Abstract
This article explores how the British Conservative Party has dealt with the dilemmas arising from its pursuit of two increasingly discordant goals: delivering Brexit and maintaining the domestic Union. Drawing on interviews and analyses of parliamentary debates, we identify a resurgence in the 2016–2019 period of an older belief in a unitarist state, and a new form of pro-Union activism in policy terms. Against those commentators who depict Britain’s Conservatives as having abandoned their unionist vocation, we explore the coalescence of a more assertive and activist strain of unionist sentiment. But we also find a willingness among Conservatives at the centre to sub-contract thinking about non-English parts of the UK to ‘local’ political representatives such as the Democratic Unionist Party and the Scottish Conservatives, and a growing anxiety about how to handle emergent tensions between the competing priorities associated with delivering Brexit and maintaining the domestic Union.
Highlights
The process of seeking to withdraw the UK from the European Union, following the result of the referendum held in June 2016, prompted an extended crisis in British parliamentary politics
In the first 3 years after the Brexit vote, the treatment of Northern Ireland in the proposed Withdrawal Agreement emerged as the main sticking point in negotiations between the UK Government and the European Union (EU), and contributed to its defeat on three occasions in the House of Commons before a revised deal was successfully passed after Boris Johnson became Prime Minister
While a good deal of political commentary claims that the British Conservative Party has become a vehicle for a new politics of English nationalism, our analysis leads us to highlight the re-emergence of an avowed belief in a more integrated and actively promoted Union among Conservative elites between 2016 and 2019
Summary
The process of seeking to withdraw the UK from the European Union, following the result of the referendum held in June 2016, prompted an extended crisis in British parliamentary politics.
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