The Brexit vote was a singular event that is one symptom of a continuing organic crisis of the British state and society and a stimulus for further struggles over the future of the United Kingdom and its place in Europe and the wider world.
(Jessop 2017: 35 – emphasis in original)
Speaking at the Conservative Party Conference in October 2016, Theresa May accentuated the need to preserve the integrity of the UK following the incredibly combative campaign:
[b]ecause we voted in the referendum as one United Kingdom, we will negotiate as one United Kingdom, and we will leave the European Union as one United Kingdom. There is no opt-out from Brexit. I will never allow divisive nationalists to undermine the precious union between the four nations of the United Kingdom. (May 2016b)
Even a cursory glance at the breakdown of the Brexit vote reveals clear divergences between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland: divergences symptomatic of the strained attachments between these component territories. As Marr accurately discerns, ‘there is no solution to Britain’s European problem that does not begin at home, with Britain’s British problem’ (2000: 206). The EU referendum reopened old wounds and accelerated unresolved grievances, exposing pre-existing intra-UK tensions and fundamentally altering the political landscape. Tom Nairn’s seminal text, The Break-Up of Britain (1977), identified these fraying ties in the years leading to the first devolution referendums, forecasting the dissolution of the state and forewarning of the potential neo-nationalisms which might emerge in the process. Subsequent post-Brexit negotiations substantiated his warning, revealing the sovereignty and centrality of Westminster, on the one hand, and the more minor role of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies, on the other hand, which lack a substantive voice in EU discussions.1 For Nicola McEwen, ‘the “one nation” nationalist rhetoric’ of Westminster following the vote, evident in May’s Lancaster House speech, ‘is at odds with the plurinational character’ of the UK, yet the condition of our increasingly disunited kingdom is intimately connected to the stance taken towards the EU (2018: 65). Michael Keating explains, it is precisely because both the UK and the EU are ‘plurinational unions without a unitary demos or shared telos’ that their asymmetrical designs complicate the relationship between nations (2018: 40). Devolution may have granted substantial powers and freedoms to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but the move further undermined the unitary state of the UK, exacerbated the ongoing English identity crisis, and failed to heal existing divisions. Further, devolution dispensations have been ‘asymmetrical [. . .] ad hoc and bilateral’, and only developed ‘in response to specific pressures and demands’ as opposed to the encouragement of progressive dialogues and equitable discussions (Wincott 2018: 20). The work of Michael Gardiner (2004) details how devolution was often pursued as a means of restricting regional unrest or delaying plans for national independence, as opposed to a genuine effort at redistributing power away from Westminster, effectively safeguarding the integrity of the British union under the guise of decentralization of Anglo-dominance. Further, the asymmetrical nature of devolution was bound to stimulate a backlash against subsequent devolutionary dispensations, while New Labour’s support for devolution – intended to create a more elastic and convivial union – also stimulated the drive for further devolutionary reform as a protective measure. This chapter therefore turns to the internal dimensions of the Brexit debate, namely the plurinational nature of the UK and the tensions between its component territories. It will be argued that diametrically opposed attitudes towards the EU are heavily influenced by historical perspectives on the state-of-the-union and ongoing political tensions following devolutionary reforms and independence referendums.
The Welsh disease
In Wales, devolution remains largely a defensive project. Welsh political institutions are seen as providing a degree of protection against the depredations of Westminster rather than an embodiment of an alternative politics.
There was widespread confusion in the aftermath of the Brexit vote as to why Wales, a major beneficiary of EU Structural and Investment Funds, was the only devolved nation to vote Leave in clear defiance of their pro-Remain political class. Welsh devolutionary processes developed in relation to EU membership with devolved power operating under a framework of EU law. The history of Welsh membership of the EU ‘is now indivisible from the story of devolution in the UK’, with ‘Welsh political architecture [. . .] developed within the context of two unions – the UK and the EU’ (Hunt, Minto and Jayne Woolford 2016: 826). Accordingly, the first section of this chapter will trace the key factors which stimulated the Leave vote in Wales and the direct intervention of authors in addressing these concerns, including the complex history of Welsh devolution, widespread industrial decline, and re-emergent questions regarding the place of Wales in the union.
In the 1975 referendum, Wales voted 65 per cent in favour of remaining in the Common Market in stark contrast to their Leave vote forty years later. From the 1980s onwards, Plaid Cymru perceived European integration to be a means of securing greater political autonomy, weakening the grip of Westminster and kickstarting the process towards independence in Europe (mirroring the volte-face of the SNP in this period). Yet the second successful referendum on Welsh devolution on 18 September 1997 generated a muted response. The creation of a Welsh Assembly, officially opened in May 1999, was only narrowly approved with a majority of 50.3 per cent based on a low 45.3 per cent turnout, reflecting the persistent divided nature of Welsh society when forc ed to consider their position within the British union and alternate opportunities for political redefinition.2 For Scotland, devolution strengthened a viable movement towards independence and nationalism functioned as a unifying force, but in Wales the issue forged deep divisions between the Welsh-speaking north-west regions and the industrial south-east (divisions clearly borne out in the regional breakdown of the EU referendum result). The assertion that Welsh devolution ‘remains largely a defensive project’, carrying an awareness of internal divisions, seems apt (Wyn Jones 2016).
However, the years leading to the EU referendum saw far stronger public support for Welsh governance and decentralization of Westminster’s powers. There was therefore justifiable astonishment when 52.5 per cent of voters, across the vast majority of Welsh council areas, chose to leave the EU. Although the EU referendum produced a noticeably higher turnout than earlier referendums (71.7%), the Welsh Leave vote illustrated the distinctive profile of Wales in comparison to Scotland and Northern Ireland. This profile can be understood by considering the sociopolitical context of pre- and post-devolutionary Wales, crucial failures of communication in the run-up to the EU referendum and disparate levels of socioeconomic inequality in various regions. Wales returned a narrow Leave vote despite being a key net beneficiary of ring-fenced EU Structural and Investment Funds and related regeneration projects, not to mention further EU investment until 2020. Many Welsh voters claimed EU funding failed to protect jobs or provide the economic stability required to overcome pre-existing social divisions produced under Thatcherite rule. Given that the majority vote in Wales did not align with leading Welsh politicians and their parties, all of whom strongly supported the Remain campaign, one can surmise that the vote involved a rejection of the establishment rather than the EU specifically.
A palpable tension clearly exists between England and Wales, yet the Brexit vote revealed that similar underlying anxieties acted as a common political denominator. A similar discontent and alienation which fuelled the English revolt – the electoral success of the far right, the influence of reactionary populist current, disillusionment with established parties and disengagement with politics more generally – was apparent within Wales but assumed a slightly different form. The geographical pattern of voting in Wales correlates with trends evident across England: university cities with younger, educated voters such as Cardiff tended to vote Remain while deindustrialized areas of the south Wales valleys such as Port Talbot and Caerphilly returned the highest Leave votes. In total, seventeen of twenty-two Local Authorities returned Leave majorities (including Rhondda, represented by Plaid leader Leanne Wood). However, as 93.2 per cent of the Welsh population was white British at the time of the referendum, the returning vote failed to reflect the feelings of Black British or British Asian voters (groups who predominantly voted Remain within England). With this in mind, it is not accurate to say Wales replicated the English revolt, but there is a clear dialogue between English and Welsh fiction in the years leading to 2016 – the sense of cultural marginalization runs down both sides of Offa’s Dyke. Through an analysis of post-devolutionary Welsh fictions, we can identify salient factors which would go on to determine the Welsh Leave vote: fictions which either consider a London-centric Westminster to be responsible for the country’s socioeconomic decline or attack the political antipathy of the Welsh people for the country’s marginalized position in the union.
The early fictions of Niall Griffiths, often cited as a key figure in the literary devolution process, illustrate the ways in which Welsh literature remains haunted by the failures and successes of the 1979 and 1997 devolution referendums, respectively, as well as the legacies of Thatcherite social policies and the failure of New Labour to correct economic divides. Griffith’s second novel, Sheepshagger (2001), published soon after the creation of the Welsh Assembly, fictionalizes the social fragmentation and slow disintegration of established communities on the verge of political devolution outside Aberystwyth, dubbed in 2016 ‘the most Europhile place in Britain’ (Lusher 2016). Griffiths, who was born in Liverpool but resides in Aberystwyth, delivers a clear critique of the apathetic ‘Can’t-be-fuckin-arsed-ness’ within Welsh politics, considering the low turnout in the 1979 referendum to be symptomatic of this ‘Welsh disease’: ‘it’s a pitiful little nation this. A fuckin boil in-a ocean [. . .] the Irish kill each other, the Scots kill emselves, an us, all we do is kill time’ (2001: 74; 75).3
The novel’s inarticulate and almost feral protagonist, Ianto, is ousted from his impecunious ancestral homestead in the hills outside Aberystwyth by English tourists using the site for their weekend retreats.4 A victim of childhood sexual abuse and mutilation by an imperious English tourist, Ianto views the territorial disfiguration of his sacred landscape as an egregious act of English colonial occupation. Appropriately, in an article for New Statesman, Griffiths labels Wales ‘England’s oldest colony’; the dismissal of Welsh citizens as sheepshaggers by English tourists in the novel, considered incapable of political autonomy and trapped in a state of colonial dependency, denotes the asymmetrical nature of the Anglo-Welsh union (Griffiths 2007).5 Ianto’s very presence in the narrative is diminished once moneyed tourists begin to rip apart the social fabric of his community, indicating how his mountainous areas, which Griffiths dubs ‘real Wales’, are ‘utterly “Other” to the Anglocentric mindset’ (Griffiths 2007). Griffiths’ use of regional vernacular for Ianto thus ‘carries a weight of nonestablishment, marginal knowledge’, echoing the fiction of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh in signalling a clear linguistic resistance to Anglocentric conceptions of British national identity (Peddie and Grif fiths 2008: 120).
Ianto’s day-to-day life is clearly impacted and shaped by geographic and political inequality, along with a sense of loss resulting from the disintegration of communal structures. His disenfranchisement and cultural impotence are evidenced by an ignorance of the TV panel discussion on the impending devolution vote. In this sense, Ianto is reflective of many citizens who feel EU–Westminster decision-making has no personal import on their lives and is determined by faceless bureaucrats ‘in some never-to-be-entered office in some marbled and columned building in some never-visited city’ (Griffiths 2001: 57).6 As his friend Danny warns: ‘devolution won’t change a fuckin thing. Still be answerable to Westminster [. . .] always fuckin will be. If yew got a fuckin big saw an separated the country down Offa’s Dyke an let us float out to sea we’d still be in their fuckin power’ (2001: 57–8).7 Danny’s resentment towards Westminster could stem from the Welsh Assembly’s weak negotiating position and continued lack of devolved juridical powers. Low turnouts in Assembly elections during this period testifies to the lack of public engagement or political awareness in post-devolution Wales, responsible for Ianto’s unfamiliarity with current debates. However, the novel fails to advance a cohesive Welsh identity to counteract the imposition of hegemonic models of British governance. Through his inability to fit within existing social systems, combined with his failure to understand the Welsh language, Ianto is alienated from both British society and his Welsh heritage, functioning as a distorted caricature of the conflicted national mood within contemporary Wales between pro-Welsh and pro-union factions. Sheepshagger thus reflects Daniel John Evans’ suggestion that contemporary Wales is in a period of ‘interregnum’ whereby the country no longer feels attached by the British state but is not quite ready to form a new state (2018: 489). Griffiths himself confirms that ‘Brexit has reinforced Cymru’s identity as the Other within, as the resistance to hegemony’, and strengthened the case for further devolution: ‘I actually hope for the disintegration of the UK. It has never been a union of equals. Aberystwyth [has] come to feel [. . .] wilfully separate’ from the union to which it only nominally belongs (Personal Correspondence 2020).
Contemporary notions of Welshness, however, much like Englishness, prove to be elusive. In the concluding stages of the novel, Ianto’s aggressive and destructive tendencies, induced by his harrowing childhood trauma and compounded by his ongoing sociocultural marginalization and economic precarity, are finally unleashed with devastating ramifications. After brutally murdering two English backpackers in a fit of rage, Ianto is himself murdered by his group of friends, appalled by the discovery of his actions. His visceral and symbolic act of violent resistance serves as an excessive political allegory for the underlying collective discontent brewing within economically depressed regions of Wales, with the general public pronouncing his crimes to be the product of nationalist ‘devolution fever’ (Griffiths 2001: 226). Accordingly, the narrative moves away from a consideration of Ianto’s motivation for the murders towards an evaluation of the cultural, socioeconomic and political inequalities of millennial Wales, which are implied to be motivating factors for the attacks on English tourists: the ‘whole bastard system needs revision’ (2001: 239). There are therefore several ways to place the character of Ianto within a political dimension: as an emergent marginalized force disrupting Anglocentric privilege; as a violent figure whose own disenfranchisement mirrors the political sovereignty denied to Wales; or as the manifestation of social traumas inflicted under Thatcherite rule. Ianto’s displacement from his homestead is itself representative of the sharp rise in home repossessions in Wales during Thatcher’s time in office. As Schmitt notes, Ianto’s attacks on English-owned homes alludes to the violent actions of the Welsh national movement Meibion Glyndŵr in the 1980s and their opposition to the loss of a distinctive Welsh culture (2018: 97).
Although the 1997 referendum coincided with the end of Conservative rule, and the emergence of the confident Cool Cymru phenomenon in Cardiff, such cultural confidence was evidently not shared in all regions of Wales. Eighteen years of Tory dominance bookended the two referendums during which time industrial decline and structural unemployment dramatically affected the Welsh economy. Economic decline was particularly apparent in the South Wales valleys: regions which voted decisively in favour of devolution in 1997. The valleys, deindustrialized areas with a strong history of pro-Welsh nationalism, are regularly listed as the most deprived regions of Wales and, crucially, all voted Leave. Clear socioeconomic similarities exist between the valleys and left-behind areas of the West Midlands and North East England, reinforcing the argument that the Brexit vote signalled a dissatisfaction with the state of the nation rather than the influence of EU integration. More importantly, the highest Leave votes were returned in Welsh regions which had received the most EU funding in recent years, supporting claims that most voters did not benefit from the implied job creation and still felt vulnerable in a deindustrialized economy. Ebbw Vale, for example, a small former steel town in the valleys, received high levels of EU investment yet 62 per cent of its population voted to leave the EU – the highest Leave vote in Wales. This result is not surprising given that the European Social Fund failed to overturn some of the highest unemployment and educational attainment levels within Wales. Former mining valleys in South Wales were still experiencing the lingering effects of mass unemployment in the 1980s, with employment rates remaining below 70 per cent (thus allowing Wales to qualify for EU structural investment). The chance to vote against the Westminster system in 2016 reignited long-standing resentment in regions which had not yet recovered from the Thatcherite era or the 2008 economic crisis. In a report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2016, Goodwin and Heath (2016b) identify clear links between levels of socioeconomic poverty, low educational attainment, lack of regional opportunities and the strength of the Leave vote. As Moya Jones succinctly puts it, ‘the Welsh vote was predictable’ (2017: 1).
A number of related post-devolutionary fictions capture this unstable relationship between economic deprivation, widespread unemployment and social marginalization experienced by citizens in deindustrialized regions of Wales, providing early warning signs of the anger, disillusionment and exclusion felt by many voters in 2016.8 John Williams’ Cardiff Dead (2000) and Grahame Davies’ Everything Must Change, first published as Rhaid i Bopeth Newid in 2005, offer pessimistic and prescient evaluations of the 1997 Yes vote. While Williams documents the pre-existing social divisions within Cardiff, Davies critiques the decision to house the Assembly in metropolitan Cardiff and questions the prospective feasibility of EU funding in fostering regeneration or strengthening Wales’ political bargaining power. Trezzo Azzopardi’s haunting debut novel, The Hiding Place (2000), adopts a similar approach, charting the lives of a Maltese immigrant family in both pre- and post-devolutionary Cardiff, detailing the changes to capital following the opening of the Assembly and re-evaluating the evolving parameters of Welshness and Britishness at the millennial turn.
Emma Schofield identifies the increased role of Welsh female authors such as Azzopardi and Trezise in the immediate wake of devolution, whose writing ‘marks a period of reconciliation between Wales’ complex political, cultural and linguistic past and its aspirations for a future which reflects the new political meaning ascribed to the country’ (Schofield 2014). Rachel Trezise’s semi-autobiographical In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl (2000) follows Rebecca Trigianni, a teenager navigating a 1990s Rhondda valley landscape beset by industrial decline, structural unemployment, low educational attainment levels and a personal homelife fractured by child abuse and drug addiction. Contrary to Anthony Cartwright’s fiction, a common industrial heritage fails to establish an oppositional form of cultural identity; instead, the open scars of the insular mining town Hendrefadog, with its decaying buildings of ‘rotting green wood’ and ‘downright poverty’, become representative of the festering wounds and traumas suffered by its inhabitants (2000: 9; 78).9 For Scofield, Rebecca’s personal development and ‘new-found sense of independence’ in the later stages of the novel coincides with the 1997 devolution vote, promising a more hopeful future, connecting her fate to that of her nation. Considering the novel from the post-Brexit moment, the Welsh Leave vote disrupts any supposed reconciliation underway within the country, proving this moment of literary optimism to be short-lived.
The Welsh political class were not alone in their determination to maintain ties with the EU. Various Welsh figures in the arts including Gillian Clarke, National Poet for Wales, were vocal in their backing of the Remain campaign and signed a letter warning of future cuts to the EU Creative Europe fund and its implications for the arts in Wales. Nonetheless, there has been a clear dearth of immediate Welsh literary and cultural responses to the post-Brexit moment as Wales considers a future outside the EU. This muted and delayed response can be explained by appreciating the artistic concentration on a string of devolutionary processes leading up to the Brexit vote – referendums which have loomed large in the Welsh creative imagination and which political commentators believed influenced the Welsh Leave vote.
The most significant Welsh post-Brexit text to engage with the legacy of devolution and the political condition of contemporary Wales is John Osmond’s Ten Million Stars Are Burning (2018). Osmond, a former director of the Institute of Welsh Affairs, provides an exhaustive and meticulously detailed semi-autobiographical account of the build-up to the failed 1979 Welsh devolution referendum (which returned a pitiful Yes vote of just over 12%) and the ongoing national identity crisis.10 Building on ideas first established in Welsh Europeans (1995), a critical examination of potential European futures for Wales, Osmond includes fictional representations of key British politicians such as Enoch Powell, who ardently opposed Welsh devolution, Neil Kinnock, who critiqued the devolutionary policies advocated by the Labour Party, as well as Welsh cultural thinkers such as Raymond Williams. Although the novel is set in the 1970s, the first part of a planned trilogy leading to Welsh devolution in 1997, Osmond creates a number of parallels between the two fateful votes, alluding to their impact on the EU referendum and their foreshadowing of the Welsh Leave vote. In so doing, he captures the national divisions between those citizens wanting devolution and those desiring the maintenance of the British union (namechecking crucial economically deprived areas such as Ebbw Vale which would go on to vote Leave), evaluating the role of the Common Market in securing and influencing national change. Moreover, Osmond dismisses referendums as ‘immensely divisive’ processes responsible for the destabilization of ‘social and political harmony’, creating perspicuous links between European integration and devolutionary debates: ‘It destroys the so-called sovereignty of Parliament. That’s what the referendum on the Common Market did last year. This one on devolution will do the same’ (2018: 376; 383). The two movements are positioned as twin complementary processes, ‘putting pressure on the system from opposite ends [. . .] the national movements in Wales and Scotland, and the international movement towards an integrated Europe’ (2018: 306).
The opening stages of the novel communicate the diverse perspectives of voters in both English-speaking and Welsh-speaking areas of Wales on European integration. Protagonist Owen James, a political journalist for the Western Mail, for whom Os mond was a political correspondent during the 1970s, monitors the approaching devolution referendum and the eventual crushing defeat for supporters of a proposed Welsh Assembly. On the one hand, stronger relations with the European community is suggested to be a viable means of preventing anglicization and ‘could be made to fit Welsh aspirations’ (an argument which would be rekindled following the Brexit vote and subsequent loss of EU Structural Funds), improving Welsh representation and allowing the country to acquire full national status (2018: 16). On the other hand, Osmond voices fears that devolution or secession would create the conditions for a form of inward-looking nationalism (with any political realignments occurring in the wake of a Welsh Assembly simply creating a novel form of bureaucracy to rival the EU and Westminster), deepen existing internal divisions within Wales, incite related devolutionary movements in the north of England and cede power to a capitalist club: ‘All this Common Market business is doing is changing one set of dictators for another [. . .] It’ll mean the end of Britain’ (2018: 16). As a fictional Enoch Powell warns later in the novel, devolution would lead to a disunited kingdom and ‘a parting of the ways [. . .] a declaration that one nation no longer existed’ with severe consequences for the future of the British union (2018: 447).
Osmond depicts Phil Williams, the former Welsh Plaid politician, arguing that the European dimension outwrites more archaic notions of Britishness and allows for the reconstruction of a residual Welsh identity – an attachment and belonging to y filltir sgwar coupled with an outward-facing cultural commonality. The notion of a Britannic Federation is even floated, which introduces reforms to create greater regional devolution of powers (yet retains a Eurosceptic reticence towards any form of federalism). Unlike the English, who believe the EEC ‘is eroding British sovereignty and reducing the power of Westminster’, Plaid only disapproves of its capitalist and centrist tendencies, still perceiving its potential role in ameliorating sociopolitical imbalances (Osmond 2018: 283). Despite the suggestion that the nationalist politics of Plaid Cymru reflect the sentimentality of the English revolt, representing a ‘gloomy longing for an imagined Wales of the past. It doesn’t exist, never has, and never will’, there are clear differences between the ways in which England and Wales envisage European integration (2018: 72). In contrast to English Eurosceptic fictions, Osmond repeatedly suggests it is ‘not the Common Market that has spoiled things for Wales [. . .] but the inadequate, outdated procedures of the House [of Commons]’ which continues to function as a centralist impediment: ‘London is the great enemy of Wales, not Europe’ (2018: 285; 475). Crucially, the narrative highlights the inferiority of Welsh media during the devolution referendum and an inherent reliance on London-based news, reinforcing the perception that Wales merely functions as a ‘small, insignificant province of England’ (2018: 335). Similar criticisms would be levelled at the Welsh Remain campaign in 2016. According to Ellie May O’Hagan, the Welsh Brexit vote is the product of Westminster neglect and an unrepresentative London-based media pushing the immigration debate, partly explaining why ‘the turkeys had voted for Christmas’ (O’Hagan 2016). As Osmond details, Wales has fewer EU migrants than most British regions, ‘just 2.6% of the population, or 79,100 out of three million’; nevertheless, he points to startling feedback from the British Social Attitudes Survey which found ‘71% of Welsh respondents thought EU migrants brought more costs than benefits’ (Osmond 2017). The referendum, positioned as an ideological battle, offered the potential to ‘Take Back Control’ in a slightly different way to the English vote, drawing attention to a lack of Welsh political agency.
Ten Million Stars Are Burning concludes rather ominously with the beginning of Thatcher’s reign: a period which would fundamentally reinforce a feeling of Welsh disenfranchisement in subsequent decades given the Conservatives’ electoral success rested predominantly on English votes. Although Osmond concentrates on the decline of the welfare state and widening socioeconomic gap between Wales and South East England as confirmation that Westminster ‘actively or consciously exploit[s] the periphery’, the novel also accedes that the same under-development applies to the north of England (2018: 536). An area of common sentiment and experience is suggested to exist between Welsh and English working-class citizens in areas such as Durham, Dudley and Dowlais – an interpretation substantiated forty years later by the territorial breakdown of the Brexit vote. In focusing so intently on the vituperative nature and public confusion surrounding Welsh administrative devolution, Osmond indicates potential reasons for the poor turnout and conflicted public response of the Welsh Brexit vote, recognizing how nations ‘tend to project on to Europe the experience of our own national systems’ (2018: 292). Osmond has been vocal in his coverage of the post-Brexit fallout, asserting that the Welsh public are gradually reversing their support as the financial implications become clear, yet underscores how Welsh political devolution has been overshadowed by greater currents flowing in Scotland. Whereas Scotland is capable of threatening Westminster with another independence referendum, and Northern Ireland can point to the Irish border problem as a significant post-Brexit concern, by voting against its economic interest (‘67% of Welsh exports go to the EU compared with 48% for the rest of the UK’) Wales is left vulnerable and exposed to the power plays of Westminster (Osmond 2017).
Plaid Cymru proclaimed the Brexit result ‘a hammer blow to Wales economically’, predicting ‘the poorest will pay the price’ if power was transferred from Brussels to a dispassionate Westminster (Chaney 2017). Leanne Wood emphasized that ‘the UK cannot continue in its current form’ and the party emphasized its commitment to operating as an independent Wales within Europe (Chaney 2017). Brexit thus places renewed pressure on nationalist parties to strive for political independence, resist further centralization of governmental powers, and formulate their own arrangements with the EU. While Scotland has assumed a more combative approach by envisioning a future outside the UK and suggesting new potential agreements with the EU, Wales has sought to secure ‘a Welsh Brexit as part of a “one UK Brexit”’ and participate in ‘multilateral partnerships and collaborative ventures’ with the EU post-Brexit (Hunt and Minto 2017: 659). As a result, the country occupies a ‘lone position among the devolved administrations’, positioned as both a ‘Good Unionist’ and a ‘Good European’ (Hunt and Minto 2017: 659). The 2019 EU elections captured ongoing sociopolitical divisions within Wales: the Brexit Party won 32.5 per cent of the vote, while parties supporting a second EU referendum garnered 42.4 per cent. Plaid Cymru, finishing in second place with 19.6 per cent, declared Wales to now be a progressive and internationalist ‘Remain nation’ – a self-image with noticeable flaws. The post-Brexit moment has seen a recent resurgence in calls for further devolution and independence in Scotland and appeals for a reunited Ireland, yet in Wales the economic and political implications are likely to be quite different. Brexit may simply lead to greater devolved powers for a nation likely to be the hardest hit by a retreat from Europe, leaving Wales and England as the only remaining survivors of a dissolved UK. The Welsh Leave vote undoubtedly complicates any desire for independence in Europe, and yet the emphasis on this decision to exit the EU – by a majority of only 82,000 votes – should not be exaggerated. A breakdown of the Brexit vote clearly reveals that Wales returned the lowest Leave vote outside south-east England while Cardiff returned a higher Remain vote than London. Further, the referendum campaign not only immediately followed a long National Assembly elections process but the London-directed Remain campaign focused heavily on English regions and was barely visible within Wales.
Unless Welsh voters in deindustrialized regions feel the benefits of political devolution, the sense of disenfranchisement that powered the Leave vote will remain. For Welsh poet, novelist and playwright Owen Sheers, ‘Brexit is not only about our future relationship with the EU but also about the nature of our future relationship with Westminster’, arguing the referendum was a vote on ‘not being heard, five years of austerity, desperation, unemployment’ (Sheers 2019). In April 2018, the Wales Arts Review in partnership with Scottish online publication Bella Caledonia published an open letter to Theresa May, signed by notable Welsh writers such as Alys Conran, John Osmond, Niall Griffiths and Rachel Trezise, calling for the protection of existing devolved powers against potential Westminster power grabs (Bella Caledonia 2018). Just as Thatcherism is considered to be the ‘midwife’ of Welsh devolution, responsible for summoning a staunch resistance to Westminster politicking, Brexit may be the catalyst for a renewed devolved nationalism, triggering a re-evaluation of how exactly Wales balances their commitment to the union with their appetite for independence in Europe (Evans 2018). The chapter will now address how Brexit exacerbates the political divergence between Scotland and England and strengthens support for enhanced devolution or even future independence movements. Indeed, an under-reported context of Brexit is the extent to which Scotland was waging its own battle over sovereignty within the British union and how this was intimately connected to a desire for independence in Europe.11 The chapter will then demonstrate how Scottish literature has responded to the post-devolutionary landscape and the ways in which Brexit is theorized and represented in the Scottish cultural imagination.
Scotland and the two unions
In Scotland the European question was crowded out or subsumed within the Scottish Question: that is, the relationship between Scotland and the British Union.
(McHarg and Mitchell 2017: 513)
In the 1975 referendum on continued membership of the EEC, Scotland and Northern Ireland returned lower Yes votes than England (58.4% and 52.1%, respectively). The SNP was initially sceptical of European integration – criticizing and challenging the EU over agriculture, fisheries and taxation – perceiving the EEC as an elitist organization which would lead to greater centralization of powers, prove incapable of protecting Scottish interests and dilute the potency of Scottish nationalist movements. In the intervening forty years between the two votes on European membership, the EU facilitated and supported deepening devolution, injecting huge sums into both countries via regional development and cohesion funds. During the 1980s, the SNP performed a volte-face and sought independence in Europe, committing itself ‘to making membership of the EU the cornerstone of its self-government policy’: a move also stimulated by resistance to Thatcherite policy and the centralist nature of Westminster (Dardanelli 2003). Thatcher inadvertently forced the Scottish to question their national identity and reformulate their resistance to the union. The SNP began to perceive the revamped EU as a socially progressive and forward-thinking arena – a broader canvas on which to paint a redefined Scottish political future – which could support their drive for national independence and increase their decision-making power in Europe. It is therefore important to consider the reasons for the territorial divergence in the period between the two votes on EU membership, as well as the influence of European integration on the devolution referendums of 1979 and 1997, and the 2014 indyref.
Although 51.6 per cent of Scottish voters supported the proposal for a devolved deliberative assembly in 1979, the turnout was so low (falling well short of the pre-agreed 40% marker) that amendments prevented the decision being upheld. Scott Hames points to 1979 as an inaugural moment in Scottish cultural politics when ‘efforts to re-construct national political space were symbiotic with efforts to reconjure national literary space’ (2019: 11). The drive for cultural devolution – which Hames labels ‘the Dream’ – bumps up uncomfortably against ‘the Grind’: namely, the wider British ‘machine politics’ at work during the devolutionary process (2019: 41).12 In the shadow of the first failed referendum, Scottish literature immediately responded with defiant creativity and, in stark comparison to Welsh cultural activity, exuded a far more confident sense of national autonomy. As Liam McIlvanney asserts, ‘Without waiting for the politicians, Scottish novelists had written themselves out of despair’ by engaging in artistic acts of self-determination (2002: 183). For Gardiner, culture and literature in the period between the two referendums of 1979 and 1997 closely responded to ongoing processes of devoluti on, operating as ‘sites of contest for the very possibility of politics’ (Gardiner 2009: 182). Scotland consequently became ‘a testing-ground for civic nationalism’ generated by ‘a post-imperial wave of constitutional scepticism which swept throughout the UK’ (Gardiner 2012: 12). The 1990s in particular saw ‘a substantial subsequent drop’ in citizens selecting British ‘as their best identity and a symmetrical rise in the proportion choosing Scottish’ (Rosie and Bond 2008: 56). The rejuvenated Scottish literary project in this period was a radically creative solution to the political disenfranchisement experienced by certain communities under Tory rule, attempting to symbolically reverse Scotland’s position as the weaker or potentially impotent partner in the union, evident in Iain Banks’ The Bridge (1986) and Andrew Greig’s Electric Brae (1992). The highly politicized fictions of Allan Massie and Alasdair Gray took up the task of narrating Scotland, ensuring debates concerning the state of the union remained in the forefront of the Scottish literary imagination. While Massie’s One Night in Winter (1984) envisages a future successful Scottish independence movement, Gray’s seminal novel Lanark (1981), published in the depressive aftermath of 1979, and his follow-up 1982, Janine (1984) evaluate a society still haunted by the referendum and register a bitterness at the hegemonic control of Westminster: ‘If we ran that race again we would win by a head and a neck so we won’t be allowed to run it again’ (1984: 66). Gray’s subsequent non-fiction polemic on the merits of independence Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992) amplifies what he perceived as the ongoing political subordination of Scotland in the face of English political dominance. Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), which admittedly also retains a disdain for contemporary Scottish society, goes further in suggesting a process of English colonization was still underway (later echoed from a Welsh perspective in Griffiths’ Sheepshagger).
When the devolution referendum on the creation of the Scottish Parliament passed in 1997, with 74.3 per cent in favour, political commentators pointed to the actions of Scotland’s literary players as key cultural figures in the ideological battle. Cultural devolution arguably preceded political devolution and influenced the outcome of the successful 1997 referendum. As Duncan McLean puts it, ‘there’s been a parliament of novels for years’, a sentiment echoed by Robert Crawford in his 1982 study Devolving English Literature (1999: 74). The opening of the Scottish Parliament on 1 July 1999 celebrated the clear contributions made by Scottish writers in formulating new expressions of national identity, featuring quotations from poets Hugh McDiarmid, Robert Burns and Iain Crichton Smith. For Scottish writer James Robertson, the inauguration produced an atmosphere ‘tenuous with possibility’:
in the end a Parliament is not
a building, but a voyage of intent,
a journey to whatever we might be. (2005: 24)
The immediate post-devolutionary moment also saw works by Black Scottish and Scottish Asian writers critiquing narrow and reductive constructions of national identification, instead proposing alternate modes of Scottishness which were convivial, hospitable and constantly evolving, including Jelly Roll (1998) by Luke Sutherland, Trumpet by Jackie Kay (1998) and Psychoraag by Suhayl Saadi (2004).13 That being said, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown repeatedly points to the ‘all white’ make-up of the Scottish and Welsh assemblies; devolution has unintentionally raised the issue of ethnicity, revealing that ‘ancestral rights, rather than other modes of belonging’ remains a key factor, problematizing this narrative of progress for ethnic-minority citizens (Alibhai-Brown 2000). While it would be inaccurate to suggest either support for celebratory Scottish multiculturalism or an outward-reaching political stance was overwhelming, the successful 1997 devolution vote stimulated more encompassing notions of nationhood and post-devolutionary Scottish writing undoubtedly advanced a culturalist discourse which captures the inclusiveness of twenty-first-century Scotland with diversity in voice, gender, sexuality and race.14
According to Douglas Gifford:
With this new confidence, Scottish fiction approached the millennium as a standard bearer for Scottish culture [. . .] The new complexities in novelistic vision relate dynamically to the changes taking place in Scottish society at large, not only reacting to them, but influencing the framework of thought in which they took place. (2007: 237)
It is therefore tempting to endorse what Gavin Wallace terms the ‘critical orthodoxy, subscribed to also by writers, that Scotland’s literature played a central role in articulating the pressures towards political change that led to devolution’ (2007: 24). Hames, however, argues against the notion that Holyrood was simply ‘dreamed into being by artists’ and offers a more balanced assessment, pointing towards the political disenfranchisement which motivated artists to bring such desires to the surface (2012: 7).15 Alex Thomson goes further, asserting th at the disproportionate support for independence among writers and members of the creative industries – such as the National Collective organization supported by Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead – exposed ‘a disjunction between the cultural sector and society at large’ (anticipating similar trends identifiable in the EU referendum), attesting ‘not to the critical power of the arts but to their subsumption by contemporary politics’ (2016: 3). After all, not all post-devolutionary Scottish texts envision such a quixotic future. As Wallace reminds us, despite devolution and the inception of the Scottish Parliament, Scotland remained ‘a stateless nation within the anomalous polity of the UK’ and was limited to a form of quasi-political autonomy following devolution (2007: 25). In short, the benefits of political devolution failed to compensate for the ongoing democratic deficit and territorial inequalities felt by Scottish citizens.
Matthew Fitt’s But n Ben A-Go-Go (2000) paints a bleak dystopic vision of a nationalist Scotland in which cosmopolitan hospitality is rejected in favour of an entrenched islander mentality. Despite the nation’s more liberal sensibilities, for Schoene the novel suggests that ‘a nationalist Scotland might lack the imaginative power to project its future beyond a mere assertion of independent nation-statehood’ (2008: 89). Similarly, Denise Mina’s Garnethill trilogy and Kelman’s Translated Accounts (2001) go against the trend by considering Scotland’s complicity in the global economy, critiquing the ongoing socioeconomic and class inequalities left unaddressed following devolution. The expression of vernacular Scots and linguistic experimentation, evident in Kelman’s fictions, serve a subversive purpose, signalling a clear challenge to Anglocentric sociopolitical impositions and marking a resistance to hegemonic structures which fail to represent Scotland’s polyvalent cultural identity.16 As James Robertson’s state-of-the-nation novel And the Land Lay Still (2010) makes clear, these devolutionary debates were deeply embedded into a longer post-war history of Scotland and its troubled place in the union. Weaving a Scottish national narrative over half a century from the late 1940s to 2008, the novel documents the constitutional debates of Conservative MPs, Home Rule activists and members of the public surrounding shifting attitudes towards decentralization of powers. Robertson’s remarks on the stimulus for Scottish devolution could equally serve as a portentous commentary on the intra-UK ideological divides evident in the EU referendum:
Here is a situation: a country that is not fully a country, a nation that does not quite believe itself to be a nation, exists within, and as a small and distant part of, a greater state. The greater state was once a very great state, with its own empire. It is no longer great, but its leaders and many of the people like to believe it is. For the people of the less-than country, the not-quite nation, there are competing, conflicting loyalties. They are confused. (2010: 534)
For Hames, the novel provides ‘the most significant literary realisation’ of Scottish cultural devolution (2019: 41).17 More importantly, Robertson’s sprawling narrative exemplifies how literary fiction may provide a creative interpretation of political events, denoting the impact of the past on the present, and the role of literature in conceiving potential futures for submerged nations haunted by their stateless histories.
Although the left-behind narrative of Brexit does apply to certain regions of Scotland, the anger and resentment regarding socioeconomic disparities and regional marginalization was instead channelled earlier through a rejection of Anglocentric politics in the 2014 independence referendum. Scottish voters were particularly tired with the paternalistic nature of British constitutional governance, which ensures the process of cultural devolution comes to be defined and manipulated by party political interests in Westminster. Whereas the monocultural parochialism of the English revolt appealed to sentimental historical attachments and reductive nostalgia, the indyref in Scotland adopted a future-oriented perspective. The kindling of a Scottish resistance has resulted in a politically enlightened electorate with an intrinsic desire for new alternatives and a more egalitarian, outward-facing society. Rather than calling for a return to any ‘golden age’ of Scottish history, the SNP espoused a ‘golden tomorrow’ for a devolved Scotland, reinforced by cosmopolitan citizenships developed by remaining with the EU (Leith and Soule 2012: 151). The indyref thus offered the opportunity to override political asymmetries within the union, readdress the complex negotiation of competing loyalties and reconsider Scotland’s ambivalent place in the union. In all, 55.3 per cent of Scottish voters went on to reject independence (on a high 85% turnout), but the margin was sufficiently narrow enough to keep alive hopes of future succession from an ailing union. SNP membership, for example, witnessed a dramatic increase from 25,000 in December 2013 to 120,000 in July 2016. For many cultural commentators, however, the No vote arrested the forward movement of Scottish literature and reignited Anglo-Scottish tensions. Scottish author and playwright Alan Bissett claimed the failed indyref would trigger ‘a period of introspection’, while the novelist Alan Warner even suggested that the No vote would create ‘a profound and strange schism between the voters of Scotland and its literature [. . .] the death knell for the whole Scottish literary “project” – a crushing denial of an identity that writers have been meticulously accumulating, trying to maintain and refine’ (Bissett 2015; Warner 2014). By 2014, then, ‘the critical and creative endeavour called Scottish Literature was [. . .] often difficult to separate from the political project with which it is entwined’ (Hames 2019: 302). For Timothy Baker, the No vote was problematic because ‘only a Yes vote allows narrative at all: Scotland’s identity is almost wholly situated in the future’ (2016: 248). Appropriately, a number of speculative fictions emerged in the period, envisioning new political futures for Scotland. Paul Johnston’s Body Politic (1997), which imagines a Scottish republic following the dissolution of the UK, and the concentration on a European dimension to Scottishness in Andrew Crumey’s Mobius Dick (2004) and Sputnik Caledonia (2008), suggest Scotland to be undergoing a transformational process of becoming, entailing the construction of imaginative spaces which allow for a radical reconfiguration of national identity in post-devolutionary Scotland.
This recent history of Scottish devolution is vital to any understanding of Scotland’s subsequent vote on EU membership. Martin Johnes (2019) argues the EU referendum itself was the product of Scottish developments as the failed indyref convinced the Conservatives that voters were fearful of supporting any major constitutional change. Such sociocultural blindness and institutional arrogance regarding both the EU and the position of Scotland in the British union are communicated in Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border (2015). In dissecting the troubled union between England and Scotland, Hall taps into the impetus for the independence vote and the underlying tensions which would re-emerge during the post-Brexit fallout once the territorial divergence in voting patterns became clear. Set during the run-up to the indyref, The Wolf Border imagines a counter-factual future in which Scotland achieves independence, raising timely debates regarding intra-UK borders and the matter of future constitutional arrangements. According to Hall, who completed the novel before Scotland’s fateful No vote in the referendum, the narrative is deeply informed by the political context of the troubled union.
The novel follows Rachel Caine as she relocates from Idaho to the Lake District to assist Thomas Pennington, the Earl of Annerdale, introduce wolves to the grounds of Pennington Hall, the largest private estate in England. Pennington, an eccentric and antiquated figure, is representative of the English superiority defining the political imbalance of the Anglo-Scotland relationship, dismissing the government white paper on Scottish independence as pure fantasy. Forced to endure dinner parties at her employer’s home, Rachel is regularly confronted with the ‘usual independence scare story’, realizing there is widespread ignorance surrounding the subject: ‘Facts versus fear, hatred and irrationality’ (Hall 2015: 98; 147). Pennington’s acquaintances cite ‘the cost of setting up new nations’ alongside continued EU membership and ‘the impoverished state of Scotland, indebted and in need of European bailout’ as essential reasons for maintaining the status quo, leading Rachel to question ‘[i]s it any wonder they want out?’ (2015: 98). Such pro-Union rhetoric continues even after the successful Scottish independence vote which cuts ‘the north of the island free’ and ominously sentences Sebastian Mellor, Britain’s fictional PM during the independence vote, to the same fate of David Cameron following the EU referendum: ‘doomed [. . .] to be the premier on whose watch the nation dissolved’ (2015: 223). In a political climate where Britain ‘no longer exists’ and Scotland is accused of wreaking havoc with the union by committing ‘economic suicide’, Hall unintentionally communicates the same criticisms that will be thrown at post-Brexit Britain just two years later: ‘They’ll be bankrupt in a year [. . .] It’ll be cap in hand to Europe’ (2015: 224; 227; 228).
Rachel’s re-wilding project, however, is not a success as local residents condemn the wolves as an immigrant threat to the stable English ecosystem of Cumbria and repudiate Rachel’s information on the benefits of EU collaboration projects, resulting in the wolves’ relocation across the Scottish border. As ‘refugees seeking asylum in the newest European nation’, the wolves furnish the newly independent Scotland with a ‘new icon for a new nation’, strengthening the first minister’s claim that ‘Scotland was, is, and will be a beacon of social enlightenment’ (2015: 102; 413). The wolves thus play an overtly symbolic role in the narrative; their introduction signifies the perceived wildness of the indyref by pro-Union voices and the resultant threat posed to Westminster decision-making. In signalling an escape from the insular mindset of contemporary England with its anti-EU posters to a future-oriented country more welcoming of otherness, the novel contains a modicum of hope for new political developments on Scotland’s horizon – developments which have been radically curtailed by the suspension of Scotland’s cosmopolitan future in 2016. However, as Rachel reasons while visiting Holyrood in the concluding stages of the novel, ‘the fabric of British politics, state definitions’ can be changed ‘if people want it badly enough, if they are tired, and hopeful’ (2015: 423). A sentiment which may prove to be prophetic as Scotland continues to negotiate its troubled position within a fraying union.
Scotland’s vote in favour of remaining in the EU in 2016 (by 62% to 38%), supported by every local authority area, was clearly not just a response to the issue of Europe, but a product of the nation’s turbulent devolutionary history and its resistance to Anglocentric systems of political control. Curtice (2016) cites a multitude of reasons for Scotland’s strong Remain vote (a number of which are reflected in post-Brexit Scottish literature): the smaller age and educational attainment gaps north of the border; the perception among Scottish voters that the EU was not a threat to their British identity; the rapid injection of funding into the country; and the role of the SNP in securing voters’ political sympathies and campaigning heavily for Remain. Arguably, the Scottish and Northern Irish have become more secure with accommodating differing political and cultural identities. Whereas Englishness is often touted as an inward-looking form of identification, and Britishness a more outward-facing identity, for the Scottish and Northern Irish the addition of a European tag fails to attract similar levels of anxiety. Similarly, the Scottish have become more accustomed to multilateral levels of government, as opposed to the heavily centralized governance within England. While Scotland has undergone substantial constitutional change in the last twenty years, England has not witnessed similar legislative devolution, leading the English people to believe that both Westminster and Brussels are incapable of change and must be radically altered. For Scotland pooled sovereignty was potentially a stepping stone to independence in Europe. Scotland’s pronounced Remain vote is thus symptomatic of the drive for national independence and a desired detachment from Westminster politicking (an argument heavily promoted by the SNP). Research by Leith and Soule (2012) indicates that a significant number of Scottish voters retain an attachment to their British identity, with the relationship between Scottishness and Britishness remaining highly complex. Brexit will have a fundamental impact on this issue of compatibility, forcing voters to question the legitimacy of holding overlapping forms of identification.
While this Anglo-Scottish bond has long been under pressure, Brexit has undoubtedly revived the Scottish Question and exposed devolution as a limited solution in rectifying entrenched cultural, political, demographic and socioeconomic disparities. It is also worth noting that both Scotland and Northern Ireland returned the lowest turnout figures, indicating that the issues dominating the campaign spoke more to English and Welsh disaffection. Europe was simply not a hot-button issue in Scottish politics.18 UKIP’s core Eurosceptic messages failed to resonate with Scottish voters and the Leave campaign was unable to gain traction in Scotland; their related narratives of strident English nationalism failed to connect with a Scottish public which had seen almost two decades of Tory rule forced upon them. The British electoral system was thus a key determining factor in shaping Scottish antipathy to Tory conservatism and creeping anglicization. Further, as Hames points out, the ‘weak cultural basis’ of post-devolutionary Scotland – ‘that is, the minimal extent to which the rationale for political independence is safeguarding and developing distinctly Scottish culture’ – permitted Scotland to ‘bypass the “traditionalist” quandary by which a narrative of cultural preservation inevitably imposes past-oriented restrictions on the nationalist imagination’ (2019: 257).
The Scottish government has certainly been the most vocal opponent of the post-Brexit process, producing a document in December 2016, ‘Scotland’s Place in Europe’, setting out their staunch opposition to the referendum result. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon labelled May’s triggering of Article 50 ‘a democratic outrage’, voicing her party’s resentment at ‘the prospect of being dragged out of Europe against our will by a right-wing Tory government hell-bent on a hard Brexit’ (SNP 2017). By July 2016 Sturgeon had already pressed for a differentiated solution and listed the free movement of people and access to the single market and customs union as red lines for Scotland moving into post-Brexit negotiations. Sturgeon cited Brexit as a central reason why a second indyref must be scheduled, insisting any exit from the EU constitutes ‘a significant and material change of the circumstances in which Scotland voted against independence in 2014’ (Sturgeon 2016). Martin McGuinness, former deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, echoed her sentiments, suggesting the result provided the rationale for a referendum on Irish reunification. May’s repeated calls to preserve a unitary British state complicated support for such moves. As Schoene appreciates, ‘from a cosmopolitan perspective’ the SNP’s ‘ongoing demand for full political independence must appear counterproductive’ allowing May to disparage what she termed the ‘tunnel vision nationalism’ of the SNP in driving for constitutional change at a time of political crisis (2008: 71).
As M. K. Thompson observes, the political rhetoric employed by the SNP ‘connects Brexit to earlier episodes of Scotland’ and places Brexit in a longer historical narrative (2019: 156). The electoral success of the Thatcher government strengthened the notion that the Scottish people were being governed against their will and Brexit merely compounds this political divergence between the two nations. Accordingly, during post-Brexit negotiations, the SNP has striven to position Scotland as a distinct and autonomous nation capable of acting as a major player on the international stage, as opposed to a submerged and subordinate member of a beleaguered British union. It would be inaccurate, however, to suggest that support for ‘independence in Europe’ was responsible for Scotland returning the highest Remain vote of any nation in the UK. As Keating identifies, following the SNP’s ideological shift they failed to convince the public that independence and EU membership could complement one another, with numerous studies failing to demonstrate a conclusive link between support for European integration and support for independence (2018: 41).19 Calls for a second referendum by Sturgeon in March 2017 were not well received and the SNP were accused of neglecting more domestic issues such as education, health and policing in their drive to secure independence, ignoring the millions of Scots who voted for Brexit. Despite winning fifty-six out of fifty-nine seats in the 2015 UK general election (displacing Labour as the dominant political force within Scotland), the SNP suffered substantial losses in the snap election of 8 June 2017, reshaping the terms of the independence debate.
Further, the EU has confirmed on numerous occasions that the British government is its sole negotiating partner in post-Brexit discussions and EU law cannot be suspended in England but continues to apply in Scotland (such an arrangement would only emerge following a radical deepening of devolutionary dispensations). As French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault underlined, ‘Europe should in no case contribute to the dismantling of nations’ (qtd. in Simon Johnson 2016). Scotland thus remains in a state of political limbo, pushed into a new arrangement against its wishes and shackled to an ever more fissiparous union, forced to reposition itself against the evolving political matrix of Holyrood, Westminster and Brussels. It is doubtful that Westminster can resist calls for Scottish independence indefinitely without transferring substantial legislative powers to the Scottish government in order to mitigate further post-Brexit instability. At the time of writing, Scoxit seems a remote possibility, the notion of a hard border between England and Scotland is unthinkable, and the EU has firmly rejected any fast-track entry process for nations which have previously been member states. However, any Scoxit will appear much more appealing once the adverse effects of Brexit begin to affect the economy, prompting many to echo Sturgeon in wondering if Scotland should decide its own future.
Taking Scotland’s strong Remain vote and the history of its devolutionary struggle into account, the Scottish literary response to Brexit has certainly been muted, with even outspoken Unionists such as Allan Massie remaining silent on the thorny issue. Given Welsh literature’s similar lacklustre response, this is understandable; writers have been too busy grappling with narrativizing devolution for measured responses to yet emerge. English author and journalist Madeline Bunting’s autobiographical Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey (2016), for example, published between the indyref and EU referendums, encapsulates ongoing attempts to diagnose Scotland’s awkward position in the British union, as Bunting plots her travels around the edges of Scotland and struggles to define the boundaries of ‘home’ in the months ‘before we tip off the continental shelf [and] leave Europe’ (2016: 2). Arianna Introna (2020) also notes the critical silence surrounding Brexit in Scottish literature, with writers evincing a focused literary engagement with the legacy of the post-indyref moment. For instance, while Craig Smith’s The Mile (2014), Jenni Daiches’ Borrowed Time (2016) and James Robertson’s 365 Stories (2014) directly respond to the sense of anticipation and possibility connected to the indyref, more recent post-Brexit texts, such as John Burnside’s Havergey (2017) and A. L. Kennedy’s The Little Snake (2018), ‘speak not to Brexit but to the political conjuncture from which Brexit has arisen’, engaging with Scottish concerns surrounding sovereignty (2020: 2). Thus, rather than marking a seminal moment, Brexit has merely deepened Anglo-Scottish fissures which were already exposed following the 2014 vote.
For Irvine Welsh, Scottish independence is potentially empowering by redefining the future evolving parameters of the union: ‘political separation could promote the cultural unity that the UK state [. . .] with its notions of “assumed Englishness” is constantly undermining’ (Welsh 2013). Welsh’s Dead Men’s Trousers (2018a), the closing instalment of the Trainspotting series, situates Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie and Spud against the backdrop of the tumultuous political present as they reunite for the 2016 Scottish Cup final. Set after the indyref and during the run-up to the Brexit vote, the novel delivers an overtly political conclusion to the drug-fuelled lives of the four friends. Welsh, a frequent commentator on the post-Brexit process and Scotland’s place in the union, avoids meticulously dissecting the referendum or launching an assault on the neoliberalism of the EU in favour of a more general commentary on how disenchantment in Scotland arises from a sense of redundancy following prolonged periods of deindustrialization and socioeconomic deprivation. Noting the inescapable attention given to the referendum, Begbie betrays an ignorance of current events and dismisses the notion that the vote will affect his day-to-day life: ‘One thing ye can guarantee is, whatever happens, things’ll be shite for maist cunts’ (2018a: 363). Further evidence of public confusion surrounding the aftermath of the vote is apparent in Chris McQueer’s short-story collection HWFG (2018a). In a short comedic piece entitled ‘Brexit’, Glaswegian tradesman Boaby reveals his ignorance concerning the exact purpose of the EU, admitting he was unaware that the referendum had even taken place two years beforehand. When he is tasked by his two apprentices to use the term ‘Brexit’ in a sentence to prove he understands its meaning, he simply replies: ‘You’ve got mah tape measure aye? [. . .] well, don’t gie it tae him incase he fuckin Brexit’ (2018a: 36).
The pessimism and divisions of Brexit Britain are conspicuous throughout Dead Men’s Trousers, evident in Renton’s commentary on the distinct ‘leakage of hope’ in British society due to the rise of aggressive nationalism, ‘and its replacement by a hollow rage’ (2018a: 31). Welsh’s own frustrations and anxieties seep into the novel when Spud acquires a passport to complete a job in Europe and questions Scotland’s future role in the union: ‘wi Britain mibbe headin oot ay Europe and Scotland mibbe headin oot ay Britain, ay’ll probably huv tae get a new yin before long!’ (2018a: 158). While no fan of the EU as an institution, Welsh has been vocal in his opposition to the disruptive absurdity of Brexit – ‘the idea of having a passport that allows you to bounce around one shit country that you have elected to make poorer, instead of being able to travel around 28 of them. It’s nonsense, absolute nonsense’ – predicting that Britain will become a mean-spirited backwater with even greater gulfs between the political class and the electorate (Welsh 2018b).
The most considered Scottish response to both the indyref and Brexit came from author Andrew O’Hagan whose keynote lecture at the 2017 Edinburgh Literary Festival, ‘Scotland, Your Scotland’ (an allusion to Orwell’s infamous 1941 essay ‘England, Your England’), bemoaned the extent to which Scotland is at the behest of Westminster Tory diktat and lacks ‘sovereign force’:
Now that the picture is clearing, we are left with an image of a belated Little England posing an existential threat to a Scotland that has seen itself for years as European [. . .] Britain has mismanaged itself out of existence, and Scotland may not be the beneficiary, but it can certainly be the escapee, free to succeed or to fail in its own ways. (O’Hagan 2017)
O’Hagan, who admits he ‘had always believed these islands were better united’, argues that the No vote in 2014 did not save the union, but rather confirmed it ‘was in fact over’, with the territorial divergence of the Brexit vote and May’s repudiation of Scotland’s ‘discreet authority’ serving as confirmation of this symbolic termination (O’Hagan 2017). Though his lecture is itself guilty of revelling in nationalist nostalgia, and fails to mention the SNP had recently lost a third of its seats despite assuming a markedly Europhile stance, if a Scottish literary project of resistance and renewal is to emerge, its seeds of discontent are manifest in his passionate denunciation of ‘small-nation retreatism’ and vociferous opposition to being dragged out of Europe (O’Hagan 2017). Commenting on the evolving nationalist movements in Britain following the EU referendum, playwright Peter Arnott echoes O’Hagan’s sentiments, singling out what he considers ‘the key difference is between the nationalism of Brexit and that of the SNP’: ‘one is dreaming of restoring a past that n ever existed. The other is working for a future that doesn’t exist yet either’ (Arnott 2019).20 For O’Hagan, whose debut novel Our Fathers (1999) lamented the death of left-wing idealism, Scottish writers are striving to formulate ‘an open space of fresh possibility’ rather than clinging to late-twentieth-century devolutionary rhetoric (O’Hagan 2017). Despite Scottish literature’s initial taciturn artistic response, texts are beginning to emerge which allude to the various sociocultural, ethnopolitical and economic explanations for Scotland’s unequivocal Remain vote, assuming a forward-looking approach to the momentous events of 2016.
Responding to the fateful events of referendum night, poet Carol Ann Duffy criticized Cameron for dividing the nation – ‘torn in two like a bad poem’ – echoing J. K. Rowling’s sentiment that ‘Cameron’s legacy will be the breaking of two unions’ (Duffy 2016; Elgot 2016). This ideological sociopolitical divide between England and Scotland is markedly apparent in Fiona Shaw’s Outwalkers (2018), which alludes to the slightly more outward-facing outlook of modern Scotland and its refusal to shy away from its global responsibilities. The novel follows a group of displaced and vulnerable children as they attempt to travel north to Scotland and escape the clutches of an authoritarian English Coalition government. Although Outwalkers is widely regarded as one of the first YA post-Brexit texts, according to Shaw the idea for the novel was originally conceived in 2013 following a dream about the impending indyref. The narrative depicts a dystopic post-Brexit England of the near-future which has ostensibly terminated its relations with continental Europe and erected the New Wall. In the months before its construction, Scotland (which remains a part of the EU) sees its citizens relegated to visiting aliens, Wales is co-opted into the Coalition’s designs and England reverts to imperial measurements in resistance to European metrics. Despite the professed formation of an Atlantic Alliance, recalling once again the spectre of the Anglosphere, this is not a Global Britain but a fragmented and partitioned disunited kingdom threatened by the actions of an autocratic and protectionist Little England.
The appointment of a minister for borders – whose remit is to prevent net inward immigration to ensure ‘Our English shores stand clean and proud’ and obstruct citizens from leaving the country – compounds the country’s parochial retreat from the globalized world (2018: 24). Indeed, the novel’s draconian government is no longer faced with the challenge of illegal immigrants seeking entry to the country following the introduction of a zero tolerance immigration policy; rather, English citizens attempt to obtain exit documents, undertake treacherous sea-crossings or stowaway on Channel Tunnel freight trains – still in operation despite the Coalition’s claims to the contrary – in order to escape to a more liberal Europe. To prevent potential uprising or cross-border movements, the English Coalition government fabricates post-truth reports of Scottish terrorist attacks and spreads rumours of a deadly virus sweeping Scotland and Europe – a cover for a simulated immunization process which implants a non-removable, nano-microchip into citizens to monitor their activities. Shaw admits her depiction of Scotland was heavily influenced by the political rhetoric and scare tactics of right-wing factions in Westminster – an impulse that she claims has hardened and intensified over the last few years (Personal correspondence 2019). Tracey Mathias’ Night of the Party (2018) develops this fear of an emergent police state following the spread of aggressive nationalism and post-truth politics in 2016. As in Shaw’s Outwalkers, a cosmopolitan Scotland offers a means of escape from xenophobic English immigration policies limiting the mobility of EU citizens. Britain’s recent exit from the EU has failed to incite a backlash against scheming populist politicians; rather, England doubles down on its mistrust of those who ‘don’t sound English enough’ provoking Scotland into breaking the union and claiming independence (2018: 13). The introduction of a British born policy – prescribing that any foreign-born citizen no longer possesses the right to remain and should be repatriated – as a necessary preventive measure in protecting the security and culture of England thus forecasts a bleak post-Brexit future in which the lessons of 2016 have not been learnt and Britain’s initial retreat from European supranational arrangements is but a stepping stone towards a more aphotic political isolationism.21
As Keating argues, a key difference between Scotland and England in the context of Brexit has been the salience of immigration and free movement: in particular, the ways in which such issues are framed by Scottish political leaders and received by a generally ‘more liberal’ public (2018: 42). The third instalment of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, Spring (2019a), marks a departure from the Anglocentric focus of Autumn (2016) and Winter (2017a) to comment on Scotland’s troubled and ambivalent place within the British constellation, as well as clear political tensions between the two nations regarding British immigration policy. In a discussion with Nicola Sturgeon at the Edinburgh Book Festival, Smith reiterated how ‘fiction is one of our ways of telling the truth’, signalling a literary resistance to post-truth politics and the prevailing inhospitable treatment of refugees by the Home Office (Higgins 2018). The opening section of Spring follows Richard Lease, a film director, as he travels from London to Scotland on impulse having recently lost his friend and colleague Paddy. His ignorance of Scottish history and geography immediately denotes the marginalized position Scotland holds in the English cultural imagination and the superiority of London-centric mindsets. The backstory of Richard and Paddy, including their product ion Sea of Troubles which accentuated the pivotal role of the Northern Irish peace movement, serves as a warning to the British government against ‘messing with the ancient hatreds’ and gives voice to Smith’s own anxiety that ‘Ireland will reunite’ while other British unions crumble (Smith 2019a: 66; Armistead 2019). Smith thus provides a diachronic response to historic fissures remerging due to Brexit and the predictable cyclicality of antiquated hierarchies: ‘Brand new union. Brand new border. Brand new ancient Irish civil unrest. Don’t tell me this isn’t relevant again in its brand new same old way’ (2019a: 42). With this in mind, Richard’s desire to read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘The Cloud’ at Paddy’s funeral, gestures to a hopeful metamorphosis and reorganization of existing political structures and cultural moods: I arise and unbuild it again.
Richard is joined on his journey north of the border by Brittany Hall, a DCO at an Immigration Removal Centre, and Florence Smith, a mysterious and almost supernatural twelve-year old (reminiscent of Amber from Smith’s 2005 novel The Accidental) who infiltrates the IRC and coerces Brittany to accompany her to Scotland. Whereas Brittany’s empathy for the detainees is complicated by her distaste for both ‘[p]olitical correct metropolitan liberal shit’ and the BBC’s attempts to paint British citizens as uninformed, Florence functions as the embodiment of Smith’s literary resistance (2019a: 158). Freeing detainees and forcing officials to question their role in the implementation of inhumane British immigration policies (a precursor and by-product of the EU referendum), she ‘makes people behave like they should, or like they live in a different better world’ (2019a: 314). Rumoured to be a migrant who undertook a sea-crossing from Greece, Florence offers a form of living hope to those facing indefinite detention, attempting to locate her own mother with the help of the Auld Alliance, a nationwide-network of anonymous members utilizing the rail system to help detainees escape IRCs (2019a: 314).22
At a critical juncture, however, when Florence has finally reunited with her mother at Culloden – the site of the famous 1746 battle intimately associated with Scotland’s vanquished status and the subsequent contested Anglo-Scottish union – Brittany alerts IRC officers who arrest and detain the pair. For Introna, Smith’s decision ‘to engage with issues of sovereignty through the prisms of anti-migrant policing is apt as borders are central to the exercise of sovereignty’ (2020: 19). The novel therefore utilizes the journey to Scotland to underscore the evident parallels of intra-UK and European border debates and their nexus with ideological divisions surrounding the act of migration: ‘You don’t need [a passport] [. . .] Not for this border. Not yet, anyway’ (2019a: 195). As Smith comments, ‘I love crossing [borders]. I love the magic line they draw between different places, which then becomes a threshold to new places, possibilities, multiplicities’ (qtd. in Elkins 2019). Though Florence’s fate remains shrouded in mystery, the closing section of Spring contains fragments of hope for a Scotland faced with an impending exit from Europe. In a flashforward to April, ‘the anarchic, the final month, of spring the great connective’, Florence’s cosmopolitan empathy has had a profound impact on her acquaintances (Smith 2019a: 336). As a tribute to Paddy, Richard begins a documentary on the activities of the Auld Alliance, gesturing to the alternative possibilities for global belonging which Scotland could afford were powers of immigration and citizenship not determined by the British state. In response to Richard’s initial reticence concerning the feasibility of resisting Home Office protocol and saving migrants ‘in any real world scenario’, an activist simply explains, ‘It’s human [. . .] There’s no scenario more real’ (Smith 2019a: 273). Spring reveals the extent to which narrative strategy and reality are symbiotic, encapsulating Smith’s repeated refrain that literature is how we learn to ‘read the world [. . .] most empathetically, most complexly, most humanly’ (Smith 2019b). While this first wave of post-Brexit Scottish fiction fails to offer a detailed explanation of how an independent Scotland might integrate itself into future European geopolitical constellations, the aspirational animating energy is there.
Scottish novelists, poets and dramatists energized the devolution debate in the absence of political initiative, yet it remains to be seen whether the next generation will feel compelled to prepare the ground for post-Brexit independence in the same manner. For example, numerous commentators and politicians questioned Scotland’s paradoxical desire to gain independence only to then willingly surrender political sovereignty to Brussels. Analysis by Curtice (2018) indicates that support for independence did not markedly increase during post-Brexit negotiations and Scottish voters still did not favour closing trading arrangements with the EU or more open immigration policies; nonetheless, fears remain that the resultant economic consequences of Brexit will trigger a re-evaluation of Scotland’s role in the British union and a greater surge for independence arrived during the Covid-19 crisis when Scotland was offered the opportunity to display its political autonomy. At the very least, selected fictions by Smith, Hall and Shaw evoke an ethical commitment to border crossings, communicating a symbolic embrace of alterity and celebration of hybridity in clear defiance of prevailing English political discourses surrounding migration and the cosmopolitanization of British society. In the post-Brexit moment, literature may once again become a vehicle for the development of devolutionary strategies and the envisioning of viable collaborative endeavours, imagining potential constitutional futures for component territories of the UK. What is clear is that these Brexlit responses are ‘structurally nationed’, shaped by specific sociopolitical, cultural and economic contexts, and it is likely that the unfinished business of political devolution will continue to find traction in British literature as writers underscore their resistance to separation from Europe (Introna 2020: 26).23
Northern Ireland
For the British establishment Northern Ireland is not a place but two places: out of sight and out of mind.
(O’Toole 2020: 73)
To say Anglo-Irish relations have been strained by Brexit is a wonderful understatement. Brexiteers wilfully dismissed the significant of the Irish Question during the referendum as well as internal friction within the island of Ireland; a political position with a long historical tradition. For all the talk of being an island nation, Britain shares a land frontier with an EU member state in the form of the Irish border. The academic and media tradition of employing the shorthand term of ‘Britain’ for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (although understandable) omits Northern Ireland from the frame and betrays an imbalance within the seemingly united polity. As Glenn Patterson reminds us, Northern Ireland is ‘an administrative region of the UK. Not a country’ (2019a: 7). Frustration with the referendum result was not only driven by Northern Ireland’s 55.8 per cent Remain vote, but through a recognition that the accession of both Britain and the Republic of Ireland to the EEC in 1973 went some way to reducing Anglo-Irish tensions and animosities through common membership. And yet, in the 1975 referendum on continued membership in the EEC, Northern Ireland returned a slim 52.1 per cent vote in favour of remaining (on a very low turnout of 48.2%): the smallest majority of any of the constituent territories of the UK. For unionists, continued membership represented an ongoing erosion of Britain’s sphere of influence and sovereignty, whereas for nationalists the supranational nature of the European community threatened the dilution of Irish culture.
As Mary C. Murphy so meticulously details in Europe and Northern Ireland’s Future (2018), although Euroscepticism is markedly reduced in Northern Ireland, the early years of EU membership were met with ‘small doses of enthusiasm’, particularly following the introduction of structural fund assistance, ‘but otherwise dominated by patterns of detachment’ due to ongoing sectarian violence (Murphy 2018: 10). Whereas political parties in Westminster were responsible for shaping the public’s perception of Europe, in the late twentieth century there was a recalibration of this political narrative in Northern Ireland. During the mid-1970s the Troubles dominated proceedings and forced the issue of European integration to the margins. It was from the late 1980s that the multinational bloc moved from being a peripheral political partner to a crucial strategic ally as the organization helped the constituent country moved towards a peaceful agreement. It is for this reason the EU referendum ‘cannot be understood in isolation from the wider history of the Troubles’ (Saunders 2018: 300). The European arena proved to be a vital forum for the development of cross-border cooperation; the subsequent Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 expressed the ‘determination of both governments to develop close cooperation as partners in the European Community’ (1985). The re-introduction of devolved administration in May 2007 deepened the level of engagement, and this period witnessed the first stirrings of the Northern Ireland-EU Taskforce (NITF).
In 1998, the multiparty Good Friday Agreement between Britain and Ireland was the cornerstone of the peace process. Joint EU membership was a crucial factor in negotiations, allowing for the inclusion of vital guarantees including an open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland due to both territories operating within the Single Market and Customs Union. Since 1995, Northern Ireland had benefited from the EU Special Fund for Peace and Reconciliation: a cross-border programme designed to underpin the peace process, secure economic stability, encourage collaborative projects and improve social relations within divided communities. In the years leading to the Agreement a diverse range of Northern Irish fictions engaged with the destructive consequences and conflict trauma of Troubles violence, including Brian Moore’s Lies of Silence (1990), Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your Own (1988) and Fat Lad (1992), Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1992), Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996), Deidre Madden’s One by One in the Darkness (1996), Robert McLiam Wilson’s Ripley Bogle (1989) and Eureka Street (1996), Bernard MacClaverty’s Grace Notes (1997), Eoin McNamee’s The Ultras (2004) and Paul McVeigh’s The Good Son (2015). The Agreement also weakened the rigid boundaries around contested national identities – offering Northern Irish citizens the choice of identifying as UK or Republic of Ireland citizens – creating power-sharing institutions and increasing support for EU membership in the process. This is particularly relevant to Brexit debates as it set in place assertions that the status of Northern Irish citizens should not be altered without their consent. As Donnacha Ó Beacháin observes, EU withdrawal ‘jeopardised rights guaranteed’ in the Agreement, including legal frameworks involving the European Convention of Human Rights and European Court of Human Rights, ‘both of which Britain was determined to leave as part of the Brexit process’ (Ó Beacháin 2019: 259). Connelly points to the irony that ‘the gestation period for Brexit coincided with a golden age of Anglo-Irish relations’ (Connelly 2018b). That being said, the political terrain in Northern Ireland was still far from stable and sectarianism remained; the Assembly suffered intermittent suspensions in the years following the Agreement. Northern Ireland thus held a liminal position as a problematic polity even after the Agreement. Novels such as Glenn Patterson’s That Which Was (2004) warn of the dangers in perceiving the Troubles as a cultural conflict, eliding the political inequalities inherent in the system and assuming the Troubles can be closed off with a ‘post’ marker. For Duncan Morrow and Jonny Byrne, peace in the region was arguably already under severe strain before Brexit emerged as a threat; any ‘reconciliation remained symbolic’ and dependent on EU funding as ‘micro-crises replaced the old macro-crisis’ and the devolved government ‘floundered over policing (2010), flags (2012), the past (2013), parades (2014), paramilitarism (2015)’ and ‘welfare changes (2015)’ (2017: 151).
Nonetheless, Euroscepticism in Northern Ireland ‘has been reformist in nature and has not generally translated into advocacy of withdrawal from the EU’ (Mycock and Gifford 2015: 62). Many of the issues which powered the referendum campaign, such as immigration, were less salient factors; moreover, neither the Conservative Party nor UKIP (which lacked an electoral base in the area) were major political players in most regions. Northern Ireland was often overlooked during the referendum debate; Vote Leave purposely retained an Anglocentric purview, understanding that any discussion of the Irish border would compromise their plans for political ‘independence’. Novelist Colm Tóibín notes it was clearly not a campaign ‘run with Northern Ireland in mind. It’s another example, in case we need one, of how little Northern Ireland matters to anyone in Britain’ (qtd. in McGrath 2017). Focus was instead redirected towards the Irish border question, related matters of free movement, and the unknowable economic and political impact of an exit from Europe on the recent peace process. Connelly cites Cameron’s announcement of the referendum as the moment ‘when Brexit anxiety first hit’: ‘This was not an Irish referendum, but it might as well have been’ (2018a: 5; 2). However, campaigns in Northern Ireland were low key, insufficiently financed and suffered from poor coordination, especially between Unionist and Nationalist Remain supporters. Only the Eurosceptic DUP, whose slogan ‘Leave makes the Union stronger’, advanced a coherent narrative by positioning Brexit as a means of retaining and protecting British national sovereignty in light of the Scottish indyref. While the Agreement attempted to reduce the significance of the border in Irish political discourse, the possibility of EU withdrawal placed the issue firmly back on the table, re-politicizing key debates surrounding sovereignty and national identity responsible for polarizing communities during the Troubles.
Abbie Spallen’s state-of-the-nation play, Lally the Scut (2015), reinforces how the spectre of the Troubles continues to raise its head in the present and threatens the Agreement, particularly given the imminent EU referendum. Spallen explains,
Lally is set around twenty years after the peace process started. People think that after the Agreement was signed, the Troubles suddenly switched off. They didn’t [. . .] It doesn’t go away. The reaction here to the Brexit vote shows that the peace process is hanging by a thread. It could start up again. (qtd. in Sherratt-Bado 2018a)
Set in an unidentified border town, the political satire follows the struggles of a young woman named Lally, who runs up against the institutional incompetence of figures within the political establishment, media and church. The lack of specificity regarding the location of the town ‘destabilises the viewer’s grasp of its locality’ and ‘engages extensively with the notion that for many people who live outside the region, the Irish border exists in the realm of the hyperreal’, with her characters ‘prob[ing] the landscape in an effort to confirm its reality’ (Sherratt-Bado 2018a). Lally’s son has fallen down a bog hole located directly on the border, ‘impossible to tell [. . .] if it’s in the North or the South’, adding to the complexities in establishing any form of cross-border initiative (Spallen 2015: 49). Furthermore, efforts to rescue the child raise the risk of disinterring bodies within the field: the tragic missing victims of sectarian violence. If the inability of the establishment to save Lally’s son lampoons ‘the inadequacy of “post-conflict” political discourse’, then the child himself, ‘pulled from a dark hole’, represents ‘the stalled rebirth’ of the island of Ireland, its future suspended by the border question (Sherratt-Bado 2018a).24
Two days after the referendum result, the front page of the Belfast Telegraph summed up the public mood nicely, declaring Britain’s exit to be ‘A step into the unknown’ (Young 2016). Northern Ireland may have returned a Remain vote, but turnout figures were relatively low compared to other regions or recent Assembly elections, indicating a level of political fatigue as evidenced in the Welsh Brexit vote. Edward Mills and Chris Colvin reveal the considerable variation within Northern Ireland, where seven out of eighteen constituencies returned a Leave vote, identifying the ‘nationalist vote share’ as the single biggest factor in predicting a Remain vote (Mills and Colvin 2016). Although they cite support for Remain among Unionists, the most nationalist constituency, Foyle, returned one of the highest Remain votes, indicating the relevance in analysing potential nationalist/Unionist splits. Religious denomination added an extra element of feverish intensity to the Brexit debate, where Roman Catholic areas such as Foyle voted to remain yet much higher turnouts were reported in Protestant areas such as North Antrim. Further, despite the referendum campaign in England assuming a very different tone, John Garry (2016) identifies some clear parallels in referendum voting behaviour between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK pertaining to educational attainment levels, immigration and national identity. In total, 63 per cent of those who identify as ‘British’ voted to leave compared to 13 per cent who identify as ‘Irish’, while 85 per cent of those who perceive immigration to be a positive force for the economy and society voted to remain compared to 76 per cent of Leave voters who strongly disagreed with the statement. Eva Urban identifies a range of contemporary Northern Irish plays which interrogate the legacy of the Troubles and foreshadow anti-immigrant sentiments which would come to define the referendum campaign. Urban points towards Owen McCafferty’s Quietly (2009), which captures a specifically anti-Polish mood within Belfast, and Stacey Gregg’s Shibboleth (2015), which anticipates the redrawing of sectarian markers and refers to a growing disillusionment with the EU. John McCann’s DUPed (2019), a one-man show exploring the legacy of the Democratic Unionist Party, lambasts the power-sha ring agreement and history of social conservatism in Northern Ireland. Lawrence McKeown’s Green and Blue (2017) adopts a more balanced perspective on the Irish border. Set in the 1980s, Green and Blue dramatizes the working relationship between two policemen, on either side of the border, as they come to understand their similar responsibilities to their respective adversarial communities. McKeown gestures to a situation which could once again emerge if the island of Ireland is pulled against its will into the gravitational pull of Anglocentric Westminster politicking.
Just as the protracted peace talks dragged on interminably for years, the post-Brexit negotiation period proved to be just as fractious and drawn-out. In the post-referendum fallout, the Irish Question went from being a neglected factor in Leaver dreaming to the most crucial stumbling block preventing a clean break from EU regulations and thus a successful implementation of the Brexit project. Zadie Smith remarks, ‘it was clear that one thing [Brexit] certainly wasn’t about, not even slightly, was Northern Ireland, and this focused the mind on what an extraordinary act of solipsism has allowed this long-brutalised little country to become the collateral damage of an internal rift’ (Smith 2018). The Anglocentric sentiments of Brexiteer politicians were apparently shared by Leave voters; a 2018 study revealed 87 per cent of such voters viewed ‘the collapse of the peace process as an acceptable price for Brexit’ (Future of England Study 2018). Brexiteers even began to perceive the Irish problem as an opportunity not a hurdle: the means by which Britain could retain some benefits of membership. For O’Toole, Northern Ireland is ‘not the tail wagging the British dog, it is a different kind of beast altogether – the Trojan horse within which all of Brexit is smuggled into the promised land of frictionless access to EU markets without the political obligations of membership’ (2020: 189). The concerns of Northern Ireland were certainly not given enough coverage in the English media nor were the consequences understood by Leave factions in Westminster. Karen Bradley, former secretary of state for Northern Ireland, admitted on taking the job in 2018 that she was unaware of the ‘deep-seated and deep-rooted issues’ at play, seemingly surprised that ‘people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice versa’ (qtd. in Carroll 2018). Donald Tusk, however, warned Westminster ‘the key to the UK’s future lies – in some ways – in Dublin, at least as long as Brexit negotiations continue’ (qtd. in McGee 2017). Where once Northern Ireland was merely ‘an afterthought’ in the context of Brexit, Murphy concludes, ‘the post-referendum landscape places Northern Ireland at the heart of UK politics’ (2018: 63).
The crude, binary nature of the referendum undoubtedly threatens to rouse the spectres of Irish sectarianism. An exit from Europe fuels a push for political change and leaves vulnerable communities open to further violence by paramilitary forces, resulting in the calcification of polarized political positions. The 2017 Northern Irish Assembly elections saw a marked increase in support for Sinn Fein, which won its largest ever share of seats, accusing the DUP of refusing to honour key principles of the Agreement. Just as the SNP saw Brexit as an opportunity to renew calls for independence, Sinn Fein made an immediate push for a future referendum on Irish reunification and called for a border poll, escalating fears that Northern Irish voters were moving back towards entrenched positions and deepening the political cleavage. A year after the vote, inflation in Northern Ireland had already increased by 0.47 per cent more than the UK average and unemployment was predicted to rise, with Brexit considered a major contributing factor in both cases (Breinlich et al. 2017: 3). In January 2017, Northern Ireland was hit by a more immediate threat: the collapse of power-sharing in the Stormont Assembly. Brexiteers, including Former Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Paterson, used the crisis to argue the collapse demonstrated the Agreement had ‘outlived its use’ (qtd. in O’Carroll 2018). For Murphy, the suspension of the devolved institution was a contributing factor in the failure of Northern Ireland to meet the economic and political challenges which Brexit presented and paralysed ‘any ability to forge a position on Northern Ireland’s Future outside the EU’ (2018: 152). The suspension of the consociational Assembly, dependent on a power-sharing arrangement between opposing and antagonistic groups, highlighted the absence of a viable political forum in which to confront post-Brexit realities (not to mention the continued decision by Sinn Fein MPs to refuse to take their seats in Westminster).25
As the introduction discussed, the meticulously planned 2017 UK general election, intended to give Theresa May a stronger hand in post-Brexit negotiations, resulted in the Conservatives losing their overall majority and becoming reliant on a confidence-and-supply arrangement with the Eurosceptic DUP to gain a majority. May’s arrangement not only lent credence to the view that Westminster was continuing to ignore the perils of being seen to privilege one political group over another, leading to further polarization within Northern Irish communities, but rekindled the dream of Irish unity for nationalists who feared the influence of the DUP in the post-Brexit decision-making process. At the 2018 annual Conservative conference, Theresa May unveiled plans for a Festival of Britain and Northern Ireland in 2022 claiming the proposed festival, ostensibly harking back to the empire exhibitions of pre-war Britain and 1951 national exhibition, would celebrate the close ties between our constituent nations and strengthen ‘our precious union’. Her failure to note that the festival would coincide with the centenary of the foundation of the Irish State in 2022 added further fuel to the complaint that the British government was neglecting the Irish Question in post-Brexit negotiations. Plans for a strict Brexit timetable was immediately derailed by one simple reality: the Northern Irish border. This lack of strategic planning in relation to the border was a defining trait of the Leave campaign. While the Agreement helped to depoliticize the border, ensuring cross-border, post-conflict institutions were established to limit the border’s effect on cultural identities and ideological positions, Brexit threatens to unsettle the fragile constitutional settlement. An interdependent economic relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is heavily dependent on cross-border trade and the Common Travel Area has been integral in allowing border communities to self-identity as British or Irish. The Centre for Cross Border Studies estimates that up to 30,000 people on the island of Ireland are cross-border workers, whose lives will be immediately impacted by any reimposition o f border control (Centre 2016: 8). Accordingly, Carr claims ‘about 65 percent of voters in the border counties chose to remain’: a much higher majority than the national average in favour of maintaining the status quo (2017: 75).
As Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado argues, ‘contemporary literature of the borderlands can elucidate the fraught context of Brexit and Ireland’ (2018b). A number of Northern Irish writers penned psychogeographical responses to the potential effects of Brexit on the borderlands. Garrett Carr’s The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border (2017) and Glenn Patterson’s Backstop Land (2019), drawing inspiration from earlier works such as Colm Tóibín’s Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (1994), engage with the region’s troubled past to indicate the psychological effects of reinstalling a border for communities still deeply traumatized by Troubles violence. Author Darran Anderson’s memoir Inventory (2020) provides a personal account of growing up in the border city of Derry (officially known as Londonderry) during the Troubles, disinterring old ghosts which are now beginning to arise once again due to the Brexit result and subsequent border arrangement disputes. Derry, ‘perched on the very edge of Europe, an outland’, may have witnessed the ‘added sense of European identity’ dilute ‘the old “us and them” mindset’ in intervening years, but for Anderson it is clear ‘London is doing all in its power to re-establish the old divisions’ (Anderson 2017). Writer Sean O’Brien, who grew up in the borderlands of County Armagh, shares his concerns, arguing the border may once again become a site for paramilitary aggression, while Derry poet Susannah Dickey claims the border gave her identity a fluidity which is often absent from reductive debates on the binary nature of Northern Irish nationhood (Patterson 2019b).
Both the EU and British government repeatedly stressed their commitment to avoiding a hard border; May’s letter to Donald Tusk in 2017, triggering Article 50, cited the importance of the peace process, while the UK-Ireland Joint Report affirmed a mutual commitment to the avoidance of a hard border or customs checks. Post-Brexit negotiations, however, revealed a startling lack of consensus between all concerned parties, as the British government negotiated with the European Commission with only occasional input from the Republic of Ireland as an EU member. Any suggestion of a Northern Irish ‘backstop’ – the maintenance of a seamless land border which keeps Northern Ireland in the customs union – was flatly rejected by May as it tied Britain to the EU for an indefinite period. Speaking in Dublin in January 2017, May stated her aim for the border to be frictionless in order for trade to remain unaffected. This inability of the British government to perceive the Irish border in anything other than economic terms – a liminal territorial zone designed to facilitate the free movement of consumer goods and services – testifies to Westminster’s ignorance of the cultural idiosyncrasies and identity politics within Northern Ireland which necessitated the creation of the border in the first place. Further, given that the rapid electoral support for English nationalism was stimulated by intra-UK devolutionary strategies, the British government should have been more attuned to the dangers of neglecting Northern Ireland and instead focused on protecting the Agreement and developing a viable post-Brexit civic culture.
When Johnson took over at the helm, he re-emphasized the return of a hard border ‘would be economic and political madness. Everybody understands the social, political and spiritual ramifications’, yet his government proved just as inept at confronting or appreciating the ideological and cultural issues underpinning the border debate, which held the potential to reignite political instability in the region (qtd. in Patterson 2019a: 184). Unionists were alarmed further when Enda Kenny warned the EU should ‘prepare for a united Ireland’ (Offices of the Houses of Oireachas 2017).26 Such a development remains more probable than an Irexit given the staunch pro-EU sentiments held by both Irish political parties and the Irish public. Fears of a hard border arguably softened the form of Brexit that emerged, yet doubts remain over whether any border management arrangement can remain frictionless following an agreement that Northern Ireland will continue to abide by EU single market rules. The poem ‘Speech’ by Northern Irish poet Elaine Gaston voices early doubts on the feasibility of a hard border:
We don know yet fthere’ll be
a clean Breggsit ra messy Breggsit
nur a hard Breggsit nur a saft Breggsit
But mnot going te build a hard boarder.
It’ll be a soft boarder, waitn see. (qtd. in Patterson 2019a: xxi)
A border in the Irish Sea merely pushes the border problem into unchartered waters – presenting a multitude of logistical problems, not to mention debates surrounding economic commitments – and effectuates a re-territorialization of the haunting partition. Bogdanor recognizes ‘the most important effect of the re-establishment of border controls would be not economic nor even constitutional, but psychological’; hence the power of literature is heightened in giving voice to border debates (2019: 243). David Wheatley’s poem ‘Flags and Emblems’ (2018) accentuates the difficulty in imposing any new territorial markers on communities still engaging with existing border debates. On handing over a ‘Northern Irish fiver [. . .] crinkling the Queen in his palm’, a man in a post office ponders whether ‘they’ are ‘part of us’, concluding ‘but for the flags on / the lampposts you’d hardly / know what country it was’ (Wheatley 2018). A number of recent fictions suggest Northern Ireland is trapped in an anxious, backward-looking temporal state; the territorial consequences of EU withdrawal merely complicate the healing process for communities still coming to terms with the past and gesture to the potential for the forces of politicization to reignite age-old feuds. As O’Toole warns, for the island of Ireland ‘there can be no “clean breaks” [. . .] just slow and delicate efforts to disentangle the pre sent and the future from the worst aspects of the past’ (2020: xvii).
Sherratt-Bado, whose significant work illuminates the animating energy of Northern Irish literature in anticipating and responding to political developments, identifies contemporary Irish poet Siobhán Campbell as a perceptive voice in debates surrounding the Agreement, the Irish border, Stormont crises and the post-Brexit fallout. While Campbell’s fifth collection Cross-Talk (2009) considers how the border’s historic ‘divisive geopolitical structure has a self-replicating effect within sociocultural structures’, her sixth collection, Heat Signature (2017) responds directly to the EU referendum result and its immediate consequences for the island of Ireland (Sherratt-Bado 2018c). Her poem ‘Why Islanders Don’t Kiss Hello’ vilifies David Cameron as a ‘Judas’ figure slipping ‘out the side door’ after his great miscalculation, ripping apart the hard-fought peace process supported by subsequent EU funding initiatives: ‘Perhaps we are not fully of the Europe / where the lean-to nature of a kiss can denote / who will be shafted in a vote’ (Campbell 2017: 58). Campbell’s work demonstrates that poetic discourse serves as ‘an ideal medium in which to explore the polysemic nature of Brexit’s “internal conflict”’, claiming ‘a bifocal vision is required to acknowledge how tightly Ireland is enmatrixed within multiple geopolitical networks’ (Sherratt-Bado 2018c). The island of Ireland has already ‘learned because we must’ to assume a bifocal vision ‘where the view over one shoulder is as good / from this side as the other’ (Campbell 2017: 58). Britain’s deep-rooted cultural Euroscepticism might wipe away that tentative ‘peck of venture in a shared future’, consolidated by the Agreement and gradual embrace of Europe, but Campbell suggests the cultural myopia underpinning Brexit ideology is not shared by those who voted in favour of closer supranational cooperation as a bulwark against the re-emergence of the past (2017).
Set immediately after the IRA ceasefire in 1996, Michael Hughes’ Country (2018a) looks back to the final days of the border conflict, as an IRA gang refuses to decommission and reignite tensions by storming a British army base.27 Drawing on the characters and structure of the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem documenting the dying embers of the Greco-Trojan War, Country insinuates that the same territorial conflicts continue to inform the present. While the British in the novel play the role of the Trojan army, the ‘scheming gods of Mount Olympus’ become the ‘politicians on both sides, casually manipulating the fates of those fighting on the ground, mere pawns in their petty power games’ (Hughes 2018b). Hughes, whose hometown of Keady, Armagh was affected by sectarian violence, recognizes that his region is once again a site of heightened contestation, complicating any stable sense of belonging: the ‘border ran through my national identity, pushing me to stand on one side or the other [. . .] hanging around on the threshold’ (Hughes 2018c). The implied continuation of sectarian violence in the closing stages anticipates further parallels between 1990s Anglo-Irish conflict and the EU referendum: two historical periods when allegiances and national loyalties were pushed to their limits. Hughes admits the tense relationship between England and Ireland in the run-up to the vote was on his mind during the writing process, a period in which ‘militant ideas of nationalism [were] resurfacing’, and accepts Country can be read as a ‘Brexit novel’:
It’s coming out of that moment when a political conflict reaches a stalemate and there’s a certain amount of bitterness. That sense of militancy and those ideas of political rivalry bubble up again. That happened during the Troubles, and it’s finding its way into the Brexit situation, as well as into the novel. (qtd. in Sherratt-Bado 2019)
A vocal Remainer, he forcefully argues Brexit and the installation of a new border not only runs the risk of destabilizing the fragile equilibrium put in place by the Agreement, but pushes Northern Ireland into the arms of the Republic, thus preparing the ground for future reunification. Indeed, Hughes was concerned the title of the novel ‘might sound too romantically nationalistic, like I was taking sides in the book. I wanted to make sure that both sides got to have a voice’ (Sherratt-Bado 2019). Yet the ‘multivalent’ title is rather appropriate to the Brexit debate where the term ‘country’ is applied and understood differently by warring factions in British politics (Sherratt-Bado 2019).
Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman (2017a) reinforces the danger Brexit poses in reigniting old grievances for political purposes. Set in 1981, when hunger strikes were attracting greater attention to the Republican cause, the play retains a microscopic focus on a family who have experienced the violence of the Troubles first-hand. Quinn, the head of the Carney family, learns that the body of his brother Seamus has been discovered preserved in a peat bog, years after his disappearance during the bloody period of the early 1970s. Suspected of being a police informant by the IRA, it is thought Seamus was yet another member of the Disappeared, citizens abducted and murdered as a form of extrajudicial punishment by paramilitary forces. His exhumation brings to the surface long buried animosities within the family, particularly for Quinn whose past links to the IRA return to haunt the political silence of the present. The play’s domestic setting within a small farmhouse kitchen heightens the suffocating tension, attending to the ways by which larger national debates, and antagonistic forces of polarization, are played out in claustrophobic familial quarters. The Ferryman premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London in 2017, drawing English attention to the dangers of resurrecting buried battles simply to satisfy national developments (even alluding to Northern Ireland’s reluctant initial entry into the EEC). In re-politicizing the Troubles, Butterworth warns old traumas are deeply preserved in cultural memory and will continue to resurface in the contemporary moment despite concerted efforts to silence the past: ‘the years roll by, and nothing changes’ (2017a: 8). For Butterworth, ‘the politics of the play are so buried, and yet it speaks to us so loudly now’, reminding us that when it comes to the victims of paramilitary violence, the bodies are far from cold (Butterworth 2017a).
Anna Burns’ Milkman, winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize, continues this backward-looking concentration on the trauma of the Troubles and legacy of the Agreement, and their combined relevance to the heightened frictions surrounding Brexit and the Northern Irish border.28 Milkman delivers a tense account of the daily life of a politically detached, nameless young woman, Middle Sister, who attracts the oppressive attention of an older, high-ranking paramilitary in Belfast, the titular character, during the height of the Troubles. The unnamed narrator realizes any attempt to ignore the fraught political conditions – particularly literary escapism – are futile; and yet, ‘having awareness [. . .] didn’t prevent things from happening or allow for intervention on, or reversal of things that had already happened’ (2018a: 65). As Clare Hutton (2019) identifies, Middle Sister may be recounting events during the Troubles, but she is narrating from a vantage point twenty years after the signing of the Agreement, when the decommissioning of paramilitary groups has taken place. Burns never explicitly mentions the narrative is set in Belfast or even Northern Ireland; instead, she employs a series of key phrases to allude to the violent sectarian conflict and internal struggles between the ‘renouncers-of-the-state’ – the IRA – and ‘defenders-of-the-state’ – the loyalist UDA – during the 1970s. Burns brings to light the rules of allegiance governing societal relations in the period as Middle Sister is threatened and stalked through her fractured landscape while her maybe boyfriend is powerless to help or enter no-go areas. Indeed, Milkman has far more interesting things to say regarding female oppression, public shaming and affect, but the novel does uncover key divides relevant to the Northern Irish response to the Brexit debate. Burns finished the novel before Brexit, which she labels an ‘absolutely disastrous and a tragic mistake’, but constructed her narrative so it could be perceived as a commentary on any enclosed community and acknowledges its timely narratological focus on ‘barriers and boundaries and the dreaded “other”’ speaks to the urgent present (Burns 2018b).
Political tension in the narrative, of course, revolves around ‘anything that could be construed – even in the slightest, even in the most contorted [. . .] as to do with the border’, but it is maybe boyfriend’s acquisition of a Blower Bentley which best exposes the fraught ‘pyscho-political atmosphere, with its rule of allegiance, of tribal identification’ (Burns 2018a: 24; 237).29 Despite broader issues of territory and political positioning, it is the instinctual ‘flags-and-emblems’ issue which is immediately ‘pathologically, narcissistically emotional’ (2018a: 25). The racing car with its ‘national self-gratifying connotations’, fits too snugly into the ‘quintessential British imaginary’, inciting fears surrounding the loss of a ‘sovereign, national and religious identity’ in Northern Ireland. Burns’ narrator notes the car’s emblematic British flag, containing a ‘quintessential, nation-defining, “over the water” patriotism’, was also that same flag from ‘over the road’, with the latter seemingly far more capable of stoking division than the former (2018a: 118). In these ‘knife-edge times’, the Bentley becomes symbolic of wider discourses concerning collusion and disloyalty, indicating the ways by which a symbol can come to stand for that much more (2018a: 27). Anglo-Irish divisions are also wrapped up in debates surrounding English boys’ names from ‘over the water’, which are socially banned for being politically contentious or connoting a ‘taunting, long-memory, backdated, we-shall-not-forget, historical distaste reaction’, but happily accepted by those ‘over the road’ (2018a: 24). It is tempting to establish easy parallels between Burns, born and raised in Belfast, and her unnamed narrator, but the novel communicates a deeper psycho-political mood was prevalent in 1970s Northern Irish society, infused with a ‘loss of hope and absence of trust and with a mental incapacitation over which nobody seemed willing or able to prevail’ (2018a: 90). In providing a suffocating and acutely personal account of everyday life during the Troubles, Milkman contributes to a movement in Northern Irish literature towards the empathetic consideration, and reconciliation, of past divides.
Four years after the referendum, the Irish border remains the most fundamental issue affecting a viable withdrawal agreement and the greatest threat to the stability of the UK. A proposed sea border not only angers Unionists but reinforces an already precarious territorial demarcation between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is widely assumed that Brexit will actuate a more destructive impact on Northern Ireland, exacerbating strains to its fragile economy by negatively affecting foreign trade and investment, reducing GDP, and ensuring the loss of structural funds. It also redirects attention away from existing challenges, many of which needed to be addressed before the issue of EU membership could be adequately deliberated, including a structural reliance on the public sector, long-term unemployment, the development of devolved politics, and a harmonization of regional policy agendas. Brexit thereby effectuates the disproportionate economic marginalization of those voters most likely to have voted to leave, merely reinforcing the sense of disenfranchisement and disaffection which powered the referendum result. It remains to be seen whether future post-Brexit fictions will depict Northern Ireland as ‘a relic of old imperial conflicts or as portent of new kinds of civic community based on newly developed kinds of national identity’ (Dix 2013: 190). However, the need for literary voices which can communicate an all-island dialogue, anticipate the development of cross-party alliances, consider th e consequences of Brexit on cross-border cooperation and peace building, and provide both critical and imaginative solutions to the struggles facing Northern Ireland, become more urgent and necessary as border negotiations continue to stumble on indefinitely.
Although much post-Brexit media attention has understandably been focused on the Irish border and Scottish independence, the neglect of Gibraltar and its overwhelming rejection of the proposed European withdrawal is just as intractable. Gibraltar entered the EEC alongside Britain in 1973 and its overwhelming vote to remain in 2016 (on a 95.9% majority) testifies to the Gibraltarian’s geopolitical awareness of Spain’s territorial claim and their inherent desire to remain tied to Britain and the EU for protection rather than suffer the indignity of co-sovereignty. M. G. Sanchez’s short-story collection Crossed Lines (2019) documents the movement of Gibraltarians and Spaniards as they commute to work across the border on a daily basis. Sanchez, a Gibraltarian author now residing in Britain, indicates how Brexit not only contradicts the wishes of the vast majority of its citizens, but suggests Gibraltar’s geo-strategic positioning escalates Spanish claims to the territory and hinders the free-flowing movement of citizens and services across the Gibraltar-Spain border. Crossed Lines reveals the extent to which the triggering of Article 50 will directly impact Gibraltar, which now serves as a spectral reminder of imperial Britain’s global reach and its complicated historical relationship with Continental Europe. In the fallout of Brexit, Gibraltar emerged as Britain’s forgotten partner, with their concerns either dismissed or ignored in strategic phases. In drawing attention to the continued relevance of borders and bordering processes to Gibraltarian identities, Sanchez’s fiction thus delivers an urgent reminder of the ties that bind.
English devolution
England is a nation; Britain is a political convenience.
(Kingsnorth 2009: 12)
But we must return to England for, as Gardiner reminds us, devolution deeply affects a ‘nation crippled by the idea of its own majority’, and finding it more difficult than Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland in ‘identifying a specific national culture’ (2005: ix; 4). O’Toole seemingly concurs, arguing ‘To throw one’s hands up in exasperation at the old familiar eruption of the Irish Question is to miss the whole point of the moment [. . .] the English Question’ (2020: 220). Kenny identifies that much political and media commentary on the English identity crisis takes devolution ‘as both a chronological and causal point of origin’ but follows Wellings (2014) in recognizing the complex relationship European integration played in establishing a ‘seedbed for a new nationalist orientation’ among the English public (2014: 27; 29). The axiomatic assumption that England constituted ‘the stable and secure heartland’ of the UK no longer seemed to hold (2014: 232). Whereas Scotland has learnt that ‘union does not mean that national identity disappears’, a post-Maastricht England is riven with fears that a federal Europe will erase its distinct cultural identity: ‘her history has given her no experience of the loss of sovereignty, or of the possibility of survival of identity’ (Smout 1994: 112). In 1962, Scottish writer John Douglas Pringle predicted England’s fate in the evolving European Union would be similar to the loss of Scottish culture within the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century. Pringle goes on to explain the lack of Scottish resistance to EU membership compared to the palpable anxiety of the English: ‘having lost our national identity once already, it matters less if we lost it again. Indeed, Scotland may even recover her sense of distinction if Britain is merged in a larger European union. But will England preserve hers?’ (Pringle 1962). Beneath all the devolutionary fervour, then, ran an inherent fear that any splintering of the union would allow Brussels to escalate the drive for the integrationist project. After all, a federal Europe is a far more threatening proposition to England than to Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, who can only stand to gain from greater political centrality. Haseler argues the ‘English tribe’ was incensed by the feeling that the EU were playing a pivotal role in ‘breaking asunder’ Britain’s ‘unitary character’ in order to create a ‘Europe of the regions’, provoking a renewed Eurosceptic stance towards any political or monetary union (1996: 7).30
Paul Kingsnorth, in The Search for Real England (2009), claimed the post-1997 devolutionary scene ‘created a situation in which the English [were] now ill-suited by British democracy’, suggesting that while Scotland and Wales have reclaimed some measure of political nationhood, England has been subsumed within the political entity of Britain and remains ‘in limbo’ (279). He poses the valid question: If England is without devolved legislature, how does the country locate its sense of self in the multinational state? In calling for England ‘to be re-democraticised, from the top down’, Kingsnorth anticipated the feelings of many Leave supporters, for whom the Brexit vote provided outlet for renewed demands for greater political autonomy (2009: 279). For Bogdanor, Brexit is thus the closest the English have come to a ‘constitutional moment’ (2019: 276). Years before the EU referendum appeared on the horizon support for an English Parliament was already gaining traction. Over half of Leave voters backed calls for an English Parliament compared to only 34 per cent of Remainers.31 Gardiner recognizes, just as with the Brexit vote, the drive for an English Parliament over the years ‘has trodden a thin line between reaction (“grievance”) and a wishful search for a working-class reconnection with Englishness’ (2012: 160). Similarly, the West Lot hian Question – an acute concern over whether Scottish and Northern Irish MPs should have the right to vote on English matters given the same rights were not afforded to English MPs in the devolved assemblies – had long troubled various traditionalist factions in the House of Commons. As Conservative MP William Hague warned, a festering resentment would develop in the electorate which had the potential to erupt in as yet unknown ways, discerning the ‘first stirrings of the sleeping dragon of English nationalism’ in the wake of devolution and accusing the Labour government of ‘constitutional vandalism’ (Hague 1999). Immediately following the indyref, after the much greater threat of Scottish independence had been quashed, Cameron turned away from the idea of an English Parliament and tabled a vote on English Votes for English Laws. The symbolic importance of EVEL, passed on 22 October 2015 due to strong support from Conservative and UKIP MPs, cannot be understated, even in spite of the vehement opposition to the legislation. EVEL contributed to the strengthening of nationalist sentiments in the lead-up to the EU referendum and revealed a heightened national awareness of the support for regional devolution in regions outside of London.
The progressive civic nationalism associated with parties such as the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Fein has failed to materialize as a viable force in England; instead, the familiar tremors of English nationalism developed as an unintended consequence of devolution. As the post-Brexit political landscape has shown us, exiting the EU has failed to satisfy the demands of disillusioned English Leave voters – particularly in the North – who felt George Osborne and James Wharton’s shameful Northern Powerhouse proposals presented no viable strategies for overcoming the widening North-South divide. It also may have fuelled re-emergent calls for regional devolution in England, including support for the media-driven Power Up The North campaign which aims to redirect investment north of the M25, but the introduction of elected metro-mayors in England during 2017 failed to correct any representational imbalances (in Tees Valley there was so little interest in the role that an inexperienced lightweight was able to be elected). If even Brexit, one of the most fundamental constitutional crises of recent times, is incapable of satiating nationalist forces and generating more control to left-behind communities, then England (and, in turn, its literature), may start looking inward to correct radical intra-English imbalances of power.
The potential break-up of Britain is fictionalized in Rupert Thomson’s dystopic novel Divided Kingdom (2005). Set in a near-future in which Britain has recently undergone a political and territorial ‘Rearrangement’ – the forcible dissection of the territory into four zones, each with its own flag – the novel speaks to fears surrounding turn-of-the-century devolutionary reforms from an English perspective, questioning the preservation of ‘a kingdom united in name only’ (2006: 335). With the populace resettled into separate and bordered autonomous republics, new national distinctions become exaggerated to the point of parody. The divided kingdom becomes a self-perpetuating and ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ as a psychological ‘border sickness’ quickly sweeps the kingdom as a consequence of territorial segregation, with watchtowers, barbed wire, minefields, search lights and detention centres erected along borders to prevent contamination by citizens traversing borders illegally from adjoining zones (2006: 23; 114). Thomson’s critique of corrosive border politics is clear, warning that the construction of intra-UK psychological and territorial borders not only fosters a form of exclusive ethnonationalism but creates an island fortress mentality which destabilizes European communication channels. Although various characters attempt to map out alternate geographies to challenge the arbitrary enforcement of internal divisions, the novel still leaves us with a debilitating post-devolution vision of a dissolved and enfeebled disunited kingdom which has ‘thrown off all pretence to be anything other than what it was [. . .] inward-looking’ (2006: 8).
The UK is at a critical juncture where the devolved nations are undergoing pivotal transitions which may destabilize an already fragile union. Understandably, the complex motivating factors (and eventual potential impact) of Brexit differ between and within England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. British Euroscepticism is clearly ‘realized across the four nations of the UK in plural and diverse forms that reflect differing interactions between state and sub-state national sovereignty and the overarching supra-state framework’ (Mycock and Gifford 2015: 67). Internal relationships and tensions between component territories – concerning conflicting layers of identification and belonging which complicate a sense of political enfranchisement – will be as vital to managing the post-Brexit transition as relations with other European member states. As Gardiner recognizes, the conditions of pre-Brexit Britain had already created ‘a vacuum in which new national cultures must be negotiated’ and we may begin to see the emergence of further devolved nationalisms in response to the territorial differentiation of the Brexit vote (2005: 4). If Scotland chooses to rerun a second Indy Ref, Wales seeks further devolutionary dispensations, or Northern Ireland confronts the possibility of a united Ireland, Brexit will have acted as the primary catalyst on a radical alteration of the political allegiances (and dissolution of the territorial boundaries) of the UK. Even if one, or all, of these political shifts occurs, the English Question remains unresolved.
Devolution has radically modified the British union and it remains to be seen whether a post-Brexit Britain will be flexible enough to house and contain such competing alternate identities and strident nationalisms. Any refusal to acknowledge the disparate political wills of constituent territories will be costly. The history of devolution has been an inherently British process and devolved nations must play more central roles in intra-UK discussions even after post-Brexit negotiations have concluded. On a special edition of Front Row on Radio 4, discussing how Britain’s literary and creative communities should respond to Brexit, Scottish writer Val McDermid suggests that literature has failed to give voice to certain factions within society and has a responsibility to become more representative of Leave-voting communities. If the UK is to re-evaluate its position on the world stage, then it may be the role of literature to begin with the British problem first.
Notes
1 The 1998 Scotland Act may have transferred some legislative powers but not jurisdiction over reserved matters such as EU membership.
2 James Hawes, author of Speak for England, points to the Assembly as a progressive forum for Welsh political debate, ‘making our representative institutions geographically closer, and demographically more sensitive, to us is absolutely a Good Thing’ (2004: 270).
3 In 2011, a referendum on whether further law-making powers should be increased for the Assembly induced a low turnout of only 35 per cent.
4 A similar sense of indignation powers Robert Minhinnick’s Nia (2019).
5 Simon Thirsk’s Not Quite White (2010), in which the tellingly named John Bull is directed to leave Westminster and modernise the last remaining Welsh-speaking town, echoes this sense of a colonial relationship existing between England and Wales.
6 Roger Scully, who spent a year researching the catalysts of the working-class Brexit vote in the South Wales valleys, discovered voters were sceptical that EU membership benefited their communities (Scully 2017).
7 An unspoken desire for Welsh independence is echoed by Sioned, the narrator of Griffiths’ debut novel Grits: ‘if Wales ruled itself, the Welsh people would be different – more confident – more laid back – less disposed to self-destruction’ (2000: 145).
8 Roger Granelli’s Dark Edge (1987) considers the legacy of the 1984 Welsh miners’ strike, Christopher Meredith’s Shifts (1988) and Mike Jenkins’ short-story collection Wanting to Belong (1997) respond to the trauma of deindustrial decline, and Richard John Evans’ Entertainment (2000) documents the structural unemployment within the South Wales Valleys during the push for devolution.
9 Alys Conran’s Pigeon (2016), which paints a bleak picture of deindustrial life in North Wales, indicates how this undercurrent of disaffection and marginalization is still present in contemporary Wales while Charlotte Williams’ Sugar and Slate (2002) reappraises the meaning of Britishness and the racial marginalization of mixed-race communities in northern Wales in the context of devolution.
10 Fflur Dafydd’s Twenty Thousand Saints (2008) ruminates on the legacy of the failed referendum from a post-devolutionary perspective.
11 Deacon and Sandry (2007) suggest the SNP and Plaid have paid close attention to Ireland’s growth since joining the EEC in 1974 and appreciated how EU Structural Funds have transformed their economy.
12 Hames’ The Literary Politics of Cultural Devolution (2019) traces the literary and political developments of the 1970s and 1980s to indicate their importance in shaping current debates surrounding Scottish independence and further devolutionary reform under Holyrood.
13 Anne Donovan’s optimistic novel Being Emily (2008) also advocates space for diversity in a Scotland not hemmed in by a bounded national imaginary and suggests the cosmopolitan possibilities open to Scottish citizens in the wake of devolution.
14 Berthold Schoene’s Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature provides an extensive overview of the condition of post-devolution writing, charting recent reconfigurations and renegotiations of national identity in Scotland.
15 Hames’ edited collection Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence (2012) contains think pieces from a range of authors who cite dissatisfaction with Westminster politicking, Anglo-centrism and anxieties concerning structural and geographical inequalities as reasons for seeking independence, including Janice Galloway, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Denise Mina and Suhayl Saadi.
16 Whereas Gardiner asserts that Kelman’s How late it was, how late (1994) functions as a ‘direct representation of devolution’ (and Jeremy Black proclaims the novel a ‘Scottish literary declaration of cultural self-determination’), Hames refutes the novel’s centrality to the literary devolutionary project, suggesting it contains a pointed refusal ‘to conceive power as representation on the devolutionary model’ (2007: 49; 2018: 149; Hames 2019: 288).
17 Robertson’s short story ‘Republic of the Mind’, first published in his 1993 collection The Ragged Man’s Complaint, anticipates the arguments set out in his later novel, mediating on a character’s inward retreat to a ‘Scottish republic’ of the imagination in light of stagnating political realities following the 1992 UK general election (2012: 133).
18 Research by McEwen demonstrates Scottish voters were more supportive of European integration and more open to the idea of European identities. That being said, seven boroughs within London returned far higher Remain vote shares than Scotland (2018: 67).
19 According to Keating, approximately 30 per cent of SNP supporters voted Leave, ‘concentrated in the same working-class and post-industrial areas that had voted most strongly for independence in 2014’ (2018: 43).
20 Arnott’s A Little Rain, which premiered in 2000, indicates that if Scotland desires independence it must gather its aspirational energies to formulate an inclusive and hospitable nationalism or risk a confrontation with a Scotland ‘no longer protected from its own ugliness by the alibi of Westminster’ (2000: 43).
21 Playwright Polis Loizou transitioned into literary fiction with his 2018 novel Disbanded Kingdom, a coming-of-age tale set in Kensington. Loizou points to the British public’s polarized views on Scottish devolution and immigration – internal debates politicized as an encroaching Europeanization – as causal factors in Britain’s withdrawal.
22 Spring engages in dialogue with Shakespeare’s Pericles, a play of migration, loss and exile. Each novel in Smith’s quartet refashions one of Shakespeare’s comedies: The Tempest, Cymbeline, Pericles and The Winter’s Tale (rather tellingly the intertextual referent for Summer).
23 As Hames points out, the matter of whether ‘there is still a British literary field, and if Scottish writers see themselves as part of it’ will require further consideration in the near-future (Personal Correspondence 2018).
24 Sherratt-Bado also points to magical realist short-story collections such as Children’s Children (2016) by Jan Carson, Sleepwalkers (2013) by Bernie McGill and Wild Quiet (2016) by Roisin O’Donnell as examples of post-Agreement literature which ricochet ‘back and forth across the “post-”marker to explore how the past impinges upon the present’, bringing to light ‘living ghosts’ of the Troubles (2018b).
25 The tragic murder of journalist Lyra McKee reignited movement to re-initiate talks and the Assembly reopened in January 2020.
26 witnessed a rapid increase in the number of applications for Irish citizenship: an increase of 27 per cent from 2015 (Fenton 2018: 273).
27 Michelle Gallen’s Big Girl, Small Town (2020), set a decade after the ceasefire, communicates how deeply a family can be moulded by Anglo-Irish politicking. Like her protagonist, Majella O’Neill, Gallen grew up near the Irish border and is well aware of the divisions that would arise should any attempt be made to reinstate a hard border.
28 Nick Laird’s Modern Gods (2019), set in post-Agreement Ulster, contains a similar fascination with the borders of the past.
29 The 1999 Patten Report addressed the crucial role played by national symbols in fuelling sectarian conflict, stating the police should ‘adopt a new badge and symbols which are entirely free from any association with either the British or Irish states’ (Patten 1999).
30 A. L. Kennedy’s Looking for the Possible Dance (1993) acknowledges how, even from a Scottish perspective, ‘England seemed more and more like a foreign country, even to itself’ (2005: 38).
31 Rather than pursue an English Parliament, Blair experimented with the possibility of devolved assemblies, but the idea was rejected in the 2004 north-east devolution referendum. Cummings, later campaign director of Vote Leave, first deployed his post-truth tactics and populist advertising in this referendum, many of which would reappear in 2016, including the mendacious claim that voting against regional devolution would save millions of pounds for the NHS.