Was there a future for the United Kingdom in our times, or would the Union itself break? Since the setting up of the Irish Free State in 1922, it was a question the Welsh and the Scots must have asked themselves from time to time. Northern Ireland had been given devolved power (the Stormont Parliament set up in 1922) against its will. When that power was taken away in 1972 it had protested with even greater vigour. By the end of the conflict, the IRA would have killed 1,800, of whom 465 were soldiers of the British Army. Loyalists killed 990, government forces 363, the army killed 297, the UDR and Royal Irish Regiment 8, the RUC 55. In addition 40,000 had been injured–nearly 3 percent of the population.1
The progress made by Mr Major in bringing this madness to an end led to a radically revised notion of devolution in all the regions of Britain. As Northern Ireland learned to make peace, with power-sharing across the Irish border and the slow process of making a democratic parliament for themselves in Stormont once again, Wales and Scotland were ready for devolution, too. Since the United Kingdom began there had been Celtic nationalists who wanted its dissolution but their aspirations could not seem realistic either on political or economic terms. British membership of the European Union altered that. Hitherto, membership of the United Kingdom provided the only umbrella by which these countries could survive. The existence of the European Union could offer the dream that Scotland could sit down in the Councils of Europe as an equal partner with France, that Wales, having cast off the English yoke, could be an independent member of the Union.
Whether in practice the EU would accept the applications of Scotland and Wales had not been tested. True, Ireland was an independent member and had done well out of it. But Spain, perpetually embattled by terrorists of the Basque separatist movement, would have resisted moves for an independent Wales, Cornwall or Scotland if this appeared to strengthen the arm of the terrorists on their own soil. Meanwhile, the Welsh could enjoy the slightly less impressive spectacle of their fellow countrymen exploiting British membership of Europe for all–and even for slightly more than all–it was worth. Anecdote began to circulate the cattle markets of West Wales of subsidised farmers writing down the extravagant shoe purchases of their wives in Freeman, Hardy and Willis in Swansea as ‘agricultural wellington boots’. And there were jobs for the Welsh-speaking boys and girls in Brussels, translating every single piece of EU legislation and bureaucratic verbiage into Welsh.
Monolingualism in Wales had vanished by the time of the Second World War, and the numbers who spoke both Welsh and English was in steady decline–909,261 in 1931,714,686 in 1951,656,002 in 1961, and 508,207 in 1981.2 It was understandable that Welsh-language enthusiasts should have laboured to preserve their culture, with an expansion of Welsh-speaking schools, an increase in Welsh-language road signs and television programmes, a lavish grant (£300,000 pa in 1988) to the Welsh Books Council and an insistence on the use of Welsh in the professions. This lead to an influx of non-Welsh-speaking Welsh lawyers, businessmen and, to a smaller degree, clergy, to England.
Welsh nationalism as a political aspiration had, in the twentieth century, been focused at first around the figure of Saunders Lewis, founder and President of Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru. The chief aim of the movement was ‘to take away from the Welsh their sense of inferiority…to remove from our beloved country the mark and the shame of conquest’. He saw the purpose of politics as the defence of civilisation. ‘Civilization is more than an abstraction. It must have a local habitation and a name. Here its name is Wales.’3 Just as de Valera and the Irish nationalists felt a natural kinship with the European right, so Saunders Lewis, who became a Roman Catholic in 1932, saw General Franco and Mussolini as the likely role models should Plaid Cymru ever find itself catapulted into power by an uprising of patriotic desire to undo the shame of Edward I’s conquests. It was understandable that until the 1960s most Nonconformist Chapel–going farmers and professional people in Wales continued to vote Liberal, while the coal miners of Merthyr Tydfil and the steelworkers of Port Talbot remained staunch in their loyalty to the Labour Party.
But Plaid Cymru evolved, as all political parties do. The 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, had he risen from the dead and met his successor, would probably have been amazed that Mr Major was a Conservative Prime Minister, rather than a Radical. Tony Blair would find himself leading the party of Keir Hardie and Nye Bevan. Plaid Cymru, its early Catholic-fascist principles quietly abandoned, became the party of Welsh-speaking schools, and the translation of medical prescriptions and the Highway Code into the language of the Gogynfeirdd.
Gwynfor Evans, one of whose first political acts had been the formation of an organisation of Welsh pacifists at the National Eisteddfod of 1937.4 became the leader of Plaid Cymru in 1945. There was something figurative about this gentle man capturing the parliamentary seat of Carmarthen on 14 July 1966. The by-election was fought following the death of Lady Megan Lloyd George.5 the daughter of the last Liberal Prime Minister and in latter days a candidate for the Labour Party. Gwynfor, a law graduate of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, farmed 300 acres at Llangadog. He was the father of seven Welsh-speaking children, a devout Christian, and a teetotaller. He seemed very different from the Free Wales Army, who modelled themselves on the IRA and enjoyed blowing up railway bridges. Nor did he advocate, as did the priest poet R. S. Thomas (who spoke Welsh with a patrician English accent), the torching of English holiday cottages in Wales. But he did concede that his election would not necessarily quieten the men of violence. ‘It does not depend on us. It depends on the Government whether the people use violent means. The Government does not think anyone serious until people start blowing up things or shooting others.’6
Gwynfor’s vision of Wales and Welshmen had been spiritual. At the beginning of 1980 two thousand members of Plaid Cymru vowed to go to prison rather than pay a television licence to an English-language broadcasting corporation. Gwynfor took the matter to Gandhian levels of heroism by announcing that he would fast unto death if a Welsh channel were not established. The government yielded before he even began his fast and the Welsh Fourth Channel (S4C) was launched on 1 November 1982.7 Meanwhile, Gwynfor lost Carmarthen to the Tories, and Plaid Cymru had moved on to a position where, by the time of the setting up of a Welsh Assembly in 1999, it was mopping up the voters who in the past would have been natural Labour supporters. The Labour Party, by the time the Assembly came, had long since ratted on the ideals which had inspired the socialists of the coal mines and the slate quarries who had thrilled to the egalitarian rhetoric of Tom Jones of Rhymni (the trades unionist, not the singer) or Nye Bevan, or even of Megan Lloyd George.
One Welsh socialist more loyal than most to the dreams of Old Labour was Ron Davies, who was best known to the public at large (if known at all) for questioning the fitness of the Prince of Wales to ascend the throne and who asked how the Prince could allow his sons to indulge in field sports. A bright boy from the valleys, Ron had progressed from Bassaleg Grammar School, via Portsmouth Polytechnic, to the world of Welsh Labour politics, beginning with a seat on Rhymney Council, rising to take the safe Labour parliamentary seat of Caerphilly in 1983, and eventually to become the Welsh Secretary and the leader of the party in their new Assembly. Alas, on Monday 26 October 1998, only weeks into his new job, he went for a walk in the dark on Clapham Common, a well-known homosexual haunt, and encountered a man who robbed him at knife-point.8
Davies resigned his Cabinet post at once, in the hope at least of securing his future as Labour leader in the Welsh Assembly. ‘In allowing myself to be placed in this situation, with people I had never met and about whom I knew nothing, I did something very foolish.’9 Three days later, Davies gave a press conference referring to his ‘moment of madness’.10 Later he blamed ‘a violent and emotionally dysfunctional childhood’ for his difficulties. Quite what he had done, in what the madness consisted, or why he felt it necessary to resign, he did not explain. Later on, he came to ‘blame the media’ for what was seen by some as ‘a personal tragedy’.11 Most of his constituents continued to support him whatever form his particular madness had taken, but this was not enough to suppress the rise of his rival Rhodri Morgan, a Blairite placeman, to the position of First Welsh Minister. In August he and his wife, Christina, announced that they would be divorcing because of ‘irreconcilable differences’.12
Was the establishment, at great expense and trouble, of a Welsh Assembly, itself a moment of madness, or the inevitable consequence of half-buried, violent and emotionally dysfunctional historical trauma? Or was it done because the Scots wanted some form of autonomy and it was deemed more judicious to offer the same to Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland rather than seen to be pandering to Scottish separatists?
As Major’s government lost strength, there was the possibility–indeed certainty–that in the Celtic countries the Conservatives would suffer electoral disaster. In the interwar years, 1918–39, the Conservatives had more MPs than any other party in Scotland.13 In 1955 they had secured the majority of Scottish seats and a majority of the Scottish vote.14 By 1987 there were a mere eleven Tory MPs, not enough to make up the necessary sixteen, which composes a parliamentary committee at Westminster. When bills relevant to Scotland came before the Westminster Parliament and reached the committee stage it became necessary to fill up the committees with English MPs. By 1997, the Scottish Tories were completely wiped out–without a single Westminster MP. Many factors contributed to the Conservative decline, though the chief of them could be summed up in the two words, ‘Margaret Thatcher’, whose attempt to impose the Poll Tax on the unwilling Scots was only the coup de grâce after a decade of high unemployment and financial hardship.
It was against this graph of psephological decline that the panicking rump of Scottish MPs in John Major’s government began to make gestures of a distinctly un-Tory kind towards the Scottish nationalists. In 1995, Michael Forsyth succeeded Ian Lang as Scottish Secretary. A new slogan was introduced–‘Fighting for Scotland’.15 (‘Fighting for their lives’ would have been more accurate.) One of the most distasteful, and ridiculous, acts performed by the Conservative Party at this time was the removal of the Stone of Destiny, or Stone of Scone, from the throne in Westminster Abbey. Forsyth, who was behind this piece of vandalism, and Major, who allowed it, both brought down ill luck on their heads. The throne of Edward the Confessor, and the stone beneath it, were all of a piece, inseparable. They were a symbol of the Union of the Crowns and Kingdoms long before these unions occurred as a matter of political fact. Edward I had removed the stone from Scotland in the thirteenth century. Until then, it had always been used as the coronation stone for Scottish kings. For Scottish separatists, naturally, they were viewed as symbols of English conquest. The Stone had been stolen by Scottish nationalists from Westminster Abbey in 1950, but at that stage the possibility of the Union being broken was entertained only by Celtic dreamers. By the time of John Major, this was no dream, but a political reality. The collapse of the Tory vote in Scotland left the way clear for the nationalists. It was to appease them that devolution was brought in. The matter was put to a referendum as soon as New Labour won the 1997 election. The referendum was held on 11 September. There was a 60.2 percent turnout, compared with a turnout of 62.9 percent in a referendum of 1979; 74.3 percent of these voted for the proposition ‘I agree that there should be a Scottish Parliament’, and 63.5 percent voted for the proposition ‘I agree that a Scottish Parliament should have tax-varying powers’. It was open to those who wished to maintain the Union to vote against having a Scottish Parliament at all. Nevertheless, a mere 74.3 percent of 60.2 percent means that less than half of the population of Scotland did in fact vote for devolution. In Wales, a mere 50 percent of 50 percent voted for their assembly–i.e., no more than a quarter of the voters.
Nevertheless, once the devolutionary idea had been set in motion, it was inevitable that the Scottish separatists should move to greater triumphs. The inevitable consequence of this would one day be the break-up of the United Kingdom itself and the end of Britain as a political entity.
During the debates about Scottish devolution in the 1970s, the Labour MP for West Lothian, an Etonian named Tam Dalyell, had posed his famous West Lothian Question. After devolution, is it justifiable for Scottish MPs to vote in the Westminster Parliament on English domestic affairs? It was not permissible, after devolution, for English and Welsh MPs to vote on Scottish matters. The constitutional historian Vernon Bogdanor wrote, ‘There is only one logical answer to the West Lothian question, but it is politically unrealistic: it is for Britain to implement legislative devolution all round, so becoming a thoroughgoing federalist state.’16 But this was an optimistic point of view even in 1999, when it was published, for it was clear that the Scottish nationalists intended to take things much further than that, in which event there would be no centralised authority from which power could be said any longer to evolve. Almost contemporaneously with the Scottish nationalist success story is–by pure coincidence–the development of the Big Bang Theory in physics. (It was in 1979 that Alan Guth, of Stanford University, aged thirty-two, proposed his view that matter, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces, etc, all came into being milliseconds after the Bang.) Modern physics was a form of poetry, if not of theology, so strange as to be all but incomprehensible. One of the metaphors which it tried to use to describe the universe was that it was expanding. But Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg noted, ‘Solar systems and galaxies are not expanding, and space is not expanding.’ Rather, the galaxies were rushing apart.
Rushing apart was a good metaphor of what was happening to Britain at the same period. It took poets to be able to comprehend the height and breadth of what was happening. Benjamin Zephaniah:
With my Jamaican hand on my Ethiopian heart
The African heart deep in my Brummie chest,
And I chant Aston Villa, Aston Villa, Aston Villa,
Believe me, I know my stuff.
I am not wandering dark into the rootless future
Nor am I going back in time to find somewhere to live…
I want to make politically aware love with the rainbow…
Dis is not an emergency
I’m as kool as my imagination, I’m, more caring than your foreign policy,
I don’t have an identity crisis.
The Rastafarian poet might not have had an identity crisis. Many other Britons did. Many Scottish nationalists did want to wander drunk into the rootless future. And their desire to do so would plunge the British who did not share their desire, not into federalism, but into chaos. Wandering drunk into a rootless future was also the inevitable lot of the English and the Welsh if the Scots decided to go it alone and declare independence. And although the monarch was technically the Queen of Scots, as well as of the rest of her kingdom, it did not seem likely that Alex Salmond and his supporters in the National Party would wish to perpetuate her role. The Union, when it broke, would eventually bring not merely Britain, but also its monarchy to an end.
Part of the reason for the resurgence of the Scottish National Party was negative–the complete disillusion felt by the Scottish electorate for the Westminster-based parties, and for the patronising manner in which Secretaries of State for Scotland had (as it was perceived north of the border) known what was best for Scotland. Part of the reason was, no doubt, the political skill and personal charm of Alex Salmond, the leader of the party from 1990 onwards. By the time our period came to an end, it was too early to say whether an independent Scotland would enjoy a renaissance of cultural and national life, bestriding the world stage as an independent European nation, or whether, by contrast, it would become an inward-looking, puritanical, provincial, dull little country, incapable of recapturing the glory days of David Hume, Robert Adam, Adam Smith, Walter Scott and Francis Jeffrey. The British Empire had in many senses been the Scottish Empire, with many of those who settled in nineteenth-century Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the newly formed African states being Scottish, many of the best engineers, medics and colonial administrators being Scottish. In the nineteenth century, Dundee had been a world centre of the whaling trade; and of the jute industry which provided sacking for half the world’s commodities. Glasgow was one of the greatest commercial centres in the world; and also one of the great manufacturing bases, where steam engines, machines for spinning cotton flax and wool were made. Above all, it was remembered as a hub of metal-working and of shipbuilding. No doubt two reasons for the pre-eminence of Glasgow were ‘the abundance of skilled workmen and the low wages paid to them’.17 But another reason was that, rather than being a small, inward-looking nation, Scotland, in partnership with England, was now part of the greatest Imperial adventure since Roman times. The Scottish Sun in January 1992 came out as a nationalist newspaper: ‘The Scottish Sun has been thinking long and hard about what form of government would best serve our future. We have come to the inescapable conclusion that Scotland’s destiny lies as an independent nation within the European Community. The political and economic union with England is now nearly 300 years old. It has served us well in the past, but as links with Europe strengthen, that union has become more and more unnecessary. The time has come to break the shackles. To collect our own taxes. To run our own lives. To talk to other nations in the world on our behalf. For too long–300 years too long–we have thought of ourselves as a second class nation…’18
It is too soon to say whether the Sun’s self-contradictory prophecy will come to pass: self-contradictory because, in one breath, it says that the Union had served Scotland well in the past, and in the next that Scotland had thought of itself as a second-class nation. Historically, this was simply not the case. The period when Scotland was manifestly not a second-class nation, and was not regarded as one either by its own citizens or by others, was during the period of its Enlightenment, and during the heyday of Empire: i.e., when the Union was at its closest. Many Scots felt, after devolution, that their country had diminished, and become more provincial, more petty, more inward-looking.
In Northern Ireland, John Major was lucky enough to have history on his side. The Long War was exhausting all sides. The IRA’s criminal activities made them deeply hated in working-class Catholic communities–the protection rackets, the knee-capping, the gangsterism. Crucially, its foreign backers in Libya and the United States were beginning to run out of cash, and at last America had a President, in Bill Clinton, who knew Britain (he was a graduate student at University College, Oxford) and who was prepared to stop the sentimental pro-Irish lobby in the US from giving money to Noraid. (Surveys had often showed that a majority of those donating money to this terrorist cause were under the impression that the IRA was the Army (official) of the Irish Republic, at war with an invading British force.) With an intelligent American President on the side of the Peace Process, the republican voters could feel reassured and, an almost equally weighty consideration, the self-importance of the Republican high command could be flattered. Not for them the kind of retirement they had witnessed being spent by IRA veterans in the 1950s and 1960s, undistinguished lives in the dingy outskirts of Dublin, poverty, whisky loosening the tongue to recall the bombing of pubs or shooting or border patrols, or to theorise about the Revolution, but with the evidence of failure all around their lyncrusta-coated parlours. They could see, if they played their cards right, careers as public speakers in America, perhaps even Irish senators. What was to prevent them by act or default from being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?
These were the rewards which history might offer. ‘It is time for the cycle of violence to be broken. We are prepared to break it,’ Adams told Sinn Fein. And this in Dublin. Neither McGuinness nor Adams ever made any public acknowledgement of membership of the IRA and they continued to speak to the ends of their careers as if the violence was something quite outside themselves, something which they, in common with the American President and the new Prime Minister of Britain, who looked and sounded like a gentle bank manager, hoped would go away. ‘Republicans want peace. We want an honourable peace, no papering over the cracks or brushing under the carpet the humiliations, degradations and injustices inflicted on us, by a foreign power.’19
So, John Major had history on his side. He began the Northern Ireland peace process. It was left to Tony Blair to finish it. Probably as a good Chief Whip, Major had already foreseen that they could allow the UUP and its leader David Trimble–i.e., the decent, sensible, pro-British, etc, etc–be the victims of the process. Hitherto, the British politicians had been unable to resist the impulse to impose decency and common sense upon the Northern Irish. Major, and Blair after him, allowed the leader of the ‘mainstream’ Unionists to be the one who was prepared, very, very tentatively, to talk about the possibility of power-sharing with the nationalists. Inevitably Trimble was represented to the Protestants as a trimmer.
There were the expected delays as the IRA, in ever less penetrable communiqués, spoke of ‘decommissioning’ their weapons. A few rogue explosions would continue to save their pride but their game was up. Major was the first British negotiator really to insist that the Northern Irish must solve their own problems. Their new political arrangements must be decided by a referendum. There were talks about talks about talks. Canadian inspectors came to inspect the caches of Libyan guns and explosives, Algerian rocket launchers and Russia.20 pistols which the maniacs had so expensively collected over the years. Boring ‘framework documents’ were drafted, read out, spat upon, agreed upon. Every now and then one of the negotiators would fall back on the old crackpot rhetoric to please their grass-roots supporters. But they were tired of killing one another. Mr Major, as reassuringly boring as a man from the Alliance and Leicester Building Society advising them about the respective merits of repayment versus interest-only mortgages, led all these fanatics, in spite of themselves, down the pathway of peace. His own personal doggedness and niceness were integral parts of the story, though perhaps the whole oddity of the situation did require, if it was to be brought to fruition, the skills of histrionic fraudulence in which Mr Major was lacking but with which nature had so liberally endowed his successor.