Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Two contrasting accounts of the Brown era. In today's Sunday Telegraph Matt d'Ancona lets forth a seasonal hymn and carol song of praise to the Premier only to foresee his doom. He lauds Brown's stamina, patience, intellect and reading. He endorses Alan Greenspan's description of Brown's "intellectual journey" to the belief that he can harness liberal capitalism to alleviate poverty and create social justice - despite, as Matt puts it, his use of the state and taxation for this purpose. And Matt says that Brown's theme of "Britishness"
is much-mocked but contains the kernel of a great idea. There was a time when our sense of national identity was defined by our institutions: the monarchy, Parliament and more recently the NHS. But our society is now so diverse, so pulverised by modernity and so threatened by fundamentalist violence that we need a new national conversation about what draws us together as Britons, or rather what should. On this matter, Mr Brown is right to persist.
Despite all this, Matt feels that the New Labour elite "has almost no sense of group purpose, or collective mission.... The mighty Blair-Brown project is drawing to a close, and there is nothing very much on the Labour side to replace it". The contrast between this vivid description and Matt's analysis of and support for Brown's Britishness strategy does not make sense to me. If Brown is so good and has got so much right, why is the whole thing an aimless void?
Is the answer provided by Paul Gillespie over on the Irish Times? He has written a mock, two-part review of a history of the archipelago looking back on 2000-2030 from the vantage point of 2060. The Irish Times still has an archive barrier, unfortunately, but here are extracts of some of the best passages from the second part, published on 2 December, on The Reunification of Ireland and the breakup of Britain 2016-2030.
"Northern unionism proved to be unprepared politically and intellectually for the disintegration of the UK's political regime following Tony Blair's departure in 2007. In concentrating so much on the threat from Irish nationalism, they underestimated the hollowing out of the British polity to which they had been so conspicuously loyal.
Scotland was pivotal for British and Irish developments. Alex Salmond crafted a remarkable deepening of support for independence from his hair's breadth victory in the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections. In the following 10 years he translated it into, first, an enduring majority in the 2010 and 2015 elections that displaced Labour's previous dominance there, and then into the famous referendum victory in 2017 that set the scene for negotiating Scotland's independence in 2018-20.
The conventional wisdom in response to 1998 and 2007 was that British-Irish relations had normalised, symbolised by the extraordinary personal chemistry between Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair and by Queen Elizabeth's visit to Dublin in 2008. Political interaction on the East-West axis could be safely left to the inter-governmental and inter-parliamentary bodies set up by the Belfast Agreement....
Besides, from Dublin's point of view, the sheer cost of Irish reunification was a major deterrent to any serious discussion of the subject. The Varney report put the annual subvention from the British exchequer at £7 billion (€9.6 billion), way beyond what Dublin could afford, especially during the 2008-9 recession. But in another irony, the decision to grant fiscal autonomy to the North sparked off the economic boom that reduced this sum to a much more manageable £4 billion by 2016 - recalling the transformation in the Republic's finances in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Northern attitudes to London and England had rapidly shifted after 2007. One impetus came from Brown's insistence on reducing the transfers to Scotland, Wales and the North when fiscal autonomy was conceded, as Varney warned would be necessary. The mean-spirited way in which those negotiations were conducted antagonised Paisley in particular. He found himself in growing solidarity with Salmond.
Anglo-Britain became ambiguously fused during the late 19th century, mediated by the construction of a state nationalism concealing itself as British patriotism in the heyday of empire. The passing of empire and then the hollowing out of post-war British institutions in the simultaneous privatisation and centralisation of the Thatcher/Blair years left the unionist formula stranded. More far-seeing Northern unionists like the former head of the civil service Kenneth Bloomfield began to put out feelers about Irish unity and whether the South was ready for it in 2007.
There were alternatives to the outcomes analysed in these volumes. A comprehensive federalisation of the UK was a possible mutation, but centralist political leaders of both main parties resisted it so much that the opportunity passed. In a further irony, Ireland emerged as the federal laboratory, linked up to the deepening European Union.
Into the vacuum fell a resurgent Conservative Party to win the 2015 election on a platform of narrow-minded, Europhobe ethnic English nationalism that temporarily overwhelmed the civic traditions Brown sought to include in a new Britishness. The Tory victory proved a turning point for Scotland and Northern Ireland. It was only in the late 2020s that Labour recovered from that disaster, this time on the basis of a reconciliation with the EU [that led to] England's decision to rejoin it in 2030."
