Will 2022 see the fracturing of the United Kingdom?

In the midst of the news foam that was partygate, it was the Tory Grandee, Chris Patten, who called out Boris Johnson’s Conservatives as not Conservative at all, but a sort of ‘English Nationalist Party’.

A little odd-sounding at first, it was, in fact, a sharp reminder of the efficiency with which the Party, under Mr Johnson’s leadership, had ripped through Labour’s so-called ‘red wall’ seats, with an uniquely English populism, that appeared, and still appears to have little to say to voters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

2022 will see increased pressure on Nicola Sturgeon to make a constitutional showdown with Westminster Tories over ‘IndyRef2’ inevitable. There will soon be echoes of the Catalan secessionists 2017 unofficial independence ballot, which triggered a constitutional crisis, political violence, trials and imprisonments, in what was a serious wobble for what is still a relatively young Spanish democracy.

It will also see the screw turned on the Brexit treaty’s cutting off of Northern Ireland from Great Britain to square the Irish circle of borders and free trade between Ulster and the Republic.

Already anxious unionists will increasingly fear the invocation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement’s provisions for a referendum on a United Ireland. The turning of the tide will have deep ramifications.

Meanwhile, Wales’ quietly competent handling of the pandemic crisis, under the cautious and conservative leadership of Labour’s Mark Drakeford has normalised the idea that the Principality can plough its own furrow.

Across England, ‘Metro Mayors’ are taking power off Whitehall, and creating a cadre of effective politicians of all stripes – Andy Burnham, Andy Street, Sadiq Khan et al – whose appetite to lead from the ground up smacks of greater authenticity than those Westminster leaders who did not seem to know when to stop partying at the height of a pandemic.

The local leaders’ reaction to Michael Gove’s seminal and forthcoming White Paper on the elusive notion of Levelling Up will be watched closely. Due early in 2022, it will be a key policy and intellectual platform upon which the Conservatives will launch their push for the finish line of a possibly early 2023 General Election. The package may prove divisive and unwelcome to Mayoral warlords across England.

The above are all tectonic and inexorable changes which will quicken in their pace in 2022. They make calls for a new constitutional settlement for the United Kingdom more credible. This comes at a time when Conservatives themselves have – to some political peril – tinkered with our basic freedoms, to the disgust of those on the right, and have also proposed partial and peculiar tweaks to the Human Rights Act, and to Convention law more widely, which was so central to the post-war reset in which Churchill himself was instrumental.

A wide-ranging debate is overdue, in terms and scope not employed since the Act of Union of 1707. Some may ask whether we have a Prime Minister with the bandwidth and sense of statecraft sufficient to engage in topic of these dimensions.