When Planets Collide: The British Conservative Party and the Discordant Goals of Delivering Brexit and Preserving the Domestic Union, 2016–2019
| Author | Jack Sheldon,Michael Kenny |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720930986 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720930986
Political Studies
2021, Vol. 69(4) 965 –984
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720930986
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When Planets Collide: The
British Conservative Party
and the Discordant Goals
of Delivering Brexit and
Preserving the Domestic
Union, 2016–2019
Michael Kenny and Jack Sheldon
Abstract
This article explores how the British Conservative Party has dealt with the dilemmas arising from
its pursuit of two increasingly discordant goals: delivering Brexit and maintaining the domestic
Union. Drawing on interviews and analyses of parliamentary debates, we identify a resurgence
in the 2016–2019 period of an older belief in a unitarist state, and a new form of pro-Union
activism in policy terms. Against those commentators who depict Britain’s Conservatives as having
abandoned their unionist vocation, we explore the coalescence of a more assertive and activist
strain of unionist sentiment. But we also find a willingness among Conservatives at the centre to
sub-contract thinking about non-English parts of the UK to ‘local’ political representatives such as
the Democratic Unionist Party and the Scottish Conservatives, and a growing anxiety about how
to handle emergent tensions between the competing priorities associated with delivering Brexit
and maintaining the domestic Union.
Keywords
Union, Conservative Party, Brexit, territorial politics, United Kingdom
Accepted: 12 May 2020
Introduction
The process of seeking to withdraw the UK from the European Union, following the result
of the referendum held in June 2016, prompted an extended crisis in British parliamentary
politics. Regaining sovereignty from this external union injected considerable energy into
the already delicate question of where power lies in the domestic multi-national Union,
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Corresponding author:
Jack Sheldon, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, 7 West Road,
Cambridge CB3 9DT, UK.
Email: js2395@cam.ac.uk
930986PSX0010.1177/0032321720930986Political StudiesKenny and Sheldon
research-article2020
Article
966 Political Studies 69(4)
which comprised territories that are variously governed, and which displayed markedly
varied levels of popular enthusiasm for Brexit. Majorities of 62% of voters in Scotland and
56% in Northern Ireland supported Remain in 2016 – results that immediately raised ques-
tions about the future status of these territories (Gormley-Heenan and Aughey, 2017;
McEwen, 2018). In the first 3 years after the Brexit vote, the treatment of Northern Ireland
in the proposed Withdrawal Agreement emerged as the main sticking point in negotiations
between the UK Government and the European Union (EU), and contributed to its defeat
on three occasions in the House of Commons before a revised deal was successfully passed
after Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. Whether departing the EU will jeopardise the
territorial integrity of the UK has subsequently become one of the most salient questions
in British politics. The Scottish Government has made the case for a new referendum on
independence, and there have also been calls to hold a ‘border poll’ on the reunification of
Ireland (BBC News, 2019a; Sturgeon, 2019).
This article explores how the UK’s governing party throughout this period, the
Conservative and Unionist party, has dealt with the profound dilemmas arising from its
simultaneous pursuit of two – increasingly discordant – goals: the achievement of Brexit
and the maintenance of the domestic Union. Despite the prevalence of claims about the
party’s reckless or disinterested approach to the latter, there has been little sustained, or
evidentially based, examination of the nature and depth of the parliamentary party’s
unionist commitments. In this article, we seek to address this gap. We take as our tempo-
ral focus the duration of the premiership of Theresa May, which began in the immediate
aftermath of the referendum in July 2016, and ended in July 2019, following the failure
to secure a majority in the House of Commons for the Withdrawal Agreement her govern-
ment had negotiated with the EU.
We draw upon a body of original empirical research consisting of a set of 17 semi-
structured interviews with Conservative politicians, conducted between March 2018 and
July 2019, and an analysis of Conservative contributions to the House of Commons
debates on the proposed Withdrawal Agreement held between December 2018 and March
2019. Our interviewees included 12 members of the House of Commons, 2 members of
the House of Lords and members of the Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for
Wales.1 We sought to ensure that our interviewees held positions broadly reflecting the
range of opinion within the parliamentary party on Brexit – by far the most salient issue
of this period. Of those that we spoke to, seven had voted Leave in 2016 and eight Remain
(and the others were undeclared publicly). The content analysis of contributions to the
successive debates on the Withdrawal Agreement which we have conducted comple-
ments these interviews, taking advantage of a rare opportunity to analyse a body of argu-
ments made by Conservative backbenchers about the domestic Union.2 In addition to our
primary research, we also draw on other publicly available sources, including ministerial
speeches and Government and Conservative Party publications.
Our analysis draws attention to the divergence of some of the distinct strands of con-
stitutionally focused thinking within the party’s higher echelons, and the emergence of a
novel species of unionist sentiment in the last few years, which we label ‘hyper-
unionism’. Against those commentators who depict the Conservatives as a party that has
succumbed to the temptation to harvest an ascendant English nationalism, and abandoned
its unionist vocation, we find instead a marked, and growing, tendency to declare and
demonstrate fidelity to the Union at the helm of the party. A more assertive and muscular
strain of unionist sentiment has, we suggest, displaced the more pragmatic, and largely
unspoken, idiom that was more typical of earlier historical periods, and which has been
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