Transcript: Q&A
What’s United About This Kingdom?
Professor Linda Colley
Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, Princeton University; Author, Acts of Union and Disunion and Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837
Sir Simon Jenkins
Author and Journalist
Ben Page
Chief Executive, Ipsos MORI
Chair: Jon Snow
Broadcaster, Channel 4 News
3 July 2014
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Question 1
It’s been hinted at, but isn’t it time we had independence for London? London is a prosperous city, it’s a city-state, it’s a world capital. Let’s have independence for London, please.
Jon Snow
Can I just say that if you were to talk to any of the guards on the Underground or many of the nurses in the hospitals, or particularly the firemen, you would find they had come from Merseyside, Peterborough, Doncaster. You couldn’t survive in London without –
Question 1
But they come to London, that’s the point.
Jon Snow
But they wouldn’t be able to house them. So you’d be perfectly happy to have your workforce living outside your country.
Question 1
If they come here, then they’re [indiscernible].
Jon Snow
They can’t.
Ben Page
[indiscernible] naturalized.
Jon Snow
Anybody else? Yes.
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Question 2
Professor Colley, you talked about the uncertainties all over Europe about regional government – Catalonia, for example. Simon, you also say that Europe is suffering from the jitters over devolution, possible devolution and the constituent parts of its states. But isn’t it curious that in the European Union itself there’s no other country, I think, which is quite so insouciant about separatist movements within its borders as the British have shown themselves to be? Take Eastern Europe, for example, the new Eastern European members. Although their borders are very recent, they wouldn’t countenance one second changing the borders that they have at the moment. There’s very intense nationalism. France – would France countenance changing its borders? Or Germany? Would any of the constituent states of the European Union? They’re not. The European Union is based on a very strong nationalism which Britain is proving not to share.
Simon Jenkins
I think that’s true. If you want – a real hero in Spain, in Barcelona, is David Cameron. They adore him because he’s allowing the Scots a vote. They really are very enthusiastic about David Cameron. I think it’s true. Certainly Spain is in turmoil over this subject, I don’t know about the others, but Spain is going through the same crises that we’re going through. I have no doubt that East Europe is fragile, it’s just fragile at the moment. See Ukraine. You can resist, as Britain resisted, breaking up a union but it doesn’t necessarily achieve that particular goal.
One point that Linda raised about the Tories and Scotland – of course, the Tory unionism wasn’t about Scotland, it was to do with Ireland. It was a sort of almost farcical Anglican, anti-Catholic obsessiveness which was ended in 1921. The whole debate is conducted as though there hadn’t been 1921 – potentially a third of the British Isles’ population went AWOL in 1921, largely because we governed them so appallingly badly. One of the reasons why I think Scotland – some of it has to do with the end of empire and the long- term view of it, but a lot of it is to do with the poll tax, the way in which London has casually dealt with Scotland over the years. Enough Scots just got thoroughly fed up.
Jon Snow
Nobody has actually mentioned Europe, which is interesting. By Europe, I mean the European Union. After all, Europe was founded as a Europe of the regions, not a Europe of nation-states. Of course, it is by constitution and definition really a Europe of nation-states, but the whole idea was to allow – which actually happens. Have you ever been to the Catalonian office in Brussels? It’s big. It’s got a very important character running it and all the rest of it. There’s a big Bavarian office. You only have to drive around the Western Isles to meet the blue flag with the yellow stars, which has been negotiated by the Scottish government for the expenditure of Section 11 – is it? – monies in deprived areas. But it doesn’t seem to have quelled the desire for separation. Very interesting.
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Question 3
As an Irishman, I slightly hesitate to become involved in this discussion, but I find myself in 100 per cent agreement with Jon Snow. Having spoken to a number of Scottish people, it’s very obvious to me when they make the calculations – or I force them to make the calculations – they’re not really, shall we say, the kind of militant nationalists that would justify the cause of Scottish independence really as a truly nationalist movement. (I apologize if there’s any of them in the audience.) But the point about alienation is fundamental. For example, why is the European Union committed to the regions, as it is such a, shall we say, hot topic in the United Kingdom? Because it is associated with that greater sense of alienation. It’s far away. Local governments always take credit for European Union initiatives. This amplifies that sense of alienation, and the sense of powerlessness I feel myself even, dealing with Tower Hamlets on parking issues. It gets down to a very local level. I’m just echoing what you say, I’m sorry I can’t add anything more to it than that.
But there is one fundamental point which does annoy me: we still have 19th-century style government administration. We’re all active in social media. I was even trying to tweet the wisdom of Jon Snow on Twitter just now, for example. But our democratic process has not caught up with this. We still have a debating chamber that’s modelled even further back than the 19th century – it goes back three centuries.
Simon Jenkins
Sword and a half. Sword and a half from the man opposite you – I mean, ridiculous.
Question 3
The point I’m just trying to make is that unless democracy catches up with the 21st century, unless we can integrate social media into the process and give people that sense of participation, that sense of alienation is even going to become –
Jon Snow
I wonder whether this isn’t borne out by polls. I don’t know whether you’ve polled on this but my sense, travelling up there as a hack – I can’t say I went up there as a scientist, but travelling up there as a hack – was that there’s about 20 per cent seriously solid nationalists, which I think they’ve always been.
Ben Page
Yes.
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Jon Snow
And then there’s a fluid kind of 15 per cent, maybe even as many as 20 per cent, who frankly are angry, embittered, resentful, alienated and just simply want – let’s just do it ourselves because nobody else has done it very well for us yet. Which I think devo max probably would cure.
Ben Page
Yes.
Linda Colley
I think to an extent though – probably neither side would appreciate this comment, but I think there are certain parallels to this extent between some of the supporters of UKIP and some of the supporters of SNP. In both cases, if you look at some of the analysis, many of the staunch supporters are – and there is no other appropriate phrase – sort of white, working-class males who feel that they are losing out. The world has shifted, they don’t have the status they once did, and it is partly lashing out at what you think is to blame, which in Scotland can be London and the Tories, and in parts of England it can be Brussels. So that’s one point.
But your point about, more broadly, how we need to adjust our machinery of government, including the wonderful building of Westminster Parliament – which as an historian and in aesthetic terms I think it’s a beautiful building, but it was created in the mid-19th century for a two-party system and for an empire stretching across the globe. The whole rectangular House of Commons presupposes a mainly two-party divide. If one moves from there and, as I did this January, visits the wonderful Assembly building in Cardiff – a light, airy, circular building where people can do their emails while they’re listening to talks and you get translations of debates into Welsh, not just English, and people can gather round outside and look at what their representative is doing (which is sometimes disastrous because they see that they’re actually ordering things online). But still there’s a kind of openness and a light about that building which Westminster doesn’t have anymore.
Jon Snow
I couldn’t agree more. I know the chairman is not supposed to agree with anything but I think it’s a very serious problem. People think it’s the yah-boo, farmyard stuff but actually it’s the whole picture. Let’s not forget: even the lavatories are delineated for mainly men. There are not enough women’s lavatories because they never envisaged having a lot of women.
Linda Colley
I know, yes. 6 Q&A: What’s United About This Kingdom?
Question 4
My question is really about the point you all followed on to quite quickly, about the relationship between London and the south and other parts of England, regardless of [indiscernible] but also of course that applies to relationships with Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland. Do you see any signs that elites in London and the south, whether government, business, academia, the lot, are really taking seriously the alienation between north and south within England and with Scotland, and are trying to do something about it? That’s at the elite level. At the mass public level, how serious do you think the EasyJet factor is? By the EasyJet factor, I mean the ease and relative cheapness of hopping off with the family to the continent rather than going to other parts of the country.
I would just also finish off by saying I thought the comments about the impact on Scotland of loss of empire were spot on. I grew up in the west of Scotland, born and grew up in the 1960s. Then, in my family and others, there was still an enormous residue of the impact of the empire. That’s all gone now. The change is massive.
Simon Jenkins
I don’t know, I don’t totally agree with my colleagues about the architecture of Westminster. I don’t think it matters very much.
Jon Snow
It’s too good a building to leave to 650 people. Surely let everybody go in there and enjoy the cradle of democracy.
Simon Jenkins
Would that it mattered. The glorious Assembly building in Cardiff, which I know a bit, is a citadel to total incompetence. However, let’s leave that to one side.
The business about localism – I think the single biggest problem that we’re all discussing now is the relationship between the centre and locality, however you define it. This business of tossing out localism within 12 months of an election is absolutely standard. It happens every election. I sat with Tony Blair before 1997 and pleaded with him – I was chairing the Commission on Local Democracy – to have elected mayors. He said: what a wonderful idea, it will smash local Labour parties. I remember him saying it. He adopted it, Frank Dobson tried to kill it. It got into statute. Blair said: if I hadn’t done it in my first year, I’d never have done it, because the Treasury were totally opposed to it, but at least they won’t have any power. This was the real conversation. 7 Q&A: What’s United About This Kingdom?
Where I totally agree with the questioner is – I just spent a lot of time quite deliberately outside of London. I’m a total Londoner. I’m a London nationalist. London is a city-state. There’s a city-state called London/New York, it’s one city-state. They’ve both got sort of crap countries, certainly crap governance, outside them.
What I think is really difficult to crack is the perception London has of the rest of the country, Scotland and the rest of England. It is completely distorted. Most of the people who make decisions in London go to France and Italy for their holidays. They never – I was in Grimsby the other day. Grimsby is the most godawful place, it really is. It really is a disaster. Many of the things wrong with Grimsby are disasters inflicted on them by London and Brussels and so on. But you know, it’s desperate. I don’t think there’s anywhere that bad in France or Italy. It really is that bad.
Liverpool, on the other hand, is now really a very exciting city. Leeds is an exciting city, Manchester is coming through. Bristol has got an elected mayor and he’s a good man. Things are moving. The countryside is full of life, thanks to subsidy. There’s no doubt the Cotswolds, much of the Pennines, the small towns there – York’s a booming city. Oxford and Cambridge are booming. It’s something to do with the great centres of population of the old industrial belt of England. It is a desperate problem, and the fact of the matter is London doesn’t trust them. It fears postcode lotteries. It wants uniformity of service because as Ben says, that’s what the public appear to want. It will not give them any power. When the other day Ed Miliband said, I’m going to allow cities to keep their business rates provided they become city-regions – what a proviso. He then added the next time: oh and by the way, it will be taken off the central grant. It was meaningless, it was a sop.
Linda Colley
I think the specific point was about the north-south divide.
Question 4
Well, the London elites’ attitude about it.
Linda Colley
I think it goes beyond that, the north-south divide, because it’s been – as I tried to write at different stages, the north-south divide has been persistent. You can see aspects of it certainly back to the Middle Ages, if not before. The great American writer Emerson, when he visited Britain in the mid-19th century, said: people talk about England but actually what people think of England is the south, and the further you go north in England that vision of England recedes, because the north is just a different place.
I have suggested, but it will never wash – I think there should be an English parliament or an English assembly, because I believe the devolution of the 1990s was incomplete. You cannot have assemblies or quasi-parliaments in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and then not have anything similar in England. I 8 Q&A: What’s United About This Kingdom?
think it provokes all sorts of problems. So in some ways it would be a logical thing not only to have an English assembly but to put it in the north of England, so as to balance the south.
Jon Snow
Sort of Salford, really, BBC.
Ben Page
This is Andrew [indiscernible]’s idea of getting the House of Lords to go to Manchester or something.
Linda Colley
But if you speak even to quite relaxed Labour politicians who are trying to think about these things, they don’t like that idea at all, partly I think because they’re worried that there might yet be another element of separatism. What happens if the north of England becomes a Catalonia situation and people say London can secede but we think we’ll secede as well. How much fragmentation do you allow?
Jon Snow
Ben’s got some figures, so maybe you should chip in with them.
Ben Page
We’ve just asked them actually this month whether they want England to be governed as it is now, with laws made by UK parliament – this is British people we’ve asked, so it includes the Scots and the Welsh – whether they want England to have its own new parliament with lawmaking powers, or whether they want each region to have its own assembly that runs services like health. The proportion who want things to be exactly or pretty much as they are now: 45 per cent in 2006, 44 per cent in June 2014. So it hasn’t shifted. England to have its own parliament: 26 per cent in 2006 and in June 2014, 26 per cent. For some more local devolution, 17 per cent think each region should run something like the NHS or health; it’s gone up to 23 per cent. So centralism does seem to have some attraction.
The other thing we know about referenda: the status quo does have, in most referenda around the world, a lot of attraction to it. I think somehow generally with polling, attitudes change much more slowly. There are great fractures that Jon is possibly predicting but I don’t see it at the moment.
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Question 5
Going back to a point Linda just made, globalization isn’t going away anytime soon. Like a kind of physical counterforce, localism is playing its tune. Where does it stop? The Scottish devolution or independence might happen, but does Scotland break down into finer component parts? Does the same happen within other countries within Europe, within broader reaches of the world? Is there a perfect size or tribal entity that it reverts back to?
Question 6
I’d really like to know what you guys think about the role of multiculturalism in all this. You were saying that in London, London’s a melting pot. Also, London, as you said earlier, is a place where Englishness is less felt. So on one hand I’m thinking, okay, does that mean having a multicultural environment, a cosmopolitan environment, means that people have less of this nationalism, patriotism? But on the other hand, often when you have many cultures that come into one place, then you kind of get ghettoization and nationalism is almost increased because people – you have the whole separation of classes, cultures, etc. So you almost have this binary juxtaposition, if you will. I’d just really like to know what you guys think.
Jon Snow
I will take a couple more questions, but if I could just say that in fact I went specifically to Govanhill, which is probably the most ethnically diverse constituency in the whole of Scotland, to find out how people and ethnic minorities in particular were thinking about independence. The ethnic minorities were largely in favour of separation, largely in favour of an independent Scotland, especially the Asian shopkeepers.
Ben Page
We’ve actually done a project amongst Scottish Asians. This was done a few years ago for the Commission for Racial Equality, as then it was. We went around asking everybody who they hated most. The Scottish Asians actually said English Asians, because they’re English. There are all these snobby southerners in my family, you know.
Question 7
There’s been quite a bit of talk about globalization. I think the connection between globalization and some of these highly political and constitutional issues addressed is not absolutely straightforward. If I look around the world, there are a lot of countries whose commitment to globalization, at least in the political sense, have definitely [indiscernible]. I’ll cite China, India and Indonesia for a start, and indeed a lot of Asia. I think we’re speaking too much in Western terms in this discussion. That has a bearing also on the ease with which you could split up the country or indeed the government [indiscernible], a referendum, etc. The question is therefore: what does the panel think, that if Scotland, however reluctantly, votes no 10 Q&A: What’s United About This Kingdom?
for independence or [indiscernible] for devo max, what are the chances, if any, of having a constituent assembly in some form [indiscernible]?
Jon Snow
A very good question. We’ve got: where does it stop, and any chance we might derive a written – I think the Scots have pledged and the [indiscernible] have pledged to have a written constitution. Indeed. Simon?
Simon Jenkins
On the first question about localism, there’s a wonderful Italian word, torrilismo [phonetic], which is your affection for your local tower. Ben’s organization has done these polls right back for 30 or 40 years and it’s absolutely clear the localism most people identify with is their parish or their town. The sort of civic entity closest to where they live, they feel a passionate commitment to. You can forget postcode lotteries – they want their town or their parish to be, in some sense, sovereign. It’s when you get above that, when you drift up to the sort of county borough or the rural district or the unitary county, they start losing faith with it. And when, of course, John Prescott tried to get a poll going for a northeast regional assembly, he got absolutely nowhere. One reason was he said, oh, I’ll be abolishing Northumberland and Durham, which was a really bad thing to say because they like the county more than the region, but they like the town more than the county.
I just think there are fundamental truths here which the Scandinavians have appreciated. Scandinavia is a very, very strong localist culture, as indeed is France. We just don’t understand it. It’s extraordinary. We feel it ourselves when we’re in a village – second homers in villages are the most passionate people about the village, even if they’re only there a couple of days a week. But I just think this idea of reinventing true localism is the key to localism generally.
Just the written constitution – the days are over when we could express pride in the fact that we had an unwritten constitution and it didn’t matter. It’s rubbish now. You just see how America, one of the most tremendously centripetal of political entities in the world, this sort of fierce religious unionism in America – the one thing that stops, I think, Washington, which is a dysfunctional place totally, from completely collapsing in the Soviet sense is states’ rights. And the only thing that defends states’ rights is the American constitution.
Ben Page
Obviously the public love the idea of a written constitution but it’s not anywhere near – this is the whole point about so many of these things, it’s just not at the top of most people’s agenda. So yes, if you ask them, they’d like one. Do they think it’s the biggest problem we face as a country? No. Maybe they’re wrong. 11 Q&A: What’s United About This Kingdom?
I think there is something about London as a place. I’m a migrant into London – I come from Devon, I chose to live here. One of the things about London – Simon is absolutely right in terms of the data about people’s sense of local identity and belonging and even where they want things run from. But people’s identity in London is always stronger than the boroughs. So their identity of this thing that is London, with slightly indeterminate boundaries – there’s all those people down in Bromley who really are in London but don’t want to be – but otherwise London actually does count as something else.
Linda Colley
I would like to link these two questions. I think interest in written constitutions, even among practicing politicians, is beginning to grow – partly, I think, because there’s a recognition that the system is now so much more complex but also of course the population is now so much more varied. The kind of pre- Second World War confidence – over-confidence – when the British elite was very small, relatively homogenous, and people could go around saying, other people need it written down but we don’t, we know. It was this ‘we know’. I think increasingly people realize that that’s not the case. I was speaking to a former clerk at the House of Commons and I raised this issue with him, and he said he’d always regarded written constitutions as just nonsenses. They’re certainly not magic bullets. But he said that in his last 10 or 15 years in the House of Commons, meeting some of the new MPs, he realized that they didn’t actually have a clue about how government was supposed to work, because it was changing so much and it was becoming so much more sophisticated. He had come to the conclusion that you needed something.
But if you have something, of course, it can’t just be a car manual. It can’t be like the cabinet guide which was recently created. There has to be, if you really want a written constitution to work, an inspirational element to it. That’s the trick: how do you get people to work on it and how do you get a written constitution that’s more than a glorified car manual?
Question 8
Have we looked at sufficiently the dichotomy that Scotland wants to break away from London but wants to be part of the European Community? I think that the European Community has had a great effect on areas wanting to separate from the nation-state.
Ben Page
That’s true.
Question 8
I think we haven’t looked at that perspective.
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Jon Snow
A very good point indeed.
Question 9
It’s very tempting to see the Scottish referendum as a precursor for the European referendum. In both cases the people who argue against secession are arguing in terms of economic issues, which cannot be known until there is a negotiation following a positive referendum. But it is my belief, and I think you share this, that people won’t vote on economic issues in either case. They will vote on a sense of identity. My question basically is, do you share this view?
Ben Page
A lot of people will vote on identity in both of those referenda, if they take place. But to be honest, it’s still ‘the economy, stupid’, I think. Ultimately people are pragmatic about it. Most of the polls are still showing that for pragmatic reasons, most Brits want to stay in, if it can be fixed.
Linda Colley
Yes, it’s ‘the economy, stupid’ – like all these clichéd phrases, perhaps it’s been used a tad too often. I would also add – it’s one of the themes – what should be added to that is ‘it’s governance, stupid’. It really is a crux both with regard to the EU and in regard to Scotland.
Simon Jenkins
I don’t think either. I think it’s ‘the identity, stupid’.
Ben Page
We finally disagree.
Simon Jenkins
We finally disagree. I just do think people somehow at these moments – they’re rarely asked sort of existential questions like this. I think the answer to your question about Europe is that they really do feel sort of a part of Europe, and also Europe is money. In that sense, it is money. 13 Q&A: What’s United About This Kingdom?
Jon Snow
What is the identity of the people sitting in these chairs? What’s your identity?
Simon Jenkins
I’m a Londoner.
Jon Snow
You’re not English?
Simon Jenkins
I think I’m English. I’m half-Welsh, I’m a quarter Channel Islands, I don’t know who I am here.
Jon Snow
Okay. Ben?
Ben Page
I’m English. It’s the standard question – if I’m asked in Britain, I’ll be English. If I’m asked in Europe, I’m probably English. If I’m asked in America, I’m British.
Linda Colley
I’m just a mongrel. I’m a mixture of transatlantic, European and British, all of which are nice and loose umbrellas, which is what I want.
Jon Snow
I confess I have searched records to try and find some Celtic blood, but I am English – and would never say so. 14 Q&A: What’s United About This Kingdom?
Ben Page
But that’s very English.
Jon Snow
I would never say so, I am British. But there’s one last point of identity we could take away and smoke, and that is that should Wales and Scotland go off, what would we call ourselves? We couldn’t say we were still united, so we couldn’t call ourselves the United Kingdom. Certainly not ‘Great’, because we’ll have lost a third of our landmass. Hardly could we call ourselves the British Isles because most of the isles would have gone.
So on that thought, I’d like to thank our panel very warmly, and you for being an excellent audience.