INTRODUCTION
The United Kingdom is not a federation, but it has passed, or more accurately, continues to pass1 through a process of “rolling devolution,” whereby substantial central government powers, both legislative and executive, have been transferred, and continue to be transferred, to sub-state parliaments and executives.
The result is that in terms of the autonomy now enjoyed by Wales, Northern Ireland, and, particularly, Scotland, together with the strong political consolidation of these devolved arrangements, the United Kingdom resembles in many ways a federalised polity.2 The seismic shift in constitutional culture since 1997 has inevitably created conditions whereby the evolving dynamics of change in the systems of government for “the Celtic fringe” has allowed these territories to occupy constitutional space and through this to influence constitutionalism within the central organs of the state both in ways we might have expected but also in others that were very hard to imagine a decade ago. This chapter will explore these knock-on effects and consider the possible implications they hold for the future, given that we are still at a very early stage in the consolidation of the devolved settlements.The chapter seeks to set this story in historical perspective and, therefore, will have several points of focus. The first will be to explore the development of territorial governance over the past one hundred years or more. In the second part it will be argued that the evolution of the United Kingdom as a “union state” and the gradual emergence of decentralised government in the century from the 1880s onwards is pivotal to understanding the asymmetrical model of devolution that emerged in the late 1990s and indeed the shape of the United Kingdom constitution today. Second, in the third part I will explore how change at the sub-state level in the 1990s itself emerged from an organic process that involved sub-state actors, a factor that heightened the democratic legitimacy of the process and hence helped cement the three settlements as seemingly fixed arrangements. This process also served to qualify assumptions that, to this point, the United Kingdom was a heavily centralized state; in fact the role of sub-state territories in helping to effect constitutional change is a well-established feature of United Kingdom constitutional history.
In other words, the constitutional dynamics of the pre-devolution period also require to be explored not only from the perspective of centre-to-region influence but also for the influence that operated on the constitution from the bottom up as it were. Third, in the fourth part I will explore the impact of devolution on the constitution of the United Kingdom and speculate about the potential for further reverberations in due course. Since it will be argued that the United Kingdom now resembles a quasi-federal system, the United Kingdom as a case study causes us to re-visit traditional definitions of federalism. More than this it also requires reflection on what is meant by “constitutional change” within an “unwritten” constitutional system. Recent turns in constitutional scholarship have encouraged constitutionalists to look beyond the façade of narrow formalism in attempting to understand how constitutions change over time through the interaction among important constitutional actors – the several branches of government, existing sub-state governments, the people or “peoples” of the state, and the extra-state presence of the EU.3 In all of this the United Kingdom seems to be a dynamic laboratory to test the role played by sub-state territories in effecting constitutional change in an environment that is neither wholly unitary nor federal.
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