Ireland, Scotland, Wales war-game UK breakup
Ireland, Scotland and Wales are quietly planning for a Reform UK government, as Belfast counts the cost of a politics already here.
Political leaders in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are quietly preparing for the breakup of the United Kingdom, war-gaming what happens if Reform UK forms the next government.
The planning surfaced at a conference in Belfast on 25 June, titled “The Future of These Islands: Preparing for Change.” Irish justice minister Jim O’Callaghan told the gathering that Dublin should prepare for unity rather than “wait for English nationalism to set the timetable.” Former Welsh first minister Mark Drakeford went further, warning of a Wales reduced to a “progressive pimple” in a rump UK run from Westminster.
Nothing here has happened yet. There is no Farage government, no border poll called, no crackdown enacted. What exists is a plan, drawn up because the numbers now make it plausible: a January MRP poll put Reform on course for a 335-seat majority on 31% of the vote, and the party finished second in both the Holyrood and Senedd elections in May.
What Farage is offering
Reform’s leader wants to leave the European Convention on Human Rights and renegotiate the Good Friday Agreement to stop small-boat crossings, though he has accepted Northern Ireland could not leave the ECHR alongside the rest of the UK, since the 1998 agreement commits Britain to writing the convention into Northern Irish law. Sinn Féin senator Conor Murphy warned Farage could simply cut Northern Ireland loose: “We’re going to save that by letting the Irish go and good luck to you and goodbye.” Estimates of the annual UK subvention to Northern Ireland range from under £6bn, by Murphy’s own reckoning, to £20bn in disputed higher estimates, a spread wide enough that either figure can be weaponised.
Belfast already knows the cost
The politics being war-gamed in seminar rooms is already being lived on Belfast’s streets. Riots in June saw homes burned and minority families targeted after the stabbing of a 44-year-old man triggered days of disorder, with elements of loyalism finding common cause with the English far right. Drakeford has warned a Farage government would deploy “ICE-like snatch squads … arresting people off the streets.” Those families, not the politicians debating a border poll, are the people with most at stake.
Delivered on a third of the vote
A Reform government of this kind would arrive without a majority of votes anywhere in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, a product of a first-past-the-post system that can deliver a Westminster majority on roughly a third of the national vote. As Drakeford put it, the risk is not a choice by the people of Wales to leave the United Kingdom, but a Britain reshaped from Westminster while devolved voters are left to inherit the bill.
