Then, on 25 September, residents along 50 miles of that coastline found that their beaches had become a charnel house. Thousands of dead and dying shellfish, their bodies twitching and convulsing, were piled thick on the sand. It was the first of several “die-offs” that left these seas barren and annihilated a centuries-old fishing industry. “Ecosystem wipeout,” Rennie calls it. 

To this day, despite two government inquiries, there is no official explanation for what caused this marine apocalypse. Finlay’s documentary, currently on release in selected cinemas, follows the region’s fishermen as they come to terms with their loss. This tragedy, it turns out, is about much more than crustaceans and lost livelihoods. It is intertwined with themes which have haunted Britain for a decade: the legacy of deindustrialization, the anger of the country’s left behind, and the false hopes offered by the political class. The North East has more neighborhoods classed as highly deprived than any other region in England, with Hartlepool and Middlesbrough ranking among the three most deprived local authorities in the country. 

Hartlepool sits by the mouth of the River Tees, an area that was until the Eighties one of Britain’s industrial heartlands. Teesside had a vast steelmaking industry, as well as power stations, chemical plants and shipbuilding facilities. Steel alone employed 40,000 workers. The rusted hulks of those factories loomed along the coastline where Rennie caught shellfish, painfully obvious symbols of a community in decline. 

Then, in 2021, the demolitions began. The Conservative government had earmarked the Tees estuary for a major redevelopment, to be overseen by the newly created Tees Valley Combined Authority and its Conservative mayor, Ben Houchen. It was to be the country’s first “Freeport”, a launchpad for Brexit Britain that would attract global investors with preferential tax and customs arrangements. By 2023, the government had committed more than £250 million of public funds for the redevelopment. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was seeking to appeal to traditional Labour voters who had supported Brexit and then swung behind the Tories to deliver it. In the 2016 referendum, Leave won every borough in Teesside with at least 60% of the vote, and three years later, first-time Conservative voters (including Rennie, his wife and his daughter) had delivered Johnson half of the six Teesside seats.

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The plan was to clear Teesmouth, Europe’s largest brownfield site, to make way for the new development. The board responsible boasted that 10 years’ worth of clean-up work would take place in just two to three years. What the prospectus did not mention was that the old industries had for decades dumped their poisonous by-products into the landscape and the river itself. This symbol of regional rebirth was being built on something akin to the edge of a volcano. 

Which brings us to the most controversial aspect of Finlay’s film. The first government inquiry into the crustacean die-off suggested that the culprit was an algal bloom, an explanation that the fishermen regarded as absurd. They had their own ideas about what caused the disaster. In the days preceding it, a dredging vessel clearing up after a landslip had removed 150,000 tonnes of sediment from the riverbed at Teesmouth, depositing it three miles out at sea. The river estuary is regularly dredged — albeit not on this scale — and the ports authority maintains that the landslip was not caused by the demolitions then taking place. Nonetheless, the fishermen were convinced that dredged material had poisoned the waters, and raised funds to hire their own scientific researchers. 

According to these researchers, the evidence pointed toward pyridine, a chemical which had historically been used by industry at Teesside. They claimed that crabs exposed to pyridine respond similarly to those observed on the beaches; that samples collected by the Environment Agency contained high levels of the substance; and that computer simulations showed a spillage from Teesmouth spreading down the coast much as the die-off had. 

To the fishermen who suddenly found themselves unable to support their families, and the locals whose dogs became sick after walking along the beaches, it appeared that the truth behind their ordeal was being suppressed. Nothing could stand in the way of the totemic Teesside regeneration, a project that would, after all, involve a lot more dredging. Suspicions mounted throughout 2022 as a stench of malfeasance gathered around Houchen’s scheme. Reporting by Richard Brooks at Private Eye and local newspapers pointed to financial irregularities, misuse of public funds, and extraordinary benefits granted to a coterie of private developers around the mayor. In time, these would become allegations of staggering duplicity and graft, leaving the development corporation heavily indebted.

The resentment toward a distant establishment which the Brexit project had harnessed so effectively was now turned against it. “Anywhere else in the country, the government would’ve thrown every resource at this,” Rennie says. “Because we’re the North East, the back hole of the country, we’re just forgotten about.”

The remarkable thing, though, is that while the fishermen’s sense of abandonment is understandable, they were not forgotten about at all. They became an emblem of the government’s betrayal of the people it claimed to represent, eagerly seized upon by critics of Johnson and Brexit. The populists had become the establishment, so their opponents could become populists in turn. In June 2022, the Guardian’s George Monbiot wrote that “with every passing week, it looks more like a cover-up”. He condemned the government inquiry for failing to publish its data and promoted the pyridine hypothesis. Channel 4 took the same course. That autumn, parliament’s environment select committee invited Rennie and the researchers working with the fishermen to make their case. The committee demanded a second, independent inquiry to address the conflicting accounts, but that too was called into question before it had even reported its findings. Critics noted that it was appointed and overseen by government advisors, that some of its members were kept anonymous — to protect their independence — and that it refused to cooperate with the scientists behind the pyridine hypothesis. 

The experts assembled by that second government inquiry later complained that the idea that they — “politically independent scientists from universities, research laboratories and consultancies” — had “colluded on a fictitious report” was “preposterous”. This narrative was, they suggested, being fed by “mistrust in government” and “inaccurate media coverage”. Unfortunately, their reasons for rejecting the pyridine hypothesis were never likely to cut through this atmosphere of suspicion, as they involved technical issues such as the validity of the samples and methods used for testing, and the chemical properties of the pyridine molecule itself. Likewise, though they dismissed the first inquiry’s theory about the algal bloom, their own preferred explanation — that a novel and unique pathogen had killed the crustaceans — did not satisfy anyone as it was entirely hypothetical. 

There are still many question marks around the government’s response to the die-offs, and plenty of reason to think that, as Rennie puts it: “They don’t want to find the truth. They want to do the Freeport the cheapest option they can.” Despite the persistence of the shellfish deaths, the work at Teesmouth was not paused nor were proper samples taken of the riverbed. The government consistently hid behind a lack of evidence without making much effort to gather it. After the second inquiry, Conservative environment minister Thérèse Coffey announced that no further investigation would take place concerning the pathogen mooted as the possible cause. She also insisted that government agencies had received no further reports of die-offs following the initial incident in 2021, which came as news to the Teesside locals who had been submitting such reports regularly.

Nonetheless, the pyridine hypothesis is, in effect, a conspiracy theory. Its popularity probably tells us less about the cause of the disaster than about the paranoia that has penetrated to the heart of British politics in the decade since the Brexit vote. This is the most revealing aspect of All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea: try as you might to keep an open mind about the facts of the case, you cannot escape the conviction that these fishermen have been wronged, that they are victims of a system which cares nothing for them. This impression stems from their brutal lack of political agency. Even as the machinery of democracy swings into action behind them, carrying them into parliament itself, their status seems to be little better than that of feudal subjects bringing a petition to their lord’s manor. They cannot navigate the state’s bureaucratic defenses, pause the Teesmouth development, or prevent Houchen being re-elected. They are hostages to historical and ecological forces beyond their control, and ultimately become just another set of protesters waving their placards. 

The image of paralyzed crabs washing ashore symbolizes the impotence of these communities, and their impotence, in turn, has become emblematic of a whole nation’s frustration that nothing, and least of all government, seems to work as it should. Hence the strange situation whereby these left-behind places have, on account of their powerlessness, become the most powerful source of moral legitimacy in British politics. Johnson, Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage and Andy Burnham have all presented themselves as answers to the anger of Stan Rennie’s Britain — and their opponents have attacked them, above all, for betraying it. 

Teesside gives a sense of why the promises of politicians have so often turned to disappointment. Burnham’s big idea is to devolve power to local areas, but he is not the first to try this; the Tees Valley Combined Authority was created by the Tories in 2016. The allegations surrounding Houchen’s regime — prompting the government to announce a statutory investigation this month — suggest that far from bringing accountable authority closer to communities, devolution creates opportunities for charismatic local figures to indulge in cronyism far from the spotlight of the Westminster-centric media. None are better placed to play on local grievances than local politicians who can blame their failures on others, as when Houchen claimed that opposition to dredging in the Tees came from “local activists and Labour politicians” attempting a “stitch-up”, because “they’d rather see the area fail than us succeed”.

The crustacean die-offs also raise awkward questions for those who say that the key to British prosperity lies in less regulation and greater executive powers to force through developments opposed by pesky locals. Teesmouth offers a glimpse of what a more Chinese approach to “delivering” actually looks like: even when there is an unexplained ecological catastrophe unfolding, developers will simply plow ahead and vilify critics as the enemies of progress. Much criticism of excessive regulation is justified, but we must acknowledge that Britain’s ecosystems are in a state of extreme fragility and depletion, not least thanks to the effects of historic pollution and mismanagement like that seen at Teesmouth. Putting aside the pyridine hypothesis, the government inquiries into the disaster revealed that numerous toxic substances are entering the sea in alarming quantities. A tragic subplot of Finlay’s film concerns a local seal colony that is sick and emaciated, its pups dying in droves, due to a contaminated food chain. 

Environmentalists are always trying to demonstrate our dependence on the natural world, but nothing I have seen conveys the message more powerfully than the image of fishermen forlornly pulling up one empty net after another. “The pots are barren,” Rennie announces in disgust, wishing they were still full of “all the bonnie stuff we should be seeing all our lives”. Suffering from heart problems and non-alcoholic liver disease, he continues working for the sake of physical activity, burning through his savings in the process. The other fishermen are struggling to sell their boats and telling their sons to find a different trade. More than half of the Hartlepool fleet has gone since 2021.

The existence of this film offers some small consolation for the fishermen’s plight; Finlay says they feel “a huge relief in being seen”. For all the promises directed at places like Teesside in the last decade and more, it seems that this remains a rare feeling.

For Professor Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy — and one of the few experts on the subject who isn’t a charlatan — the formulation of effective strategy goes something like this. First, diagnose the problem. Second, adopt a guiding policy. Third, devise coherent actions, marshaling your resources to execute them. Everything else is irrelevant. Distraction is the enemy.

When it comes to diagnosing our problems in Britain, there’s much consensus among the public. Those services which are, relatively speaking, well-funded feel inefficient — parts of the NHS especially, with military procurement worse but less recognized. Meanwhile, for less generously furnished services like the police, what was once sold as prudence has long been recognized as crippling austerity.

Elsewhere, the economy isn’t productive enough. Recent immigration has been too high, at least in the abstract. Work no longer pays. The country lacks a vision of the future. And there’s litter everywhere. These are the issues that matter most to those who voted in recent local elections — and others who simply didn’t see the point.

They also seem central to Andy Burnham’s pitch to return to the House of Commons. Just days into his campaign to win the Makerfield byelection, the former health secretary has blasted the two main parties, declaring that Britain has been on the “wrong path” for 40 years. As a country, we keep doing bad strategy. And both Labour and the Tories are complicit.

Whenever I speak to punters, from Runcorn and Birmingham to Winchester and the Welsh Valleys, they tend to agree — embedding their criticisms in what they can see rather than abstractions. Thus their disquiet generally boils down to the simple fact that the physical infrastructure of the community has decayed while people feel less affluent. Conversations invariably drift to high streets, the ground zero of our national malaise. Such places combine the sense of a fraying built environment with the recognition that our economy doesn’t work. It is here where we feel poorer, both in body and spirit.

And so, in response, we get the Government’s Pride in Place program. Unveiled last September by the prime minister and Secretary of State for Local Government Steve Reed, it was expanded in February and now has a budget approaching £6 billion. The plan? To throw pots of money towards disadvantaged neighborhoods, with tranches of £20 million allocated over a decade to almost 300 areas. Almost all the recipients are outside London.

Alongside that deluge of cash comes a democratic innovation: rather than local authorities determining how the money should be spent, newly formed “neighborhood boards” will “co-create” a plan alongside the local community, as well as the constituency MP and council. “Local people are best placed to determine what should happen in their neighborhoods” as Reed put it last autumn, “and they don’t need government to dictate it.”

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Where I live, in Portsmouth, two areas stand to gain £40 million from this largesse. One is Landport, labeled “Fratton West” by Whitehall mandarins. The other is Paulsgrove, in the north of the city. Each is a small part of a single council ward. In ONS-speak, they are “Middle layer Super Output Areas”: neighborhoods comprising between 2,000 and 6,000 households. Fratton West is on the low end of even that, with the area home to just 5,000 residents. Over the next decade, and thanks to Pride in Place, they can now expect additional spending of £4,000 per person.

But as more historically middle-class parts of the city are being given over to HMOs, halfway houses and student housing — as family homes become lucrative bedsits for landlords — Landport and Paulsgrove already have high amounts of social housing and amenities for young families. Both also have youth and community centers and are, by the squeezed nature of Portsmouth, Britain’s second-most densely populated city, rather green. Castle View Academy, in the heart of Paulsgrove, has been rebuilt in recent years. In 2022 it was described as a “Good” school by Ofsted.

My hometown of Bournemouth is an hour’s drive up the coast. Three areas there — West Howe, Boscombe West and Hamworthy West — will receive £60 million between them. While there is no doubt these are similarly disadvantaged areas, it’s again unclear what such tiny places (West Howe’s population is 7,000) will do with such large sums of money, and so quickly. What’s more, the directors of these newly convened neighborhood boards, who will be responsible for managing £20 million of public investment, and generating plans as soon as November, will be volunteers — and expected to hang around for years.

But what is even being measured? What counts as success? And given the scale of the scheme, and the hundreds of locations where it will apply, how can we guarantee there won’t be corruption, grift and poor value for money on an industrial scale? Nobody seems to have answers to such questions.

Which brings us back to good strategy. Throwing money at poor areas might sound laudable, and if there are specific objectives it can be. But it isn’t an end in itself. As with defense spending, the Government fails to grasp an obvious point: that conflating more cash with a strategy — or, in the case of military spending, a higher percentage of GDP — is moronic. It’s also a world away from the promise of mission-oriented government that defined Starmer in opposition. Where before he promised “laser-like focus” on key priorities, now the Government appears indifferent as to whether this spending will even create skills and jobs.

Given the Government is expected to spend £1.6 trillion over the next 12 months, £6 billion doesn’t sound like much. You might also ask why I, supposedly a socialist, would begrudge a few hundred neighborhoods such a tiny slice of luck.

That’s a fair question. Returning to my seaside roots — my now-wife and I left London in 2018 and came to Portsmouth, her native city — has shown me how far even a little money can go. The point, though, is it needs to be spent wisely.

The older I get, the more I realize how that undermines the argument for government-led investment. Profligacy has become the enemy of progress. This is particularly surprising given Starmer’s promise of “deliverism” before June 2024, and his purported desire to do politics differently.

If anything, indeed, Burnham’s promise of “Manchesterism”, combining public control and the elimination of outsourcing with a pro-business, pro-development instinct, seems truer to Starmer’s original vision. It’s certainly a more sensible political offer than maintaining the outsourcing debacle and intermittently hosing areas with cash.

In the case of Portsmouth, £100 million would move mountains in its revival — not least for Fratton and the city center, both abutting the Landport neighborhood set to receive funding from Pride in Place. In these particular areas, urban renewal, done assiduously, would serve working-class communities more than anyone.

The recent pedestrianization of Castle Road, a conservation area in the more affluent Southsea, could be repeated in half-a-dozen smaller streets in the area. Roads around major transport hubs could also be developed. The local authority could buy commercial property in both areas, anchoring investment by providing municipally-owned space for small business. Whatever’s left over could be put towards investment for tourism, and reversing some of the worst horrors of postwar development. Who knows: some money could even be found to fund apprenticeships for young people, a worthy idea given the rising problem of youth unemployment.

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Of course, a minimal tram network, as Portsmouth once boasted, and a connection to neighboring Gosport (thanks to Dr Beeching the largest town in England without a train station) would also be sensible, value-generating developments. But unlike the items listed above, these would be large-scale capital investments. The painful truth, which should also provide succor, is that many of Britain’s medium cities don’t even need that level of investment to kickstart a renaissance.

But money, spent wisely, still matters. A good example is the recently opened “Mid Cornwall Metro”. It may not be the maximalist option that locals wanted, the re-opening of a line that was also subject to Dr Beeching’s axe. But at a cost of £56 million it means that, for the first time since the Sixties, a direct train will run between Falmouth and Newquay, helping tourism and businesses as well as residents. A reminder: Pride in Place will be spending almost as much in Portsmouth, and more in Bournemouth, just without a clear vision or goals. These, apparently, are the options: either game-changing transport infrastructure, or youth clubs in a neighborhood which already has them.

Sometimes I wonder if we even want large towns and smaller cities to succeed at all. Bournemouth is a Victorian jewel on the South Coast, once home to everyone from Robert Louis Stevenson and Tolkien to Mary Shelley. Yet today its town center, a sort of Dubai for the late Victorians, is synonymous with vacant shop fronts and vape stores. Nearby Boscombe, another fashionable 19th-century resort, has long been home to innumerable bedsits — many of which are owned by DWP Housing Partnership. Those letters don’t stand for the Department for Work and Pensions, but a property company started by the notorious Dave Wells, a recently deceased slum landlord.

Where’s the wisdom of building a community center with taxpayer funds while letting such men run riot, and permitting what feels like infinity HMOs? A refurbished play-park is always welcome, but if the area is also warehousing recovering addicts — as Boscombe does — how is that meant to transform the life chances of those living there? Just as important, how does any of this help those addicts in recovery? Nor is Bournemouth alone: this is an issue that afflicts places right across southern England.

But rather than address issues like rent-seeking, outsourcing and the treatment of addiction, Starmer’s government has decided on the easy option: a Frankenstein of David Cameron’s “Big Society” conjoined with Fabian welfarism.

In fact, Pride in Place seems particularly bizarre when viewed against the long-heralded Local Government Reorganisation (LGR). Merging councils, and integrating services and back offices, is meant to reduce costs. For their part, new metro mayors, including one planned in future for Portsmouth, promise to create a singular point of local accountability. So why, at the very moment that the Government is trying to create efficiencies, and focus scrutiny on a single individual, is it creating more bureaucracy through neighborhood boards?

In 2020, The Economist wrote that “other countries have poor bits. Britain has a poor half.” The first step in addressing that should be to drive up productivity, and the quality of life, in our large towns and smaller cities. There’s no reason Sheffield should be poorer than Katowice, or Birmingham less affluent than Lyon. But turning things around requires good strategy — more even than money and the best of intentions. That means Westminster must stop looking at the world beyond the M25 as a basket case whose only hope is a one-off cash bonanza amid inexorable decline.

This handsome village, nestled on the Pembrokeshire coast of West Wales, isn’t dead, exactly, more in a state of semi-hibernation. Nowhere is this more true than up a narrow hedgerow-lined road a short walk from the center. Here sit several stone cottages and bungalows, with names such as Sandalwood and Green Bank, their windows shut, their curtains drawn. Key safes, like limpet mines, cling to porch walls, while neatly assembled recycling bins stand undisturbed at the bottom of empty driveways.

All the telltale signs of holiday lets and second homes, before the summer surge. Some are for sale. Sure enough, it’ll be a different story come June, as Saundersfoot transforms into a bustling honeypot. Its shops, bars and restaurants will welcome these part-time residents with open arms, as a vital source of funds in a county short of cash. Yet even here in Pembrokeshire, long known as “Little England Beyond Wales”, these seasonal arrivals are resented too — their coming prompting fights over land and identity that could yet spark a political flashpoint.

All coasts and countryside, it’s easy to understand why anyone would want to own a home in Pembrokeshire. And, compared to British idylls such as Cornwall, it remains cheap. According to the latest data from the Office of National Statistics, the average price for a detached house here is £308,000; a similar-sized property in Falmouth or St Ives might set you back £100,000 more. No wonder Pembrokeshire has some 4,300 second homes. Only Gwynedd, home to Snowdonia, has more in Wales. In Saundersfoot and nearby Tenby, Pembrokeshire’s most popular tourist resort, one-in-four properties are reckoned to be second homes or holiday lets.

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But investors in getaway properties here are starting to question whether they really are welcome. Using discretionary powers allocated by the Welsh Labour government, Pembrokeshire County Council slapped a 200% council tax premium on second homes in 2024, effectively tripling their rate. Though the charge was subsequently lowered to 150%, and is due to fall even further this year, it has spooked second homeowners, who are now looking to sell up. That’s shadowed by changes elsewhere in Wales. In Gwynedd, for instance, the council proposed legislation that would require homeowners to apply for planning permission to convert residential properties into second homes — though it was later forced to backtrack after residents and businesses complained.

To be fair, the idea of a second home tax — mandating that owners of non-primary residences must contribute to the local economy beyond visiting their local fish shop in the summer — doesn’t appear wholly unreasonable. For hard-up Pembrokeshire County Council, whose latest budget revealed a funding gap of £27 million, that extra money could go some way to tackling real problems of housing and local services. “This isn’t an abstract policy debate,” says Josh Phillips, a Labour candidate for the Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire constituency in the looming Senedd elections, and who himself grew up in Solva, a picturesque Pembrokeshire fishing village with a high concentration of second homes. “It’s about whether people’s children will be able to live anywhere near where they grew up.”

Phillips, a former publican, understands the economic value second-homers bring. Yet he’s nonetheless tired of seeing the “hollowing out” of villages where houses lie empty for months at a time. Herein lies a crucial distinction between empty second homes on the one hand — and those with visible signs of occupancy on the other. Speak to people in Pembrokeshire and, without exception, they have no time for totally vacant properties, blaming them for everything from falling property prices to vandalism to vermin infestations. In January, the Pembrokeshire Council backed a last-ditch proposal that would force the sale of properties left empty for over a year back to the community.

From afar, the debate around Pembrokeshire’s second homes can seem framed in anti-English terms, given how many second homeowners come from across the border. Though plenty hail from Cardiff too, it’s an easy assumption to make. I speak to one English former second-homer outside Tenby who tells me his family ended up selling a few years ago, after being made to feel unwelcome in the village. As he puts it: “I don’t think it helped that we were from Kensington.”

That’s arguably echoed by a rise in nationalist activism, with second homes a predictable focus. Cymdeithas yr Iaith, a campaign group, claims Welsh speakers have effectively been priced out, turning their villages into “holiday parks”. It brings to mind a recent story about the coastal hamlet of Cwm-yr-Eglwys, which, reportedly overrun with second homes, had just one remaining Welsh speaker.

The truth, though, is that the origins of that moniker “Little England Beyond Wales” extend far beyond the modern age of tourism. The phrase first featured in a 16th-century text by the topographer and historian William Camden, who discovered a distinctly English-speaking culture upon his arrival in the region.

Camden was specifically referring to southern Pembrokeshire, whose Anglicization began with the Norman Conquest of the area in the 11th century, followed by the later arrival of Flemish settlers. Indigenous Welsh speakers were forced to move to the hilly country in the north, then kept in check by a boundary of castles built by the Normans and Flemish, known as the Landsker Line (deriving from the Norse for “divide”). This is why most place names in the south of the county, such as Saundersfoot, Haverfordwest and Milford Haven, are English sounding, a vivid contrast with the Maenclochogs, Crymychs and Trefdraeths further up the coast.

Hints of this history remain. Compared with neighboring Ceredigion, and Gwynedd to the north, Pembrokeshire is not a traditional voter base for Plaid Cymru. Nor is it synonymous with Labour like the former industrial valleys of South Wales, where “The Internationale” once rang out from miners’ welfare halls. Instead, the county swung between Labour and the Conservatives for decades before increasingly turning blue. The Tories prevailed in the last Westminster and Senedd elections here, buoyed substantially by the rural vote. (The county council, for its part, is made up of a hodge-podge of independents).

Now, though, rising frustrations with the national Conservative and Labour parties — and Westminster politics in general — are likely to impact the looming Sennedd election: potentially changing policy around second homes. Reform, which is standing candidates in Pembrokeshire, has pledged to increase Wales’ housing supply to tackle the issue. A party spokesperson tells me that it also intends to “take a wrecking ball to a number of anti-tourism measures” implemented by its rivals. Such is the frustration that even Plaid is in with a shot. After winning a council by-election seat in February, the party now also hopes to snatch a Pembrokeshire Senedd seat or two, its manifesto promising to “work with local authorities” on second homes.

Yet look past the politics of holiday homes — or even just politics generally — people here clearly have more humdrum worries too. In a back room of Pembroke Rugby Football Club, signed Wales shirts pride of place in a glistening glass cabinet, club chair Richard Jelley says the county’s biggest problem is a lack of jobs for young people, which has contributed to a brain drain. While the tourism industry is all well and good as a provider of seasonal employment, he says, it’s not enough to keep working-age people around, with many leaving to seek opportunities elsewhere, often in Cardiff or Bristol.

Jelley points to the closure of the Murco oil refinery in Milford Haven in 2014 as an inflection point for the county’s fortunes. The refinery had supported thousands of local jobs, which effectively went overnight. “We used to have two thriving senior sides here, but now we just have one,” says Jelley, a compact 60-something with a shock of fair hair. “That’s because the kids get to a certain age, there’s no work, and they move away.”

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This supports the argument that the proliferation of second homes and struggles of younger people might be more a case of correlation than causation. Wyn Harries, a school governor from Crymych, close to the Ceredigion border, makes a similar point, pinning the blame of depopulation of his rural part of the county firmly on “years of neglect” by a Welsh government stuck in the urban bubble of Cardiff Bay. “Their policy,” argues Harries, “is that people in the countryside shouldn’t be allowed to prosper,” adding that if there were decent rural jobs, the second-home issue would “resolve itself”.

In his 2019 book Wales: England’s Colony, the historian Martin Johnes argues that Wales’ identity has fundamentally been shaped by its relationship with its larger neighbor over the centuries, from its conquest in the 13th century by Edward I and subsequent annexation under Henry VIII, to parliamentary laws governing the use of the Welsh language in schools. This has led to a tendency, Johnes writes, to “blame England for everything that is wrong with Wales”.

Would it serve Wales better to turn the spotlight on itself instead? After all, devolution was meant to help the country steer its own path. Yet Cardiff Bay — or, more specifically, Welsh Labour, which has held a tight grip on the reins for the past 27 years — might well be accused of being as indifferent to the plight of the people in Pembrokeshire as their counterparts in London, contributing to the sense of alienation so clearly felt by locals. They’re frustrations sure to remain whoever triumphs in the Senedd next month, or whoever buys up the pretty cottage down the lane.

Now compare Burnham to Richard Parker. Politicos are still unsure what even drove him from the spreadsheet anonymity of a career in accountancy to mayoralty of the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) a year ago. Certainly, Parker’s pitch for the job didn’t stray far from vague lines on family ties to the region — and being unable to stand by while the Midlands rotted. Boilerplate stuff, topped off with pledges written in a say-nothing Starmerese so diligent they may have come straight from the Labour leader’s playbook. 

Parker’s lackluster style is even more striking given his peers. I don’t mean Burnham here, or indeed Sadiq Khan. Even in the West Midlands itself, there’s Parker’s predecessor Sir Andy Street, who elegantly dovetailed the region’s fortunes with his own personal brand. Mr Commonwealth Games. Mr HS2. Whatever you want to call him, Street was the Midlands for locals and outsiders alike. 

Parker’s failure to follow suit is especially remarkable given there’s so much he could plausibly build a political personality around. In a largely deindustrialized region, housing inequality, transport woes, and low-paying jobs are all urgent problems to be solved. Then there’s the Birmingham bin strike. It may be the responsibility of the local council, but with 26,000 tons of stinking rubbish left uncollected, it’s hard not to see the dispute as the ultimate symbol of Midlands failure. Parker’s electoral victory at least paid lip service to these issues, promising to boost regional skills, explore high street rejuvenation and, given top billing, take buses back into public control. But the wide popularity of these ideas hasn’t protected him from criticism. 

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For one, bus franchising isn’t projected until 2027 at the earliest. A retiring figure, albeit one well-liked by colleagues, Parker doesn’t seem to lead much on policy, only getting excited about housing — a hangover, I’m told, from his exposure to the issue during his accounting years. He’s happy to outsource the blue-sky thinking the mayoral role is known for to less political policy leads. There’s a joke that if you want to know what Parker really thinks, you should ask Rachel Reeves, to whom he lent a holiday home and donated £12,000 in cash the year before he became mayor. 

This closeness to the Treasury runs exactly contrary to the expanding mayoral model’s devolutionary principles. It also comes with risks, not least when the Westminster party’s poll numbers are in the basement. According to YouGov, after all, only 60% of Labour voters in 2024 plan to stay loyal next time. More than that, the latest polling has Reform UK on 30% nationwide, a far cry from the 5.8% the party won in last year’s West Midlands mayoral election. No less striking, May’s local elections saw Farage’s juggernaut pick up two mayoralties, with Labour pushed extremely hard by insurgent mayoral candidates in former Labour heartlands like North Tyneside. In such a landscape, it remains to be seen whether Parker can win in 2028; some insiders already whisper he may not stand at all.

It’s not just Reform that poses a threat to Parker either: his old rival Street retains plenty of popularity right across the Midlands. Many feel his 2024 loss was a repudiation of Tory rule rather than a personal slight, especially given Street himself is famous for his issues-first style. More than that, he lost to Parker by just 0.15% last year. Defeat, then, but one far less resounding than what his party suffered nationally. I know many across the Midlands, both to the Left and Right of Street, who admire his region-first approach. But as the former mayor is busy burnishing his centrist credentials — telling a recent interviewer that he’ll fight for a “moderate, inclusive conservatism” — Reform’s rise could yet stymie the careers of Parker and Street both.

Quite aside from that looming light-blue wave, meanwhile, Street’s tenure was far from perfect. For one thing, HS2 was a nightmare. It’s too early to know if this latest iteration of the Northern Powerhouse could belatedly link London and Birmingham to Manchester, but Street himself certainly failed, and that was despite the help of Burnham further north. For its part, Street’s cross-city rail project was also hit by waves of delays. In contrast, and to give Parker his due, the current mayor has attached his name to a mega-bucks tram project which might finally give him a political identity worth the name. Linking up a proposed “Sports Quarter” in Birmingham with the airport and NEC events space is an unqualified good, especially when the network will travel through some of the city’s poorest areas.

But the region has been burnt by doomed development projects before. Forget HS2: though it rarely makes headlines south of Warwickshire, a long-in-the-offing gigafactory, meant to be built on the site of Coventry Airport, has faced epic struggles too.

For years, people across the Midlands were promised that the huge battery-making facility, designed specifically to power electric vehicles, would secure 6,000 jobs and £2.5 billion in investment. As far back as 2017, Street told the Conservative Party conference that the future growth of the West Midlands would emerge from its car-making past. “It’s a modern industrial strategy,” he said. You could almost see the gigafactory materialize as he spoke.

As it is, nothing much has happened, though those close to Street celebrate his ability to pull in private sector support for his embattled region. Perhaps — Street is certainly an enthusiastic booster for his patch — but apparent interest from Jaguar Land Rover and the Tata Group never went anywhere. Instead, a local manufacturer called Volklec, backed by funds from the Chinese battery sector, turned up instead. Yet even then, a £1 billion investment plan falls far short of Street’s grand words. All the while, the gigafactory itself is nowhere to be found, its promise of prosperity lost among the Warwickshire hedgerows.

In a sense, of course, these challenges aren’t the fault of Parker or Street. For if regional mayors occasionally show the strength of personality to make a difference, the fact is that they are never in complete control of their destinies. After all, even under boosted devolution deals, mayors rely on private partnership for success, a model that pits areas against each other. Tata, for instance, took investment that might have come to the West Midlands to Somerset instead.

A reliance on private cash also emphasizes risible public support. For the long-signaled gigafactory, the WMCA has only offered £23 million to the project. Whitehall might stump up another £65 million, but that’s not much either. “We hardly have the carrots to tempt investors with,” says one WMCA insider, a fair point when funding for projects comes from tightly controlled government pots. It’s impossible, here, not to mention the “Treasury Brain” adherence to environmental legislation and London-centric development logic — which together make it tough for post-industrial sites in the West Midlands and elsewhere to get off the ground.

In other words, then, for the mayoralties to really turbocharge their regions they first need to escape the clutches of Westminster. “Devolution is about driving economic growth, not societal or welfare change,” says Ben Brittain, a former advisor to Street. “You run the risk of low-energy over-promoted accountants or a chair of a council subcommittee as the region’s leader, which does a disservice to citizens of that region.” 

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At this point, it’s tempting to return to Parker. Even people less close to Street than Brittain miss his ambassadorial energy and soft skills: knowing when to bollock, reward, charm, or simply put in the hours to get things done. Of course, it would be unfair not to mention that every local and combined authority still battles austerity, which persists even under the Labour government in Westminster. “There must be a strong relationship between mayoral teams, No. 10 and No. 11, which can unblock a lot,” says Brittain. “But there is no formal structure for that.” 

Here, Parker might point to his relationship with Reeves as crucial to unlocking funds for his gleaming new tram project. But those same links, insiders worry, could be exactly what undercuts regional confidence and, potentially, renewal on the West Midlands’ own terms. Parker, after all, is Reeves’ man. And for a country like England, with its hyper-centralized political culture, it’s equally concerning that Labour may now plan to make its mayors more accountable to the party. What would this mean for Parker, who might need to take on Downing Street if his tramline goes the way of HS2? Then there’s the gigafactory which, as it stands, remains an underused airport. Hardly something to build a political brand around.

Or at least a kind of Whig history. It — infamously — relied on grand narratives. Here is one. In the Middle Ages, England made a precocious finish to what we might call the story of early modernity. It had a single language; a single legal code; central government; national feeling; no great magnates; no municipal liberties; no regional distinctions that mattered. There was no rigmarole of provincial Diets, as was the style almost everywhere else. There was one organ, Westminster, where people could speak of a national interest that was felt as keenly in Scunthorpe as in London. These were legislators, not petitioners pleading the case of a town, or a guild.

The logical next step for this hot-housed national England was to round out the polity, incorporating the rest of the island to prevent it being used as a “backdoor” by its rivals. The unification of England meant, inescapably, the unification of Great Britain. Everything seemed to be pulling in this direction. The Scottish aristocracy was Norman. The Lowlanders, great bulk of the country’s population, were Anglo-Saxons. The Reformation had given the people of Great Britain a common religion (mostly), and, still more, a common set of enemies.

That decision, in 1707, to take the plunge for full parliamentary union simply made sense. Sure, much of it was down to self-interest. But it was a self-interest that presupposed a common one. The sectarian difference, dowdy and obscure by continental standards even during the time of Oliver Cromwell, was becoming even less important. Scottish merchants declared that the internal customs barriers with England were intolerable — barriers which were still the European norm well into the 19th century. Nationhood had arrived, and required only its formal consummation.

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If the unity of the island of Great Britain seemed in some way preordained, it still feels that way. Modern technology means that centralised rule is easier than ever. The confessional divide between England and Scotland has vanished. So too has the economic one: the choice is no longer, as it was in the dog days of Churchill’s chancellorship, between the shipbuilders of the Clyde and the City of London. Scotland and England both are now sustained by high finance; luxury goods; education; tourism. The departure from the European single market has made the British single market more important than ever.

And yet, there has been a concerted effort to throw the tide of history into reverse. Since the Scottish referendum in 2014, it has become common to say that Great Britain is an artifice with no real historical existence. But that rupture — devolution, Scottish and otherwise — is part of a particular idea of authority that has become hegemonic over the past 25 years.

The administration that came to power in 1997 was decentralist and localist in its assumptions. It did not like the idea of a powerful central metropolis in London. It did not like Parliament, with its debates, its majorities, and its ability to make and unmake any law — which threatened new unfalsifiable ideas of human rights. New Labour opposed majorities, executive power, and central government. No tradition of distributed power existed in Britain, so it would invent one. So was born the Supreme Court and the devolved assemblies, both practically free from Parliament’s writ, and which would make endless bartering between claims of right the legerdemain of politics, not popular appeals, or debates.

That idea soon became bipartisan. As a political programme, it preferred the local and familiar to the remote and metropolitan. It wanted politicians to “stop arguing” and come to an agreement. It distrusted Power, and sought to set things up in such a way that no one could exercise it over anyone else — except over the common people. It was, as George Orwell once wrote of Swift, “despising authority while disbelieving in liberty”.

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Modern Scottish nationalism is not separable from this programme of decentralism. The two are symbiotic. Devolution created a strange and subsidised layer of local politicians and bureaucrats, who, having no real reason for their existence, could do little else but play to provincial rights and an exaggerated Scottishness as a gambit for funding and jobs. Westminster, won for the cause of sham provincial liberties long ago, always obliged. As national life was purposefully fractured, rule from London began — completely by default — to seem like a foreign imposition.

As the entirely self-created “crisis of Union” began to mount in 2014, Westminster could answer only with yet more decentralisation. Everything about London’s response to the separatist threat presupposed that a Scottish nation already existed, and that a British one did not.

The latest invocation of local rights was that Scotland had recently been getting governments and policies it had not voted for (so had, say, Cambridge). When a set of voters is unhappy, the usual course is to change things around to appease them — as Rishi Sunak is now attempting in the Red Wall. Instead, London’s response was a promise to shield them from the English electorate: “The Vow”. Reform of public services had been the main aim of David Cameron’s premiership, but now these public services were to be devolved entirely. In his heart of hearts, the prime minister did not believe that his mandate from the British people gave him any real right to govern Scotland.

The Vow, and the further devolution that followed, was an avowal that a British body politic did not and should not exist. London conceded every premise of the SNP. But these were its own premises. For its part, while the SNP was not the creature of London, at every turn it consented to play the role marked out for it. In the years that followed the referendum, Nicola Sturgeon became a permanent fixture of national life, and offered a general running commentary on British affairs. She was acting the part cast for her by London: a stern and forthright provincial critic of central excess. Unlike in Catalonia, or Quebec, there was never any serious talk of unilateral secession, even as parliamentary government in London virtually collapsed between 2017-19.

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The implicit relationship became clearer during Humza Yousaf’s year in power. One of his first announcements was that no second referendum would be pursued until a “sustained majority” emerged for one. This was, in practice, a way to adjourn the idea forever. In his resignation speech, Yousaf warned of the threat of populism. What? Scottish nationalism’s aim is to break up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: a permanent member of the UN security council, a stately member of the international system, and a nuclear power. It is, ostensibly, one of the most populistic causes on the planet. But that is no longer its way. To its leadership, at least, Scottish nationalism is not for Scotland, merely against majoritarian democracy in Britain.

But this dependence on patronage and concession made the SNP’s position too precarious. Having forsworn demagogy, it could now only petition Westminster to carry through its own project by degrees. Up till now, it had always found a receptive audience. But were even the feeblest of unionism ever to emerge in London, it would be out of road.

So it proved. After 2016, London took the bold and daring step of not allowing the SNP to hold another referendum at the time of its choosing and with its own gerrymandered franchise. This threw the party into a crisis from which it never fully recovered. The end, when it came last year, was suitably anticlimactic. Scottish nationalism, as practised, did not survive contact with a unitary British state that was prepared to take even the smallest of steps to preserve itself; and it perished over a trifle. The decision to veto the Gender Recognition (Scotland) Bill in January 2023 was a humdrum affair, entirely normal under any federal or pseudo-federal structure. But it has probably buried the SNP for a generation.

Buried, but dormant. In Westminster, devolution remains the solution to all political problems, and has indeed been given energy anew by recent events. Britain’s governing classes now believe that devolution is the best bar to the populist threat. They could not have been more clear about this: every anti-establishment vote from the British people is interpreted as, really, an inchoate cry against London, and for local autonomy. People in Teesside did not truly want lower immigration, it was said — only an Assembly of the North East, and a Mayor.

Rather than any change of course, Britain’s rulers have answered populism with devolution: to reroute and blunt public anger at the direction of national policy; and, still more, to break up the unified British body politic that had just delivered those results. It is proposed to dismember an ancient constitutional polity and hand over the fragments to a series of local fanatics and workaday crooks, in exchange for the assurance that these people will preserve the country from populism.

For their part, the British people have been vaguely bewildered by devolution. For all that is made of a clamour for regional identity and local belonging, the mandates for the new devolved assemblies and metro mayors have been derisory. The recent election for Mayor of the North East had a turnout of 31%; for the Mayor of York and North Yorkshire it was 29.89%. In May of 2022, the people of Bristol voted to abolish their Mayor and return to the old system of council oligarchy. The Liverpool mayoralty has collapsed in scandal. London politics only really exists insofar as there have been attempts to artificially wall it off from the rest of southern England: the battle over Ulez being the case in point.

Devolution, as a means to bar the way to populism, may yet reawaken Scottish nationalism. Gordon Brown’s plan for a new federal constitution, A New Britain, includes such howlers as giving the Scottish Government the ability to conclude its own international treaties. These proposals are already being watered down, and are unlikely to be adopted in full. But they show a clear direction of travel — even as Scottish separatism itself starts to sputter out. The end of the British union, if it comes, will have been entirely self-inflicted.

More than anything else, it will be a tragedy. Great Britain was created as a vehicle to unleash the energies of two almost uniquely talented peoples: people who had much in common anyway, but were being forever side-tracked by a tedious and endless cousins’ war. Union seemed to make everything young again. Union meant that the Scottish and the English could turn outwards. They pounced on the world with a boyish enthusiasm unequalled since the days of Alexander.

Devolution aims to bring this grand enterprise to an end. It offers — demands — a slower pace of life for the island and its people. The United Kingdom was created to do Something. One gets the sense that Decentralised Britain — introverted, particular, ruminating — is by design meant to do nothing.

This uniquely English parochial cosmopolitanism courses through the recent, flourishing discourse on political Englishness. As the Economist’s Duncan Robinson has correctly observed, English nationalism is the dog that refuses to bark: there are no meaningful popular campaigns for an English parliament, secession from the UK is a position of the extreme fringe, and even Boris Johnson’s scrapping of the modest constitutional reform of English Votes for English Laws was met with mass apathy. If the English are, as Chesterton claimed, “the secret people… that never have spoken yet”, it can only be assumed that that is because they prefer silence.

And yet, as a consequence of devolution, there has been an explosion in recent years of political commentary on that mythical dragon, English nationalism. What is perhaps most remarkable is that this discourse is entirely driven by the Left: in so far as English nationalism exists in Britain it is a product of centre-left think-tank panels in Westminster. As nationalisms go, it is thin gruel, but then it’s explicitly meant to be. For what is most striking about this SW1-endorsed Englishness is how it is inevitably framed in terms of “reclaiming Englishness from the radical Right”, despite the fact such a thing does not meaningfully exist in England and shows no appreciable sign of coming into being.

English nationalism, indeed, often appears like a culture-bound syndrome of Celtic nationalists, a foil for them to rage against, or a danger to be guarded from, even as England continues on its course with amiable indifference. Bearers of strong ethnic identities themselves, Celtic nationalists perceive their equivalent potential in England, even if the English themselves prefer not to. From the Ukania hypothesis of British dysfunction and disintegration put forward by the Scottish nationalist Tom Nairn and Anglo-Irish grandee Perry Anderson, to the musings of the recently-deceased Labour MP-turned-Welsh-nationalist David Marquand, England is a problem to be urgently solved, by granting the English a sensible, Scandinavian-style social democracy before the English belatedly adopt something harder-edged for themselves.

It is explicitly within this vein of thought that the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas has published her new book, Another England, written to fend off the risk that “politicians and others… will use this latent tension for their own ends, stirring up emotions, provoking confrontations, and hoping to ride the same kind of nativist rage that took Donald Trump to the White House”. There is much to admire in Lucas’ book: her love of England’s natural beauty, so poorly served by Conservatives who profess guardianship of the land; her appreciation of the genuine diversity of dialect, vernacular architecture and sentiment packed into such a small area; her sensitive reading of English Literature, drawing on her PhD research. Many of her suggestions — for an English Parliament, civic autonomy, a land value tax, nationalisation of common goods, and expansion of the right to roam — are sensible and good: all are sentiments that are, in their way, fundamentally conservative, at least when compared to the radical liberalism of the Conservative Party. 

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Yet the remarkable thing about her book — perhaps the most English thing about it — is its squeamishness in framing Englishness as a national identity like other national identities, the cultural heritage of a specific people in a specific place over historical time: just like the Japanese, or the Palestinians, or the Kurds (whose lack of national self-determination in their ancient homeland Lucas takes the time to lament). Remarkably, hers is a book about fending off English ethnonationalism in which her object of inquiry, the English as an ethnic group, does not appear. 

The reasoning is swiftly apparent. She opens with a lament over Brexit having cut our island off from European politics — but though she alludes once to Europe’s rising wave of Right-wing populism, she strenuously avoids addressing the cause. But look at our closest, most impeccably liberal and social-democratic European neighbours: in Germany, the most popular party among the young is the AfD; in Denmark, the Social Democratic government aims for “Net Zero Migration”; in Sweden, the radical Right is buoyant, and in the Netherlands it is the largest political force. Even Ireland, now that it is belatedly undergoing a parallel demographic transformation to the UK, seems to be developing a significantly more volatile reaction (to the discomfort of Irish liberals, who have begun claiming that Irish populism is somehow a British plot).

If anything is remarkable about England, however, it is the near-total absence of such a political current. This is despite the fact that England, far more than Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, is currently undergoing the greatest wave of demographic change since the historic folk migration that carved an England out of Brythonic-speaking Britain in the first place. Lucas herself is relaxed about such a historic shift, even as she observes the academic consensus, like Europe’s observable political reality, is towards it driving political disorder. “On current trends,” she notes, “the white British will become a minority (though still by far the largest minority) at some point in the 2070s… and academic thinking has come from different directions — demography, politics, sociology — to identify this phenomenon as a decisive driver in political populism. But it doesn’t have to be.” 

Yet anyone anticipating a groundbreaking rebuttal of the social-scientific literature finds only the assertion that: “For one thing, we can be confident that a more diverse population is a strength.” In any case, she reassures us, “I won’t be around in the 2070s to see an England where… [future generations] do not see a multi-ethnic, multicultural society as something to fear”. It must be said that the English have taken to such a historically transformative, high-stakes experiment with a rare degree of equanimity. 

Whether or not she is correct, Lucas’s serene detachment is, ironically enough, an unreflexive example of the English Exceptionalism she lays at the door of the Eton and Oxford rotters at the top. Other less enlightened nations may turn to angry reaction as an inevitable result, but such things simply aren’t British… sorry, English. And perhaps she’s right: England really does appear to be an outlier, certainly within Europe. While the majority, in increasing numbers, believe migration, especially under the Conservatives, has been too high — even Lucas states that “in the short to medium term at least, some rules on immigration are also necessary” — there is admirably little hostility to migrants themselves. There are, after all, few if any other nations so solicitous of minorities as to wish to become one: perhaps the English really are the most liberal and tolerant nation on earth. 

Even still, it is impossible to read this book without sensing Lucas recapitulating all the outward-looking, world-beating, boosterish exceptionalism she mocks in the British ruling class, and squeezing it into England’s smaller container. In a book ostensibly aimed at carving out an English political imagination from the constraints of the British state, she spends a chapter lamenting the British Empire, including for its “essentially racist notion that the ‘white man’ had a moral duty to care for… ‘less fortunate peoples’” (no doubt this is different to her own desire to host the less affluent of the Earth). Brexit itself, and the ongoing culture wars over the past, Lucas reads as a top-down displacement activity launched by Westminster elites to stifle progressive change — rather than, as the academic literature predicts, a displacement proxy conflict fought by the dwindling ethnic majority against demographic change, no different to Ulster Protestant fears over the Irish language and Irish Republican symbolism. 

Like the English themselves, the very reason she is writing this book in the first place can only be addressed obliquely, like some malign folk spirit whose naming grants it power. Even as the liberal order is shaken by ethnic conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine, today’s liberals cannot bring themselves, as their predecessors in the Nineties were able to, to address their long-described dynamics frankly, retreating to their comfort zones of Americanised race discourse and elite-driven conspiracies.

It is fascinating, then, that the precipitating factor for Lucas’s call for Englishness is her sympathy for the separatist Celtic nationalisms, which she understands as perfectly natural historical developments. Though she does not address this point, these are of course ethnic nationalisms: the Scottish and Welsh and Irish are nations by virtue not just of their inherent “cultural stuff” (in the anthropologist Fredrik Barth’s phrase), but of the amicable but real ethnic boundaries demarcating the Welsh and Scottish from the English, and the Irish from the British peoples. It is not, after all, through racism that Welsh nationalists resent English homeowners moving into their country or weakening the vitality of their language, but ethnic consciousness and fear of the cultural change English migration brings. 

The fact that these ethnic boundaries are permeable — that Gerry Adams possesses a solidly English surname, and Arlene Foster was born with a good native Irish one — does not mean they do not exist. When, in Lucas’s telling, the Welsh and Scots set off in pursuit of their historical destiny by leaving the United Kingdom, and the Northern Irish (due to shifts in political power wrought by demographic change, though Lucas does not address this dynamic) join the Republic, then the English will find themselves, like the Austrians and Russians before them, heirs to a shrunken state, and at risk of all manner of unprogressive political malignities. It is the work of Westminster liberals, in this reading, to shape political Englishness before the English find it thrust upon them, and Nigel Farage finds his inner Atatürk. Whether the proportional representation Lucas advocates would neuter such an eventuality, as she imagines, or accelerate it, as European politics suggests, remains unclear.

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But the assumption, made by Celtic nationalists as well as the English liberal Left, that the English are inherently prone to an aggressively exclusionary ethnic nationalism, which requires constant diverting in a healthily multicultural direction, is so far not borne out by the evidence. When Scotland and Wales, which possess the homogeneous demographics of mid-20th century England, reach the same stage — if they ever do — their nationalist critiques of English intolerance may be worth listening to. As we have seen, it is the precise contrary that is most remarkable, a situation that is poorly explained other than by that unfashionable thing, national temperament. Perhaps that will change, perhaps not: one way or another we will find out, even if Lucas won’t. 

As the writer Paul Kingsnorth (who Lucas incidentally cites in her acknowledgements, without engaging with intellectually) remarked in his own St George’s Day missive, perhaps England’s new non-English majority will choose to become English over time, as immigrant Irish and Jews did before them; or perhaps “England is simply coming to an end, as all nations ultimately do.” But for now, the English seem uniquely happy, or resigned, or apathetic about merging their nation into a new and determinedly bloodless civic identity, a European Canada or Australia. 

In waiting for the English to begin to hate, England’s powerless radical Right, like its dominant equivalents on the liberal Left, have been left waiting a very long time. Here is the irony of Lucas’s position: lamenting an English exceptionalism her worldview depends upon, and yearning for political unity with a Europe whose politics she detests. Perhaps Westminster politicians like Lucas, so keen to ward off the dark potential of English ethnonationalism, can cut the English nation a little slack: if the fearful dragon ever existed, it seems to have died long before our time.

Given its distinctiveness, it’s hardly surprising that the region has a long history of being run as a separate political unit. By holding out against Viking invasion, the Northern Anglo-Saxons established an Earldom of Northumbria that reached from the Forth to the Tees (before pressure from the Scots pushed its northern boundary south to the Tweed). Not only was this territory topographically encapsulated — “between the brine and the high ground and the fresh stream water” — but it was also defined by its sheer distance from London and the centres of royal power. The armigerous families who then controlled the medieval North East, such as the Percys and the Nevilles, had an unusual degree of independence within an English polity that had centralised much earlier than its European neighbours.

To a historian, therefore, there is something very satisfying about the recent news that the Government has approved a “devolution deal” to create a new “North East Mayoral Combined Authority” with an elected Mayor. This is an important milestone in the evolution of what is arguably England’s most well-defined region, as the new entity will cover the historic counties of Northumberland and Durham — the land from the Tweed to the Tees — and the cities, within them, of Durham, Sunderland and Newcastle upon Tyne.

The hope is that the North East will thrive under a unified political leadership; and the region’s history suggests this optimism is not unfounded. In the Early Medieval period, the Prince Bishop of Durham presided over his Palatinate from his palace at Bishop Auckland like a Rhineland Fürstbischof. He had the powers of a king to hold courts, raise armies (to defend the border against the Scots) and even mint his own coinage — with silver Durham pennies issuing from Silver Street by the River Wear. This quasi-independence created a cadre of educated clerks to manage the county palatine’s legal, financial and administrative affairs. The presence of this proto-civil service contributed to both local economic development — the Prince Bishops were enthusiastic participants in the coal trade — and perhaps even the unusually high levels of literacy in the far North of England.

This was a sort of English devolution, avant la lettre, and meant that by the 17th century, County Durham was the only part of England which returned no members of parliament. The first MPs for Durham were elected in 1675, a full 410 years after a comparable cathedral city such as Lincoln; the Prince Bishop only returned his powers to the crown in 1836. So there is a sense that the governance of the North East was only settled around the same time as the United Kingdom itself was forming. Some excitable Northumbrian patriots (probably including me) might even consider us to be the fifth nation in the union.

But if the region’s political independence was dwindling, its economic independence was growing. The early modern period saw the temporal power of the Prince Bishops eclipsed by that of the coal barons who grew fantastically rich from the collieries of Northumberland and Durham. By the 18th century, control of the northern coal trade had fallen into the hands of a cartel of wealthy families known as the “Grand Allies”, whose price-setting so irritated the City of London that they nicknamed them “the Newcastle Parliament”.

This oligarchic and proto-corporatist approach to conducting business was typical of the North East, and would recur in the 19th century, when a handful of plutocratic industrialists dominated the civic life of the region, and wielded almost feudal power: men such as the armaments tycoon Lord Armstrong, the shipbuilder Sir Mark Palmer, or the great ironmaster Sir Lowthian Bell. Studying the region for his report on “Industrial Tyneside” in 1928, the sociologist Henry Mess observed that “the feudal tradition is strong in Northumberland”, “and there is not the sharp divorce between it and the new industrialism which is found in most areas”.

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In many respects the Trade Union barons who emerged in the 20th century to challenge the oligarchs could be similarly feudal — especially Durham miners’ leaders such as John Wilson, Peter Lee and Sam Watson. And yet the Trade Unions in the North East achieved much for their members — not just better pay and conditions, but in their pioneering work on housing, schools, sanitation and care for the elderly. Organisations such as the Durham Miners Association achieved something approaching a welfare state while William Beveridge was still in short trousers. For as John Tomaney has argued so cogently, “County Durham thrived when it had the power collectively to help itself”. History offers something of a blueprint to a region thinking anew about how to exercise local power to improve the lives of its people.

A word that was often depicted on miners’ banners in shimmering gold like the Name of God was “nationalisation”, and yet nationalisation turned out to be a mixed blessing. For as much as it delivered gains in living standards — which my grandparents from the Northumberland coalfield spoke about with wonder for the rest of their lives — it inevitably led to centralisation. It left the North East vulnerable to capricious and parsimonious Westminster governments. Not only that, it disempowered the civic and associational institutions that had once had the confidence to tackle the scourge of poverty in old age, or build something as beautiful as South Shields Town Hall, where the debates “had the importance of those in Cicero’s Senate or Pitt’s House of Commons“.

The North East has been hammered by austerity, with funding cuts to councils of 79% since 2010. These have come close to undermining the functioning of local government altogether. But municipal leaders themselves have come to recognise that the principle of devolving power matters almost as much as the funds that come with devolution.

Reading about the latest development, I was particularly delighted (and not a little surprised) that the seven North East councils have managed to overcome the parochialism and local rivalries that have stymied municipal coordination in the region. “They have a beef that goes back centuries”: what Tony Soprano once said of the Balkans could be said of Newcastle and Sunderland. From the English Civil War, during which they took different sides, to the previous attempt at regional governance — the short-lived Tyne and Wear County Council, which was perceived to favour Tyneside excessively — mistrust and bad feeling have for too long percolated from the football terrace and message board to the political sphere. Despite evidence that shows that people in the North East have the greatest sense of belonging to their region than anywhere else in England, we’ve memed ourselves into thinking that Tyneside and Wearside are so totally incompatible that we can’t present a united front — even as the North of England’s other great conurbations have surged ahead with their own elected mayors.

That’s not what the North East wants anyway, some would argue. The shadow of a 2004 referendum hangs over any debate over devolution in the region. Rejected by almost 78% of voters, it’s often held up as evidence that there is no appetite for devolved power. But it took place in a different time, when there was a Labour government in office that was spending big in the region. The cabinet was stuffed full of North Eastern MPs, including the PM himself. And the Yes campaign was vague and complacent, while the No campaign tapped into a burgeoning anti-politician rhetoric, as well as the fears in the south of the region that this would be an assembly run from, and in the interests of, Tyneside (fears exploited skilfully by a trainee political Svengali from County Durham called Dominic Cummings, a key figure in the No campaign).

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The question remains, then, as to whether this new mayoral authority will receive a public mandate. But the North East only ever thrived under local political leadership. As a distant outpost of the over-centralised British state — still reeling from the effects of the First World War, let alone the Second — it has been declining for over a century. For all the boosterism about being the only region with a positive balance of trade, the North East is now the poorest, unhealthiest and unhappiest region of England. It regularly tops the charts for “deaths of despair”, with a suicide rate twice that of London; 38% of local children live in poverty; and GDP per capita has plummeted in the North East from 93% of the national average in 1981 to 73% by 2017. No other English region has suffered such decay.

But something is stirring in the North. A phalanx of City Region “Metro Mayors” are establishing new centres of independent power and influence, while attempting to move beyond the belief that Westminster is both the cause of — and the solution to — all our problems. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that whatever the problem, it is always someone else’s fault. Especially in politics,” wrote Jamie Driscoll, one of the likely contenders for the North East mayoralty, recently. “What, though, if there are some genuinely difficult problems to solve?”

There certainly are. Labour Together’s recent “Plan for National Infrastructure” argued that Britain’s “urban hinterlands, small cities, towns, coastal and rural areas… are experiencing forms of economic ‘undevelopment’”. This would present a daunting prospect to any government, but could an elected mayor for the lands between the Tweed and the Tees catalyse a Northumbrian renaissance?

Maybe. Certainly, the nationalising and centralising tendencies of the British state over the past century have disenfranchised the regions of England that might look enviously at the thriving German Länder — with their networks of regional banks and vocational training centres — and wonder what went wrong. For there’s a prize to be seized in the North East. The region that arguably did more than most to carbonise the planet might lead the way in decarbonisation, and create meaningful work. It might even rediscover the traditions of bottom-up social and economic development, and become one of the great heartlands of technical innovation, associationism, self-help and co-operation. Never again, we must hope, will talented locals like Dr Fiona Hill — recently installed as Chancellor of Durham University — be told that “There’s Nothing for You Here”.

Every football fan grew up watching the World Cup, but for most in Wales it was always someone else’s party. We’d come to expect disappointment. It wouldn’t have been so bad had we not had to watch the world’s biggest sporting competition through a UK-media that assumed every viewer was an England fan. To make things worse, we were always subject to a barrage of “Come on England” advertising in shops and on television. During the 1998 tournament, I wrote to my local supermarket in Cardiff to complain it was full of England flags. They replied, with more than a touch of sarcasm, that they’d get behind Wales if we ever qualified. Well, now we have — and tonight are taking on the English team we were tacitly expected to support.

The current buzz around football in Wales represents more than just matters on the field. Unlike other Welsh national institutions, the Football Association of Wales (FAW) has been unashamedly political in recent years. Players have received lessons on Welsh history and official social media has marked important anniversaries. The official Welsh World Cup song is “Yma o Hyd”, an Eighties anthem that proudly declares that the Welsh are still here, “despite everyone and everything”, despite Thatcher and her “crew”. It was written and sung by Dafydd Iwan, a former president of the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru, who was imprisoned several times during the Sixties and Seventies civil disobedience campaign for the Welsh-language rights. The FAW’s video for the song includes footage of those protests, and iconic moments from Welsh history such as the 1984-5 miners’ strike and the flooding of the Tryweryn valley in the Sixties to build a reservoir for Liverpool. And the interweaving of historical archive with contemporary scenes of flag-waving fans resembles a video by the campaign for Welsh independence. Whereas once this would have been controversial, it has been embraced by most fans regardless of their politics and language.

The Welsh language has been central to Welsh identity and the historic Welsh independence movement. Welsh has been used and respected by the FAW, not just in a symbolic way but in interviews and press conferences, showing the world and the Welsh people that it is a living language. For more than a century, parts of the Welsh population had a schizophrenic relationship with Welsh. They were proud that it existed but also prone to think that it had no practical use, that it was a language of the past, not the present or the future. The FAW have challenged that view, helping normalise the language by using it where English might have been easier and more widely understood. The last line of the national anthem translates as “May the old language endure”. In the FAW’s actions, there is hope this can become reality.

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But football can also give a misleading picture of modern Wales. The Welsh language is only spoken by around a fifth of the population. Its future in its rural heartlands is endangered as young Welsh speakers move away in search of jobs and affordable houses and their place is taken by older English migrants. In urban areas, the language is undergoing something of a revival as more and more parents choose to send their children to Welsh-medium schools, but that can make those children think of the language as something educational and consequently uncool. The playgrounds of those schools are dominated by the English language. Too often their pupils make little of Welsh after they leave.

The particularly assertive and self-confident sense of nationhood that is depicted around football is also misleading. Support for Welsh independence has risen dramatically since Brexit but it remains no higher than maybe a quarter of the electorate. The emotional Britishness that held the union together is fading with generational change, but the old ideas that Wales is too small and too poor to be independent remain very powerful. Migration from England has changed the dynamics of Welsh society. In the 2011 census only 66% of the population recorded their national identity as Welsh. In a recent YouGov poll, 17% of respondents in Wales said they would be supporting England at the World Cup. The proud Welshness so evident in football is not shared by the whole population.

Yet sport has been fundamental to why Welsh identity has survived in the modern period. Through the historical accident of the two sports being invented in the UK, Wales had its own national teams in football and rugby. In the face of internal political and linguistic divisions, these teams provided an emotional symbol to unite behind. It allowed both migrants and the different forms of Welshness to come together and reminded the Welsh, and the wider world, that Wales was a nation. In the face of the immense cultural and political shadow of England and the absence of any real political self-government before 1999 this mattered. The historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote that the “imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 named people”. In Wales, there has been little else that has done this.

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Wales has never been a nation

By Polly Mackenzie

Since the advent of devolution, sport should matter less. The actual devolution referendum in 1997 was won with a majority of less than 7,000 and just a quarter of the total electorate voted in favour. But today it is only a fringe that wants rid of the Senedd (the Welsh Parliament). As political scientists say, devolution has become the settled will of the Welsh people. As is so clear in football, the Welsh have become more comfortable being Welsh. But devolution has in many ways been a disappointment. There are fine words about inclusivity, environmentalism and economic regeneration but little real action. A third of Welsh children grow up in poverty. Waiting times for NHS treatment are much longer in Wales than England.

Yet the Welsh Labour Government gets an easy ride. The Conservative opposition suffers from remarkably poor leadership and has yet to find the distinctive Welsh voice it needs if it is ever to make significant electoral gains. The nationalist opposition is not really an opposition at all. It has an agreement of cooperation with Labour and is often reluctant to criticise anything the Welsh government does, seemingly for fear of being seen to criticise the very concept of devolution. The London media is not interested in Welsh politics, while the Welsh media is too small to offer substantive criticism. The result is that, after 23 years in power, Welsh Labour are secure, complacent and perhaps even arrogant. They made a song and dance about managing Covid in their own way and yet they refuse to hold a Welsh inquiry into what happened.

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Wales’s smallness contributes to this. Everyone in Welsh public life seems to know each other. In the media, academia and the voluntary sector, the networks that give people access to funding and power are too small to risk rocking the boat. Rather than criticise, it is often easier to celebrate, and the Welsh media’s upbeat treatment of the World Cup is evidence of this. There has generally been less discussion of the politics of Qatar than in the London media. The Welsh Government has a presence at the tournament and put chasing investment and tourism opportunities before its stated principles of equality and diversity. Yet it has not had substantive criticism for this. Even complaints about the tactics and squad selection were responded to angrily by some fans, who seemed to think it was unpatriotic or ungrateful. In Wales, we too often just seem happy to have qualified. We have waited too long for this for politics to get in the way.

But we shouldn’t just be happy to be there. Our game has matured enough that we should be debating team selections and tactics. Likewise, we shouldn’t just be content that, after centuries of governance from Westminster, we now have our own Senedd. We need to be critical of our institutions and our government. We need to move beyond celebrating the fact that Wales and Welshness are still here and start asking where we are going next. Football shows how deeply many care about Wales, but that passion and patriotism has yet to be put to full use.

With lockdown sceptism having proven itself not very popular with populist voters, another cause presents itself in the form of “devoscepticism”.

Next year marks the 25th anniversary of the referendums that began devolution in Scotland and Wales. The first, and most radical, of the big New Labour reforms has long outlasted New Labour itself, and a quarter of a century on, what have we got to show for it? The devosceptic answer is this: SNP rule in Scotland; and not much of anything in Wales. Devolution has been a disappointment, and a failure.

Just as unionists warned, home rule has empowered nationalists and marginalised unionist parties, leading to one-party state in Edinburgh with all the corruption and incompetence that goes with it.

In those areas where power is devolved, such as education and health, the SNP has performed poorly. Evidence of a Scottish or Welsh culture renaissance is thin on the ground, and the main growth industry associated with the devolved administrations is the growth of government itself. Just as the Eurosceptics of old longed to be rid of the Eurocrats, the devosceptic bugbear is the “devocrat”.

Is it any wonder, then, that a small, but growing, band of devosceptics scent an opportunity here? Yes, they may be few in number — but 20 years ago the same could be said about the early Brexiteers. So could the anti-devolution movement become a serious force?

Politicians aren’t popular, especially those deemed surplus to requirements. Reversing devolution in Scotland and Wales would mean getting rid of 189 MSPs and AMs — plus all the hangers-on, of which there are many.  And public hostility to paying for the apparatus of politics is a potent force. It proved decisive in the 2004 referendum on the creation of a North East regional assembly and the 2011 referendum on electoral reform. Those two paved the way for the biggie: the Brexit referendum.

Already, the devosceptics have a voice in the media: try Googling “devocrat” — a word which no one uses with admiration, but which is already gaining traction just as so much of the language of Euroscepticism helped sow the seed of Brexit.

In May’s elections the anti-devolutionists are also set to establish a political bridgehead. Polls show that the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party (whose purpose you can probably guess) will win its first seats in the Senedd. “Abolish” is full of former-UKIPers and they’ll be hoping that 2021 is the start of bigger things just as 1999 was for Nigel Farage.

And yet, I fear — or, rather, hope — that the devosceptics are doomed to disappointment. Devoscepticism is not the new Euroscepticism. Look beyond the superficial parallels and it soon becomes apparent that the two causes — and their underlying dynamics — are completely unalike. It also becomes clear that there is no going back on devolution; instead something else needs to be tried to correct the mistakes made by the Blair government.

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Has the EU lost its mind?

By Peter Franklin

Let’s start with a point that ought to be obvious, which is that Scottish (and Welsh) separatism is first and foremost a British failure — specifically that of the British political establishment. With great power comes great responsibility — so when millions of people yearn for something as disruptive and painful as leaving the United Kingdom, the responsibility has to lie primarily with those who had — and still have — most of the power.

The devosceptic agenda, however, puts all the focus on the failings of Edinburgh and Cardiff, therefore avoiding the underlying problem. Devolution in its current form has not — as promised — halted the march of Scottish nationalism, but that doesn’t change the fact that the stresses and strains of the Union precede devolution by decades. Unless the devosceptics have anything to say about that, then they don’t have anything to say at all.

Let’s not forget that prior to 1997, there was an explicitly anti-devolution party — called the Conservative Party. You may recall how that worked out for them. From holding half of all Scottish seats in 1955, they went down to zero by 1997 — and zero in Wales too. Even they got the message after that.

In any case, Eurosceptics, of all people, should understand that voters don’t like being ruled from distant places. Westminster was to pre-devolution Scotland and Wales what Brussels was to pre-Brexit Britain. In many ways, it was worse. At least the UK was never under direct rule by a team of ministers headquartered in the Berlaymont. And only some of our laws were decided in the European Parliament.

Also I don’t remember any occasion when the EU trialled its least popular directives in the UK first — unlike Margaret Thatcher’s government, which introduced the hated Poll Tax to Scotland a year before England and Wales. Whatever you think of Scottish separatism, it is a monster of Westminster’s making.

Of course, the parallels are far from exact but, being Eurosceptics, devosceptics ought to have a sense of what it feels like to have your future decided by institutions in which you’re outnumbered by outsiders. What part of “taking back control” don’t they understand?

This is also about the principle of power sharing. We’ve already had eleven years of Conservative government. Given the state of the opposition parties in England it’s likely that we’ll have many years more. Indeed, it’s not impossible that we could see a situation like in Japan where one party governs for decades on end. This might work in a consensus-driven society with a highly unified national culture, but Britain is not either of those things. We are a nation of nations — of different sizes and political predispositions. Such a situation would be torment to most Scots.

Devolution therefore provides a vital safety valve, a mechanism by which the Westminster system can persist but without giving the dominant English party exclusive power over the whole of the UK.

That’s why the boo-word “devocrat” is so ill-judged. Devocrats are in fact democrats. As individuals and as governing parties they are voted in directly by the Scottish and Welsh electorates — and they can be voted out again. They couldn’t be less like the Eurocrats we’ve just freed ourselves from. Whether you like Nicola Sturgeon or not — and I’m about as big a fan as Alex Salmond is — she has democratic legitimacy.

But, of course, for devosceptics that’s the problem. If the SNP secures a majority in May, then the pressure on Westminster to concede another referendum on Scottish independence becomes overwhelming.

Well, so be it. It is completely consistent with the principles of British Euroscepticism to give the people — in this case, the Scottish people — the deciding vote on that most fundamental of democratic questions: who governs? Brexit supporters in the Government, and the London media, can hardly complain if Scottish voters demand that its government carries out their wishes.

If such a vote is what Scotland truly wants, it’s not our place to suppress it. After all, isn’t that what the pro-EU establishment did to a number of countries which voted against them, and what EU supporters in Britain tried to do after the 2016 vote?

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How the EU humiliated itself

By Peter Franklin

There are of course matters to settle about the timing of the referendum, the wording of the question and who can vote. The UK Government should be adamant that the Covid recovery comes first; that the question presents a clear and explicit choice between leaving and staying in the United Kingdom; and that Scots who live outside Scotland should not be disenfranchised. However, the principle of Scottish people deciding Scotland’s future should never be in doubt.

In any case, what’s the alternative? A constitutional ban on independence referendums forever? Lock up the SNP leadership? Force Nicola Sturgeon into exile? This is Britain, not Spain.

We’d do better to follow the Canadian example instead, the only country to democratically neuter a secessionist movement. Back in 1980 the French-speaking province of Quebec held an independence referendum that was defeated. Then a landslide election victory for the Parti Québécois (the equivalent of the SNP) led to second referendum in 1995, but that too was defeated — though more narrowly. At the time, independence for Quebec looked inevitable, the result of unstoppable trends; today, the PQ is in long-term decline, independence is off the political agenda and the province is governed by the centre-right Coalition Avenir Québec.

Perhaps the single worst argument for reversing devolution to Scotland and Wales is that devolution is imperfect and full of contradictions. Well, of course, it is! There’s no such thing as a perfect democracy. The rule of the people, in all their wondrous complexity, will always and everywhere produce messy compromises and inconsistencies.

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Those who think we should give up on devolution because we’ve never really solved the West Lothian question remind me of the anti-Brexiteers who relentlessly focus on all the problems caused by leaving the EU. In both cases, they overlook the much greater problem of their preferred alternative. In the case of the continuity Remainers, it would have meant submitting to a sovereignty-destroying superstate. In the case of the devosceptics, it would mean going back to an outdated, over-centralised model of Britain that the people of Scotland and Wales have clearly rejected.

We don’t have to stick with Tony Blair’s botch job, and there are other ways of decentralising a country. We could learn a thing or too from the Swiss, for instance — who have been at this lark for a lot longer than we have. Without a common language to unite them, they’ve nevertheless held their confederation together for centuries — and they’ve done it through fiercely-defended localism and direct democracy.

A system of cantons with local responsibility for their finances could suit the nations of the UK very well. Each area could come together with other areas as they saw fit — so that our governing institutions could emerge from the bottom-up instead of being determined by Westminster.

But that’s just one option. The key point is that if you believe that our model of devolution doesn’t work, then you need a positive vision to put in its place, not some unloved and long-discarded ancien regime that can never be brought back. Devolution can and should be re-done, but it can never be undone.

That the Government is under pressure from the national and not just the Scottish press for calling devolution a disaster is a similarly depressing sign. Of course devolution was a disaster, for the British state: that was the express intention of the Scottish nationalists when they demanded it. If Blair’s intention was to arrest Scotland’s steady march towards secession, then the results were clearly yet another, and perhaps the most dangerous, of the many slow-fused time bombs he emplaced beneath the structure of the United Kingdom.

There are four possible outcomes now, and none of them is especially attractive: the first is that Scotland leaves the union, and the pieces fall where they will; the second is that Scotland’s government is persuaded to stay under the same roof, in the fraught and loveless cohabitation we are now accustomed to; the third is that we plunge headlong into a great constitutional reordering, a full confederalisation of the United Kingdom, incorporating either an English parliament, or an England broken into pieces small enough to assuage the periphery; and the last is that London calls last orders on the devolution experiment and rings the bell for Westminster rule once more.

The last idea, popular among some online Unionists, though far beyond the bounds of reality, would call for the dramatic reassertion of the power of the central state, a high-stakes gamble by the executive that the powers relinquished with such fanfare a generation ago can be suddenly reclaimed without aggravating crisis. Decisive as the idea may be, the hurdles it faces are most likely unsurmountable.

No matter how bloodlessly and bureaucratically the task was carried out, revoking devolution would surely inflame Scottish sentiment to a degree no Westminster government could long survive. Would the Scottish police, like their Catalan counterparts, put down the street protests that would likely ensue? If anything, Westminster is dependent on the Spanish state to wield the metaphorical baton for it, by blocking Scottish entry to the EU for fear of the precedent it would establish for its own separatist nations. 

But Britain is not Spain, and the idea of sending English police north of the border to shutter the Scottish parliament is unthinkable, not so much for any legal reasons but because the reaction of the London press would soon make the entire country ungovernable. The wave of political mania unleashed by Brexit, with its entire cast of resistance QCs and online political celebrities, buoyed by the grey-haired legions of Guildford and St Albans, would be dwarfed by the derangement unleashed by so stirring and romantic a cause; and a good proportion, perhaps a majority, of the English electorate would feel more sympathy for the Scots trying to escape Westminster’s rule than the government trying to enforce it.

This option must, then, surely be struck off the list of potential outcomes, at least as a choice for Westminster: yet if the Scottish government decides to hold an independence referendum against London’s will, as the Catalans did, surely these exact same dynamics would play out, and with the same results. The option to escalate is in Scottish hands and not English ones: Westminster is forced to stake the union’s existence on a hand no one would ever have chosen.

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By Aris Roussinos

For those of us in what is irritatingly called the rump UK, clearly the time has come to make hard and serious decisions about our political future, before fecklessness and entropy make them for us. Could an independent England be a solution? If collapse is inevitable, or even probable, should we not start planning the successor state now, rather than leave it to be hashed out haphazardly in the courts and the press?

If the loss of Scotland would be painful, that of the Westminster apparatus would at least be some kind of liberation. At one stroke, if handled well, Westminster and all its baggage could be cut adrift and replaced with a more coherent and streamlined government, both closer to and less despised by the electorate.

An independent England would, it must be said, be a weaker state than we are accustomed to. Scotland possesses unique strategic and (through the solicitous self-interest of Labour governments past) industrial capacities necessary to maintaining our place among the upper-second tier of world powers. Perhaps a smaller, more inward-looking, even more Scandinavian England would not be a tragedy: we would be richer, for one thing, and we can always hope that the final severing of world power status would force a future English government to devote the attention to industry and infrastructure that has been neglected for so many decades.

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By Aris Roussinos

For Tories, there is the minor consolation that an independent England would at least be a significantly more conservative polity than the UK, and a less congenial political home to the London media class cheering on our nation’s dissolution out of some strange and self-negating sense of Brexit schadenfreude. A divorce would be sad, of course — they always are — but some good may come of it, eventually. Perhaps it is England’s destiny to be born not with any great burst of enthusiasm, but with a shrug of resignation, and only after all other options have been exhausted. 

If such a breach is too much to bear, then we are left with the alternatives of keeping things as they are, and hoping that the Scottish electorate changes its collective mind, or with the grand experiment of confederation. An English parliament in the singular, or a collection of regional ones, all within a looser union, would effectively mean a trial separation, and would at least offer the benefit of allowing England some meaningful practice in governing herself, for herself, before she is forced to do so by events out of her control.

If it meant the shuttering of Westminster, this would be no catastrophe in itself: a certain contempt for the inhabitants of the Gothic confection on the Thames is one of the few things that unites this country politically, and its mothballing might offer a rare moment of national consensus. 

Federalism could come in many different forms: a unitary English state within a loose union, an England broken into regions or even counties, or even a parallel reconfiguration of Scotland and Wales, so that across the entire country local governance take the place of nationalist fervour and sullen resentment. The idea should be seriously discussed, at least, before the moment for compromise is lost: yet whether a Westminster long-regretting devolution and an Edinburgh already scenting nationhood could accept such a half-way house, and its diminishment of both their power, is surely doubtful.

In truth, none of the options available to us is appealing, but then the status quo is not sustainable either. It is intolerable that the political future of the entire nation is kept waiting on the finely-balanced whims of four million Scottish voters. One way or another, the situation that currently exists must be resolved. If the Government intends to make the case for the union, then it should do so now, and not leave the great ship of state drifting rudderless to crash where it will.

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Trusting that the narrow economic self-interest of the Scottish electorate will make the case for the union on its behalf is madness: lurid warnings of economic disaster did not sway England’s voters away from Brexit, as Johnson well knows. The case for Scotland’s independence is a romantic one, like that of all nationalisms, and though the SNP shrinks from comparison to its sharper-clawed counterparts, it is a nationalist movement like any other, whose strange and irrational impulses will likely override any measured arguments made by Downing Street. 

Yet even if the Government devotes itself to maintaining the Union, it is long past time to begin planning for what comes after its collapse. Its heartland is in England, and England has been ignored in this debilitating psychodrama for far too long. Perhaps the birth of England as a coherent political entity will stave off rupture by proving to wavering Scottish voters that the stakes are real; perhaps it will do the opposite, and convince the nationalists that history is on their side; we do not know.

But a sober appreciation of the options available to the Government must surely underline that the responsible task ahead of it is to limit the damage that a disorderly and contested breakup of our nation will entail. Johnson is unlikely to go down in history in the manner he intended, but he can at least salvage something for the nation in the decisions he takes now, by preparing a working lifeboat for the mass of his electorate as we rush towards the rocks ahead.

She worked hard all week, she said, and enjoyed her weekends. She liked spending time with her friends and she was happy with her life in London. But often she would look around her at her fellow commuters, shoppers, drinkers and diners and ask herself: where are all the old people? And that question would trigger unnerving feelings of sadness, guilt and loneliness.

So she did something about it, and signed up to a charity initiative which got young people to go to the local hospice to share drinks, talks and dancing with the geriatric residents.

The lack of contact between young and old is a recognised and serious social problem. And it is closely related to arguments about intergenerational unfairness – indeed the UK think tank the Resolution Foundation has called for “a new generational contract” aimed at giving the young a better deal.

But how can there be a sense of solidarity between generations if there is so little contact between them? And how can there be more contact if the young and the old are living in different places?

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By Fred Pearce

Recent research by the Centre for Towns has starkly demonstrated that our cities are getting younger while our towns are getting older. Since 1981 the number of people aged 24 or under living in small towns has decreased by 270,000. And yet there are around 1.3 million more people in small towns aged over 45.

And if you look at the big ‘core’ cities – not just London but Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and the six other major metropolitan hubs in the UK – they are home to around 1.8 million more people  than in 1981, but there are nearly 200,000 fewer people over the age of 65. That’s despite the well documented ageing of our society – there are over two million more people aged 65 plus than in 1981, and yet cities have seen a fall in the numbers of old people living in them.

The trend is shown most clearly in the old age dependency ratio, which measures the number of people aged 65 or over per 100 people of working age. Up until around 1990 this ratio was fairly similar across different types of settlement, from village to core city. But ever since then, the smaller the settlement the higher the old-age dependency. In villages, it’s up to 36. In cities, it’s down to 19.

Some may not be worried about this – perhaps it is OK for every major city to look, demographically speaking, like a university, and every small town to look like a Florida retirement community. But we are living in an age of ever-increasing polarisation, with those who voted to Remain in the EU pitched against those who voted to Leave, graduates against non-graduates, Left against Right, and yes – young against old.

And on top of this it is an age of fragmentation and isolation. Echo chambers on social media, the slow death of the high street and the disintegration of collective institutions like unions and churches have left us with ever fewer places where we can talk across social difference. In that context, the age divide in cities and towns becomes less an oddity, and more a serious social crisis. In fact, most of these divides – from the electoral divide to the higher education divide – are encapsulated by the divide between cities and towns.

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Will Hispanic immigration make or break the land of the free?

By Henry Olsen

Cocktail parties in hospices, however well meaning, will not be enough to provide the bridge between young and old – we have to slow or reverse this trend of growing geographic division.

And to do that, we have to look at the economy. Graduates are flocking to cities (and smaller research centres like Cambridge) because that is where there are jobs and opportunities. Until we have an economy which provides decent work everywhere, age segregation will only get worse.

Within public policy, there are initiatives which are aggravating the divide between cities and towns. The government’s industrial strategy is supposed to do something about the stark regional imbalances in the country. And yet it is dominated by investment in high-tech industries which inevitably cluster in cities and already successful research centres. Devolution sounds like it might do something about the town-city divide, but as research by the New Economics Foundation shows, it is focused on empowering city centres, not the places around and outside cities that most need it.

We need an economy which gives people the space to work decent jobs and live decent lives wherever they are, not force them to live in metropolitan hubs while leaving the rest of the country to hollow out.

That means building transport and housing which supports towns to flourish and doesn’t just drain them of investment, talent and energy. And it means pursuing a devolution agenda which gives real power to smaller towns so they can build on local knowledge and create resilient local economies.

Ultimately, it means taking towns seriously again. These are places which, like all places, have meaning for those who grow up there. They are powerful sources of identity and belonging. As long as we have an economy which works ceaselessly against this sense of belonging, and which pushes nearly all young people – no matter their preferences – into major cities to look for work, then we will remain a fundamentally divided country.

Suggested reading

Is capitalism ‘productive’ or a city ‘diverse’ if they don’t leave room for children?

By Peter Franklin