Paul Gillespie: UK is struggling to choose between competing constitutional models, and that affects us

The substance and timing of constitutional futures in Ireland are driven not only by events on this island but by those in Britain too. Prospects of a united or shared Ireland depend on British constitutional outcomes.

Ironically, unionism varies according to place, time and circumstance. It is as much governing practice as ideological principle. Part of its genius has been to conceal that diversity by statecraft, whether based on solidarities of empire, welfare or economic interdependence. Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English unionisms offer differing accounts of these realities.

But unionism in the United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland is now deeply divided between those advocating a centralist unitary state and those favouring a more pluralist and shared account of its nations and institutions. Both sides of unionism are in turn pitted against nationalisms offering convincing models of democratic self-government to their Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English citizenries.

These competing visions make for a fragmented British political system. Its faultlines have been deepened by Brexit’s resurrection of absolute sovereignty externally against the European Union and internally vis-a-vis devolved authorities. The resulting contradictions demand resolution either by new shared and self-rule between centre and peripheries, or by disintegration and break-up into distinct sovereign entities. Prolonged impasse is likely to intensify the crisis.

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This is the setting in which to judge the latest row between the Conservative government in Westminster and the Scottish National Party in Edinburgh over transgender rights. London has invoked a rarely used clause of the 1998 Scotland devolution act to override legislation passed on as cross-party basis by the Scottish parliament, on the grounds that the Scots bill might prejudice UK-wide policy.

Seemingly technical or ostensibly depoliticised issues suddenly become potent if they offend one or other political sensibility

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon says this is an outrage reinforcing the case for independence. According to the Conservative brand of unitary unionism, Westminster sovereignty is necessarily asserted. The Labour Party’s alternative devolutionary unionism is more favourable towards the Scottish case but anxious it will stoke secessionist opinion and therefore cautious about supporting Sturgeon.

Such neuralgic confrontations reveal and articulate the underlying faultlines and instabilities at play between contemporary UK unionisms and nationalisms. They are equally visible in arguments over the Internal Market Act, which replaces EU regulation, over the machinery of inter-governmental relations between the different UK authorities, or separately over the Northern Ireland Protocol. Seemingly technical or ostensibly depoliticised issues suddenly become potent if they offend one or other political sensibility.

Unitary unionism assumes there is a single demos or national people across the UK, with a unified telos or history and purpose and a shared ethos or values, as the political scientist Michael Keating puts it in his recent book on the subject. These assumptions cut across the historical and political realities of a much more varied, flexible and increasingly fragmented polity than they realise. Unitary unionism lacks the political will or capacity to forge a new doctrine capable of embracing devolution and creating new institutions to govern the UK. Brexit’s reinforcement of the Westminster parliament’s absolute sovereignty doctrine makes that task all the more difficult.

‘Point of inflection’

The Labour Party’s recently published report of a constitutional commission led by former prime minister Gordon Brown is an ambitious but partial effort to address these faults. It frankly admits this is “a point of inflection in the history of the United Kingdom, a constitutional moment”. Its strongest points acknowledge the UK “is the most centralised country in Europe”, one of the most regionally and socially unequal, and with some of the lowest levels of political trust.

It proposes a radical decentralisation of government in England and links that to a more secure devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The House of Lords would be replaced by an Assembly of the Nations and Regions representing all these authorities. It would have the right to veto House of Commons legislation undermining devolution – an important gesture towards a new federal-type entrenchment of UK governing powers.

Critics say that falls crucially too short of curbing Westminster sovereignty – unionism’s central doctrine. It also ignores the distorting effects of the “first past the post” election system for Westminster elections, which inhibits such necessary reforms, including the political coalitions which are now the norm in the devolved nations and regions. This long moment for unionism may thereby become an unresolved impasse.

It is smart for nationalists, unionists – and others – in Ireland North and South to pay close and informed attention to these UK developments because of their undoubted impact here.