The Council of the Isles and the Scotland-Northern Ireland relationship
by Graham Walker
At the very least the constitutional reforms taking place, and in particular the BIC, offer the opportunity for such as Scotland and Northern Ireland, with their close historical and cultural links, to fashion a new working relationship independently of London (Linklater 1998; Scotland on Sunday 28 June 1998; Ramsay 1998) and this paper will discuss the kind of possibilities - and possible points of contention - which the new arrangements might bring. Little of a detailed or definite nature about the role of the Council of the Isles has yet emerged; in keeping with so much of the Blair government's constitutional programme its development looks set to be piecemeal and in accordance with no clear overall vision or plan (Keating and Elcock 1998). The situation in this particular as well as generally, is eminently fluid. Thus discussion of the future role of the BIC will be necessarily speculative for the most part. Before that, some more comment will be offered on the way the Scottish and Northern Irish questions have been pulled together in recent years.
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The inclusion of Strand Three in the Agreement dealing with East-West links was in part a reflection of the way Ulster Unionists had imposed themselves on the debate about UK constitutional change as it developed during the late 1980s and 1990s. In practical terms this amounted to 'muscling in' on the issues which the revived demand for a Scottish Parliament gave rise to. The Scottish demand was increasingly looked upon as a likely catalyst to wider constitutional changes, and the Scottish Constitutional Convention which deliberated from 1989 to 1995 was a source of inspiration to those who sought radical democratic renewal in the UK as a whole. While hardly natural constitutional radicals, the Ulster Unionists, led by the cautious figure of James Molyneaux, nonetheless took every opportunity to highlight Northern Ireland's claim to be part of any constitutional re-structuring and any inconsistency in the government's handling of the constitutional position of the different parts of the UK> Molyneaux duly made contact with the Scottish Constitutional Convention, and on the eve of the 1992 General Election leading Ulster Unionists demanded that any further devolutionary concession to Scotland be granted also to Northern Ireland (Walker 1998; Lynch 1996). The Unionists were alive to the implications of any single constitutional change for the rest of the UK - they gave consideration also to the effects on Northern Ireland of Scottish independence - and saw that there were salient points to make in relation to what might be called 'the nature of Britain/UK' question. They positioned themselves accordingly and made much of those issues in Parliament.
Thus, in the 1992-97 Parliament, Unionists regularly put the government on the spot regarding the inconsistency in their approach to the Scottish and Northern Irish cases. They drew attention, for example, to the value the government appeared to place on Scotland's place in the union in contrast to that of Northern Ireland (Hansard 9 March 1993). In the 1993 the Ulster Unionist MP John Taylor called for 'all party talks' on the future government and administration of Scotland (hansard 5 May 1993) and the then fresh face of Unionism, David Trimble, pointed out to the Scottish Secretary Ian Lang that there was a revealing contrast between himself, who did not want party talks but had a policy and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland who wanted talks but had no policy (Hansard 9 June 1993). Later that year Taylor called on Lang to assure the House that if a referendum were held in Scotland over any proposed constitutional change an identical one would be held' elsewhere in the United Kingdom' (Hansard 8 December 1993).
Although politically somewhat at odds with the Unionists, the Labour opposition
were also not averse to making political capital out of the government's
inconsistencies, and of the government's failure to address the many anomalies
and conundrums inherent in questions of UK constitutional affairs. These
centred on contrasting application of principles towards the Scottish and
Northern Irish cases. The government's attempts to depict Northern Ireland
as 'exceptional' in the UK context only served to highlight the extent to
which there were many 'exceptions' and much diversity lying beneath the
surface of the unitary state. Somewhat belatedly it came to be widely appreciated
that 'the West Lothian question' had had a fifty year life as the 'West
Belfast question' during Northern Ireland's experience of devolution and
that this devolutionary history still had much of relevance for the rest
of the UK, especially in the circumstances of the 1980s and 90s. |
