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As Boris Johnson finished his televised speech on Sunday night, many viewers were confused by what he had just said. However, one thing about his message had been surprisingly clear. To the surprise of many who were watching, and perhaps even Johnson himself, it turned out that the coronavirus outbreak has transformed the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom into the Prime Minister of England.
In the past two months, we have all become familiar with the fact that Covid-19 causes its most powerful effects in those people who are said to suffer from “serious underlying conditions.” What is being clarified is that the virus can have a similar destructive effect on nation states and societies that also suffer from their own serious underlying conditions.
In the June issue of the Atlantic, writer George Packer presents a searing controversy in these terms against the United States’ response to the pandemic. Chronic diseases, a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a soulless economy, a divided and distracted public, had not been treated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortable, with the symptoms, “he writes. Britain also shares some of the United States’ untreated symptoms, although fortunately not all. But it also has many untreated symptoms of its own, particularly those associated with the weakening of the British state, tolerance for the widening of inequality, Brexit illusions, and Donald Trump’s refusal to see America because of the threat it is.
One of these underlying conditions is the broken governance of the United Kingdom. Some of us have been doing this for a long time. Our concerns are routinely rejected by those who claim to be wiser in the world because they are not conventional issues, or those who do not appear at the door. Even when Scotland has been run for 13 years by a party whose goal is to divide the UK, we still find ourselves with a shrug. This is so true on the right, where there is often an indifference to anything other than English, and on the left, that too often it is soft on the head about any nationalism except the English variety, which it detests.
When the health policy was returned in 1999, few anticipated an effect such as was made clear this week, as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland decided to stick with the closure strategy that Johnson began to relax in England. While differences in health policy were limited, as they have been for the past 20 or so years, to approaches on issues such as spending, prescription charges and social care, the differences between nations, while significant, they remained politically manageable at the UK Level.
But when, like this week, it became effectively illegal for the English to cross the Scottish or Welsh borders to do what they are now allowed to do, erroneously, in my opinion, a significant political line has been crossed. It would be interesting to see if historians can identify the last time the English were excluded from Scotland or Wales. But we must be talking centuries. In such circumstances, it is more difficult than ever to know what “one nation” conservatism now means. What nation and what UK?
Loosening UK bonds is a process. The context is constantly evolving. The dynamics of the relationship between England, on the one hand, and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, on the other, could even include the Republic of Ireland at this point, is different in each case. There are push factors, such as the general overcentralization of an often deeply inefficient British state, and pull factors, the most effective of which is the SNP’s determination to dismantle Britain.
Covid-19 was unexpectedly inserted into this argument. At first, the pandemic functioned as a centripetal factor. When the UK government, with its deep pockets, placed itself firmly behind the self-interest of companies and workers across the UK, it provided a powerful reminder of the protective scope of the British state. But as the lifting of the blockade approached, the effect of the pandemic became increasingly centrifugal. Johnson’s desire, in part under pressure from the conservative party right, to encourage renewed economic activity despite the continuing pandemic, has encouraged delegate nations to move more cautiously and to more sharply differentiate themselves from Johnson and England . But it’s not all Johnson’s fault.
The result is a curious and still tentative British form of what Lenin once called “double power. “But it is growing and is significant. It became much more obvious with this week’s divergences in lifting the blockade. However, it has been there the whole time, germinating for the past two months, Scotland and Wales first. They sought small ways to assert their power to act differently in response to the common Covid-19 threat, with Northern Ireland’s authority to share power in their wake.
It does not yet add to a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain. In fact, it may have reached its zenith this week, because northern Scottish, Welsh and Irish authorities will finally lift their blockades in a way that brings them closer to England’s more permissive approach. Also note that Nicola Sturgeon faces increasing challenges to her authority from other nationalist opponents and that her track record in managing the pandemic is far from impeccable.
However, Covid-19 is proving to be a wake-up call on serious flaws in the UK constitutional order and its sense that it would be unwise to ignore it. Things could become more conflictive, not less. The case of a more federalized United Kingdom, with the same degree of local self-government and double sovereignty, is getting stronger. We don’t live in the failed state that Packer sees in America. But we live in one that fails, and we would be fools if we ignored it.
• Martin Kettle is a columnist for The Guardian
