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Is Britain Disintegrating? Changing Views of 'Britain' after Devolution

The question of whether Britain might be breaking up dates from the 1970s, specifically from the title of Tom Nairn’s collection of essays in 1977, The Break Up of Britain. That book has been highly influential on academic discussion ever since. At the time, though, even more influential was Tam Dalyell’s Devolution: The End of Britain?, also published in 1977, and it helped to shape the debate that led in 1979 to the inconclusive referendum on a Scottish Assembly and to the clear rejection of a Welsh Assembly. A memory of these notable books is one reason why the question has come back since 1997, when the second referendum on a Scottish Parliament emphatically reversed the indecision of the 1979 one, and when the Welsh swung even more clearly than the Scots against their previous vote, yielding a bare majority for a National Assembly (Taylor and Thomson, 1999). Distinguished journalists and academics have concluded speculatively that the conditions that encouraged the emergence of Britain are, perhaps, now declining – for example, Marr (2000), Davies (1999) and Colley (1992). The question has been raised with particular urgency on the political right (Redwood, 1999). The Spectator warns that devolution is breaking Britain apart: ‘It is utterly absurd’, they wrote on 9 December 2000, ‘that Labour should be calling on us all to remember the value of that inclusive word “British”, when it is the government’s own devolution programme which has fomented the rising sense of Scottishness, and Englishness.’ The belligerently Unionist historian Niall Ferguson wrote in the Daily Telegraph in 1997 that ‘to us authentically British families [of Scottish birth and parentage, living in England], the whole notion of home rule is bogus. There is, I fear, nothing we can now do to stop the repeal of the Union.’ Another strand of right-wing opinion acknowledges the impossibility of keeping Scotland in the Union against its will: Simon Heffer, for example, wrote in 1999 that ‘if the Scots want to be rid of England, then maybe it is not, after all, such a good idea for the English to cling onto the Scots’ (Heffer, 1999: 10). Against all this, the genuinely decentralizing ministers in the Blair government – such as Gordon Brown – insist that only devolution could have held the Union together, and that the