A Big Day in the North: Nationalism in the UK, The British-Irish Council and unintended consequence…

A Big Day in the North…or so Black Grape had it… back in 1995. So, what’s up next week? Why, the British-Irish Council meet, and as Gerry Moriarty writes in yesterdays Irish Times:

First Minister the Rev Ian Paisley and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness are scheduled to greet Gordon Brown at Parliament Buildings, Stormont, on Monday when he makes his first visit to Northern Ireland as British prime minister.

Mr Brown is due to join the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and leaders of UK devolved assemblies for the first meeting of the British-Irish Council since devolution was restored. The North-South Ministerial Council, another key institution of the Belfast Agreement, will meet the following day in Armagh.

Choreography is everything. According to Moriarty the BIC meeting was to be held last week, but Brown was unable to make it due to ‘diary difficulties’, well, that and the small issue of settling into his new job. Problem was Paisley is said to have stated that if Brown wasn’t there, well then, neither would he be. Needless to say he has his own fish to fry on this issue:

Dr Paisley has made a point of emphasising that the East-West relationship should have equal billing with the North-South link, which is why the two institutions are meeting on the same week.

“For too long the East-West axis was the poor relation of North-South business. We are committed to redressing the balance and that is why there will be a British-Irish Council meeting in addition to a meeting between Northern Ireland Ministers and the Republic’s Government on Tuesday,” said Dr Paisley yesterday.

Martin McGuinness has adopted a somewhat more muted tone and noted that ‘both summits were important’. Yes, indeed. But which is more important?

Anyhow, whatever the optics, it is good to see Brown engaging at this level only a couple of weeks into his premiership. And Paisley might like to ponder on the fact that ‘Britain’ is not quite as it used to be.

Michael White, writing in the Guardian yesterday, suggested that although:

Not many people in England seem to care very much…nationalist politics within the British (or is it Atlantic?) Isles take a significant step forward today when a politician called Ieuan Wyn Jones is appointed deputy first minister of Wales.

The first minister, Labour party stalwart Rhodri Morgan, was taken to hospital suffering from heart problems early this week. As he is out of action it seems likely that he will be the representative of the Welsh Assembly. And this is significant? It is indeed, as Ieuan Wyn Jones is the leader of Plaid Cymru.

A remarkable deal has been hammered out between PC and Labour. This entails:

a [Labour promise] to review Welsh funding and to give the Welsh language official status that will require basic service information to be written bilingually in the private as well as public sector.

Now, let’s consider the line up at the meeting of the British-Irish Council. Scotland will be represented by the able and charismatic Alex Salmond of the Scottish National Party and now head of the Scottish Executive. Ieuan Wyn Jones represents Wales as part of a PC/Labour coalition. And Northern Ireland is represented by the Democratic Unionist Party (arguably taking on more and more an sort of Ulster nationalist identity) in tandem with Sinn Féin.

So, in a strange inversion of the Sinn Féin aim to have people serving in governments both north and south of the Border, here we see Nationalist representatives of the constituent elements of the United Kingdom, bar of course that constitutional anomaly - England itself.

How different all this must seem from the heady days of constitutional reform in the late 1990s when - presumably - the idea was to lock Labour administrations in power in Scotland and Wales. In truth, Labour remains pre-eminent, but the Nationalists are doing remarkably well. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Offer people a forum to exercise even limited power and they will generally take it. Add to that the incentive of democratic elections and chances are they will break against you every once in a while.

As White notes:

It is all a bit sudden, but the tectonic plates of nationalist sentiment are slowly shifting. In Edinburgh a minority SNP executive is managing to keep the buses running on time, and in Belfast Sinn Féin now shares power with Ian Paisley’s DUP. Labour’s hegemony is eroding.

So this, somewhat disunited Kingdom, is the all but inevitable outworking of processes that were relatively predictable. But the tenor of the times is another thing entirely. Because the nature of the Nationalist parties is bound to alter the nature of the BIC. I think this is all for the good. It provides an example to the DUP of how Britain itself is changing, and relatively quickly. And a further example is provided in the way in which there is a coalition in Wales and how that is engaging with overlapping identities. The SF/DUP rapprochement is remarkable. But it is only the most remarkable of any number of events.

These pave the way for future developments where we can expect to see the ties that have bound the UK loosening, but not being discarded entirely. The Republic also has a part to play in the future, by demonstrating that there is a shared history between these islands but that this can be encompassed within multiple political and cultural identities. That I suspect will see the North and South on this island develop ever deepening linkages whereas the process will probably be quite the opposite between Scotland, England and Wales. But not to the point where political centrifugal forces lead to no linkages at all.

Anti-GFA Republicanism has one reasonably strong argument in reference to the Good Friday Agreement. That is that the cross-border/all-island aspects will run into the ground because it is not in the interest of the British or Republic to engage with them on any significant level. I’ve always felt that argument to be willfully pessimistic, if only because I suspect that SF in government will provide part of the dynamic. But in the context of a changing Britain, one where Scotland is eager to work closely with the RoI and Wales perhaps to the exclusion of England, then there will be pressure external to this island to see broader movement on this island because they will be seeking to emulate in part such movement themselves.

I have no idea how this will play out. Does it shore up Fianna Fáil, or Sinn Féin politically? Or, indeed, the DUP? The last election saw the North recede as a topic of any great interest to the electorate in the Republic - not that it has ever been very central to electoral choices. That seems unlikely to change.

Finally, the initial point Michael White makes is important. Not many people in England seem to care very much. That is troubling, and a subject for another day.