Lord Dafydd Elis-Thomas discusses the role that identity plays in the way the UK works.
We must begin at the location once described by that parliamentary authority Erskine May as ‘the political centre of the British Empire,’ the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament at Westminster. In each direction you look you will view one of the four entrances and exits for the public and the members to both houses and committee rooms, adorned with mosaics of four patron saints of four constituent nations of an imagined multi-national state. I did not write ‘imaginary’ as Benedict Anderson did in his ‘Imaginary Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism’ as that has a hint of something made-up, as a work of fiction not bearing much sense of reality. I do think it is helpful to bear in mind that all social constructs are indeed that, made-up things, and therefore continually made and re-made.
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Such made-up things as societies are not one thing at all, for they are all perceived differently, viewed from outside and inside. From the perspective of histories; countries, nations and what for convenience we call polities, change more than they remain the same, as do their boundaries and common relations. My brilliantly colourful mentor and much-loved party colleague Gwyn Alf Williams used to describe the state to which we currently belong as ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and about a half of northern Ireland’. Britain as an island, a state and a geographical and historical term first describes Brythonic peoples of Britain. The modern usage developed after John Dee who was descended from a Radnorshire family, popularised the term ‘British Empire. Great Britain originally of course had nothing to do with alleged political ‘greatness’ and was only used to distinguish it by size from Bretagne (Brittany) a region of the French state. So there is hardly any clarity about something called being British or more complicated a thing described as ‘Britishness’. This does not prevent people from asserting that this is something they choose to identify themselves with or indeed describing it as their’ identity’.
Such people who wish to assert that such and such is their identity and that it is singular rather than plural, should not seek to assert that other people who have many co-existing identities in their lives are somehow abnormal. Just as we may all have a series of affiliations in our social and family life and may play many parts and roles, so too with our affiliations as citizens.
Just as we live and work in different places and follow different international sporting activities across the globe so too our sources of powers and decisions that affect us in different parts of our lives vary widely. We are not governed from one place but from many, and despite the attempts of ‘nationalists’ of all shades and opinion to assert that the nation (however construed) is the primary category of powers and therefore should command our chief affiliations, this is patently and increasingly no longer the case.
We are in fact governed to as greater or lesser extent in different policy areas by international agencies of the UN which increasingly take on a role in achieving binding agreements for the fragile world environment, and by EU law and administration seeking more unity of purpose in key areas such as a fiscal and an energy union. All new Welsh law has by our constitution as set out in a series of government of Wales acts to be compliant with EU as well as UK legislation and international conventions. So we need a different spatial metaphors such as mention of ‘levels’ of governance to understand how we can function most effectively as citizens of an ever-widening circle of cities, or people of simultaneously more than one polity, paying equal or variable allegiance to all, as a matter of active choice.
Rather than fretting about what will happen to one level of governance such as the UK which realistically only represents a period of short duration as a state structure in the common history of interaction between peoples on these west European Islands, why can’t we ask the simple question what functions can best be carried out at which ‘level’ of competence, and work accordingly? In the common life of polities as everything else, ‘form’ should follow ‘function’. An essential part of this approach is that it is up to the people of a given polity to decide for themselves according to the international principle of the self-determination of peoples what form their desired competences should take. Replicating traditional or pre-existing forms in another polity should not be regarded as necessary or logical. A decision to operate with different competences should not be seen as the institutionalisation of some perceived ‘inferiority’. Neither should there be a be any presumption about appropriate levels of operation in constitutional forms, which should be guided mainly by a willingness to agree common arrangements rather than seek to enforce presumed central models.
Nowhere should this be clearer than in the operation of law and regulation itself. As Lord Chief Justice Thomas keeps telling all who want to listen, we are already living simultaneously in three jurisdictions. Comparative federalism in legislative, fiscal and administrative policy is the only practical future. We should not move grudgingly in this direction but embrace these principles and approaches in a relaxed but determined way. Along with a different philosophical approach in public lives and politics will come a further change of cultures and identities? Gwyn Alf Williams wrote ‘We Welsh look like being the last of the British. There is some logic in this. We were, after all, the first’!
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