‘Muscular Unionism’: The British Political Tradition Strikes Back?

Introduction

Since 2018 scholars and commentators have coined a number of terms to denote a marked shift in the UK’s approach to territorial management. Among them are ‘muscular unionism’ (Kenny and Sheldon, 2020b; Wincott et al., 2021b), ‘hyper-unionism’ (Kenny and Sheldon, 2020a: 2), ‘know-your-place unionism’ (Martin, 2021), ‘aggressive unilateralism’ (Welsh Government, 2021) and ‘Anglo-centric British nationalism’ (Denham, 2021). These terms are rarely conceptualised or fleshed out, but they denote a number of observable changes in recent UK government policy-making. These include naming and prioritising ‘the Union’ within strategic policies; operating policy initiatives UK-wide that would previously have been confined to England; and rhetorical and symbolic acknowledgement of ‘the Union’. Many scholars have suggested that these developments constitute a step-change in the UK territorial management practice, and that they could threaten the existence of the UK in its current form.

In this article, I approach these observations from a different perspective. First, I suggest that the evidence for a strategic territorial management initiative of ‘muscular unionism’, seeking to roll back the UK’s 1999 devolution settlement in favour of a centralist and unitary state structure, is relatively thin. Observable changes in governance practice have been minimal: it is at the ideational and rhetorical levels that the more significant change has occurred. Second, I suggest that the ideational changes described by many as ‘muscular unionism’ lie squarely within the ‘British political tradition’ (BPT), and that they can be understood as the BPT reasserting its primacy within British governance in the face of threats, specifically from the Brexit process and increases in support for what Arthur Aughey (2018b) termed ‘endism’ – advocacy of the break-up of the United Kingdom into its constituent parts. Alternative approaches to heading off these threats, in the form of proposals to codify and clarify British constitutional practice, have largely been sidelined because they would demand fundamental changes to core elements of the BPT.

Third, contrary to some scholarly predictions, I suggest that these developments could come to constitute a successful territorial management strategy for the UK government. They are not merely forms of ‘muddling through’ or nascent approaches to statecraft (Andrews, 2021): there is an alignment between the BPT and an Anglo-British imaginary (Bryant, 2003; Wincott et al., 2021a) predominantly, though not only, found in England. This imaginary bridges law, constitution and national identity: for the UK, it provides the route through which ‘national identity is linked to constitutional practice’ (Colls, 2007). From the perspective of the public as well as of governing elites, it provides a stronger political foundation for a territorial management strategy than pursuing further constitutional codification and clarity. In particular, polling evidence on national identities, and preferences regarding the governance of England within the UK, suggests that a majority of English people continue to identify as both British and English, providing ongoing support for England’s traditional position as the core of the British state. There are many groups of voters that do not share this imaginary, and for whom this shift in rhetorical emphasis is unappealing, even provocative. But the Anglo-British imaginary may have sufficient visceral appeal, at both public and political levels, for changes in emphasis to become generally accepted and embedded.

The British Political Tradition

The concept of a BPT has a long pedigree (Birch, 1967; Greenleaf, 1983; Marsh et al., 2003; Marsh and Hall, 2016). The phrase denotes a body of ideas that inform British political and governance practice. Birch (1967) identified four main features: ‘a theory of democratic representation; the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty; the accountability of ministers to parliament; and the legal principles of the rule of law’ (Flinders et al., 2021: 5). The BPT is intimately bound up with the ‘Westminster model’ of strong majoritarian, power-hoarding governance, seeing this as the cornerstone of political stability (Marsh and Hall, 2007; Vines, 2014). It is both ‘a political culture or body of beliefs widely held in British society’ and ‘inscribed in the institutions and processes of British government’ (Marsh and Hall, 2007: 221). The BPT has ideational, institutional and cultural dimensions, and the dialectical relationship between the ideational and the institutional dimensions fundamentally frames political developments in the UK (Greenleaf, 1983; Hall et al., 2018; Marsh and Hall, 2016). When faced with challenges to traditional constitutional or governance practice, the priority of the core actors is ‘to preserve as much of the BPT as possible in changing circumstances’ (Hall et al., 2018).

A BPT that is distinct from constitutional principle is detectable in Dicey’s formulation of the UK’s constitution. Dicey treated parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law as descriptive and normative cornerstones of the British constitution, interpreting earlier writers, such as Coke and Blackstone. But although he advocated Parliament’s right ‘to make or unmake any law’, his later work introduced the idea that resistance to laws made by Parliament could be justified if they did not represent the ‘will of the nation’. Significantly, this claim arose in the context of Irish Home Rule debates in the 1910s. Home Rule, like ‘devolution’ in the twenty-first century, implied an erosion of the UK government’s power and an attenuation of its territorial reach. Dicey’s reaction was to insist on unionists’ right (in Britain and Ireland) to resist this threat. In his critique, McLean (2010: 133) argues that Dicey allowed ‘the political doctrine that the unity of the UK is best preserved by maintaining the unitary state, federalism being unsuitable’ to trump his commitment to the constitutional and procedural neatness of parliamentary sovereignty.

The BPT remains a cornerstone of elite actors’ and citizens’ understandings of the British system of government, and it is both descriptive and normative in character (Flinders et al., 2021; Richards et al., 2019). It has long enjoyed politically bipartisan support: while this article focuses on political developments under the Conservative governments of the 2010s and 2020s, the BPT’s framework has had equal influence on the perspectives of senior Labour politicians (Diamond and Richards, 2012; Flinders and Curry, 2008). Both unitary understandings of the Union (historically associated with the political right) and ‘welfare’ perspectives (associated with the political left) have supplied a convenient rationale for the BPT’s reflex centralism and its aversion to acknowledging distinct territorial claims within the UK (Brown Swan and Cetra, 2020; Gamble, 2016).

Scholarly debate on the BPT has only rarely overlapped with explorations of ‘unionism’. Much discussion of unionism has focused on the ideational level: Keating (2021) identifies a number of strands of thinking, including integrationist and patriot traditions, contractual attitudes to the Union and a civically focused neo-unionism. None of these engage to any extent with the questions of exercising power and the governance structures that animate the BPT. But in the absence of that engagement, unionist thought, particularly within governing elites, has tended to align with or be assimilated to the BPT. Central government’s preference for indirect rule of localities via ‘local collaborators’ has formed a cornerstone of territorial management practice alongside a recognition of Parliamentary sovereignty, and from the latter ‘the unitary nature of the territorial system could be inferred’ (Bulpitt, 1983: 223). Parliamentary sovereignty remains a core doctrine, but the practice of governance can be varied in the service of preserving the Union. This flexibility enabled a practice of governance that ‘present[ed] the state as unitary at the centre, but differentiated at the periphery’ (Keating, 2015: 179). That justified variations in the UK government policy in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during the twentieth century, potentially an example of the phenomenon of Union states recognising contractual limitations in some parts of their territory (Keating, 2021).

The imperative of retaining the BPT’s core principles has also prevented any serious consideration in the UK of federalism. A federal structure of government would imply a number of developments that would reduce the capacity for strong, accountable government, via parliamentary sovereignty and ministerial accountability, that is core to the BPT. Those include clear definitions of the powers of, and relationships between, different tiers of governance; shared rule within the functioning of central government (allowing the federal units to participate in governing at the centre); and justiciable rights for the federal units, likely with some form of written constitution underlying them.

This clash may be one explanation for why tentative proposals for ‘devo max’ or ‘federalism’ that appeared in debates in the late 2010s (see, for instance, Bingham Centre, 2015; Constitution Reform Group, 2015) failed to gain political traction. Similar tensions are likely to emerge from what Andrews (2021) calls ‘progressive unionism’, which embraces federalist thinking, Unionist thinking by the Welsh government, up to the proposals from the Labour Party’s New Britain report of late 2022, led by the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. This report proposes to introduce a statutory ‘Council of the Nations and Regions’, and to give a reformed House of Lords the power to reject bills pertaining to a range of ‘constitutionally protected statutes’: for instance, Acts concerning devolved competences (House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, 2022: 140). It would be a significant departure if any of these proposals come to fruition: as Andrews (2021: 520) notes, ‘UK Labour is constitutionally wedded to Westminster’s parliamentary sovereignty’. ‘Federal’ states are heterogeneous and the line between them and regional states, such as France, Italy or Spain, cannot be clearly drawn. But many of the Labour proposals would challenge the doctrines and practices of the BPT, and the federal practices noted above would step clearly outside them (see Martin, 2021).

The BPT’s unitary approach is complemented by a predominantly functional approach to governance, acknowledging territorial distinctions only where it cannot avoid doing so (Davies and Wincott, 2022; Kenny et al., 2020). This functional approach to governing is one of many contributing factors to ‘congested governance’ (Skelcher, 2000) in English local government, where it underlies contemporary critiques of ‘silo government’ and a failure to join up public services at a local level. As Hall et al. (2018: 367–368) state,

The largely centralised approach to territorial politics which the UK developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . . . was seen as likely to ensure continuity and stability across the four nations of the UK. This belief in the virtue of centralisation of power is clearly reflected in the notions of parliamentary sovereignty, the unitary state and unionism. . . . the BPT legitimises executive power.

The British Political Tradition and Territorial Management

Four practical features of territorial management flow from the BPT. First, the practice that Nevil Johnson termed ‘leaving principles inexplicit’ (see Mitchell, 2009): minimal codification or justiciable duties, and institutional reform only when unavoidable. Second, tacitly acknowledging ‘the English core of the British state’ (Bryant, 2003: 397). This aims to assuage fears of English dominance by cultivating a belief that British political stability rests on English restraint (Bryant, 2003; Cetra and Brown Swan, 2022; Keating, 2021; Kenny, 2021; Martin, 2021). Implicitly, the price – the existence of few distinctly English political or public institutions and the fusing of English and British administration (Diamond and Laffin, 2022; Gallagher, 2018) – is regarded as worth paying and of minimal salience to the majority of English voters (Aughey, 2016). Third, importantly, this acknowledgement does not extend into creating, or seeking to create, an explicitly integrative narrative for the UK on the cultural plane. Territorial management consists predominantly of constitutional practices intended to maintain central authority or central autonomy (Bulpitt, 1983); principles are left inexplicit. Fourth, political concessions to non-English parts of the Union, such as divergent policies and financial support, have been used as a management tool for intractable problems or crises. These have played a part in the development of different narratives about the Union’s essence and purpose, and about the nature of intra-Union relationships, as in Mitchell’s ‘state of evolving unions’ (Keating, 2021; Mitchell, 2009: 187, 2018).

The institutional reforms of the 1999 ‘Millennium Settlement’ (Keating, 2021; Wincott et al., 2021b) can be perceived as a significant departure from the BPT. The process known as ‘devolution’ comprised the establishment of new, comparatively powerful, democratic institutions, in a state commonly known for its embrace of centralism. Because of this, it may be easy to see the 1999 changes in historical institutionalist terms, as an example of a ‘critical juncture’ following a history of institutional stability (Thelen, 2009). Many scholars have suggested that UK devolution comprises a discontinuous change, driving a fundamental constitutional evolution within the UK (see, for instance, Bogdanor, 2009; Keating, 2021). But focusing on the new political institutions introduced by devolution serves to obscure a much broader story of constitutional continuity during this period. The UK government’s interaction with those new institutions since 1999 has fallen squarely within the BPT’s territorial management framework. Not only did the 1999 changes introduce minimal change to the institutional structure of the UK government – while downplaying intergovernmental relations (IGR) and avoiding justiciable duties wherever possible – but also at the ideational level, the BPT continued to animate the UK government’s everyday behaviour, leaving difficult issues to ad hoc management or still-developing conventions (Keating, 2021). IGR operated on a need-to basis; no attempt was made to defend the Union rhetorically, or codify or delineate the respective purposes of central and devolved governments within a consensual constitutional framework. That reflected a confidence that the ideational dimension of the BPT would endure following institutional reform.

Similarly, the UK government’s acquiescence in ‘permissive autonomy’ (Jeffery, 2007) for the devolved governments reflected previous practices of preserving the Union via informal concessions to its non-English parts. This explains the high levels of self-rule, minimal shared competences, generous financial settlements and budgetary autonomy with no conditional grants that have characterised UK devolution (Diamond and Laffin, 2022; Sandford and Gormley-Heenan, 2020). But viewed alongside the lack of change to the practices of the UK government after 1999, permissive autonomy contributed to a perception of a centrifugal devolution settlement, causing the UK to move towards what James Mitchell has described as ‘ever looser union’.

This view was encouraged by the competing constitutional frameworks that began to emerge, energised by the devolved governments (Sandford and Gormley-Heenan, 2020; Tierney, 2009; see also Flinders and Curry, 2008). Likewise, some scholars began at this time to analyse and articulate ‘unionism’ more explicitly (Keating, 2021), to account for the continued relevance of a supra-national Union while also accepting political demands from sub-national territories as legitimate. Keating (2021) describes this stance as ‘neo-unionism’: it is civic in character, viewing the Union state as a defender of universal values and pluralism, and embraces the differences expressed by political devolution.

However, neither of these developments impacted substantially on the practice of governance at the centre. UK governments of all political colours continued to operate within the BPT’s constitutional assumptions, confident that their own political power remained paramount. This accounts for their willingness to devolve additional powers between 2010 and 2017 and to accept the implicit ‘parity of esteem’ that accompanied their negotiation (Hall et al., 2018; Sandford and Gormley-Heenan, 2020). ‘Devo-pragmatism’ (Convery, 2020) or ‘passive unionism’ (Andrews, 2021) animated tactical concessions – in the form of further devolution of power throughout the 2010s – to preserve the core framework of the BPT. The ideational dominance of the BPT could even account for the UK government’s insouciance during the ‘existential threat’ of the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 (Kenny et al., 2020).

Clarity and Parity: Threats to the British Political Tradition

Given the apparent sense of ideational security displayed by the BPT in the 2010s, what explains the emergence of terms such as ‘muscular unionism?’ I argue that the BPT faced two novel challenges in the late 2010s. One was a rise in constitutional tensions arising from the process of Brexit. The other was a surge in sentiments associated with what Aughey (2018b) terms ‘endism’, in the form of support for independence for Scotland and Wales, and for the reunification of the island of Ireland.

A ‘wider resurfacing of Britain’s power-hoarding constitution’ (Ward, 2021: 905) quickly became evident under the 2016–2019 May administration, under pressure from the Brexit process. May famously referred to ‘our precious, precious Union’ in one of her earliest speeches as Prime Minister (Wellings, 2018: 62), and overt defence of the BPT ran through the 2017 Conservative manifesto (Richards et al., 2019). This rhetoric was paralleled by changes in practice during the process of Brexit. The Government frequently disregarded the devolved administrations’ desire to act as partners in the Brexit negotiations, and failed to obtain their consent for Brexit-related matters impinging on devolved responsibilities (Sandford and Gormley-Heenan, 2020; Wincott et al., 2021a). In ideational terms, when finding itself under pressure the May administration moved quickly from a ‘devo-pragmatic’ approach to an ‘ultra-unionist’ stance (Convery, 2020). The implication was that the traditional features of the BPT – parliamentary sovereignty and strong executive government – could, and would, be legitimately reasserted in a time of crisis.

These actions comprised a sudden retreat from the approach of ‘constructive ambiguity’, through which the UK government had acquiesced in competing narratives of sovereignty since 1999 (Sandford and Gormley-Heenan, 2020). It also undermined other emergent narratives, such as the idea of the Union as a voluntary Union of four nations, which had found cross-party support in 2016–2019 (Brown Swan and Cetra, 2020), and which even featured in a speech from Theresa May at the end of her premiership in July 2019. In turn, the devolved institutions invoked their own competing sovereignty narratives to justify how they sought to operate within the UK system of government. In effect, the tensions of Brexit brought ideational differences between tiers of government into the open. This was most evident in the first Miller case, where the Supreme Court found that parliamentary sovereignty was not affected by the reference to the Sewel Convention in the Scotland Act 2016 and Wales Act 2017. The Sewel Convention states that the UK government will ‘not normally’ legislate on devolved matters, not that it will never do so. In this case, the government advocate Lord Keen argued that ‘it would be for Parliament to decide whether or not it adheres to the convention as interpreted by the court’, which was described by Convery as an ‘ultra-unionist’ stance (Anthony, 2018; Convery, 2020). Similarly, the Supreme Court’s decision in late 2022 that the Scottish Government could not hold an advisory referendum on independence indicated that the statutory provisions of the Scotland Acts would continue to be interpreted in line with the BPT.

The Brexit period also saw a surge in the manifestation of what Arthur Aughey (2018b) termed ‘endism’. This is a predictive and normative narrative that the United Kingdom state will and/or should come to an end in its current form, via Scottish and possibly Welsh independence and Irish reunification. ‘Endism’ ‘is usually tied up with a “declinist” view of the United Kingdom, as constitutionally weakened, bereft of former self-confidence and purpose’ (Aughey, 2018b: 6). Manifestations of ‘endism’ in the late 2010s and early 2020s include increases in support for Scottish independence, which has hovered between 45% and 55% in most polls between 2018 and 2021; support of up to 39% for Welsh independence in polling in the same period; and support for Irish reunification falling not far short of that for remaining in the UK (Ashcroft, 2021). It has been abetted by much recent scholarly speculation that the future of the UK is uncertain (e.g. Cetra and Brown Swan, 2022; Garry et al., 2021; Kenny and Sheldon, 2021; Wincott et al., 2021a).

Complementary to the rise of ‘endism’ was the emergence of England as a territorial unit of administration by default (Kenny, 2021; Wyn Jones and Henderson, 2021). Although many UK government departments had operated almost entirely as England-only departments since before 1999, polling data only records significant levels of public grievance regarding English governance appearing in the 2010s (Wyn Jones and Henderson, 2021). That development was then complemented by the introduction of English Votes for English Laws (EVEL) in 2015. Perhaps because EVEL came to be innocuous in its practical effect, its symbolic substance has been largely overlooked. By explicitly demarcating the governance of England from the governance of the UK, it marked a departure from the BPT’s traditional dependence on ‘English restraint’. For the BPT, distinguishing England and the UK institutionally is a far more momentous step than devolving power to the non-English parts of the Union, particularly when complemented by the ideational phenomenon of public grievance. British constitutional thinking has never clearly distinguished England from Britain/the UK (Wincott et al., 2021b), and many scholars have suggested that a system of government that differentiated England clearly from Britain could damage the Union (Gamble, 2016; Hazell, 2006; Martin, 2021). EVEL was an attempt to manage intra-Union relations via clarity and codification, which subsequent changes have avoided.

It is significant that, when EVEL was abruptly abolished in July 2021, MPs drew on concepts, such as the ‘Union Parliament’ and ‘English restraint’ to justify the change. For instance, Jacob Rees-Mogg said that, through EVEL’s abolition,

all MPs are equal once again in a Parliament that considers the matters put before it from the broadest possible Union perspective . . .. We have now restored authority in this Parliament to address the problems of voters in every part of the United Kingdom. That is in all of our interests, because our country is much more than the sum of its parts (House of Commons, 2021).

Similarly, Michael Gove later described the House of Commons as ‘a constitutional arrangement in which the gentleness, patience and tolerance of the English people is displayed to great effect in making sure the United Kingdom works successfully’ (Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC), 2022).

Clarity and codification have featured in many other proposed responses to the challenges from Brexit and endism. They reflected a stance that the appropriate response to territorial management tensions was the ‘institutional fix’ – stronger, clearer and more legitimate governance practices. Thus many proposals have appeared since 1999 for institutional reform to reinforce the devolution settlement. These focused on strengthening IGR frameworks, introducing binding commitments on central government and accepting the principles of shared policy-making or even shared sovereignty (e.g. Airey et al., 2019; Bingham Centre, 2015; Constitution Reform Group, 2015; House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, 2015, 2021, 2022; Kenny et al., 2020; McEwen et al., 2020; PACAC, 2016, 2018; Robinson, 2021; Welsh Government, 2021).

At one level, these proposals are no more than demands for improved IGR practices and procedures, grounded in an uncontroversial aspiration towards effective governance. But to the extent that proposals for ‘institutional fixes’ undermine strong central government and parliamentary sovereignty, they clash with core elements of the BPT. The BPT could accommodate the democratic institutions introduced in 1999 as long as they operated in a familiar manner, but introducing binding practices and rules regarding how the UK government should interact with the new institutions, or seeking to fetter the UK government’s discretion, would be another matter entirely. Adherents of the BPT might fear that an increasingly clear constitutional settlement entrenching some form of shared sovereignty could lead to national identity and constitutional practice feeding off one another, speeding in lockstep towards a terminal challenge to the existence of the UK state (Airey et al., 2019; Keating, 2021; Robinson, 2021). Though the devolved institutions were originally intended to buttress the Union, specific types of constitutional concession could cast them as potential enablers of secession, ‘states in waiting’ (Wyn Jones and Henderson, 2022). ‘Endism’ has long played on this duality: Tom Nairn (1981: 63) noted in 1981 that ‘to give effective power away . . . the whole British political system [would have] to be altered’.

Culture Trumps Institutions; Promoting the Union

An alternative strand of thinking then emerged in the late 2010s. This sought to buttress the BPT, not via institutional fixes, but on the ideational plane. Most of the developments associated with terms, such as ‘muscular unionism’, emerge from this strand of thinking. Using rhetoric to strengthen the BPT is a significant shift, as explicit rhetoric promoting the Union is untypical of the British Political Tradition. I argue here, however, that this change does not amount to a comprehensive shift in governing strategy.

A critical development was the 2019 report Modernising the United Kingdom: Unleashing the Power of the Union published the think-tank Policy Exchange (Airey et al., 2019). This included a number of proposals for changes to governance structures, but also proposed explicit foregrounding of the Union within policy narratives. Many of the report’s proposals found their way into the Government’s Dunlop Review into UK government union capability (Dunlop, 2021). This report proposed a new minister with responsibility for ‘the constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom’; a new Cabinet sub-committee; a national fund ‘to initiate projects that strengthen the Union’; a single Permanent Secretary for the three territorial UK departments, to ‘give Union strategy a coherent voice within government’ (Dunlop, 2021: 10–11); and a UK Intergovernmental Council to replace the Joint Ministerial Committee structures. It is significant that most of Dunlop’s institutional reform proposals have not been progressed, though a new Intergovernmental Council was fleshed out in the Intergovernmental Relations Review published in early 2022 (Cabinet Office/DLUHC, 2022). The Prime Minister and Heads of Devolved Government Council, replacing the Joint Ministerial Council, met for the first time in November 2022.

Dunlop (2021: 24) also made many proposals on the ideational plane: mandatory training for civil servants to enhance awareness of devolution and the Union; branding of spending by the UK government in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland (but not England); staff interchange between the UK and devolved governments; and one board member in each Government department being responsible for ‘devolution capability and Union priority’. The aim was to make the Union ‘a mainstream consideration embedded in policy development, decision-making and delivery’ (Dunlop, 2021: 9).

The Johnson government’s flagship policy of ‘levelling up’ instituted a number of competitive funding programmes for local authorities on a UK-wide basis, managed centrally by the UK’s Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Previous comparable funds had operated within England alone, with ‘Barnett consequential’ funding flowing to the devolved governments. Andrews (2021: 516) uses the term ‘muscular unionism’ to describe this type of initiative specifically, which he sees as ‘a particular agenda to undermine the devolved administrations’.

Promotion of the Union has featured in Ministerial speeches and symbolic activities. In July 2021, the then-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government said ‘MHCLG has seen itself for too long as an England only department. We are one United Kingdom and MHCLG should aspire to represent and support communities in all parts of the UK’ (Jenrick, 2021). Similarly, the Secretary of State for Wales, Simon Hart, has said ‘the UK Government are not remotely ashamed to say that we intend to be a more prominent and visible Government for the UK in Wales’ (Welsh Affairs Committee, 2021). Boris Johnson (and subsequently Liz Truss) held the title of ‘Minister for the Union’ alongside that of Prime Minister. In 2020, the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) began to include Scottish and Welsh counties in its regular programme of flying county flags. Andrews (2021) describes these types of promotional activity as ‘activist unionism’.

A little More Conversation, a Little Less Action

These types of initiative reflect the territorial management stance of the BPT. They blur England, Britain and the UK, leave principles inexplicit, but stop short of an overt integrationism. However, it is far less clear that they amount to a governing strategy. Their political significance lies in the fact that they are articulated by the UK government, rather than in the strength of their impact on policy. They are peripheral when viewed alongside the totality of government practice. They can be seen as an example of ad hoc adaptations to the BPT aiming to bolster existing constitutional arrangements (Richards et al., 2022). This is evident in the extent to which they recall many long-standing features of British governance. For instance, connecting quick and visible domestic policy in the form of investment funds with ‘unionism’ signifies a move back towards political constitutionalism, as anticipated by McHarg and Young (2021). The Dunlop Review’s determination to avoid the creation of new (quasi-) legal obligations or veto players evokes Bulpitt’s (1983) ‘court autonomy’ doctrine. And rejecting institutional fixes as a core mechanism for policy change is redolent of ‘club government’ (Jennings and Lodge, 2019).

Indeed, despite Andrews’ (2021) claim of an agenda to undermine the devolved institutions, there is considerable evidence that strong devolved government in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland remain central to the UK’s territorial management strategy. For instance, the 2022 Review of Intergovernmental Relations, while remaining firmly within the BPT’s ideational framework, seeks to strengthen and regularise intergovernmental meetings and procedures, and to provide for increased transparency. Significant policy developments in 2021 took care to acknowledge the role of the devolved governments, such as Sir Peter Hendy’s connectivity review (Department for Transport, 2021), the increase in national insurance contributions for the ‘Health and Social Care Levy’ (HM Treasury, 2021), and plans for the reform of health and social care (Department for Health Social Care, 2021); this was also visible within the Truss administration’s ‘investment zones’ in late 2022. On a far broader level, the UK state’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic largely respected the division of powers between the UK and devolved governments. Certainly, IGR structures were poorly used, and UK government communications were often unclear (Diamond and Laffin, 2022; Giovannini, 2021) but the UK government did not usurp devolved competences or seek a wholesale reversal of the institutional changes of 1999. At the time of writing, the same pattern has held for the UK government’s response to the cost-of-living crises of late 2022. That the UK state’s responses to two major governance crises have respected the contours of devolved powers suggests that it is premature to identify a generational shift in the UK’s territorial management.

The label ‘muscular unionism’ has also been applied to various legislative developments in the late 2010s and early 2020s. There has been a marked increase in the UK Parliament legislating on devolved matters without the consent of the devolved administrations – something that had normally been avoided, in accordance with the Sewel Convention. Consent was withheld eight times by the devolved institutions in 2020–2022, compared with 11 times between 1999 and 2019 (Institute for Government, 2022). The most notable example was the Internal Market Act 2020. This Act obliges devolved governments to accept goods and services that comply with the regulatory requirements in other parts of the UK, even if they do not comply with their own regulatory requirements, and provides explicit powers for the UK government to spend funds on devolved matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In the longer term, the Act could undermine the voluntarism of the ‘common frameworks programme’ that governs the exercise of powers returning from the EU (House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, 2021; McHarg and Young, 2021; Wincott et al., 2021b). A similar long-term effect could arise from the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill: at the time of writing, this Bill would repeal most retained EU law as of 31 December 2023. The UK government has committed to preserving existing intra-UK divergence that is underpinned by EU law, but if all EU law were to be repealed, it could in principle be replaced by provisions that stood outside that commitment, thus enabling the UK government to regulate in areas that are currently devolved.

However, again, it is not self-evident that these two pieces of legislation form part of a wider perspective seeking to roll back devolved competences. They call to mind Bulpitt’s (1983) concept that an external support system underlies a state’s choices about territorial management. The EU served as an external support system for UK devolution, underpinning the division of competences between the UK government and the devolved administrations (Sandford and Gormley-Heenan, 2020). A focus on external support systems would suggest that this legislation is driven by the imperative to sign post-Brexit trade deals, and that the effect on intra-UK territorial relationships is a second-order concern for the UK government. As Andrews (2021: 517) suggests, such decision-making can be seen ‘not as statecraft, but simply as a response to the consequences of getting Brexit done’. Neither the 2020 Act nor the recent Bill have been accompanied by comprehensive attempts by the UK government to legislate on other devolved matters – and indeed neither piece of legislation actively erodes the powers of the devolved administrations. They would facilitate a government that wished to re-centralise some regulatory provisions, but that does not demonstrate that re-calibrating UK IGR is a core aim of either piece of legislation. Similar considerations can be applied to the UK government’s decision in early 2023 to veto Scottish Parliament legislation for the first time, under section 35 of the Scotland Act 1998. There is little to indicate that this is more than an ad hoc decision based on highly specific governance concerns.

Enduring Tradition: The Strength of the BPT in Popular Imaginaries

To what extent, then, will the initiatives described above have an identifiable impact on UK territorial management and territorial relationships? Many scholars (often in passing) predict tensions and instability, arguing that the explicit quality of the policies noted above will inflame intra-Union tensions and are at odds with both constitutional practice and public opinion. At best, in the words of Kenny and Sheldon, they take the view that, in the wake of Brexit and the threat of ‘endism’, ‘British politicians are going to have to engage with [devolution’s] . . . complex realities and the wider challenge of articulating a vision of the nature and purpose of the UK’s asymmetrical system of governance’ (Kenny and Sheldon, 2021: 86). Andrews (2021: 520) is more circumspect, warning against ‘constitutional determinism’ and suggesting that a combination of ‘muddling through’ and administrative flexibility, possibly supplemented by a ‘paternalist centre . . . [and] a new local clientelism’ could maintain the BPT for some time yet.

Here, I suggest that the BPT does indeed have enduring strength. However, an unacknowledged source of this strength is its alignment with an Anglo-British imaginary that has strong roots at the popular level (Hall et al., 2018; Wincott et al., 2021a). This imaginary stretches across law, governance and popular sentiment, finding reflection in much British constitutional thought from Dicey onwards (Wincott et al., 2021a). It sees England as the ‘beating heart’ of Britain (Wyn Jones and Henderson, 2021) and sees no need to distinguish clearly between Englishness and Britishness, nor, by extension, between English and British governance. The erosion of markers of territorial governance, such as the Sewel Convention and EVEL are low salience for this perspective: it would see nothing unusual in a member of the English public’s question ‘don’t we control Wales too?’ when stopped by the police for breaching lockdown in Wales (Cushion et al., 2020).

Blurred territorial identities within England are evident in quantitative data. Territorial identities in England have remained remarkably stable since 1999 (Denham and Devine, 2017; Jeffery et al., 2014; Kenny, 2021; National Centre for Social Research, 2021). In 2020, the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey found 46% of respondents were ‘equally English and British’, far higher than the other options made available (using a standard 5-point ‘Moreno’ scale). That implies that there is still no inherent contradiction, for much of the English public, in the idea that ‘English nationalism is formed around the defence of British sovereignty’ (Wellings, 2018: 375). This perspective does not prioritise territorial clarity: the idea of formalising England as a territorial unit within a four-way United Kingdom has limited appeal among English respondents. Twenty-two percent of respondents to the 2020 BSA survey supported an English Parliament (National Centre for Social Research, 2021): the percentage was 18% in 1999, and peaked at 29% in 2009. The 2014 Future of England survey found 31% support when respondents had no option of EVEL (Jeffery et al., 2016). A Panelbase poll in 2021, published in the Sunday Times, found 15% support for, and 60% opposition to, English independence. Polling during the 2010s found that English respondents were finely balanced on supporting Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales leaving the Union (Wyn Jones and Henderson, 2021). Notwithstanding Denham’s (2021) claim that ‘delineating England’s governance from that of the Union is now essential if any union of consent is to be sustained’, there is little evidence of an emerging national consciousness or ‘political community’ within England in the early 2020s that seeks to distinguish it from, and assert itself against, that of Britain or the UK (Gallagher, 2018; Gover and Kenny, 2018). The English core and the British state remain intertwined in terms of national identity as well as public administration. This also explains why the Labour Party’s New Britain report proposes altering consultative structures and informal practices in England, but stops short of a ‘progressive unionism’ that distinguishes England and Britain/the UK.

In the same vein, the blurring of England and Britain is an important contextual factor for well-publicised survey findings that large percentages of voters prioritised Brexit over retaining Scotland in the Union or avoiding a return to violence in Northern Ireland (Wellings, 2018; Wyn Jones and Henderson, 2021). Those findings could be portrayed as showing that English voters place little value on the continuation of the Union, but that interpretation may be misplaced. An alternative interpretation is that Anglo-British territorial imaginaries (or principles, such as ‘sovereignty’) only harden into defined constitutional stances in response to a challenge (Keating, 2021). This would align with a territorial management policy that focuses on the ideational plane: assertiveness matters more than what governments ‘really’ do. There is some tentative evidence of this from other survey data (Wyn Jones and Henderson, 2021), which displays minor spikes in English identification and support for changes to English governance at points when decisive political events have taken place in Scotland (e.g. 2007, 2011 and 2014). This latent, defensive English sentiment may accompany a belief that the non-English parts of the Union should accept Union on English terms (Wyn Jones, 2017); or that the strong central government characteristic of the BPT should be reinforced. It need not equate to distinguishing England from the UK. Polling data shows that, although ‘dissatisfactions’ (Jeffery et al., 2016) and ‘devo-anxiety’ (Wyn Jones and Henderson, 2021: 117) – and a desire to rebalance the Union (Kenny, 2016) – are widespread among English voters, they most commonly respond to these sentiments by wishing to renegotiate the terms of the Union, not to abandon it (Kenny, 2021; Wyn Jones and Henderson, 2021).

Promoting the Union – or Undermining It?

Despite the strength of the Anglo-British imaginary, the UK government’s recent approach may face challenges in the longer term. First, and most obviously, the stance described above focuses on English attitudes to the Union but it takes little account of developments and fluctuations in national identity in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Since 2016, in Northern Ireland, support for reunification has passed 40% at times, while support for a ‘Northern Irish’ identity, distinct from both British and Irish, has grown (McNicholl et al., 2018). Research suggests a greater potential for flux in constitutional preferences than might be expected among different parts of the population of Northern Ireland (Garry et al., 2021). Unlike Scotland and Wales, Northern Ireland has a statutory route to self-determination, backed by an international treaty. Meanwhile, in the same timeframe support for independence in Wales has peaked at 39%, and in Scotland at 58%, though it has dropped back since in both countries. Scottish National Party (SNP) support remains strong in Scotland, and the Welsh government has established an independent commission on the constitutional future of Wales, which will among other matters examine the case for independence.

There is no evident political or legal route for these sentiments to influence the majoritarian centralism of the British Political Tradition: the UK government’s gamble is that its assertion of the ‘power of the Union’ will continue to win sufficient political support to dampen ‘endism’. An alternative outcome is that this ideational shift, towards explicit promotion of the Union, could strengthen support for ‘endism’. In a state that has historically governed flexibly in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, this rhetorical change could be perceived as comprising an actual shift in practice, which might then stoke opposition to unionism in general (Kenny et al., 2020; Wyn Jones and Larner, 2020), with effects that are hard to predict. The potential strength of intra-Union tensions was visible in the 2015 General Election, which saw visceral English fears raised by the prospect of an electoral alliance between Labour Party and the SNP (Andrews, 2021; Gamble, 2016; Kenny, 2018a; Wyn Jones and Henderson, 2021). Equally, an atmosphere of explicit pro-Union rhetoric can cause policy proposals to land poorly with the devolved governments. This undermines IGR on a day-to-day basis: an example is the devolved governments’ responses to the IGR Review in 2022. As Nicola McEwen (2022) notes, ‘process and organisation matter, but the culture and conduct of intergovernmental relations matters more’. The presence of explicit pro-Union rhetoric in the political environment also encourages actors seeking to ascribe a strategic intent to the examples of recent legislative practice noted earlier.

Second, there are some groups of voters within England with whom more overt referencing of the Union may not land well. Polling data does suggest that a minority of English respondents do not adhere to the Anglo-British imaginary. There is some evidence that English identifiers feel more strongly English than British identifiers feel British (Denham and Devine, 2017; Wyn Jones and Henderson, 2021), and that they are more Eurosceptic and supportive of an English Parliament (National Centre for Social Research, 2021). This type of perspective would not, on the face of it, automatically support a renewed unionism. Recent initiatives may hope to neutralise this constituency’s ‘mood that the English should no longer be at the periphery of British statecraft’ (Aughey, 2016: 354), calculating that these voters have nowhere to go, in regard to their views on identity and governance. This may be politically savvy: such voters tend to be attracted as much by ‘muscular conservatism’ arising from a ‘hankering for the status quo ante’ (Wyn Jones and Henderson, 2021: 117) as by territorial concerns. Equally, some voters in England will have supported devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and/or have an ambivalent perspective towards the BPT, and may therefore be alienated by the explicit tone of recent rhetoric.

Third, the ideational shift within the BPT continues to circumvent the task of developing a positive case for the Union. Key texts (Airey et al., 2019; Aughey, 2018b; Dunlop, 2021) largely assume that the Union is beneficial while calling for that case to be more effectively made. In effect, these authors favour preserving existing UK state practices and cultural assumptions precisely in order to avoid complex and emotive questions regarding national identities and constitutions (Kenny, 2018a; Wincott et al., 2021a). This is a long-standing phenomenon and is itself arguably at the core of the BPT, but it has consequences – not just at the ideational level but also within the core of British public administration. Kenny et al. (2020) note an ‘absence of deep capability’ regarding territorial matters in the UK government. No attempts have emerged to develop binding narratives of the Union (Murphy and Evershed, 2022), calling to mind previous warnings that bringing an intellectual clarity to the Union could itself jeopardise its survival (Aughey, 2018b). A continued lack of a positive narrative, instead relying on practice, vestigial loyalty, and ‘leaving principles inexplicit’, could leave the BPT weakened in a crisis (Airey et al., 2019; Aughey, 2018a; Cetra et al., 2021). A potential source of crisis could be real or perceived material failures, which often boost support for political change (Wyn Jones and Henderson, 2021). It is no accident that support for Scottish independence reached its peak to date during 2020, when the UK government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic was widely perceived as incompetent (Andrews, 2021; Diamond and Laffin, 2022).

One critical dimension of the BPT in the 2010s was the concept of a ‘voluntary Union’ – in which all four territories are regarded as consenting to the UK’s continued existence (Welsh Government, 2021; Wincott, 2020). This perspective received rhetorical support from all political parties during the 2016–2019 May administration (Brown Swan and Cetra, 2020: 55), but by the end of that period it had arguably been eclipsed by a more ‘ultra-unionist’ position (Hayton, 2020). Under the Johnson administration, the refusal of the UK government to clarify when it would accept a second independence referendum in Scotland fed perceptions of a future Union ‘sustained by law alone’ (Martin, 2021: 6). These may have been augmented by the Supreme Court ruling in November 2022, which found that the Scottish Government could not lawfully hold an advisory referendum on Scotland becoming independent. Combined with the UK government’s refusal to hold a further referendum that decision leaves unclear how public opinion on Scottish independence could ever be tested in the future – undermining the concept of a Union of consent. This shift in emphasis could be a powerful weapon for ‘endist’ movements, not only on the terrain of governance and national identity but also on that of democracy and self-determination.

Conclusion

The recent initiatives associated with terms, such as ‘muscular unionism’, arise from a genuine conundrum: how a central government can manage relationships with strong sub-national governments within a constitutional environment founded on the avoidance of clarity. The initiatives noted in this article represent attempts to reassert the primacy of the UK central government in rhetorical terms, while avoiding a major political clash between central and devolved governments. They are a symptom of the BPT’s struggle to manage a surge in ‘endist’ sentiments within the UK, while also attempting to retain parliamentary sovereignty as the framework for territorial management. It should be acknowledged that the territorial management of a multi-national state, where one part forms 85% of the population, and large parts of the populace in that majority unit do not distinguish between it and the state unit as a whole, would be a challenging prospect for any political tradition (Wyn Jones and Henderson, 2021).

The challenges of accommodating territorial aspirations within the UK’s traditional practice of governance are not likely to recede if there is a change of government at UK level. Although the pressures driving it have appeared under UK Conservative governments, they are emphatically not restricted to the Conservative Party’s intellectual tradition. There is a bipartisan adherence to the BPT at the UK level (Andrews, 2021; Aughey, 2018b; Denham, 2021; Jeffery et al., 2016; Nairn, 1981; Richards et al., 2019), an outlook within which ‘comprehensive constitutional re-design remain[s] anathema’ (Wincott, 2020). The (Labour) Welsh Government’s (2021) discussions of constitutional options have so far found little reflection within the UK Labour leadership. This constitutional conservatism points towards a future Labour government, unless it has an active strategy to the contrary, adopting a ‘muscular unionist’ approach by default.

On current evidence, however, it is not clear that proponents of a more activist unionism or supporters of independence or ‘endism’ have the cultural or political resources required for ‘victory’. The policy developments, changes in legislative practice, and court judgements noted above have not generated clear shifts in public opinion in any part of the UK. In addition, no realistic legal or political route to the dissolution of the Union currently exists in the face of UK government opposition (Martin, 2021). Equally, there is little sign of a sustained and deliberate ideological push by the UK government towards a more unitary understanding of the Union. Territorial issues remain low salience for UK institutions of governance and English popular opinion alike. Possible catalysts for a further ‘endist’ resurgence include a rise in English opposition to the Union; a future Labour–SNP agreement at Westminster; or a rise in support for Scottish independence driven by intergovernmental disputes – but none of these appear likely at the time of writing. It is possible that, beneath occasional intergovernmental clashes, territorial relationships within the UK will continue to drift, with few political incentives to reset them.