Making the best of it?

Tweet

Yesterday’s Western Mail carried a report based on an interview of Cynog Dafis by Martin Shipton.  I haven’t been able to find the report on-line, but the podcast is available here.  One of the key points which Cynog made was that independentistas need to think more about how the UK is reformed rather than scrapped, in the context of Brexit.  Whilst I might wish it were otherwise, I see no real alternative to that as an approach, and it’s something about which I’ve blogged on more than one occasion previously. 

Within the EU, I see no obstacle in principle to Wales becoming a full member state in its own right (there are practical and political obstacles, but no fundamental reason why they can’t be overcome).  That wouldn’t quite give us equality of status with England – larger EU members have more influence than smaller ones – but it would move us into a context in which there are a number of other nation states of similar size, and no one state has complete dominance.  It's closer to equal status with England than anything imaginable within a continuing UK.  We would have a voice directly in the decision-making process.  And in such a scenario, the links between Wales and England would remain strong, with complete freedom of travel and trade between the two, and no real need to ‘institutionalize’ that relationship in the formality which the UK level of government represents.

Outside the EU, and given that I can see no scenario in which it makes any sense at all to implement border controls along Offa’s Dyke, we will inevitably be bound more tightly to England, not least in economic terms, and that constrains the degree of independence to which we can aspire; the meaning of the word ‘independence’ changes significantly.  In such a scenario, the approach outlined by Cynog – effectively a move to a more federal UK, with measures to try and lessen the dominance of the largest member state – is probably the best we can realistically hope for.  The problem is that, whilst sharing the aspiration, I find it hard to share Cynog’s apparent optimism about the willingness of England to accept such constraints upon its dominance.

Cynog refers to “the English at their best” as being likely to respond to the idea.  Maybe; I doubt, though, that we’ll be dealing with “the English at their best” in either the short or medium term.  We will, rather, have to deal with the political representatives of those who still believe that Britannia can and should rule the waves and stand alone against the rest of the world.  I hope that, if Brexit happens, it will be the shock that traditionalists in the UK need to shake them out of their delusions about the UK’s place in the world, but at the moment, it seems likelier to me that they will choose to interpret the situation as one in which the rest of the world is trying to punish them and will simply double down on their delusional rhetoric, demanding unity and conformity 'at home'.

So, reforming the UK is a realistic assessment of the best we can hope for, and something for which we will have no alternative but to work – but I don’t find it particularly attractive or inspiring.