Treating the politics of the UK as it
affects Wales and Scotland as a division into independentistas and
unionists is a vey easy shorthand which too many of us – myself included – tend
to fall into. The problem is not that it’s wrong as such – particularly in
Scotland where politics has effectively polarised around the question of
independence – but that it’s too simplistic to label all opponents of
independence as ‘unionists'. In reality, unionists come in different flavours
(none of them particularly palatable from my perspective), and support of ‘the
union’ isn’t really as uniting a factor as it can seem. That’s one of the
reasons why unionists are doing such a hopeless job of putting their case.
There are undoubtedly some people in Wales
who genuinely believe that Wales’ best interests are served by remaining part
of a greater whole covering all or part of this archipelago. They usually (although
not always nor exclusively) see those interests in economic terms. I think their
understanding of the economics of independence is deeply flawed, but I don’t
see anything unpatriotic about arguing for what they sincerely believe to be in
the best interests of Wales. Others argue, equally sincerely, that class and
economic relationships are more important than nationality. It’s an argument
with which I have a degree of sympathy, but the idea that that solidarity ends
at Dover (as at least some of them seem to believe), or that it mandates a particular
kind of relationship between the nations of these islands (a belief which seems
common to all of them) strikes me as having more to do with nationalism of the
Anglo-British variety than with class solidarity.
The biggest problem faced by Welsh unionists,
though, is that the unionists in England (and they’re the ones in charge) have
an entirely different perspective on the same issue. Many English unionists may
use the same language about Wales being too poor to support itself, but the
idea that they are driven to maintain the union by some great altruistic wish
to help and support Wales is naïve to say the least. My evidence for that
statement is simple – they have presided over long term economic decline in
Wales in favour of concentrating the UK economy in the South-East of England.
They simply haven’t achieved, or even attempted to achieve, that which they say
is their objective. So what does drive English unionism? It’s tempting to fall
back on the grumbling Welsh narrative of England having land and people to
exploit. It’s true, of course, which is part of what makes it so tempting; but
it isn’t the whole truth.
Independence for any given geographical
area does not, in itself, demand or require any question of national identity.
For those of us who believe that sovereignty ultimately derives from and
belongs to the people who reside in a particular area, the right of those
people to govern themselves as they see fit is, ultimately, entirely for them
to decide. The importance of national identity is not about whether people have
a right to govern themselves, but about where they choose to draw the lines. Wales
isn’t obviously a natural economic unit (and I know that that is not just about
geography, it’s also about history and the way communications have developed)
but what makes it a suitable unit for self-government is more about the extent
to which the people living here define themselves (in a highly subjective
process) as being Welsh. It doesn’t follow (as some seem to argue) that we must
therefore be independent, but it inevitably forms part of the argument about
why we should make that choice.
Not all independentistas see things
in such terms, of course. My starting point – that sovereignty ultimately stems
from the people – means that I cannot put up a single argument of principle (as
opposed to practicality) against, say, a proposition that Ynys Môn should seek
independence from Wales. The importance of this point is that those in Wales
who raise objections of principle to the idea that Wales could ever be divided
in such a way are actually seeing things through exactly the same prism as
those British unionists who are so vehemently opposed to Welsh to Scottish independence: because the real driver of unionism is the idea that the UK is a natural and
indivisible whole. As is becoming increasingly obvious, they don’t care about
the ‘union’ at all, nor about the terms on which it was established
(particularly relevant in Scotland). They don’t even see it as a ‘union’ either
(although they use the term), they see the UK, rather, as a homogeneous nation-state
which emerged from historical processes which are now irrelevant and in which
all sovereignty belongs to the centre. There have been a series of articles and
comments recently which portray the current government as being cavalier about
the union and endangering it by their approach. It’s fair comment, but it fails
to understand their perspective.
It’s not even the case that their
perspective is wholly wrong or completely misguided – it’s merely dated. It’s a
classic example of the way in which ‘institutional wisdom’ (which some might
consider an oxymoron) fails to move with the times. Attitudes and beliefs
change over time, but institutions struggle to acknowledge that fact. We are
left with a UK run by centralist parties (Labour is as bad as the Tories on
this) supported by centralist institutions which simply cannot conceive of the
possibility that large swathes of opinion in the north and west of ‘their’
territory no longer share their views on what constitutes ‘the nation’, and they assume that changing the presentation and pasting union flags on everything will somehow
eliminate any problem. The union is doomed by those who claim to be its
supporters. Sooner or later, Welsh unionists will wake up to find that they are
not only not on the same page as their leaders in England, they’re not even
reading the same book.
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