The next Tory leader must get serious about protecting the Union

With Theresa May’s premiership collapsing, the UK’s next prime minister will be chosen through a Conservative leadership contest. MPs will whittle the shortlist down to two and the party’s membership will vote for one of these candidates.

During the campaign, you would hope that the contenders will move beyond talking warmly about the importance of the Union and address important questions about its future. As members of the Conservative and Unionist party, they should each feel a responsibility to repair our damaged sense of common identity, restore confidence in British nationhood and ensure people across the country feel properly included in UK-wide political conversations.

Compared to other countries, the United Kingdom can seem like a complicated and even a contradictory thing.

It’s a nation state, but it’s also a Union of nations. It’s governed by a sovereign parliament, but Westminster’s power is now devolved, unevenly, to several regional assemblies. The country is not a federation, but its component nations sometimes wield an informal authority that has a whiff of federalism about it.

Historically, the shape of our constitution was not a major topic for national debate, because our blend of institutions, laws and conventions worked surprisingly well. The United Kingdom is still more robust than its opponents acknowledge, but devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland created tensions between regional governments and Westminster that allow separatists to mount a running challenge to the Union.

This ongoing threat has become more serious thanks to Brexit, which was commonly portrayed as an outburst of English nationalism imposed over the heads of voters in other parts of the UK. The idea that we can make major political decisions as a united nation has sustained significant damage as a result.

Our prospective leaders should be thinking seriously about how to balance the rights and competencies of the devolved institutions with the interests of the UK as a whole. And this conversation should extend beyond haphazard plans to hand ever more powers to Holyrood, Stormont and Cardiff Bay. Why aren’t we constantly discussing the relationships between various levels of government and how they can be improved?

Devolution, insofar as it was thought through at all, was intended to kill off nationalist sentiment in the smaller nations of the UK. These major constitutional changes were included in Labour’s glitzy 1997 manifesto and, Tony Blair later admitted, steam-rollered through after the election. Instead, this experiment created a platform for the SNP to dominate politics in Scotland and come within 200,000 votes of breaking up the Union at the 2014 independence referendum.

It was easy for devolved administrations to pose as defenders of their nations and regions, fighting with an overbearing central government for a fair share of power and resources. They could claim credit for all the things that were right, while attributing responsibility to Westminster for everything that went wrong. In poorer parts of England, the perception flourished that the devolved nations were getting a great deal at the expense of English taxpayers.

Devolution is responsible for a less united kingdom, but there is no popular appetite to abolish these institutions. So, the challenge is to prevent this layer of government from becoming a constant source of ill-feeling against Westminster and a rallying point for separatist feeling.

It is easy, particularly with the chaos of Brexit still unfolding, to fall for a narrative about the United Kingdom’s decline, but there could and should be more confidence in our nation’s future. The economic case for maintaining a strong, integrated country remains compelling, but the cultural, political and historical affinities on which our Union is based are even more powerful and shouldn’t be neglected or talked down.

In a thoughtful paper for Policy Exchange, the historian, Arthur Aughey, noted that the modern UK is based on the principle of consent of its constituent parts. This consent has to be maintained, he believes, by a “continuing political ‘conversation’ in which citizens can participate in an imaginative debate about the Union’s history, politics, culture and society.” Political deliberations should highlight the importance of ‘shared rule’ as well as respecting the value of ‘self-rule’ for the devolved regions.

Over the past three years, it’s seemed at times like the UK has suffered a crisis of confidence, or even that its population has developed a streak of self-loathing.

It is sad, for instance, that it’s become so common to mock the belief that Britain is exceptional and sneer at British achievements. By any standards – through our parliament, our language, our judicial system and (whisper it) our empire – this country’s contributions transcend the national. British ideas shaped a civilisation and not merely a nation state.

I don’t want radical change in our country, but I do want the UK to get its mojo back.

I want Britain to be confident and outward looking, with pride in its past and a sense of togetherness that spans all four component parts. In this Britain, devolution will be a means of bringing decision making closer to the people, rather than nurturing separatist grievances or avoiding responsibility when policies go wrong. The big UK-wide political debates will be passionate and fiery, but we’ll have them as a nation, in the conviction that we all have something at stake and that each of our voices matter.

Will any of the candidates who hope to replace Theresa May explore these important themes during the Tory leadership race, or will they be too busy with the trivial trappings of photo shoots and social media?