-government and double
sovereignties, becomes ever stronger. We do not live in the failed state that
Packer sees in America. But we live in a failing one, and we would be fools to
ignore it.
• Martin
Kettle is a Guardian columnist
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário