Compared with economic inequality or Brexit, the two subjects that dominated political argument in 2017, the state of the United Kingdom’s union may seem a second-order issue for 2018. Yet this should not be so. For, just as inequality and Brexit are themselves intimately linked, so the way the UK works reflects and influences these more obviously dominant issues. The questions “What kind of country are we?” and its companion “What kind of country do we want to be?” are in many ways the overarching issues of our times. They are about more than inequality and Brexit. And they are badly neglected in the way Britain talks about itself and does its politics.

Seen from many parts of the UK, this claim of neglect may seem perverse. Northern Ireland, where the national question slices across the Brexit issue in such powerful ways, is a place where the nature of the nation is a subject of permanent argument. Scotland, where the divide over Brexit connects with the still-simmering argument over independence, is in some respects the same. Wales, where economic inequality helped, as elsewhere, to drive up the leave vote, now marches decisively to its own devolved drum. Even England, where feelings about social neglect and EU membership fired the angry majority whose Brexit writ now stretches across all the home nations, is alive with argument about differences of region, class, wealth, religion, ethnicity and connection.

Special relationship

The health of the United Kingdom matters for us. But it also matters for our neighbours. The future relationship with the EU is the most obviously pressing aspect of this. But other individual countries have perspectives that matter too. Spain, in particular, watches the stresses and strains of the UK, at the same time as it grapples with its own civil society and governance issues in Catalonia. Yet the most important and sensitive of the UK’s external relationships is with the Irish Republic. In one form or another it was ever thus. Most of Ireland has been an independent country for nearly a century, but it is bound to the UK and the rest of these islands in ways even France cannot match. As Brexit is showing, these issues go well beyond even the relationship between Northern Ireland and the republic. In sum, the UK’s true special relationship is not with the US but with Ireland. Any renewal of the UK for modern times must take special account of what the peace process called “the totality of relationships” within these islands, including with the republic.

Such a renewal, though, feels a long way off. In part, that is because the very notion of a renewed UK is so actively contested by so many. It is disputed most obviously by the nationalist populations of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Distant independence dreamers also exist in places from Cornwall to Yorkshire – and even in London. Immigration and the proliferation of identities add other enduring complexities. But change to the UK is most fiercely contested by Anglo-British traditionalists, many of whom think that the existing UK remains perfectly adequate and is not in need of reform or renewal, especially once Brexit has taken place (if it does) or, on the other wing of politics, once a Corbyn government has transformed it (if it does).

There are several self-deceptions here. One is that Brexit or a Corbyn government would somehow magic away the need for reform of the UK. In fact the reverse is true. The solutions to these questions are far from purely governmental. They rest on civil society and, ultimately, on the way we think and act. Another deceit is the idea that traditionalists really give much thought to the UK and its more distant areas at all. Theresa May, for example, routinely asserts that she is passionate about the whole UK, and that she is a dedicated unionist. Yet when she said last January that the leave vote was a vote to restore “national self-determination”, she meant Britain. Her claim ignored nations that voted remain. Mrs May sees nationalism in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as divisive, which it can be, yet talks about Britain as a nation without making qualifications. She speaks of her wish for a “new united Britain”. But as Anthony Barnett observes in one of the most important political books of 2017, The Lure of Greatness: “Apparently, her English nationalism is not divisive. It is unifying. It is British.”

Sweet and violent

Words and terminology matter in these disputes. Few debates about the Irish border issue are free of terminological arguments with deep historical roots. Mrs May always refers, for example, to the Belfast agreement of 1998, which is the Northern Irish unionist term for what nationalists (and New Labour) always called the Good Friday agreement. Perhaps that is why she, and many Brexiters, misunderstand so badly how it changed the nature of sovereignty in Northern Ireland.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The most common misuse of language remains the elision in the conservative English mind between England, Britain and the UK.’ Photograph: Keystone USA-Zuma/Rex Features

Yet the most common and most revealing, because most insulting, misuse of language remains the elision in the conservative English mind between England, Britain and the UK. When the Daily Mail ran its angry pro-Brexit front page during the referendum campaign, it was headlined “Who will speak for England?”. Buried away inside the paper was a clarification of sorts: “By England … we mean the whole of the United Kingdom.” As Mr Barnett puts it, England-Britain is a “post-empire hybrid … English within and British without”. The English aspect is often whimsical and pastoral; the British aspect exterior-facing and imposing. “The sweet and the violent are attached.”

Readers do not have to agree with Mr Barnett’s account. However, we all need to recognise that there is a powerful and emotive set of issues at stake here. Brexit or not, Britain remains what the US politician Dean Acheson dubbed it in 1962, a country that has lost an empire but still not found a role. But it is also a country that has not worked out how to share its different identities either. It is a country that sometimes overlooks the fact that, even now, it is a union, and in many respects a very successful one. But it is not a unitary state in the way Mrs May pretends. The first thing that modern Britain needs to do in this context is to recognise that fact. The second is to listen much more attentively and respectfully to its divergences and differences. The third is to have a respectful and constructive conversation about them. The fourth is to decide what can be done together about them.

These islands

All this is much more easily said than done. The idea that all the parts can be thrown up in the air and then relaid in some perfectly constructed logical way is a fantasy. But there are many things that form part of the answer that can be begun, often in quite small grassroots ways as opposed to grand Napoleonic ones. These Islands, a group that launched in 2017, is one promising approach, based on the crucial recognition that this is an issue that civil society should engage and reason with across borders. But big things will need doing too, in particular by grasping the nettle of England’s needs for its own forms of self-determination and recognition within the larger UK whole. The departure of parliament from Westminster, if it happens, also offers a huge opportunity to rethink the nature of the second chamber along more federal lines. London-based media and other professions need to think with fresh minds too. The turn of the year should be a moment of collective resolution to examine whether and how our union of nations can be renewed most richly. If that union is to survive these testing times and prosper as it can, it needs to be one that is much more equal to the task than the one we have now.