Why the breakup of the ‘United Kingdom’ can't come soon enough

Does the recent agreement and declaration of a renewed effort at the constitutional break-up of Britain, launched by the heads of nationalist parties across Scotland, Wales and Ireland, signal the return of the national question to British politics?

Meeting in Cardiff Bay less than a fortnight ago, the leader of Plaid Cymru Rhun ap Iorwerth, Scottish National Party leader John Swinney, Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald and Sinn Féin Vice-President Michelle O’Neill signed a Memorandum of Understanding seeking to revive momentum behind their respective quests for national sovereignty. The Memorandum itself articulated a shared agreement over stronger, fairer economies, the expansion of national energy resources, a commitment to the future of the European Union, and a defence of self-determination.

Coming within months of Andy Burnham’s rise to the top of government, this announcement of intentions, clearly geared towards taking advantage of the Labour leader’s support for devolving power regionally and nationally, was met with polite dismissal. A spokesperson for Burnham made it clear that the Prime Minister was focused on uniting the nation and confronting the cost-of-living crisis rather than on “constitutional debates”.

Whilst the evidence for Andy Burnham focusing qualitatively on resolving the cost-of-living crisis remains remarkably thin, the relative success of Celtic nationalism has always depended on the nationalist parties’ capacity to conjure social content into their strategies.

In 2014, despite the SNP losing the independence referendum by 10 points, the Yes vote, in no small part due to the mass grassroots efforts of the non-aligned Radical Independence Campaign, energised working-class voters on council estates across the country. Across the decade since the referendum, however, the SNP has actively sought to demobilise those sentiments, welding itself far more thoroughly to the technocratic management of the devolved constitutional order.

As Johnathan Shafi has argued in his aptly entitled Independence Captured blog, “behind the scenes, the SNP have acted as a cog in the corporate machine. In 2020 alone, hundreds of secret meetings between multinational corporations and wealthy individuals took place with Scottish Government ministers. The SNP signed off on freeports, subnational tax havens owned by private companies. They sold off Scottish wind energy to foreign capital.”

From their roots in radical leftism and peace politics, the SNP have evolved into a party incapable of inspiring a movement for independence, an issue far less salient to voters than a decade ago. Instead, the party is recovering from its enthralment in a series of high-level corruption scandals involving senior figures such as Peter Murrell and Nicola Sturgeon.

The quest for independence

The recent announcement that Members of the Scottish Parliament will be able to vote on a legal mechanism for an independence referendum should be a significant step towards the break-up of Britain, especially given it was emboldened by the majority. However, the dissonance of an establishment party trying to conjure mass support for independence on establishment grounds does not bode well.

In Wales, the quest for independence is situated in an earlier phase. The 2025 Caerphilly by-election, in which well-known local Plaid Cymru candidate Lindsay Whittle defeated the Reform UK candidate, in some ways prefigured what was to come in the recent elections to the Welsh Parliament, the Senedd. By May 2026, Labour’s century of managed decline, as argued compellingly by Seb Cook, had come crashing down.

Labour’s vote had been cannibalised by Plaid Cymru, which had become the biggest party in the Senedd, five seats short of a majority. Holding off Reform UK, which had increased its number of seats to 34 in its first run at the Senedd, the Welsh nationalists have faced several challenges since forming a minority government.

Having ruled out any commitment to a referendum in this governing cycle, the party has made a significant miscalculation, expecting Labour to operate as Plaid has historically, like the reasonable opposition, reluctantly supporting austerity budgets. The declining establishment party in Wales has given them no such reprieve.

The Irish dynamic remains somewhat different. Whilst, as the late historian Neil Davidson argued, Scottish nationalism emerged as a constituent part of British national identity in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union, Irish republicanism is the distinct and heterogeneous expression of centuries of anti-colonial resistance, articulated and practised by figures as diverse as wealthy Protestants such as Theobald Wolfe Tone and working-class Catholics like Bobby Sands.

The early twentieth-century war of independence saw Republican forces divided by the British state, as Free Staters accepted the British Empire’s partition of Ireland and the erection of a formalised Orange State in the north, exercising sectarian discrimination and oppression against the Catholic minority.

A century later, the republican cause has officially put down the guns, with Sinn Féin commanding the largest bloc in the Northern Ireland Assembly and topping election polls in the Republic of Ireland just four months before an election to the Dáil Éireann must legally occur.

Change must come now

Despite its growing dominance, Sinn Féin reflects a different social base compared to its days as the political wing of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. In the north of Ireland especially, it has increasingly become the party of the Catholic middle class, as parties such as People Before Profit and smaller left Republican outfits chip away at its vote in the working-class Catholic strongholds of Derry and Belfast, as well as some Catholic rural areas.

In the Republic, the Catholic middle class is somewhat more afraid of Sinn Féin, fearing the disruption to their comforts that a potential border poll could bring.

If Sinn Féin is going to win its arguments for a border poll north and south, however, it will have to disregard its framing of Irish unity as “Vote now, change to come later”. The Celtic Tiger may be experiencing a healthier growth pattern than many of its comparators to its east, but its image as a low-tax, low-regulation haven for tax-dodgers and Artificial Intelligence won’t provide the most promising appeal to working-class voters, of Protestant or Catholic descent, in the north.

For independence and unity to be an enticing prospect on both sides of the border, it will require a government geared towards transforming the Irish Republic into a profoundly free and sovereign place for working-class people tout court if the centuries-long colonial sectarianism of Orange state versus Green is to be broken out of.

The existence of left-wing challengers to Sinn Féin, such as People Before Profit, keeping them honest and giving a social content to the independence project not unlike the Radical Independence Campaign, could be central for determining the outcome of Irish politics.

What remains of the imperial British state

It may be counter-intuitive to suggest that the British state might boast of some success for having held on to these three statelets for so long. Without a doubt, the powers that be are evidently capable of great hubris. But the efforts of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, bringing the Provisional IRA to the table, acceding to the popular demands for peace of those in the north of Ireland, instituting the Good Friday Agreement and devolving power to Scotland and Wales have all served to tame and absorb the threats of nationalist projects.

Constitutional devolution transformed nationalist leaders into state managers long before those projects came close to achieving their demands. Andy Burnham, if he is to avoid becoming, in John Swinney’s words, “the last prime minister of the United Kingdom”, will seek to follow in his predecessors’ footsteps, offering up a vision of devolution tempting enough to placate today’s nationalist politicians whilst rescuing what remains of the imperial British state.

In a clear signal of their intention to take advantage of Burnham’s devolutionary impulses, Swinney and ap Iorwerth’s separate agreement between the Welsh and Scottish governments, signed the same day as the Memorandum of Understanding, stated it would "press the case for greater fairness for Wales and Scotland in areas such as the operation of the UK funding arrangements and powers over our constitutional future".

The future of Britain’s break-up, a desirable outcome for democrats and anti-imperialists everywhere, depends on those same nationalist politicians rejecting this tendency and embracing a radicalism which might energise their constituents. In short, as the history of Irish republicanism in particular has shown, the future of Britain’s break-up requires the nationally oppressed and subordinated populace to take national sovereignty as a potential starting point, but by no means an endgame. It’s unclear that today’s nationalist leaders grasp this.

Jonas Marvin is the author of The Breaking of the English Working Class. He also cohosts Life of the Party podcast and blogs at Marx’s Dream Journal.

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