Vive L’Empereur! (DeAgostini/Getty Images)
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is weird. Just look at how it plays sport. It competes in the Olympics as Great Britain, while in football it plays as separate entities called England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In rugby, meanwhile, Northern Ireland doesn’t get a team, and in cricket, the Welsh play for England. Don’t ask.
But this sporting oddity is only a pale reflection of the UK’s political and constitutional complexity. While it is one sovereign state with one King, it has two established churches, three judicial systems, four home nations, and a whole host of crown dependencies and overseas territories which form part of its single, royal realm. (Are you following at the back?) And that’s before you consider the fact that the King of the United Kingdom (not England) is also king of lots of other countries with lots of other titles, which were once also part of the UK’s single royal realm but are no longer.
To some, the impenetrable complexity of the UK and its royal family is part of its strength. Nations aren’t “rational” constructs but the products of history and human imagination; old trees which suit the soil in which they grow, not brutalist modern buildings rising from concrete. In fact, often the more arcane a country’s political order, the better. The Holy Roman Empire was impenetrably messy but gloriously superior to many of the Germanies which followed its violent destruction.
This is the Burkean conception of constitutions, anyway: organic orders which contain much that cannot be justified in simple rational terms but nevertheless provide the shelter under which nations live freely and in harmony — often more freely than those constantly forced to cut down and rebuild their societies based on some abstract principle. As T.S. Eliot wrote, art does not “improve” with time but simply changes to reflect the new material. So, too, with constitutions.
While I agree with much of this Burkean analysis, it also seems clear to me that the British constitution today is not some glorious old oak left to grow naturally, but the product of half-arsed topiary. The UK has been robbed of much of the organic strength of a traditional constitutional order without gaining the simplicity of a revolutionary constitution; we have the constitution of Ted Heath, not Edmund Burke or Napoleon Bonaparte.
Nothing better illustrates this reality than our impenetrable local democracy. Occasionally, someone or other tries to call Britain’s local elections our “midterms”, but they are nothing of the kind. In the United States, every seat in the House of Representatives is up for grabs every two years — as well as a third of the Senate. The midterms are a chance for the American public as a whole to grant or deny the President legislative control. They are an important moment in the life of the nation, part of its ever evolving story. In Britain, meanwhile, local elections happen every year in some form or another and are so arcanely complicated that almost nobody understands what is going on. Today, for example, around 8,000 councillors will be elected from around two thirds of our 300-plus local authorities in England. Why some councils vote in this four-year pattern and not another is largely just chance. Scotland and Wales will not be voting; Northern Ireland will vote in a couple of weeks.
The map of British local democracy makes the principalities in the Holy Roman Empire look positively geometric. In some parts of England there are “county councils” and “district councils”; in others “unitary” authorities; and in others metropolitan boroughs. Some of these hold elections for a third of their councillors each time, some for half. Some parts of the country also have “metro mayors”, some of whom double up as local police and crime commissioners. There are fire and rescue authorities, sui generis councils such as the City of London and the Council of the Isles of Scilly as well as the Greater London Authority and, of course, the devolved parliaments and assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Each body has different powers and responsibilities, each funded according to different formulas described by the House of Commons library as “extremely complex”. Meanwhile, voting systems differ across the nations.
The problem is not so much the complexity of Britain’s political order, but the fact that it just doesn’t hold together: partly the product of tradition and partly of supposedly modernising reforms which have just been bolted on here and there. The result is a whole array of competing bodies with criss-crossing lines of responsibility and legitimacy, a mishmash of incohesion that robs the country of shared national moments, customs and stories. A country needs more than an army and king to hang together.
Roger Scruton wrote that most beliefs necessary for the functioning of society are both “unjustified and unjustifiable” in purely rational terms; try to rationalise them, and you’ll end up losing them. National customs are justified not through reason but rather “as an anthropologist might justify the customs and rituals of an alien tribe”.
The House of Lords, rationalised to the point of illegitimacy, illustrates this perfectly. It once represented the landed interests of Britain, a national class stretching from Orkney to the Scillies, bound in a physical connection to the parts of the country that they owned and ran. In 1999, Tony Blair’s reform seemed necessary because much of this class’s old power and authority had gone. But what replaced it has made the Lords even more absurd: a House of inherited privilege has been replaced with an instrument of political corruption shorn of all power, responsibility and justification. The body which fused the powers of state more than any other — king, church, law, legislature and executive — is now a dead and rotting organ at the heart of Britain’s constitution.
Something similar has happened with local democracy, which lost much of its autonomy and connection to the traditional boundaries of Britain with the local government reform act of 1974. This did away with many of the old county boundaries, replacing them with new more “rational” ones which might have looked good on a map, but did not plot onto the real-life loyalties of the people actually living on the land. The old counties of Britain could easily have formed the basis of a new class of elected peers for the House of Lords — or for a layer of English local democracy to match the parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Instead, new ones were created and crowbarred into the old system, neither rational nor traditional.
There is something of the ancien regime to Britain’s local democracy. In pre-revolutionary France, there were more than 300 different legal codes. By the time Napoleon began reforming the system there were still over 40. And by the time he’d finished reforming the system there was one. “Napoleon instinctively understood that if France was to function efficiently in the modern world, she needed a standardised system of law and justice,” wrote Andrew Roberts. “Uniform weights and measures, a fully functioning internal market and a centralised education system, one that would allow talented adolescents from all backgrounds to enter careers according to merit rather than birth.”
Like post-revolutionary France, paradoxically, we are also in need of someone who can make sense of it all over again — a Napoleon to reinvigorate the British political order, to prune it back to give it life. Napoleon created a strong, unified nation state from a place even more diverse than the UK today. From a population of 28 million, some six million could not speak a word of French and another six million could only just understand it. After the chaos of the revolution, the population wanted conservatism, and Napoleon gave it to them.
Today, Britain also needs a reforming state to once again bind the country together, to protect the things we have — nation, state, constitutional freedom and prosperity. We need more shared rituals, irrational or otherwise; more shared institutions; and more shared endeavours in order for us to keep telling a national story and not multiple little sub-national novellas that are unintelligible to the other. The old oak needs cutting back to be able to grow again. Vive L’Empereur!
Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016, due to be published in September 2025
TomMcTague 
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe“Inclusive language” is an anglocentric hustle. I was recently asked on a scientific grant application to write my CV in a “gender-neutral” way. Trouble is, my surname is Ó Náraigh, which is the male form of the surname. The female version would be Uí Náraigh or Ní Náraigh, depending on the context. So not gender-neutral at all. You would wonder how the Russians manage (“Vladimirov / Vladimirova”). There must be many other languages where such “gender-blinding” is not possible, leading me to believe that “woke” is a mind-virus that specifically affects the English-speaking brain.
Not to mention having to write everything gender neutral in french.
lunac.y.i.e !!
Of course Google should issue intersectional guidance as well so that if you register as black you will be able to use such expressions as “N****r” as a friendly greeting and “B***h” for your girlfriend without being deleted.
My wife used to drive our 13 year old son to school together with a friend’s 5 year old daughter and was constantly turning the radio off when songs by Rappers were played – which my son much enjoyed – for fear of the friends daughter coming out with such words at embarrassing moments. For some reason a startling level of sexism seemed (at least then) to be acceptable if the singer was black. It was all very difficult for her to explain the problem that didn’t seem to make much sense to my son.
This is yet more woke capitalism. Rents are at an all-time high across the industrialized world. Home ownership is in long-term decline. Having trouble with your landlord? That’s okay. Google is here to the rescue – the solution is to give him a more gender-neutral name. Problem solved, let’s move on… to children’s entertainment. Disney wants to take over parents’ duties, and teach children about race, sex, gender, and identity. The kids’ college fund is a bit depleted. If Disney is so good at parenting, will it stump up the cash?
Come to think of it, what , if anything, has been proposed as a gender-neutral version of “landlord”?
Will it be like the acting profession, where it’s apparently politically correct to call all by the male term “actor”? Or the confusion of chairman / chairwoman / chairperson / chair? The only one of those that is disappearing fast is “chairwoman”.
But, if “ever-mutating woke language shibboleths serve to signal class status” they won’t if everyone has access to this technology, as Google seems to intend. Ironically enough, the main purpose of “inclusive language” is to divide people. The new snobs will have to find new markers.
I give it a year, at most.
When I read about ‘Baby G’ and her ‘bimbofication’ I honestly thought that this must be satire. Is this real?
I noticed that my comments are being edited even before I write them down. I wonder how that happened. Oh, maybe I’ve already been influence not to write certain things. Google is late to the game!
True. In composing a post here I always have to bear in mind the quirks of the moderator’s algorithm to try to avoid giving it a hissy fit. I am getting better at knowing what will get it ruffled.
A number of posters who I enjoyed no longer post here presumably because they were less inclined to tailor their posts to meet the moderators predilections. Of course a time may come when rephrasing my thoughts is insufficient and I have to leave the only forum I bother to post on.
This is of course just the beginning. “AI” can and will be extended to more intrusive “auto-corrections” on what you write. This is not necessarily a problem for the individual – you should be able to find and set software that controls such intrusions. Where it will become a problem is when it is used by the publishing media to edit contributions, with or without, the author’s consent. It is inevitable, so railing against it will achieve nothing but journalists and readers voting with their feet might. Integrity lies with the participants.
My pronouns are notfuc/kingwoke, and I think it’s ok for mankind to mention but not to use the word “ni55er”.
Grammarly does not care for the word homosexual.
If you include the short form of that in your post here your post will likely be moderated automatically. What does Grammarly recommend?
Don’t worry… Elon is taking them head on. Gosh, Apple corrected my elon to Elon! Things are looking up!
One presumes this inclusive language AI will be writing in characters developed by the Romans.
Ropeople, please!
Yes, it is utterly absurd that the term ‘nazi’ cannot be used, even to describe the German government of 1933-45! Either this shows very bad faith on the part of UnHerd, or that algorithms just cannot get context at all. Either way, it is censorious and appalling.
Apart from the patronising and hysterically un-self aware notion of anglophone (white) twenty somethings telling the rest of the world how to think about ‘gender’, and indeed, everything, Google is any case the archetypal the classic ‘punching down’ organisation. While endlessly hectoring and cajoling the ‘unwoke’ working class, it bows down and does whatever the governments of the world tell it do, or face being blocked, as in China.
Softwear package…