The UK risks falling apart. Keir Starmer can mend it now – but he doesn't have much time

The Guardian

22-05-2025

A house divided against itself cannot stand, warned Abraham Lincoln. The United States' later descent into civil war over slavery would prove Lincoln right. But is 21st-century Britain now also becoming, in its different way, an unsustainably divided house too? And have Britain's economic divisions become so intractable that the UK state can no longer manage them? More than at any time in the postwar era, the answer to both questions looks increasingly like yes.
History shows that Britain's capacity for pragmatic resilience in the face of internal and external threat is not to be underestimated. Wednesday's partial climbdown on winter fuel payments was an example of that instinct for self-preservation at work. Yet the U-turn will not have restored the public's lost trust in the ability of government to solve their problems.
Keir Starmer has inherited this uneasy long-term decline, not created it. His 'island of strangers' remarks last week were one attempt to respond. But immigration is not the sole cause of division. Centrifugal forces have been making the United Kingdom a more fragmented country for much of the past half century. Public confidence in this country's system of government has reached record lows. There is little evidence of a cohesive or collaborative political economic purpose that might mark a nation more at ease with itself. The May local elections, which have now triggered the winter fuel rethink, were a powerful sign of how the divisions could easily deepen further.
On Friday, Starmer will attempt to remedy another part of the problem he faces. To some, the Council of the Nations and Regions will sound merely like a politicians' talking shop. Let's be frank, there is a risk it could become just that. Nor will a Britain whose discontents are fundamentally economic and aspirational be transformed by a constitutional innovation. But this second meeting of the council, which was promised in Labour's election manifesto and which met first in October, is nevertheless a fundamental test. Put simply, Friday will show whether modern British governance is up to the job.
The council is a distant cousin of a proposal that Gordon Brown devised when Starmer's Labour was still in opposition at Westminster. Under Brown's ambitious plans, the council would ultimately have formed the basis of a new upper house of the UK parliament, replacing the unelected House of Lords with a more federally conceived body. That project never reached the Labour manifesto in 2024, and there is zero sign that Starmer, let alone the Labour peers, want to revive it in any way.
Instead, and according to the Cabinet Office website, the new council is 'designed to facilitate partnership working between the UK government, devolved governments, the mayor of London, and mayors of combined authorities and mayors of combined county authorities'. The wordiness of that language underlines that this is not the council's final form, since Labour's English devolution plans remain work in progress, and because much of the council's potential role is extremely ill-defined.
All this reflects the continuing piecemeal way that devolution has taken root in a system of government that still insists the UK parliament's decisions are sovereign. From the 1990s on, UK governments have tended to turn to devolved solutions only at times of crisis in the non-English nations. One result is that some in Westminster and Whitehall still see devolution as something that happens somewhere else.
Those instincts were given full rein under the anglocentric prime ministerships of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Both leaders had a tin ear for and a visceral dislike of devolution. Johnson called devolution a disaster, and tried to subvert it in his UK internal market act. Neither he nor Truss ever respected the devolution settlement or consulted the devolved governments on anything important, as Covid would exemplify. The hostility was roundly reciprocated.
The council's first meeting came at a propitious moment for Starmer. He was not seen as hostile to devolution, as the defeated Tories had been, while Labour's UK general election success had made Scotland's Scottish National party government less openly combative. With the English mayors attending, it was an overwhelmingly Labour gathering, happy to embrace the new UK prime minister and the new era he promised.
That seems like another country now. In Scotland, John Swinney's SNP has its confidence back, and is positioned to beat Labour in next year's Holyrood election. In England, Reform UK has captured coveted mayoralties in Hull and East Yorkshire, and in Greater Lincolnshire. Reform UK has its eyes on more mayoralties in 2026, as well as on winning the Welsh Senedd and on becoming at least the second party at Holyrood. The upshot is a much more challenging political environment for Starmer, making attempts at 'partnership working' more problematic. At the same time, it also puts pressure on Reform UK's mayors. Do they engage? Or grandstand? Or even turn up?
Yet none of these new tensions weakens the case for collaboration between governments and with mayors. 'The key question is: what is the council for?' Prof Michael Kenny argued this week. Last week, Kenny and colleagues from Cambridge University's Bennett Institute published a report broadly supporting the thinking behind the council, but lamenting its repeated lack of clarity. 'It's not a decision-making body, but it ought to be more clearly structured,' Kenny told me.
Another crucial issue, according to Glasgow University's Prof Nicola McEwen, is that attenders have such different powers. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland there is clear legislative devolution. Almost nothing of that sort exists in England, where there is no national parliament and mayoral powers are strictly limited from the centre. The danger is that the council becomes all talk and no action. 'There are risks in stretching the concept of devolution to include both the intergovernmental relationship with the nations and the functional relationship with the mayors,' McEwen warns.
This may all seem somewhat academic, but don't be deceived. This stuff really matters. Without collaboration between the different parts of the UK's increasingly devolved system of governance, no government – whether at the UK, the devolved national, or the English regional – is going to achieve its priorities. If Starmer wants his growth agenda or the reset with Europe to work, he needs the give and take that cooperation with the devolved bodies can give. Likewise, if Swinney's SNP wants to deliver on things such as the abolition of child poverty, it cannot do it without the UK's help.
The collaborative political impulse is not widespread among Westminster parties. Luckily for Starmer, his Paisley-born colleague Pat McFadden, the cabinet minister responsible for making the council work, definitely gets the realities. It may not suit the tribalists in UK politics to admit it, but collaborative government is the way Britain has to be governed now. This week's council may seem a sideshow to some. Yet it could hold the key to whether public confidence in politics begins to grow again.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist