Brexit and the “Constitutional Integrity” of the United Kingdom

an article by Colin Murray published by the UK Constitutional Law Association

This is not a rant, nor is it, as far as I can tell, politically biased. A possible solution for Northern Ireland based on a 1919 precedent. Hazel

The Foreign Office records regarding the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 must be amongst the most regularly requested papers held at the National Archives. One file, FO 608/65, is part of the herculean effort to redraw the map of Europe after the First World War. It recounts the efforts of officials and ministers to work out how to provide Poland with meaningful access to the Baltic. The focus of this attention was the port city of Danzig. The two options before the Council of Ten were to include the city as part of Poland, but place limits on how Poland exercised its national sovereignty over this part of its territory, or to create a “free city”, administered by a League of Nations High Commissioner, which was tied into a customs union with Poland. In late March 1919 Lloyd George expressed the UK’s support for the former option in the Council. Behind the scenes, however, the Foreign Office was preparing the alternate plans for a free city, which Lloyd George backed to decisive effect in April 1919. Concerns that this reversal might destabilise the fledgling Polish state were summarily dismissed.

It is therefore not without irony that a century later the UK, its great power pretensions a little more careworn, finds the shoe very much on the other foot in Brexit negotiations. Theresa May came to Salzburg blustering that the EU’s proposals for Northern Ireland represented a compromise of the UK’s “constitutional integrity” that no British prime minister could contemplate. The UK contemplates imposing such choices upon other countries, but not being confronted with them for itself. As she left Austria in a rage it is a small wonder that the EU has not yet proposed the creation of the Free City of Belfast (and hinterland). This post examines the mantra of constitutional integrity in the era of Brexit.

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