Would England be better off without Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? This may seem an extraordinary question but it is one that can be asked in the wake of the recent elections in the United Kingdom.

Following these elections Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are all led by chief ministers whose parties are formally pledged to independence and the establishment of a separate state outside the UK.

In Scotland this is the avowed goal of the Scottish National party which remained the largest group in the Holyrood parliament and has been in power for almost 20 years.  In the Welsh Senedd, as its parliament is known, Plaid Cymru, with its aim of a separate Welsh state, became the largest party and has formed a minority government. There was no election in Northern Ireland at this time but at the last poll the largest vote was for Sinn Fein which took the post of chief minister. Its long-held aim is to take Northern Ireland out of the UK and into the Irish Republic.

There seems to be an assumption in the UK that these dreams of independence could be realised by referendums in the various entities.  There was such a referendum in Scotland in 2014 but it was lost. In the case of Northern Ireland, under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement between the Britain and Irish republic, there must be a referendum if it ‘appears likely’ to the British government that most people in Northern Ireland would support unity with the republic.

But it also seems to be assumed that the voters in any referendum would be only those in the polity whose government is seeking independence. Why, however, should these not be questions for the entire UK? Scotland has 8 per cent of the UK population, Wales 4.5 per cent and Northern Ireland a little under 3 per cent. It seems extraordinary that a majority vote in one or more of these provinces could dismantle a nation that has existed for centuries.

Financially, of course, England would be better off without all three provinces because they are heavily subsidised by Westminster, receiving significantly larger funding than they produce in tax revenue. But this ignores the political concept of the UK and the historical ability of a nation state to maintain its existing borders. Secession has generally been resisted by nations, most violently in the case of the US Civil War where the unsuccessful attempt by the Confederate states resulted in the loss of 700,000 lives.  In more recent times northern Sri Lanka’s Tamils and the Chechens in the Russian Federation both failed in military attempts to achieve independence. And in 2019 leaders of the Catalan separatist movement received lengthy jail terms from Spanish courts after holding a referendum on independence for Catalonia without the consent of the central government in Madrid.

There have been exceptions to this pattern of failure but normally only where the seceding province has received military assistance from one or more other nations.  So in 2008 Kosovo, a Serbian province with a predominantly Albanian population, achieved independence as a separate state after Nato engaged in a bombing campaign against Belgrade, although its status is still not recognised by Serbia.  Similarly, Bangladesh achieved independence from Pakistan in 1971 after India intervened to quash the resistance of the Pakistani government.

It is something of an irony that these efforts to dissolve the UK are being made relatively soon after the Brexit referendum of 2016 that reclaimed some of its national sovereignty. It is fashionable now to say that Brexit was a mistake and that its economic consequences are considerable. The economic consequences have been exaggerated but, whatever they might be, the real issue was sovereignty, that is, whether decisions on the governance of the UK would be made at Westminster or in Brussels.  As it happens, however, Britain’s current Labour government would like to reverse Brexit and will continue to inch back towards the European Union.

This is hardly surprising as Brexit was a very rare event in modern political history – a decision by the electorate taken in the teeth of opposition by the civil service, the media, the judiciary, the business sector, the literary world and even a sizeable proportion of the Conservative party that was nominally in favour of leaving the EU. Almost all the forces of power and influence in Britain were opposed to that course and the decision to leave was never accepted by many of those who wanted to remain. The attitude of the EU itself was summed up by French president Macron when he said, ‘The Brexit campaign was made up of lies, exaggerations and simplifications. We must remember at every moment what lies can lead to in our democracies.’ The EU protracted the Brexit negotiations in a way designed to cause the maximum political and economic damage to Britain and no doubt views with rare delight the prospect of imposing terms on any application to rejoin by the current British administration.

One safeguard against the various independence movements in the UK is that the government at Westminster would have to consent to a referendum in any of the provinces, let alone of the UK as a whole. It would be able to say to the Scots that they had their vote in 2014 and are not entitled to another one. Nor is there any reason to observe the 1998 agreement on a vote in Northern Ireland when the beneficiary would be Sinn Fein which, as the political arm of the IRA, was complicit in a campaign of murder and terrorism over decades in Britain as well as in Northern Ireland. In the case of Wales, a refusal to allow a vote could be rationalised as simply putting it on the same basis as the other two provinces. All of this, however, will require a strength of purpose to preserve the UK on the part of its prime minister, whether that be Sir Keir Starmer or one of his Labour rivals.