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Looking into England Papers
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[ Home > Papers > Simon Partridge ] The British-Irish Council: the trans-islands symbolic and political possibilities Simon Partridge has written extensively about British-Irish relations and devolutionary issues. He is author of the pamphlets "Beyond Nationalism in These Islands" (1996) and "The British Union State: imperial hangover or flexible citizens' home?" (Catalyst, 1999). He is editor of "Building a New Britain: an alternative approach to devolution and local governance in the UK" (City Region Campaign, 1996) and co-author of "Nordic Co-operation: a possible model for British-Irish relations" (Finnish Institute, London, 1997). In 1998 in Antrim he gave the John Hewitt International Summer School Lecture "Reimagining the British-Irish Islands: the creative hyphen". * * * This paper is closely based on the presentation I gave to the British Council/University of Warwick "Looking into England: English identities in the context of UK devolution" Conference at 14.00 on 16.12.99. It may be freely reproduced for non-profit purposes provided that my authorship is acknowledged in any reproduction or reference. The postscript takes account of some of the principal comments made at the launch of the Council the following day. Click to view Simon Partridge's map, The Countries, Regions and Crown Dependencies of the British-Irish Isles. Introduction It is not often one has the good fortune to be asked to speak about an institution the day before its first meeting - at Lancaster House, London - so I'd better make the most of my opportunity here today! However, I do have to point out that any enthusiasm I do express - and in my view tomorrow will be genuinely a historic day for these British-Irish islands - should be tempered by the knowledge that if there is not a substantive start to decommissioning of paramilitary weapons early in 2000, all the new institutions of the Belfast Agreement are likely to enter into a state of prolonged, possibly permanent, suspended animation. (The political institutions of the Agreement were in fact suspended from 12 February until 29 May, but have been restored in the light of the IRA's commitment to put their weaponry verifiably "beyond use" by June 2001.) But today let's think positively and look to the future. Before outlining the workings and possibilities of the BIC - or "Council of the Isles" as it is becoming to be colloquially called - I would like to sketch the demographic realities of the Isles as presently constituted, and which it will be partly the job of the Council to reflect. These contingent social realities suggest to me that something like the Council would be needed - Belfast Agreement or not. I think they might also suggest a likely resolution to the question of England, post-devolution, at least politically. A question which I understand has been a central focus of this Conference. But let's glance back a bit before I address the present. The Social Geography of Britain and Ireland (1) There have been some startling changes in the demographics of these islands over the past 200 years, which go a considerable way to explain why there has been an "Irish problem". - The per centage proportion population of England has grown by some 20% The causes of these population shifts are complex and include the controversial episode of the 1840s famine in Ireland. But as importantly, they also include the epoch of rapid industrialisation of Britain and north east Ireland, which included major shifts from the countryside to fast expanding urban areas. It should be noted that such population movements took place within Britain as well as between Ireland and Britain. What seems incontrovertible is that England has ended up as the Net beneficiary in terms of sheer numbers of people, though to be more specific that should be South East England. London, and the East and South East regions have a population of 20 million or 31%; the rest of England 29m or 46%. Wales seems to have fared better than the other non-English areas, but there are complications here we will come back to. The question immediately rises as to how this "growth" effected the composition of England - which in any case had always been a mongrel mixture of pre-Celt (the considerable bronze-age inhabitation capable of building the mighty Stonehenge and other monuments), Celt, Pict, Roman, Saxon, Angle, Dane, Viking, Norman, Huguenot, Jewish and now of course new Commonwealth. You would be right to assume that Ireland's loss was England's (and America's) gain (though many Irish people also went to the industries then expanding on the Clyde - Scotland's estuarial counterpart to Belfast). It is not really surprising then - though not as well known as it should be - that 7% of people born in Britain have at least one Irish parent. That is nearly 4,000,000 people qualify automatically as Irish citizens. In addition, the 1991 UK census showed 830,500 Irish-born people living in Britain (174,000 from Northern Ireland (11% of population) and 656,500 from the Republic (18% of population)) - giving a total of at nearly 5 million potential Irish citizens. These figures are taken from the sociological work of Prof James O'Connell's 1994 study "British Attitudes to Ireland and the Irish: A Special Relationship" (4), carried out by the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University. The survey work as conducted by the independent polling organisation ICM Research. It also showed that: - One quarter of the inhabitants of Britain have an Irish relative. 60% have Irish friends, acquaintances or fellow workers. These latter two figures, taken with the first, confirms an estimate of those of Irish origin at around 7 million in England. Rather less than the early estimated figure of 13 million used in reaching the world-wide figure of those of Irish extraction at 70 million, but nonetheless considerably larger than the population of Ireland! - just over 5 million. - The more qualitative aspects of the survey confirmed that most - Only 6% consider those who come to Britain from Ireland to be "foreigners". The great majority of the British say they have more in common with the Irish than with Americans or Continentals. Only 14% of the children or grandchildren of Irish immigrants felt they had a "strong" Irish dimension to their identity. 45% felt there was no Irish dimension. Only little more than half identified themselves as Catholics. - The social class profiles of the Irish were almost identical to their British counterparts. More recent research, commissioned by the London-based Irish Post newspaper (5), has shown that if anything the contemporary Irish in Britain, like the Asian-British, outperform their indigenous British colleagues, particularly among women. - All this points to a very substantial and rapid integration of those of Irish extraction into wider British society. The ease of this integration points to large elements of overlap and commonality in the two cultures. To this evident mixing of the Irish and the people of England, we should add the influence of overlapping popular and literary cultures. British TV is widely watched in the Republic (the schedules are carried in every Irish newspaper and Dublin's skyline is renowned for its extended TV aerials picking up signals from across the Irish Sea), Irish presenters and actors are prevalent on British TV, the circulation of the British press in Ireland and the Irish press in Britain is increasing (the National Union of Journalists organises across both islands, as do some other unions), and shared sporting interests such as football and horse racing are more like common passions. And at times it seems that every other pub in Britain is now Irish-themed. As regards literature and theatre the mutual influence is so complete as to be almost impossible to disentangle. Such names as Beckett, Burke, Heaney, Joyce, Flann O'Brien, O'Casey, Shaw, Sheridan, Swift, Synge, Wilde and Yeats are, of course, familiar in Britain. Seamus Heaney, Ireland's recent winner of the Nobel prize for literature, has just published a new translation of the classic Anglo-Saxon epic poem "Beowulf". Further contemporary evidence for the mixing-up of peoples on these islands can be drawn from the UK censuses of 1971, 1981 and 1991. The disposition of the various nationalities - with new Commonwealth immigration now bringing extension well beyond white Europe - in Britain and Ireland, and their movements, has been rigorously mapped by Daniel Dorling, the pioneering social geographer, in his comprehensive A New Social Atlas of Britain (6) published in 1995. This draws on census material down to the ward level (the smallest unit of local government), which is then reaggregated using a variety of criteria (e.g. place of birth, age, unemployment etc) and mapped through new computer-generated "cartograms". By colour coding each ward for the characteristic one is examining it is possible to create visual patterns which are stunningly revealing. The cartogram for the "second largest population in each ward by ethnic or national minority" reveals: - the extensive English diaspora in Scotland and Wales; A notable feature from the census findings over the 20 years from 1971-1991 was the movement of people born in England to Wales and Scotland. Nearly 20% of the current population of Wales was born in England, and nearly 8% of the population of Scotland. The rub in Wales is that the expansion has not been due to the Welsh-born. The movement in both these instances is from urban England to rural Scotland and Wales, a rise of 40% since 1971. In the other direction, according to the 1991 census, England had some 743,000 Scottish-born residents, equal to nearly 16% of the Scottish-born living in Scotland (4.7 million out of 5.1 million). There were some 545,000 Welsh-born residents, equal to nearly a quarter of Welsh-born people in Wales (2.3 million out of 2.9 million). And we have already mentioned the 830,000 or so Irish-born residents in Britain (16 % of the population of Ireland). Further information from the London Research Centre (7), again based on the 1991 census, showed that London is easily the most cosmopolitan city in Europe. One fifth of its population (1.4 million) belongs to ethnic minorities, a figure estimated to rise to 30% by 2011. Of these some 250,000 are estimated to be Irish-born (north and south). Around 5% of Ireland's population lives in London! Participants in this Conference "looking into England" must I imagine have found many. As Paul Gillespie, deputy editor of The Irish Times, put it recently in the joint Irish Times/Scotsman supplement (8) on Scottish-Irish relations: "There are many Scotlands, including the Irish one - and many Irelands including the Scottish one." Equally there are many Englands, certainly including the Irish, Scottish, Welsh, new Commonwealth and others far too numerous to mention. Or as Linda Colley, the eminent historian, put it in her recent Millennium Lecture at No 10 "Britishness in the 21st Century" - "the infinitely diverse polity (of) Britain" (9). It is for these reasons of the mixing of the peoples and cultures of these closely located islands that I believe that if the BIC did not come into existence tomorrow we would shortly have to invent it; and if it ceases to exist early next year we will then have to reinvent something very like it. So what will the BIC do? The remit of the BIC as set out in the Belfast Agreement (10) is to "promote the harmonious and mutually beneficial development of the totality of relationships among the peoples of these islands" - a very wide brief. Its membership is to comprise representatives of the British and Irish Governments, the executives of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as well as the crown dependencies of the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey - 8 administrations initially. Provision was made for membership to be extended to other devolved regional Administrations in England if and when they so wished, but not local government bodies. Potentially, there are 17 members if all the English regional Administrations are included (assuming the London city region is not a mere local authority), coincidentally the same number as the "autonomous communities" of the devolved, post-Franco Spanish state. The secretariat for the BIC will be provided by both Governments, with the Cabinet Office taking the lead on the British side and the Taoiseach's office on the Irish side. The BIC will be able to meet in different formats. Two summit level meetings will be held each year, at which participating Administrations will be represented at head of Government or senior ministerial level. Specific sectoral meetings could also be held attended by appropriate Ministers. In addition to multi-lateral meetings the Agreement makes provision for meetings between two or more members of the BIC. Such meetings have already taken place between Donald Dewar and his Irish counterparts, including the President. The Agreement gives an illustrative list of suitable issues for early discussion in the BIC - transport, agriculture, health, education, environment, culture and common EU matters - but there is no limit on what can be raised. Other themes likely to emerge include: tourism, sport, rural development, regional development, drugs, ports, aquaculture and marine matters - the Irish sea being an obvious area of common concern to Northern Ireland, the Republic, Scotland, North West England, Wales and the South West England. In addition to these inter-ministerial meetings, the Agreement expressly encourages the elected institutions of the members of the BIC to develop inter-parliamentary links. It suggests that these could be built on the existing British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body, established in 1990 as a result of the 1981 Anglo-Irish Joint Studies Report. However, that Body at the moment consists of 25 parliamentarians from each jurisdiction and there are tricky issues of representation to be negotiated if it is to expand to include other Administrations. I'll come back to this. Symbolic and Political Implications So what are the likely (I say "likely" subject to my opening caveat) symbolic and political implications of this new institution? I myself believe that the insertion or reinsertion of the hyphen between British and Irish will come to be seen in time as significant as the insertion of the hyphen between Angle and Saxon. This provided the critical mass for something approaching a proto-Anglo- Saxon state, which lasted for the second half of the 10th century, although it should be noted that this polity already "incorporated" the Brythonic-speakers of Cornwall. (Incidentally, the term Anglo-Saxon survives in the most unlikely of places, such as "Anglo-Saxon capitalism", which indicates a continuing commonality between Britain and America on economic matters, though I would place a large bet than neither country contains anyone who could claim to be purely such.) Its significance might also be apparent if we consider that the extreme Irish nationalists behind the moves to secede from UK before and after World War I called themselves "Sinn Fein", in Gaelic meaning "Ourselves Alone" - condensing their wish to establish an autarkic, rural, Gaelic-speaking, sovereign and predominantly Catholic Ireland. To insert the hyphen is to challenge the originating ideology of the southern Irish state. It also challenges a burgeoning Anglo-Saxon-Cornish-Welsh British (British being derived from the Brythonic Prydein under Tudor influence) hegemony of the 16th century which felt free to name these isles "British", and which later, at times, wanted to rename the Catholic Irish as West Britons. "The Isles" - used as the title for Norman Davies recent voluminous history (11) - may be a convenient way of getting round this thorny problem of naming, but I think accuracy calls for the hyphen. If Anglo-Saxon is still tolerable after all these centuries, why not "British-Irish"? Although, if "Anglo- Saxon" gave rise to "English", perhaps "British-Irish" will contract in time to "Brirish". In any event, under this broad umbrella - as is clear from the structure I have already outlined - considerable disaggregation will evidently take place. However, the "high politicians" gathered in this new forum may well not simply divide on assumed "national" lines. As Ruari Quinn, leader of the southern Irish Labour Party has pointed out (12), there may well be cross-parliament and cross-assembly alliances along left/right lines - such groupings exist within the European Parliament and, more relevantly, the Nordic Council (13), the closest analogy we have. Or the interests of women and greens may cut across more traditional lines. Certainly, if the institution is broadened and works the "border" issues in these islands should fade into insignificance. However, for the institution to spread its influence beyond a narrow political elite of ministers it would seem essential to add a parliamentary and even civic dimension. If all goes well, the Belfast Assembly will have a statutory Civic Forum attached and there are similar voluntary plans for Edinburgh and London. And it is at these locations where the issue of England and its representation will appear again in a highly visible form. If we add representation from other devolved administrations to the existing Inter- Parliamentary Body, according to the Constitution Unit based at University College London, we end with a forum looking something like this: (14) Country > Population > Seats in Inter-Parliamentary Body UK > 59m > 25 England as such will only be represented via the UK parliament, so one could argue that some 20 out of the 25 UK parliamentarians "represent" England - I think the "0" figure projection is a bit misleading. Still, 20 representatives for 49m compared with 25 representatives for some 3.6m southern Irish does not seem fair. However, if we take England as a devolved polity in its own right (and it has never been anything approaching a modern unitary state) and, say, allocated 3 seats to each of its 9 regions (including London), that would bring its representation to 27 seats, plus some more from the "UK" which would disappear as a separate entity. It seems to me some such juggling will be needed if the necessary parliamentary dimension is to be part of the Council of the Isles. What does not seem viable to me is ignoring the representation of England altogether (the apparent present situation), or treating England pro rata as one political unit where its numbers would inevitably lead to domination. The "constitutional and functional logic" of devolution to Scotland, Wales and, hopefully, Northern Ireland points in the direction of substantive regions for England, and a quasi-federation along Spanish lines. There is also growing evidence of demands for this in the North East and North West, both of which have recently established their own constitutional conventions modelled on Scottish lines (15). Indeed, as even the smaller nations in our archipelago move in an increasingly "civic" as opposed to "ethno-cultural" direction, where functional effectiveness and civic and social rights take on as much or more importance than "identity", there seems good reason to believe that this will be the "political" solution for England. Linda Colley again: "regional government (in England)...will have in the 21st century to expand far beyond the purview of current Regional Development Agencies." Though I would add to those who are concerned about a more unified sense of English culture, that here is no reason why there could not be continuing all-England links in the realm of certain sporting and cultural matters - football, rugby, cricket, and expensive arts like theatre, ballet and opera, or even an annual celebration of St. George's day. There is already an Arts Council for England. If we return to our opening demographic evidence which showed the overwhelming numerical predominance of England, it does seem to me that the peoples of these islands would live more easily side by side if England was divided into smaller political units, probably based on the new Regional Development Agency areas. I would even go so far as to suggest that this could be seen as an English solution to an English problem. A return not to the 9th century proto-imperial England of Alfred the Great with his expanding Wessex (in may ways he was a West Saxon on the make), but to the more confederal Heptarchy: the so-called seven kingdoms of the Angles and the Saxons in the late 7th and 8th centuries, before its destabilisation by invading Vikings and Danes (16) (a similar destabilisation upset a highly decentralised Ireland of small kingdoms). (17) But it could also be seen as a thoroughly post-modern, post-national solution, in keeping with our mongrelised and global times. Postscript The Irish Times in its Editorial of 18 December (18) quoted David Trimble approvingly as describing the inauguration as a "revolutionary political development", and said it was "an idea whose time has come; if it had not been part of the Belfast Agreement it would have to be invented to provide a forum in which the sovereign governments and devolved administrations in Britain and Ireland can meet". It went on to say that "there is a strong case for the development of a British-Irish inter- parliamentary tier to match co-operation among the executives". The Irish PM, Bertie Ahern, at the opening said: "Never before have representatives of all the peoples of these islands, and all our political traditions, come together in one room...we come here in friendship and mutual respect, to consider how we can promote practical co-operation amongst us, for the benefit of all of our peoples. Even by its very name the Council symbolised the widening and multiplying of relationships..." Tony Blair described the first meeting of the Council as "an extraordinary event, a coming together of people who have much in common, much shared history." (19) He pointed to the agenda for the next meeting scheduled in six months time in Dublin and covering: drugs, social exclusion, transport, the environment and e-commerce. Michael White, the Guardian columnist, saw a further radical constitutional departure in the establishment of the Council: "It is another step in the rebranding of Britain, though not in the Cool Britannia sense. Rather it is a matter of unbundling and rebundling the United Kingdom as put together between Alfred's expansion of Wessex (871-899) and the final incorporation of Ireland in 1800, a process never generally accepted before or since, and (partially) reversed in 1920...(the Council) is a means of rebinding weakened UK ties now that protestantism, monarchy and empire ("plunder and glory" as historian Linda Colley told a Downing Street audience) are not the ties they once were. But the model it follows is that of the "Europe of the regions" in which local identity-plus-Brussels replaces the centralised nation state created by the Tudors, consolidated by the industrial revolution and war...as Colley noted, if the Irish crisis proves to be solved, it is possible that "these islands may actually move closer together in the next century"." (20) NB. Hard copy available:This paper has been designed for email transmission and the British Council's website (http://www.britishcouncil.org/studies/). A more typographically detailed hard copy of this paper with coloured cartogram and illustrative appendices is available on application to me via my email address, at £5 to cover cost of reproduction and p&p (POs or cheques payable to Simon Partridge). Orders outside the British-Irish Isles will be priced on request. Email 101723.463@compuserve.com Notes and website links 1. This new social geography is explored more fully in my pamphlet The British Union State: imperial hangover or flexible citizens' home?, chapter 3, "The new social geography of Britain and Ireland", Catalyst, 1999, pp. 12-16; www.catalyst-trust.co.uk 2. Norman Davies, The Isles: A History, Macmillan, 1999, App. 44, p. 1153 3. The Conditions of the Working Class in England, Classics in Politics: Marx and Engels, ElecBook, London, 1998, p.161. And The British Isles: A History of Four Nations, Hugh Kearney, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.202 4. This was the first comprehensive survey of its kind, the results of which were published in ten parts in The Irish Post (London) between 19 November 1994 and 4 February 1995. The questions were drawn up by Prof O'Connell and his colleagues. The survey involved interviewing a tightly controlled quota sample of 1,396 adults aged 18+ in 103 randomly selected constituencies Britain-wide, over 24-25 June 1994. 5. "Irish in Britain are 'Economic Success Story'", Press Release, The Irish Post (London), 26 February 1998; www.irishpost.co.uk 6. A New Social Atlas of Britain, Daniel Dorling, John Wiley & Sons,1995, pp. 46-59 Also "Born to Move", Prospect, December 1995, pp 76-78 7. "London: the new melting pot of Europe", Nicholas Timmins, The Independent, 13 December 1995 8. "Scotland & Ireland: An overlapping of many shared identities", Paul Gillespie, Irish Times, 30 November 1999; www.ireland.com 9. "Britishness in the 21st Century", 8 December 1999; www.number-10.gov.uk" 10. The Belfast Agreement: An Agreement Reached at the Multi-Party Talks on Northern Ireland, 10 April 1998 - Cm 3883 11. Norman Davies, The Isles: A History, op. cit. 12. "Opportunities for the left", Ruari Quinn, Times Change, Dublin, Autumn 1998, pp. 10-11 13. "Nordic Co-operation: A Possible Model for British-Irish Relations", Simon Partridge & Tapani Lausti, Finnish Institute, London, February 1997; www.finnish- institute.org.uk "How the Nordic countries resolved conflict", Richard Kearney & Simon Partridge, Irish Times, 15.1.98, op. cit. "The Council of the Isles: precedents from the Nordic Council", Simon Partridge, December 1999; www.finnish-institute.org.uk/articles/internet/council.htm 14. Mads Qvortrup & Robert Hazell, The British-Irish Council: Nordic Lessons for the Council of the Isles, Table 5, p.20; wwww.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/ 15. "Towards a Federal Britain: An England of regions", The Economist, 27 March 1999, pp. 25-28 16. Peter Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge University Press, 1977, p.87 & p. 89 17."Up to the time of the Vikings, Irish civil organisation was marked by a cellular, un- centralist structure. It was, in fact, resistance to the Norsemen that provoked the need for a model of high-kingship to overcome the indigenous tradition of political disunity. Thus as D A Binchy points out, the rise of the Tara monarchy in Ireland found a striking parallel in the rise of the national monarchy in England as the house of Wessex also sought to resist the Danes. In other words, it was largely the Norse invasions of Britain and Ireland that evoked among the native populations 'that sense of "otherness" which lies at the basis of nationalism'. Binchy concludes accordingly that the political reality of high-kingship is relatively late, superseding the long tradition of the Pentarchy or 'Fifth Province' which conceived of unity as a spiritual-cultural rather than poltical-governmental phenomenon." Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland, Routledge, 1997, p. 102. D A Binchy in The Impact of the Scandinavian Invasions on the Celtic-speaking Peoples c.800-1100 AD, ed. Brian O Cuiv, Dublin, 1975, p. 128 18. "Progressive Politics", The Irish Times, 18 December 1999, op. cit. 19. "The British-Irish Council: Ahern clasps the hand of history one more time at unique London gathering", The Irish Times, 18 December 1999, op. cit. 20. "Rebranding the kingdom: Today a new body meets for the first time. Behind it lies a new constitutional notion - the Atlantic Isles", The Guardian, 17 December 1999; www.guardian.co.uk |
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