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15 September 2026 - 7:00am
Britain’s three nationalist leaders gathered in Cardiff on Monday to demand that Westminster “prepare for, plan and facilitate” the break-up of the United Kingdom. Following the May elections, for the first time, separatist parties lead the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Yet their constitutional ambitions run far ahead of public opinion.
The Scottish National Party won another term in May, but its constituency vote fell by 9.5 percentage points and its regional vote by 13.2. A July poll put Sinn Féin on 22% in Northern Ireland, down from 29% at the 2022 Assembly election. Plaid Cymru is the exception, having become Wales’s largest party in May — but even there, a Westminster poll last week placed Reform 10 points ahead of Plaid, while only 32% of Welsh voters say they would vote for independence tomorrow.
Why, then, do the nationalists behave as though they hold all the cards? The answer is simple: it’s because Westminster keeps dealing them in. Since New Labour established devolution in Scotland and Wales, the default assumption has been that more devolution is better. Devolution’s founding assurance was that dispersing power would accommodate nationalism and secure the Union. Almost 30 years later, nationalist parties control the institutions devolution created and use them as platforms from which to demand more. This should surprise nobody. Scottish First Minister John Swinney does not want a better devolution settlement — he wants independence. No transfer of powers will make him fall in love with Britain.
Coupled with this is a political class that has no idea how to say no. Instead, its members would rather slowly chip away at the foundations of their country to avoid upsetting separatists. Andy Burnham’s own position illustrates the confusion. At Prime Minister’s Questions last week, he said there would be no Scottish referendum until majority support emerged — language the SNP immediately interpreted as a new route to one. Downing Street then insisted that another vote remained “off limits”. If the Union is to survive, it needs to be carefully, clearly and forcefully defended, not rest on the whim of a frit PM issuing statements for TikTok.
But this is not an irreversible tide — which one suspects Plaid also knows, given it has ruled out holding a referendum on independence during the Senedd term ending in 2030 — and Westminster is not powerless. When Holyrood’s gender recognition legislation threatened UK-wide equality law, the then-Conservative government used Section 35 of the Scotland Act 1998 to block it and survived a legal challenge. The fallout even helped to claim the scalp of Nicola Sturgeon. This should have been a wake-up call to Unionist politicians that devolved autonomy exists inside a constitutional order, not above it. The centre can defend that order when it summons the will.
Similarly, in Spain the central government held the constitutional line against Catalonia’s illegal 2017 referendum — by 2024, the separatist parties had lost their parliamentary majority in the region for the first time since the independence crisis began. The lesson here is that not every grievance deserves a concession.
The weakness of the political class to stand up for the centre has not just led to enemies within, but also emboldened opponents overseas. Faced with Argentine President Javier Milei’s renewed claim to the Falklands, ministers called the UK’s commitment “unwavering” and grounded it in the wishes of the islanders, but there must be few Britons who expect Burnham to send ships to defend the islands. Similarly, the Tories started, and Labour enthusiastically took up, negotiations to hand away the Chagos Islands on a flimsy, non-binding legal opinion. And if it’s not land, it’s money: Buckingham Palace was right not to grant a meeting this month to the Jamaican delegation that arrived with a multibillion-pound petition for colonial reparations.
The danger is not that the separatists have the stronger arguments, but that those charged with defending the Union too often seem ashamed of the country they are meant to preserve. While these campaigns differ in substance, they exploit the same perceived weakness — that the British state can be pressured into surrendering authority, territory, or treasure. A useful answer can be found in the famous words of Margaret Thatcher: no, no, no.
