Union & devolution

The “United Kingdom” was not a single act of creation but a long process of joining together — and, in part, coming apart. Over three centuries, separate kingdoms were merged by Acts of Union, most of Ireland left to become independent, and powers were later handed back from London to new parliaments and assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. To understand the modern UK and its constitutional tensions, you have to follow this story of union and devolution from 1707 to the present.

The Union of 1707

England and Scotland had shared a monarch since 1603, when James VI of Scotland also became James I of England, but they remained separate kingdoms with separate parliaments. That changed with the Act of Union 1707, which merged England (with Wales) and Scotland into a single Kingdom of Great Britain, governed by one Parliament at Westminster.

The motives were mixed. Scotland was in economic distress, deepened by the disastrous Darien scheme, a failed attempt to plant a Scottish colony in Central America that had ruined many investors. Union offered Scots access to England’s markets and its growing colonial trade. England, for its part, wanted to secure the Protestant succession and prevent a potentially hostile, independent Scotland on its northern border. The union was controversial and unpopular with many ordinary Scots at the time. Crucially, Scotland kept its own distinct legal system, established church and education system — institutions that preserved a strong sense of Scottish identity within the new state.

The Union of 1801 and Irish independence

A century later came the Act of Union 1801, which merged the Kingdom of Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The separate Irish Parliament in Dublin was abolished and Irish MPs sent to Westminster. The union followed the bloody Irish rebellion of 1798, and was intended to bind Ireland more securely to Britain.

But it carried the seeds of lasting grievance. Catholic Emancipation — full political rights for the Catholic majority — had been expected to accompany union, but was blocked until 1829. Many Irish Catholics felt betrayed, and resentment at being governed from London fuelled successive campaigns: first for repeal of the union, then for Home Rule, a parliament in Dublin handling domestic affairs while Ireland stayed within the UK. Home Rule bitterly divided British politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was fiercely resisted by Ulster unionists, the largely Protestant population of the north who wished to remain fully part of the UK.

The question was settled, painfully, by force and partition. The Easter Rising of 1916 and the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which created the Irish Free State in 1922 as a self-governing dominion; it later became a fully independent republic. Six counties in the north-east, with a unionist majority, were partitioned off and remained part of the UK as Northern Ireland. The country’s name became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Partition shaped the conflict known as the Troubles that would later convulse Northern Ireland.

What devolution means

For most of the twentieth century, Scotland and Wales were governed centrally from Westminster. Devolution changed that. The word refers to the transfer of certain powers from the central UK Parliament to subordinate parliaments and assemblies in the nations of the UK — while Westminster remains, in legal theory, sovereign and able to alter or reclaim those powers. Devolution is therefore not the same as independence, nor a fully federal system; it is a carefully limited sharing-out of power.

The 1997-99 settlement

Devolution arrived in earnest after the Labour government elected in 1997 held referendums. Scotland voted clearly for a Scottish Parliament with tax-varying powers; Wales voted, very narrowly, for a Welsh Assembly. These results produced the Scotland Act 1998 and the Government of Wales Act 1998.

The Scottish Parliament, opened in 1999 at Holyrood in Edinburgh, gained law-making powers over devolved matters such as health, education and justice, with reserved matters like defence and foreign affairs kept at Westminster. The Welsh body began with more limited powers, which have since been expanded so that the Senedd is now a fuller law-making parliament. Devolution in Northern Ireland came by a different and harder road: the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement of 1998, which largely ended the Troubles, established a power-sharing Assembly and Executive in which unionists and nationalists govern together, alongside institutions linking Northern Ireland with the Republic.

An asymmetric, evolving union

One striking feature of UK devolution is that it is asymmetric: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each received different powers and arrangements, and England has no parliament of its own. This unevenness raises continuing questions — the so-called “English question,” debates over funding, and, most dramatically, the issue of whether Scotland might one day vote for full independence, as it nearly did in the 2014 referendum. The story of union and devolution is, in other words, far from finished: the shape of the United Kingdom remains a living and contested question.