At the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) annual conference last month, its leader Mike Nesbitt stated that English nationalism now posed the greatest danger to the Union. ‘While unionists have always looked over their shoulders at Irish nationalists as the biggest threat to Northern Ireland’s place in the UK,’ Nesbitt said, ‘Irish nationalists have been knocked off the gold medal spot by English nationalism.’
Nesbitt’s speech expressed concerns over the potential consequences of a future right-wing government at Westminster, particularly in relation to levels of public spending in Northern Ireland. Nesbitt alluded too to the impact of Brexit, which has, of course, dominated contemporary debates over Northern Ireland’s place in the Union. Nevertheless, recent tensions should be understood as part of the much longer story of the fracturing of Conservatism and Unionism in the UK, a process that unfolded across the final third of the twentieth century.
The challenges posed by this process were explored at a witness seminar we organised in London on 12 June 2025 in partnership with History & Policy. The reflections of the three participants – Arthur Aughey, David Melding, and Malcolm Rifkind – ranged both chronologically and geographically. Together they presented an insightful account of the evolution of Conservative and Unionist constitutional thought.
It is well known that, as the Irish Question began to dominate British politics in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the defence of the Union became a key element within Conservative politics. This political and ideological commitment yielded institutional expressions.
In Scotland, the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists formally merged in 1912, creating a distinctive Unionist identity that endured until 1965. Following the partition of Ireland, and the creation of a devolved Northern Irish parliament in 1921, Ulster Unionist MPs took the Conservative whip at Westminster. If Conservatism and Unionism were never entirely identical, these formal relationships reflected a belief, rarely articulated explicitly, that the two creeds were in close alignment.
This situation changed from the late 1960s. Amid the onset of the Troubles involving renewed claims for Irish unity, and the rise of political nationalism in Scotland and Wales, relations between Conservatives and Unionists began to unravel.
In Northern Ireland, Ulster Unionists were enraged at the Conservative government’s suspension of the Unionist-dominated government and Parliament at Stormont in 1972, and its abolition the following year. Although the relationship was subsequently repaired for a time, it deteriorated dramatically in 1985 when Margaret Thatcher’s government signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, giving the Republic of Ireland a consultative role in Northern Ireland.
In both Scotland and Wales, the Conservatives were confronted by growing calls for constitutional reform. Edward Heath’s ‘Declaration of Perth’ as Leader of the Opposition in 1968 had committed the party to supporting a devolutionary settlement for Scotland, but in truth Conservatives were always ill at ease with devolution. Meanwhile, in the 1970s and 1990s, Labour and then New Labour (with greater enthusiasm) endorsed, with Liberal backing, devolved institutions for Scotland and Wales.
By the 1990s, in the wake of widespread popular opposition to the policies of the governments led by Thatcher, Conservative support in Scotland and Wales had declined sharply. The Conservatives failed to win a single seat in either nation at the 1997 general election; in 1970 the party had boasted 23 Scottish and 7 Welsh MPs.
Against this backdrop, the years between 1968 and 1997 saw extensive Conservative and Unionist debates about the Union. Constitutional issues, seemingly dormant since the apparent settlement of the Irish Question in the 1920s, re-entered the forefront of UK politics.
In consequence, Conservatives and Unionists were compelled to reconsider the nature of the United Kingdom:
Was it a unitary state (with all power flowing from the centre, based on the extension of the sovereignty of the English Parliament)? Was it a federation (in practice, a loosely defined concept often taken to mean a form of devolution all round but technically involving dividing, not devolving, power between Westminster and regional governments)? Or was it a union state (shaped by the Scottish and Irish Unions and characterised by imperfect integration)?
Moreover, the sentiments that had underpinned the established alliance between Conservatism and Unionism began to weaken.Historically, Unionism’s strength had rested upon an acceptance of the distinctive national identities that existed within the UK.
Yet this came under sustained pressure during the 1990s, not least with the rise of a more overt English nationalism. This has sometimes been seen as a reaction to European integration or to a broader range of factors, including economic and cultural change. In any case, English nationalism sat awkwardly with contemporary debates over British identity.
Shifting attitudes towards Europe also impacted the relationship between Conservatives and Unionists. In the late 1960s, the Conservatives were the national party most strongly in favour of European Community membership but, by the 1990s, the party contained an influential body of Eurosceptic opinion emphasising the threat posed by the EU to Britain’s parliamentary sovereignty – a view that generated both sympathy and hostility from Unionists. A similar concern with sovereignty was evident in the continued opposition of the Conservative party towards devolution.
Lastly, in an important sense the alliance between Conservatives and Unionists was, in the mid-twentieth century, an anti-socialist coalition, cemented by the on-going Cold War. The abrupt ending of that conflict, symbolised to many by the fall of the Berlin Wall, left this political perspective in disarray.
That historic alliance struggled to adapt to the radically altered political landscape of the 1990s. John Major’s governments, of course, made great progress in advancing the Northern Ireland peace process. At the same time, the negotiations presented a considerable source of strain within certain quarters of Conservative and Unionist opinion. Meanwhile, the Conservatives’ deteriorating electoral fortunes in Scotland and Wales – facing a wipeout at the 1997 General Election – only tended to confirm the general impression that the Conservatives were essentially an ‘English’ party.