Making a TV series, by its nature, involves a deep dive into the topic, an opportunity to engage with the specialists and read all the key books and documents. The result, usually, is that by the time the programmes are ready for broadcast, the team behind them have reached firm opinions, or at the very least, know more or less where they stand on the subject. My new series explores the history of the union of the nations that make up the UK but, more than 18 months after I started work on the project, I feel only marginally less conflicted than I did at the beginning about the history of the union, and its future.
It was my own conflicted sense of identity that first made me want to make the new series, because I – like millions of people – don’t have to dig very deep or ask myself too many difficult questions to uncover a mass of contradictions. For example, I happily describe myself as Black British. But despite having grown up in one English city and settled in another, and despite supporting England through every football tournament, I would never tick the box for “Black English”, on a monitoring form. Perhaps tellingly, that box is often not even there to tick. On the last census there were boxes for both “Black British” and “Black Welsh”, but “Black English” was not among the options.
Not only is Black English an identity I have never claimed, a minority of English people regard it as an identity for which I am ineligible. A 2021 report by the thinktank British Future and the Centre of English Identity and Politics at the University of Southampton discovered that 14% of white people and 19% of people from a minority ethnic background regard Englishness as an ethnic rather than a civic identity, only available to people with white skin.
On top of that contradiction is a host of others. Like most British Africans (yet another identity) I feel a sense of affiliation to both Britain and Nigeria, the country of my birth. But whenever I am in Nigeria just how culturally British I am becomes laughably obvious to me and my extended family. Similarly, I regard myself as a northerner despite having now lived in the south of England longer than the north and again, like millions of others, I regard myself as culturally working-class, despite having worked in middle-class professions for decades.
Many of us grapple with these sorts of contradictions not simply because identity is always complicated, and has to be navigated and negotiated, but because we live in a complicated country. Ours is a state made-up of four nations (although there is not even agreement that all of them actually are nations) which were brought together – and at times torn apart – by a complicated history. The fact that this history is taught differently in each of the four nations does not help. It was only when I got to university, and for the first time had Irish friends, that I realised how little my English education had taught me about the long and brutal relationship between Britain and Ireland. Had my friendship groups contained students from Scotland and Wales I would have discovered other gaps in my knowledge.
Many states contain different ethnic groups and cut across the half-forgotten borders of earlier polities. The United Kingdom is not unique in this respect. Yet the fact that I could have written that previous sentence describing our state as “Britain” or “Great Britain” rather than the “United Kingdom” and many people would regard those terms as interchangeable, hints at the way in which the complexities of the history lie behind many of the contradictions and tensions of today.
As well as holding multiple identities we have to navigate multiple terms, many of which are open to interpretation and refutation. Is Great Britain the name of an island or the name of the state? Or is it both? Is the term “the British Isles” merely a geographic expression, used to describe the large group of islands that lie off the north-western coast of the European continent or – as many in Ireland understandably conclude – is it a political expression with colonial overtones that linguistically subsumes Ireland into Britain’s cultural and historical orbit?
As individuals we are citizens of the United Kingdom while at the same time we identify as Scottish, English, Northern Irish, Welsh or British, or see ourselves as a combination of those identities. We come together to support Team GB at the Olympics. Yet Team GB also includes Northern Ireland and should – some would argue – therefore be Team UK. In football, rugby and much else our loyalties are to the teams of what we still sometimes call the “home nations”.
We are a people obsessed with history, the inheritors of a long and ancient past. Yet our current state, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, was formed in 1922 when Ireland was partitioned, and is barely a century old. Its precursor, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, was established by the union of 1801 that brought the whole island of Ireland into a union with Britain. Confusingly, therefore, the UK, in either of its iterations, is younger than the US. We are in reality a relatively young state that has been repeatedly made and remade through a series of unions between very old nations. Each of those moments of union is remembered differently by different communities and is often hotly contested.
As the series Union – I hope – demonstrates, those who come to history to smooth out these contradictions in our sense of identity by offering up simple binary narratives, tend to leave disappointed. The best history can do, I would argue, is explain how we got here, and even that is not a simple task.
The history we largely focus on begins in 1603, when King James VI of Scotland added King James I of England to his list of titles. Among the many lessons that can be drawn from that early history is that opposition to the idea of an Anglo-Scottish union came not just from Scotland, but also from England. Had English members of the Westminster parliament not been so persistent in their opposition to King James’s mission to unify his kingdoms – Scotland, England and Wales – the union of 1707 that did finally bring those nations together might have arrived a century earlier.
Those English MPs were not alone in their hostility towards the king’s vision of a united British state. During his interrogation, Guy Fawkes cited opposition to a union with Scotland as one of the many motivations behind the Gunpowder Plot. The yellowing pages on which his confessions were scrawled, held in the National Archives, record Fawkes admitting to his interrogators: “the plot was done in order to prevent the union that was sought to be published at this parliament”.
The MPs who offered greatest support to King James in the parliaments of the early 17th century tended to be not English but Welsh; men who in some cases regarded themselves as the first of the Britons and were the beneficiaries of an earlier union – the Tudor union that united England and Wales. That union, like those that were to follow, created winners as well as losers. Yet not only its terms but even what we should call it today is a matter of controversy.
Welsh support, however, was not enough for James to ever make real his dream of a union and he was left instead to tinker around the edges, devising the symbols of a state he was incapable of bringing into existence. In 1604, he had a new coin struck, the “unite”. Its inscription gave James the title “king of Great Britain”. On the reverse appeared the Latin inscription Faciam eos in gentem unam (I will make them into one nation). James also commissioned designs for a British flag. The original document on which the designs were painted – the actual piece of paper that was presented to the king – is held at the National Library of Scotland. The six alternative designs are all attempts – some, it has to be said, more successful than others – to bring the flags of Scotland and England together into a single design. The most convincing inch close to the modern union flag.
A century after Welsh MPs had loaned their support to King James, a union less complete and comprehensive than he had proposed came into being, the English having been converted to the idea of a union by the fear of a Catholic monarch coming to the still-separate throne of Scotland. After the negotiations had been concluded and the acts passed, the old Scottish parliament voted itself out of existence. Anger in Scotland led to the outbreak of riots in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Yet just six years later, in 1713, a motion for a repeal of the union was put to the now joint House of Commons. It was rejected by just four votes, with many English MPs voting for an end to the union.
At the end of that century, sections of the Scottish elite, who in the intervening decades had done well under the union and benefited from access to the expanding, commercial and imperial Britain of the Georgian kings, were among the most vocal advocates for a new union that brought Ireland and Great Britain into a new United Kingdom.
The story of union is one of parliaments, armies and the grand schemes of monarchs; kings and queens are inevitably central to the story of what after all is a United Kingdom. Yet through the series we have attempted to shift focus and also explore this vast, sprawling history through the experiences of individuals and families. We trace the events in Ireland that led to partition through two working-class Belfast families who lived just miles apart but on opposite sides of the religious divide. We illustrate the pragmatic adaptability of the union through the extraordinary account of the Drummonds, an aristocratic Scottish dynasty who, within a single generation, went from traitors to George II to become bankers to George III.
The Drummonds’ astonishing act of dynastic reinvention was possible partly because they made the move to London, and the vast centripetal power of the English capital is the elephant in the room in any discussion of the union. Another unavoidable reality is the demographic disparity that exists between England and the other nations. England has always been the most populous of the four, but the magnitude of its dominance has varied considerably over time. At the time of union with Ireland in 1801, 46% of the population of the United Kingdom were not English. In 1845, on the eve of the great famine in Ireland (another event for which there are various contested terms) one in three of Queen Victoria’s subjects was Irish, the population of that island having reached 8 million. It is testimony to the scale of that disaster that the current population of the island of Ireland is still below that of 1845.
Today, as the population of England inches towards 57 million, the English make up 84% of the UK population. Such a demographic mismatch, when combined with political power that, even after devolution, remains highly concentrated in Westminster, makes it unsurprising that a great many of the 16% who are not English feel marginalised.
In the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, what helped console the Celtic nations over being in union with a comparative giant was economic success. The Industrial Revolution, the wealth of empire and Britain’s emergence as the predominant global trading nation had the effect of spreading wealth across the nations. In the 19th century, the dominance of London was counterbalanced, if only momentarily, by the emergence of booming industrial cities in the north of England, Scotland, the valleys of south Wales and elsewhere. While London remained a colossus, Glasgow, Belfast, Newcastle, Leeds, Sheffield, Cardiff, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool became significant cities, and in some cases world cities. In their Victorian heyday, the richest of them engaged in a civic arms race, competitively building grand town halls, art galleries and museums and universities (of which, incredibly there were none in England outside the south until the 1830s).
What fuelled their rise was another constant feature of the story of the union: migration and movement across the borders, a legacy that lives on into the present. My own family moved from Scotland to the north-east of England and it is estimated that there are 6 million people living in the UK who have at least one Irish grandparent, which means that about 10% of the current UK population have the right to Irish citizenship.
If the wealth and industrial employment of the 19th and early 20th centuries helped make the case for the union, the decline of those industries, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, reawoke the deep structural problems that had been there since the start. All the more so as the same period saw London and the south-east begin to pull away economically. Deindustrialisation decimated the north of England, while in Scotland and Wales the decline of traditional industries meant that the benefits of the union were increasingly called into question.
From the jumble of contradictions and complicating factors that lie within the history of union, what perhaps stands out is the fundamental truth that the UK was formed, not in accordance with some great master plan, but through a series of accidents, compromises, chance happenings and, on occasion, some rather dodgy back-room deals. The unions of 1707 and 1801 were both in part motivated by the urgent need to prevent Scotland and Ireland respectively being used as a bridgehead for a foreign invasion of England.
The improvised way in which our current state was created is one of the factors that helps explain why so many of us have complex, overlapping, hyphenated identities, and the history of the union reminds us that like many other nations the UK, despite all it has endured, is a more fragile construct than appearances might suggest. With the majority of younger Scots, according to polls, now committed to independence, and with Catholics outnumbering Protestants for the first time in Northern Ireland, the future of the union is as contested as its past.
