Back in 2006, when he was close to executing his masterplan to chase Tony Blair out of Downing Street, Gordon Brown sought to address something that worried many voters: his Scottishness. ‘My wife is from Middle England, so I can relate to it,’ he pronounced, as if Middle England were a town somewhere off the M40.
In fact, though Sarah Brown was born in Buckinghamshire, she spent most of her early childhood in Tanzania and her family moved to North London when she was seven. By mistaking a term denoting the provincial English psyche for a geographical area, Brown merely demonstrated that he was indeed all at sea.
He has never let that stop him from drawing up governmental systems that will allegedly solve the tensions inherent within the United Kingdom, a union of one highly populated country with three sparsely populated others. And now he is back at it, having been invited by Keir Starmer to spearhead Labour’s attempted fight back against Nicola Sturgeon.
In an article for the Daily Telegraph, Brown recommends massively over-reacting to the current fetish among some for talking-up the risk of the Union collapsing. ‘I believe the choice is now between a reformed state and a failed state,’ he tells us.
My time as an MEP for the East of England underlined to me just how weak regional identity is in this country
The trigger for Brown’s intervention is, as always, his perfectly understandable wish to thwart Scottish separatism. He cites worrying polling about the number of Scots believing the Union undermines their distinctive identity and advises Boris Johnson about how to tackle that (basically, yet more devolution of power away from Westminster).
But it should be remembered that Brown does not have a great track record in this area. He was one of those who believed that setting up a devolved parliament in Scotland would kill nationalism stone dead. In fact – as Johnson recently observed in an unguarded remark to Tory MPs – it has had the opposite effect, giving nationalists multiple opportunities to promote Scottishness at the expense of Britishness. So why would taking further steps down the federal route produce a different outcome?
Brown was also a key champion of the idea of elected English regional assemblies as a counter-balance to Celtic devolution. But that idea was rejected by a majority of almost four to one in a referendum in the North East in 2004 (the first major campaign honour of a certain Dominic Cummings) and Labour’s plans for further regional referendums in the North West and Yorkshire were quietly shelved.
In his Telegraph article, Brown latches on to the fact that regional metro-mayors want more powers – a case of Mandy Rice Davies’ law if ever I heard one (they would, wouldn’t they?). But is there really a credible case for believing that transferring more decision-making authority to one-party states in Greater Manchester, Merseyside and South Yorkshire will help promote the sense of Britishness upon which the UK depends?
Andy Burnham was elected on a turnout of 28.9 per cent in Greater Manchester, Steve Rotheram on a turnout of 26.1 per cent on Merseyside and Dan Jarvis on a turnout of 25.8 per cent in the Sheffield City Region. This hardly indicates a fervour for regional government among English voters.
The dog which is never allowed to bark in Gordon Brown’s schemes for constitutional reform is, of course, English nationalism. However coherent it may be as a collective identity in the eyes of tens of millions, Englishness is the one national feeling upon these islands that Brown is always determined to suppress.
Yet England – too big and too powerful to sit comfortably amid an ultra-devolved UK – is inescapably what one is left with if one keeps undermining Britishness by conceding further ground to Celtic nationalists. Containing the English within ‘regions’ of roughly similar populations to those of the other UK nations is a bodge job – an obvious retro-fit necessitated only by imbalances created elsewhere. My time as an MEP for the East of England underlined to me just how weak regional identity is in this country. Would a Norfolk farmer feel any special sense of East Anglian kinship with a Bedford estate agent? Hardly. But at World Cup time both might hang out a Cross of St George.
Gordon Brown would not have known it, but when he bumped into the estimable Gillian Duffy in working class Rochdale during the 2010 general election and was confronted by her concerns about the impact of excessive immigration on social cohesion, hers was a voice of Middle England too. His plan for a ‘Forum of the Nations and Regions’ – their nations, our regions from an English perspective – just won’t wash.
Boris Johnson would be much better advised to trust the instincts which recently led him to suggest the 2014 referendum in Scotland had settled constitutional matters there for a very long time ahead. Those were indeed the rules of engagement to which all participants signed up.
It’s hard to justify the current craze for claiming the UK is on a knife edge due to polling far removed from the moment of decision. A Union which saved Scotland’s banking sector not so many years ago and has just secured life-saving Covid vaccines for Scots by the million needs simply to get on with being a success.
But if Scots do vote to go their own way when a referendum is next held, they should know that their southern neighbour will not be broken into manageable, bite-size ‘regions’ called things like East or North West. It will be a country called England.
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