Mend the Kingdom – roll up that map

Give me the map there. Know that we have divided In three our kingdom

King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1

If Whitehall is to be tasked with mending the tattered relationships across the United Kingdom, it must first reverse its two-hundred year practice of driving it apart.  It may start by shredding all the maps in every Government office. They are three hundred years out of date.

When Great Britain was united three hundred years ago and more, it was the consummation of a process of unity that had been moving on since the Reformation, and the actual incorporating union of the mediæval kingdoms into one was intended to began a process of integration to the benefit of all. Something went wrong.  That may be the subject of another article on this site shortly. Now though the priority is fixing it.

Firstly, there is no shortage of Scots in the civil service: the service takes the best and brightest, or most complaisant, and none is disadvantaged through having been born far from the din of London. The issue is found in a deeper structure.

Many Whitehall departments have become, since devolution and often before it, mainly England-only, with some responsibilities across the nation. I once asked a high-level mandarin in one such department whether his was a England-and-Wales department with some UK functions, or a UK department with some England-and-Wales-only functions: the result was an embarrassed silence. This equivocal quality in such departments will ensure that the mindset in those departments ends at the Tweed and just has add-ons for Scotland and Northern Ireland (when they remember Ulster at all). That is not serving the residents of Scotland or Ulster with equal consideration.

Furthermore, where functions do legally extend only to England, that paper boundary can become too real, forgetting that there are people beyond it who are affected by the decisions made. Their needs are just as much a part of the responsibilities of a British government department.

Responsibility is the key, not power, for the one does not come without the other, and even if a particular power is for some reason legally limited to one regions there is responsibility for every Briton who is affected by it even those not usually resident in the region in question.

I recall some government guidance which gave (and I believe still does give) details of how to get particular documents signed in England and Wales and how to get them done in foreign countries, but with no hint on having them signed in Scotland or Northern Ireland. My enquiry about this to the office in question was brushed off with the assertion that they are restricted to England and Wales and cannot look at Scotland or Northern Ireland; and this to the extent of pretending they do not exist, even though the rest of the world was considered.

Maps are deadly. There are maps in Whitehall that end at the River Tweed, and others where the mediaeval border is so heavy it looks like an impassable frontier. Others omit Northern Ireland, though it is barely 12 miles of water apart from Great Britain. Such maps discourage those who look at them from thinking beyond. Maps mould the mind.

Shred the maps – all of them. Make a big heap in the courtyard and consign them to the flames. Let no more like that pass the portal.

Wipe the data maps. These are more frequent and pernicious: those with statistics, which show England as an island on its own. Wipe them from every database. No map in government, unless it is of a narrow region, should show anything less than the whole of the United Kingdom (or of the British Isles as that is the spatial reality, and all things must be based on reality). Where a map is used as a graph of statistics, those statistics may well relate only to England or England and Wales, but there will be equivalent statistics for Scotland and Ulster, so include them: the welfare and status of Britons of those parts are equally the department’s responsibility. If they can shy off that responsibility, nevertheless without a full picture of statistics for the whole of Britain, you have a partial and misleading picture. There may be lessons too to be learnt from the wider picture.

As to those hermaphrodite departments; split your teams. There are those whose concerns day-to-day are with a limited area, and they should not then be trusted to do Scotland as an afterthought. Where the responsibility is national, there are no internal borders. There should be maps with no borders to illustrate to those concerned that there is no border, nor has been one for over three hundred years. Borders on maps make borders in the mind, so have none.

Recently Holyrood adopted a law that the Scottish devolved government may not buy any map of Scotland that shows Orkney and Shetland in a separate box. Whitehall should adopt a rule like it: no government office may acquire nor produce any ‘national’ map that does not include the whole of the United Kingdom, nor any map that includes ‘the border’ as anything beyond normal administrative boundaries. That way our governors may lift up their eyes to the full extent of their responsibilities.

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Author: AlexanderTheHog

A humble scribbler who out of my lean and low ability will lend something to Master Hobbes