Tom Holland: belief

Transcript context

…Moving into the present day, you’re involved in a pro-UK union think tank called These Islands that wants to keep the United Kingdom together. Do you feel that the devolution of so much political power to Scotland and Northern Ireland, in retrospect, was a mistake? No, I’m all in favor of devolution. I think that Britain before the Second World War was a state in which power was devolved to Scotland, to Wales, to Northern Ireland, but also to the great cities of England as well — to Birmingham. Joseph Chamberlain, the mayor of Birmingham — absolute embodiment of a high-achieving mayor who shaped and reconfigured the architecture and the industry of his city. I think that in the challenge of defeating Hitler, the British state became so centralized that we have long Second World War, if you want to put it like that. The aftereffects have continued for too long, and it is partly the Second World War; it’s partly the fact that we had a very centralizing Labour government that wanted to concentrate power in its hands. The health secretary — he institutionalized the National Health Service, and he famously said that he didn’t want a nurse to change a bedpan in any hospital across the country without him knowing about it. I think that we live with the aftereffects of that, and so therefore, actually, I’m all in favor of devolution. I don’t think that devolution is the enemy of the United Kingdom and the union of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. I think it’s the best way for the United Kingdom to function properly. I think that what we’re going through at the moment is a process of teasing problems. We are trying to test and work it out, but I think it’s a creative process. I’m an optimist. I hope that it will work out for the best But isn’t Irish unification, in particular, almost inevitable, and we should just rip off the Band-Aid and get it over with?…

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