Has the United Kingdom, as we have come to know it for generations, gone?

Have factors like Brexit, the resurgence of Scottish nationalism,

and demands for a border pole here,

change the complex set of relationships between London, Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff forever?

And if the UK does formally break up in the years to come,

will it be because of the English rather than anybody else?

Gavin?

I think it might be.

The tectonic plates are clearly shifting.

And when I've been in Scotland and Northern Ireland and said Boris Johnson's a one-nation conservative,

I'm quite often met with the reply, yes, but that one-nation is England, not Britain.

Alex.

Yes, if this comes to pass, and there is still plenty of reason to suppose that it might not, but if it does come to pass, then almost by definition it has to be in large part because of the English.

They do, after all, form around

85% of the United Kingdom. And so they can no longer be ignored. And their preferences and the

expression of their preferences is not confined to England. It has consequences elsewhere. And that's one of the things

I think people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have always understood, but it is only just

now perhaps being understood in England itself. Mary? Well, in the Victorian era, I think it was Lord

Randolph Churchill, who said that once Ireland broke away from the United Kingdom,

that a thread would be pulled and that it would encourage so many national movements everywhere.

And it is actually interesting to me that the language of Brexit echoed very, very clearly the language of Patrick Pierce in 1916 when he talked about the unfettered control of our destiny.

So in a funny way, English nationalism is actually copying Irish nationalism a century on.

...