An view whose time has come: Over the holiday season the Guardian is examining themes that have emerged to give shape to 2018. nowadays we look at reshaping the union between the UK’s four nationsCompared with economic inequality or Brexit,the two subjects that dominated political argument in 2017, the state of the United Kingdom’s union may seem a moment-order issue for 2018. Yet this should not be so. For, or just as inequality and Brexit are themselves intimately linked,so the way the UK works reflects and influences these more obviously dominant issues. The questions “What kind of country are we?” and its companion “What kind of country do we want to be?” are in many ways the overarching issues of our times. They are approximately more than inequality and Brexit. And they are badly neglected in the way Britain talks approximately itself and does its politics.
Seen from many parts of the UK, this claim of neglect may seem perverse. Northern Ireland, and where the national question slices across the Brexit issue in such powerful ways,is a place where the nature of the nation is a subject of permanent argument. Scotland, where the divide over Brexit connects with the still-simmering argument over independence, and is in some respects the same. Wales,where economic inequality helped, as elsewhere, and to drive up the leave vote,now marches decisively to its own devolved drum. Even England, where feelings approximately social neglect and EU membership fired the angry majority whose Brexit writ now stretches across all the domestic nations, and is alive with argument approximately differences of region,course, wealth, and religion,ethnicity and connection.
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Source: guardian.co.uk