Is the United Kingdom still one nation?

Is Britain a nation? If you’re trying to maintain the United Kingdom — or destroy it for that matter — this is surely a very important question. It may seem obvious at first, of course the United Kingdom is a nation. Yet Unionists too often seem reluctant to address the question.

Devolutionaries, often non-separatist nationalists, are keen to talk about Britain as if it were merely an arrangement between states — like some kind of federal ‘United Kingdoms’ plural, rather than a singular polity made up of constituent parts. Full blown nationalists tend to reject the idea of British nationhood out of hand as it invites the awkward prospect of nationality as an overlapping and complex phenomenon that doesn’t magically confer a special legitimacy on their preferred group.

Even the government often seems reluctant to use the word ‘British’, favouring instead the sterile and technical ‘UK’ or the confederal language of the ‘four nations’.