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State of the union

Matthew Holehouse: British politics correspondent, The Economist

The cracks in the United Kingdom will widen

Message to London

2021 in brief

A new right-leaning, free-to-air television news channel, GB News, starts broadcasting.
Andrew Neil, a leading political journalist, has left the BBC to help set it up, saying it
aims to serve “the vast number of British people who feel underserved and unheard by
their media”

THE UNION of the United Kingdom—England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—is
unwell. It will survive 2021, and the years immediately after. Its condition is chronic,
rather than acute. But relations between London and the other national capitals will
worsen. For 20 years the tension between unionism and separatism has been contained
by the devolution settlement, under which parliaments in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast
make laws. That system will come under assault from all sides.

The deepest reflection over whether the union can hold together will come in Northern
Ireland. The centenary of its founding and the partition of Ireland will be
commemorated in 2021. It will be a muted affair. The British government has proposed