I desire a perfect Union of Lawes and persons, and such a Naturalizing as may make one body of both Kingdomes under mee your King. That I and my posteritie (if it so please God) may rule over you to the world’s ende; Such an Union as was of the Scots and Pictes in Scotland, and of the Heptarchie here in England. And for Scotland I avow such an Union, as if you had got it by Conquest, but such a Conquest as may be cemented by love, the only sure bond of subjection or friendship. –King James vith and 1st, Speech to Both Houses of Parliament at Whitehall, 31 March 1607footnote¹

The week before the May First General Election, Robert Harris wrote in his Sunday Times column that the interminable electoral campaign had probably been a waste of time for the outgoing government. It had made no difference to voting intentions because ‘the tectonic plates had shifted’ already to deter the outcome. I think this was more than just a striking phrase. Deeper pressures had indeed asserted themselves, and are continuing to do so. The fault-lines are still widening, and we are still trying to work out just what they are.footnote²

Theorists of nationality-politics have invented the term ‘ethnoscape’ to describe certain aspects of traditional national identity.footnote³ By analogy, what we are dealing with here might be called the ‘sovereigntyscape’ of the United Kingdom—the deeper configuration of central authority inherited and taken for granted, and in practice grafted on to most ideas (including popular ideas) of the nation, of ‘what it means’ to be British or English. I think it is in this zone that the tectonic shifts are occurring. The two outstanding manifestations so far have been the precipitous decline of the Monarchy since around 1990, and 1997’s electoral earthquake, ‘the Labour landslide’ as most comment called it—appropriately enough in the context of Harris’s metaphor. But there is another old-fashioned metaphor which might be applied too. It could equally be said that ‘a crisis of the State’ is going on. Marxists used to be fond of this idea, which implied that social forces (notably economic ones) were out-pacing and undermining the existing power-structures, and hence bringing about an inevitable ‘collapse’ (with any luck, a ‘revolution’) from which Progress would emerge victorious, guided by Marxists. A crisis of the State is by definition a crisis of Sovereignty.footnote⁴

Sovereignty is the ultimate or last-resort power of decision over a given population and territory.footnote⁵ The question is a fundamental one, but I do not propose to tackle its philosophical side directly here. Everyone knows that in Great Britain a peculiar mysticism attaches to the notion, reflecting the metempsychosis of the late-feudal Crown into a representative Parliament, after the Revolutions between 1640 and 1688. Given the aristocratic or patrician nature of the resultant English representation, an extraordinarily centralized and elitist apparatus of power and administration was created. It was voiced literally by James vith and ist in the above quotation, at the moment of birth of the British Union. Then the Crown-in-Parliament became the sovereignty-mode of what Liah Greenfeld has called ‘God’s first-born’—the early-modern or primitive template of the nation-state.footnote⁶ This lasted three centuries, plenty of time to acquire delusions of immemoriality. Round about its three-hundredth birthday in 1988, however, in the thirty-fifth year of the reign of Elizabeth the 11nd and 1st—and the ninth of Counter-Sovereign Margaret—it began to exhibit serious symptoms. As if stricken by a premonitory curse, the Crown abruptly de-metempsychosed into a tacky Heritage side-show, leaving Parliament as sole manager of the national team-identity. Westminster was poorly equipped for the role: hauteur, immemoriality and Empire had long ago immured it into a traditionalism immune from ‘that sort of thing’. So the Deposition of Margaret in 1990 consigned Britain to a sort of Hades, John Major’s grey nether kingdom of dinge, sleaze, rigor mortis constitutionalism, tread-water triumphalism and anti-European xenophobia.

It is tempting but erroneous here to speak of the old regime as having ‘scraped the bottom of the barrel’. That would imply that there had been something else in the barrel, previous stratagems or reforming devices attempted and found wanting until, in extremis, the political class just had to go for the bilge-water. Of course this was not so. Mother-of-Parliament-land had no requirement for such stratagems and devices: historic-exemplary status implies that nationalistic status-anxiety is for wimp-lands alone. Where first-born nationhood is threatened, therefore, there is only the barrel-bottom: it can’t be our fault, so they must be to blame. Hence identity may legitimately be redefined by the crudest means to hand: in this case a spluttering concoction of warm beer, bicycling clerics, filthy abattoirs, plotting foreigners and Sir James Gold-smith.

Beneath the rotting barrel lies the sand, fortunately: a ‘sovereignty’ which will outlast the fall of Britain. But the banks of sovereignty are now themselves shifting rapidly in new tides. The locus of debate has at last shifted decisively from the economy to the state. It always used to be said by conscious and unconscious apologists of Old Corruption that the people ‘had no interest in constitutional questions’. Well, they seem to be acquiring one fast. That was in any case always a piece of Westminster dullardry. Ah for the days of such pseudo-shrewdness and unflinching self-admiration! Naturally there was little popular concern with reforming a Constitution which everyone had been taught to revere alongside the State Opening and Vera Lynn. But all this meant is that people used to behave themselves. In the 1980s they stopped behaving themselves. Then the Royal Family and the Tory Party stopped behaving themselves too. And finally Britain’s last hope of rectitude, the Labour Party, embarked upon a noisy and compromising—though possibly brief—affaire with democracy. About the same time as the National Lottery, identity-Angst crept at last into the British soul and led it to query ‘the way we’re governed’—which means sovereignty.

Thus did 1989’s End of History (etc.) reach Ukanian shores, only eight years late. One effect of the original event had been a great expansion of the view, as historians realized that the fateful eternity of the Cold War had been but one dismal chapter in a longer and more interesting story. Similarly, in archipelagic terms we ought now to try and perceive Archaic-British Sovereignty as an episode now approaching its end. It started with the late-feudal assimilation of Wales and ended—morally speaking, at least—amid the strident hysteria of Tory no-surrender Unionism between 1992 and 1997.