2029 will be a generational opportunity to reverse devolution

It is time to make the case

Now that Kemi Badenoch has made a binding commitment to ECHR withdrawal (all Tory candidates will have to sign up to leaving before standing) we can be 80% certain that this event will take place in 2029. Even if tactical voting prevents Reform from achieving an overall majority, this policy will still be implemented by a hypothetical coalition. That means that the constitutional issue of Northern Ireland will become a top three priority for the British government during the 2029-34 Parliamentary turn.

This was also the case during the Brexit years, during which time the Conservative governments were severely underserved by the Brexiteers philosophical and political indifference towards the consequences of EU withdrawal on Northern Ireland. Brexiteers like David Davis and Boris Johnson were initially surprised that the EU made Northern Ireland a sticking point. Once they did, May’s government immediately accepted that the preservation of the Good Friday Surrender was sacrosanct - greatly limiting their ability to manoeuvre against Brussels. They were intimidated, as well, by dark forecasts of violence on a hard border - essentially a capitulation to the threat of terrorism.

It would be cannier for Farage to enter talks with the EU in 2029 with an entirely new model for governance in Northern Ireland in mind. This should not only be a negotiation tactic part of a wider political project of reversing Blair’s constitutional, including abolishing fake assemblies in Wales and Scotland. Farage has already said that he is willing to ‘renegotiate’ the Good Friday Agreement but the scope of his ambition should be broader if he wants to make good on a platform of unadulterated British nationalism.

Before setting forward a realistic plan for 2029, I will set out my own vision. My feelings towards Ireland are mixed between a hatred of nationalist terrorists and an admiration for the historic contributions of the Irish people, a martial race (in 1813 around a third of the British army was Irish) with a rich literary tradition, particularly to the east of the Pale. The people of Yeats, Arthur Guinness and Connor Cruise O’Brien should not be sequestered to a boggy swamp of seven million people. Dublin, once the second-largest city in Britain, is a monument to an almost extinct Anglo-Irish civilisation.

With that said, all is not lost. Trinity College still puts forward three ‘senators’ to the Oireachtas - a privilege withdrawn from Oxford and Cambridge in 1950 - a clear sign that the candle of Merit still burns in the Emerald Isle. My sincere hope is that the tedious religious/sectarian enmities are one day put to rest and the people of Laegyr can be reconciled under one banner. I think this could be achieved diplomatically with a few concessions towards Irish passions that I am sympathetic to; renaming the country, abolishing the Monarchy and disestablishing the Church of England.

Let us return to the grubby art of the possible. A great friend of the publication has pointed out, contra Aris the Celt, that the Union is in the strongest place it has been in decades, with Reform making massive inroads into Scotland and Wales on a platform of explicit British nationalism. The Brexit vote, another nationalistic act, has made separation from the Union an impossible proposition in Scotland.

The entire political project of Nicola Sturgeon collapsed the moment that Sunak/Badenoch used section 35 of the Scotland Act to skewer her on Trans, Westminster was able to crush them with the slightest application of its reserved powers. It must be remembered how stark this about-turn in the direction of travel has been. In the early 2000s, it was the standard received opinion that Scotland would eventually leave Britain and join the European Union. This was something that Darcus Howe loved to gloat about.

It was seen as a matter of when, not if, a view that persisted even after the Scottish referendum and throughout the Brexit years. The legacy of Cameron’s three referendums - No To Av, Scottish independence, Brexit - has been the complete reassertion of Westminster’s primacy against three separate threats, Proportional representation (which died immediately as a political topic post 2011), Holyrood and Brussels. That, in my view, is a much stronger legacy to trumpet than Free Schools and Libya.

This man died of a heart attack, his life’s work a failure

To make good on this political moment, Farage must tear the infrastructure of separatism out root and stem. The breeding grounds of petty nationalism are the assemblies that Blair set up in Edinburgh and Cardiff. These mock legislatures provide plum salaries for failed civil servants and regional solicitors to spend their lives attempting to undermine the British state; the powers that they exercise also allow them to give out freebie bribes (only English people pay for prescriptions) and to dislocate national institutions by setting up needless parallels (NHS Scotland, National Records Scotland) in order to make the country less governable by Westminster. They also use their office to fund the teaching of dead languages like Welsh in an attempt to foment division and anti-English discrimination.

These bodies, alongside the Blairite democratically elected Mayoralties will all have to go. A simple mechanism to abolish these assemblies would be to pass a law stating that these bodies will have no mandate to govern if they fail to achieve a turnout over 50%. Andy Burnham is governing Manchester from an election which only achieved 32.05% turnout, his popular vote (420,749) is about a sixth of Manchester’s population. All of the of the bogus regional assemblies including the London Mayoralty (40.5%) and the Senedd (46.6%) would fail to meet this threshold. Scotland (63.5%) is the only one I can find which exceeds 50% - but Unionists and Reform voters could simply be instructed not to vote. Labour and the SNP would come nowhere near the target on their own.

Where this change will be most contentious is Stormont (Northern Ireland). Farage’s political hero Enoch Powell was an integrationist who reject Stormont on the grounds that it is another version of Home Rule, and believed the region should be governed directly from Westminster. This was also the view of Edward Carson, possibly one of the most accomplished British men to ever live, who not only prevented Asquith from surrendering Ireland to Home Rule but also managed to get that odious little paedophile Oscar Wilde sentenced to hard labour.

I am certain that Farage is in the right place ideologically to tear up the Good Friday Agreement and abolish Stormont. If he makes good on that instinct and delivers mass deportations he will be a much more consequential Prime Minister than Margaret Thatcher.