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The 20th century sees Ireland divided by Partition and the Union threatened by war. New ideas unify the four nations, but the decline of industry sparks new divisions.
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00:08Here, in Carnarvon Castle in North Wales,
00:11on the 13th of July, 1911, a ceremony was held.
00:16It was one of the first national events to be captured on film.
00:22And it was designed to celebrate the union of the Four Nations.
00:31This ceremony was the investiture of the young Prince of Wales,
00:35the future Edward VIII.
00:39The footage of the investiture,
00:41it's all a bit broken up and a bit grainy,
00:44but you can piece together what's happening.
00:47Here is a royal procession made up of lords and ladies
00:52and members of parliament and members of the clergy.
00:55And next comes the king, George V,
00:57and his wife, Queen Mary.
01:02When you look at the size of the audience,
01:05it is hard to believe,
01:07but they managed to find seats for 12,000 people in this castle.
01:12The investiture of the Prince of Wales
01:15was a tradition that had been established in the 14th century.
01:19To many, it had been a powerful symbol of England's dominance.
01:25But in 1911, the ceremony was repurposed and redesigned
01:30in order to tell a different story about the union
01:34and the history that had created it.
01:40When you look at all of this pageantry,
01:42it all appears to be very old and very traditional.
01:46But in reality, much of this ceremony was devised
01:49in the months leading up to it.
01:56But there was also a big philosophical idea behind this ceremony.
02:01And that was the belief that the United Kingdom
02:04was a nation that was now reconciled with its history,
02:08with the long, difficult story of invasion and conquest.
02:13Carnarvon Castle, a military facility built by an English king
02:18to control the people of Wales.
02:21That became the site of a ceremony
02:23that was a celebration of the resilience
02:26and the survival of Welsh culture over the centuries.
02:31And what that meant was that the Celtic nations,
02:34not just Wales, but also Scotland and Ireland,
02:37their cultures were now not to be dominated by England
02:40and English cultures, but to be celebrated in their own rights.
02:45That the United Kingdom was unified in its diversity.
02:51But those claims of equality and diversity,
02:55the belief that the divisions of the past had been left in the past,
03:00were to prove over-optimistic.
03:03Because during the century between then and now,
03:06the ancient divisions that the organisers of the 1911 investiture
03:11claimed had been put to rest, repeatedly,
03:14and on occasions, disastrously, re-emerged.
03:29Britain has never been an easy country to define or understand.
03:35It's a state made up not of one, but of four nations,
03:40each with its own history, its own institutions,
03:43cultures, languages, and identities.
03:48If anybody was to say to me, also, you're British,
03:51I would always correct them, say, no, I'm Irish.
03:54I'm British first and Scottish second.
03:56Well, I'm a Brit. I'm a very proud Brit,
04:02but I'm also an English woman.
04:04Over five tumultuous and violent centuries,
04:08those four nations were slowly brought together.
04:13By the power of faith.
04:16By the wealth of empire.
04:19By the threat of invasion.
04:21But that history has always been one of rival competing identities,
04:28loyalties, and nationalist passions.
04:34This long history of union and disunion continues to define
04:40how people see themselves and the country today.
04:45For this series, we invited people from all four nations,
04:49people of different backgrounds, faiths, and politics,
04:53to share their personal views on our history.
04:58How it binds us together.
05:00It represents a lot of good things,
05:03things that have made us great.
05:06Or divides us.
05:07If we're talking about recent past, time for a divorce.
05:12And why it still matters.
05:15I always describe the union as a family.
05:17Families will always get on together.
05:19You know, we fought.
05:19The big question of today is can the great historic forces
05:25that built the United Kingdom still hold us together?
05:30Are we merely passing through one of the many periods of turbulence
05:35in this long history?
05:37Or are we perhaps slowly approaching the end of the union?
05:43Are our generations right now in the 21st century
05:47destined to become the last of the Britons?
05:50Or will the union survive?
06:10In the early years of the 20th century,
06:13the benefits and successes of the union
06:15were, to millions of people, obvious and manifest.
06:22The United Kingdom had led the world
06:25into the Industrial Revolution,
06:27but was still the foremost trading
06:30and financial power on Earth.
06:33Many of the industries within that economy
06:36were powered by coal mined in the valleys of South Wales.
06:40There, each year, the hundreds of mines
06:43and thousands of miners who worked them,
06:46produced 39 million metric tons of coal.
06:55To meet the enormous global demand for Welsh coal,
06:59towns like this, Pontypridd in South Wales,
07:03were expanding at an astonishing rate.
07:06population growth here was ten times the national average.
07:12But the great economic boom that drew in so many people
07:16and created so much wealth led to a cultural crisis.
07:21And we can see what that meant for Wales
07:23through the records of the people who lived here, Tower Street, Pontypridd.
07:28And we can see what that meant for Greece.
07:30Because Wales had a smaller population than any other country
07:34in the United Kingdom,
07:36all of this movement and migration
07:38had a very specific impact here.
07:41And you can see that on these census forms from 1911.
07:46Because the forms that were printed for Wales
07:49had a column that the ones in England didn't have.
07:52And it's this one here, language spoken.
07:56And if you look at these census returns
07:58from here on Tower Street,
08:00a pattern begins to emerge.
08:03This is the entry for number 14, Tower Street.
08:06The head of the household and his wife
08:08are listed as speaking both languages.
08:10But their daughters only speak English.
08:13And it's exactly the same.
08:15The one next door, head of the household,
08:17speaks both languages.
08:19His two daughters and his son only speak English.
08:22Now, these same patterns were being repeated across South Wales.
08:27The older generation speak Welsh,
08:29but it's not passed on to the children.
08:32And this, this is how languages die.
08:38In 1911, less than half the people living in Wales
08:42spoke the Welsh language.
08:44Much of this was a consequence of mass migration
08:48from the other nations of the Union.
08:51But many people in Wales
08:53traced the decline of their language
08:56back to Victorian reformers,
08:58who had drafted a report that had characterised
09:01the Welsh language as a problem
09:03and the English language as the solution.
09:06And this is one of the most iconic documents
09:09in Welsh history.
09:10In Wales, it's known as the Blue Bucks.
09:12But the official title was
09:14Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry
09:16into the State of Education in Wales.
09:19So this is from 1847?
09:211847.
09:22So a question is asked in Parliament,
09:24what can we do to help the Welsh people learn English
09:27so they can become more like the rest of us, essentially?
09:30And three commissioners are sent to Wales.
09:33They were all upper-middle-class English lawyers.
09:36They didn't speak Welsh.
09:38What do the commissioners think
09:39only being able to speak Welsh is doing
09:41to the people of Wales?
09:43They felt it was removing them from civilisation,
09:46but also that it was holding them back economically,
09:49that it was impossible for anybody
09:51who didn't speak English
09:52to make it up the social ladder.
09:54I mean, they say things like this.
09:56In the works, the Welsh workman
09:57never finds his way into the office.
09:59He never becomes either clerk or agent.
10:01He may become an overseer or a subcontractor,
10:04but this does not take him out of the labouring class
10:06and put him into the administering class.
10:08So they're talking about social mobility.
10:10Exactly.
10:10And to be honest, that's not entirely unfair
10:13because to speak English was something
10:15that enabled you to get on.
10:17But there's another level to this as well,
10:19that they don't understand the culture of the Welsh language.
10:23They want people in Wales to learn English and drop Welsh,
10:27whereas what people in Wales, I think, wanted
10:29was to learn English and essentially to become bilingual.
10:32The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales
10:35and a manifold barrier to the moral progress
10:38and commercial prosperity of the people.
10:40It's not easy to overestimate its evil effects.
10:44Its evil effects?
10:45Yeah. And that phrase did hit home.
10:47And then those prejudicial attitudes,
10:50which were repeated in the street,
10:51were repeated by teachers often,
10:54you know, that combined with the economic advantages
10:57of speaking English,
10:58that leads to parents taking the decision
11:00to raise their children in English.
11:03I think very few people outside of Wales
11:05have heard of these blue books.
11:07Are they still remembered in Wales?
11:09Of all the things that happened in Welsh history,
11:11this is one of the most famous.
11:13And lots of people in the street could tell you
11:15about the blue books.
11:18The long decline of the Welsh language
11:20continued throughout much of the 20th century.
11:24But the language, of course, did not die.
11:27In the 1990s, Welsh began to recover
11:30and today is increasingly at the heart
11:33of modern Welsh identity.
11:40It's more than a language.
11:42It ties generations of Welsh people together.
12:02The Welsh language has been seen as this tool of hostility towards the English,
12:08when it should have been seen as a tool of empowerment.
12:11It's a beautiful language.
12:14It's a beautiful language.
12:15And it makes me incredibly ashamed to say that I don't speak Welsh.
12:26Across the Irish Sea, in the early years of the 20th century,
12:30lay another part of the United Kingdom
12:33that, like the Welsh Valleys, was booming economically.
12:40At the end of the Victorian age,
12:42Belfast had overtaken Dublin to become the largest city in Ireland.
12:48Its Harland and Wolfe shipyard was the biggest in the world.
12:52And from its slipways,
12:54some of the greatest ships of the age were launched.
12:58The city was also home to the biggest linen mills on earth,
13:03which employed over 30,000 men and women.
13:08Yet despite its modern, booming economy,
13:12the legacy of history meant that Belfast was a deeply divided city.
13:20Belfast was home to an old, established,
13:23and powerful Protestant majority.
13:26Whereas in the south, and across the country as a whole,
13:29the majority of the Irish population were Catholic.
13:35And just a year after the investiture of the Prince of Wales,
13:40Belfast was at the centre of a crisis between these two communities.
13:47This is a copy of a bill that was introduced into the Westminster Parliament in the year 1912.
13:54And its formal title is,
13:56A Bill to Amend the Provision for the Government of Ireland.
13:59But everybody in 1912, in Britain and in Ireland, knew this as the Home Rule Bill.
14:06Its key provision is the very first one.
14:09It reads,
14:09On and after the appointed day, there shall be in Ireland an Irish Parliament.
14:16So what this bill proposed doing was reopening the old Irish Parliament in Dublin,
14:22that had been shut down by the Act of Union back in 1801.
14:26By 1912, many Protestants in Ireland believed that any Irish Parliament in Dublin would inevitably be dominated by the Catholic
14:36majority.
14:37And they regarded Home Rule as a threat to them, to their status, and ultimately to the Union itself.
14:46The story of what happened in Ireland in the years after 1912 is a story that has the city of
14:54Belfast at its centre.
14:56A story that can be told through what happened to two ordinary working-class Belfast families,
15:03who lived about two and a half kilometres apart,
15:06and who found themselves on opposite sides of a crisis that was ultimately to tear the Union apart.
15:17This is the Shank Hill Road in West Belfast.
15:21Today, as it was in the early 20th century,
15:24this part of the city is largely Protestant and passionately Unionist.
15:30Our first family lived just off the Shank Hill, here on Palmer Street.
15:37Palmer Street was rebuilt after the Second World War,
15:40and although the original houses have now all gone,
15:44we do know quite a lot about the families who used to live on this street.
15:48And that's because of this document, the Census of Ireland for 1911.
15:54And what it tells us is that at number 8 Palmer Street, which was just down there, was the Beattie
16:01family.
16:02Now, the head of the family was Henry Beattie.
16:06And under rank, profession or occupation, it describes Henry as a linen weaver.
16:12And in fact, all five of his grown-up children, all the ones who've now left school,
16:17are also working in the linen trade.
16:20And then there's this column, religious profession.
16:24And that says that the Beatties, like most of the families in this street,
16:29were Church of Ireland.
16:31That means they're Protestants.
16:33They are part of a community that at this moment was really beginning to organise
16:38and to mobilise against Home Rule.
16:46Throughout 1912, as the Home Rule Bill was debated in Westminster,
16:51the Protestant Unionist community of Belfast held a series of vast public gatherings,
16:57attended by tens of thousands of people.
17:03The culmination of all of this activity is the so-called Ulster Day,
17:0728th of September 1912.
17:10And at that, an almost sacred protest document is presented,
17:16the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant, which we have here.
17:19It reads that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material wellbeing of Ulster.
17:24We, whose names are underwritten,
17:27do hereby pledge ourselves in Solemn Covenant
17:30and using all means which may be found necessary
17:33to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland.
17:39It is threatening language.
17:41This is a threat of violence, yes.
17:43How many people signed the Covenant?
17:45Just a little bit over 470,000 men and women signed, so a vast number.
17:51If we look at this sheet, you can see a name that will already be familiar to you,
17:59Henry Beatty of 8 Palmer Street, written in a rather scratchy manner.
18:05This is not somebody who's used to writing.
18:07Exactly so.
18:09But given the importance of the occasion, he's making a particular effort
18:14and that effort is almost tangible in this script.
18:18And we have a photograph of Henry Beatty.
18:22These are people who are secure in their political and wider identities.
18:28And do the Beatty's make the transition from signing the Covenant
18:31to agreeing to take part in the potential violence?
18:35Yes, indeed.
18:36And there's evidence from another source.
18:39This relates to membership of the paramilitary movement
18:44called the Ulster Volunteer Force,
18:46which exists as the militant wing of the unionist movement in the north of Ireland.
18:51So we know from this document
18:53that four men from the Beatty family joined the UVF.
18:57Here's Henry, Herbert, Samuel and Robert Beatty.
19:04Around 100,000 men from the Beatty's community,
19:08two-thirds of all Protestant men in the north of Ireland,
19:11ultimately joined the UVF.
19:14This family, the Beatty's, that we see on the 1911 census,
19:18within a year, within two years,
19:20they've gone from being linen workers to members of a paramilitary force.
19:25It is extraordinary, isn't it?
19:27But it is a reflection of the extent to which the Beatty's
19:32and their contemporaries feel under threat,
19:37feel that their livelihoods and their citizenship is imperiled,
19:41that sense that their backs are against the wall.
19:45Unionists, like the Beatty's, were not alone in opposing home rule.
19:51This is the Falls Road, an overwhelmingly Catholic part of Belfast.
19:57The majority of the community who lived here in the early 20th century
20:02would have supported the return of an Irish parliament.
20:06But there were others who wanted not home rule, but an end to the union.
20:12And evidence from the census of 1911 suggests that our second Belfast family,
20:19who lived on the Falls Road, were engaged in exactly that struggle.
20:24These pages from the census are for the family that lived in this house,
20:30number 428 on the Falls Road.
20:33The head of the household is Joseph Murphy.
20:36He's 60 years old, and he's a widower.
20:39And he lives in this house with five of his children,
20:43three sons and two daughters, and they're all now in their teens or their twenties.
20:48And like members of the Beatty family over on Palmer Street,
20:52Joseph Murphy works in the linen industry.
20:55He's listed here as a head spinning master, so a kind of overseer.
21:00And in fact, these two Belfast families, the Beatty's on Palmer Street,
21:05the Murphy's here on the Falls Road, they have a lot in common.
21:08They're both working class, both in the linen trade.
21:11They live about a mile and a half from each other in the same city.
21:15Where they differ is when it comes to religion and politics.
21:19Because the Murphy's, like most people in this neighbourhood, are Roman Catholic.
21:24But the census also tells us something significant about this family.
21:30All of the Murphy's speak the Irish language as well as English.
21:34And what that suggests is that here is a family who identify with the culture
21:41and the traditions of Ireland, and also perhaps with an idea.
21:46An idea that was growing in strength in the early years of the 20th century.
21:51Irish Republicanism.
21:53The longing for independence from Britain and an end to the Union.
21:59And younger members of the Murphy family,
22:02just like the Beatty's on Palmer Street, were increasingly convinced
22:06that their aims could only be achieved through force.
22:13This is a generational shift that's beginning to happen in the early part of the 20th century
22:18in Irish families throughout the country,
22:21where the younger generation are rejecting the constitutional nationalism
22:25of the older generation that those who had fought for home rule.
22:29They want to break the link with England completely.
22:33If you look at the 1911 census, you can pick out names of young men
22:38and indeed young women who go on to become involved in the various organisations
22:42that commit themselves to a violent uprising against Britain.
22:47Two of the Murphy boys who appear in the 1911 census, James and Joseph, did exactly this.
22:56Joining the Irish Volunteers, a paramilitary force founded in 1913
23:02and committed to Irish independence and an end to the Union.
23:07And here you have a photo of their sister Kathleen.
23:10Here she is, serious-looking young woman.
23:13Kathleen becomes involved in organisations that are separatist
23:17and committed to violence.
23:22Kathleen joined Komen Amman, a militant organisation for Republican women.
23:29By 1914, both communities had formed paramilitary organisations
23:35that now began to import weapons into Ireland.
23:40In April 1914, the Ulster Volunteer Force smuggled 25,000 rifles
23:47and three million rounds of ammunition into the country.
23:52The two divided communities stood on the brink of war.
23:58What prevented Ireland from descending into a disastrous civil war in the summer of 1914
24:05was the outbreak of a far bigger conflict.
24:19Thousands of Irishmen, both Protestants and Catholics, joined the British Army
24:24during the First World War.
24:26Six members of the Beattie family left Palmer Street for the Western Front.
24:32The father, Henry Beattie, a veteran who had fought in the Boer War,
24:37rejoined the army at the age of 56.
24:43But for others, for families like the Murphys,
24:47the First World War represented not an opportunity to fight for Britain,
24:52but to end the Union.
24:55At the centre of the events that followed was the daughter, Kathleen Murphy,
25:00who later wrote an account of her involvement
25:03in an uprising against British rule.
25:07She says, I joined the Cumin Amman at the time the organisation was started in Belfast
25:14with her friends, Nora and Dinah Connolly,
25:17the daughters of the future 1916 rebel leader, James Connolly.
25:21And James Connolly lives here on the Falls Road, close to the Murphys.
25:26Close to the Murphys. So they would have grown up together.
25:28They would have known each other very well.
25:30Those influences bring people like Kathleen Murphy into militant nationalism.
25:37So this testimony very quickly gets to Easter 1916 and the so-called Easter Rising.
25:45And it's clear from this that she is being given extremely sensitive and privileged information.
25:50She says, on Good Friday of 1916, we were told that a mobilisation was ordered for Easter.
25:57So she knows what is going to happen.
25:59She is very trusted. For somebody like Kathleen, a young working class woman from the Falls Road in Belfast,
26:06to know the Rising is going to happen is extraordinary.
26:09And she is absolutely at the centre of it.
26:13Absolutely at the centre of it, because she ends up in Liberty Hall in Dublin,
26:18the headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union.
26:22Also the headquarters of the Irish Citizen Army that's going to be part of the 1916 Rising.
26:28With James Connolly at its head.
26:29With James Connolly leading it. And she is there. She's at the centre.
26:34On Easter Monday, 1916, as Kathleen Murphy returned to Belfast,
26:40Republicans in Dublin, including James Connolly, launched the Easter Rising.
26:48Six days of fighting left the city devastated.
26:52450 people dead, thousands wounded, and the rebels defeated.
27:01But it was not this violence, nor the devastation of Dublin, that was to change the union and the relationship
27:08between Britain and Ireland.
27:11It was what the British government did next.
27:15These are a couple of pages from two Irish newspapers, the Ballymina Weekly Telegraph and the Freeman's Journal.
27:23And they're both from Saturday, May 13th, 1916.
27:28So a couple of weeks after the Easter Rising.
27:32And what they tell us is what happened to the leaders of that rising.
27:36The Ballymina Telegraph reports 14 executed to await the death penalty.
27:44And the Freeman's Journal reports that those final two death penalties were carried out.
27:50Two leaders shot.
27:53It names those two men as John McDermott and James Connolly.
28:00Connolly had been badly wounded in the fighting in Dublin.
28:03And because he was so weak that he couldn't stand, he was literally tied to a chair that was placed
28:10in front of the firing squad.
28:12It was the reaction to these executions, much more than any reaction to the Easter Rising itself, that changed opinions
28:21and changed attitudes in Ireland.
28:25Across much of Ireland, the executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising and a wave of mass arrests led
28:33to an outpouring of horror and resentment.
28:37Two years later, in December 1918, at the next general election, Sinn Féin, a party committed to Irish independence, won
28:4673 out of Ireland's 105 seats.
28:52But rather than take their seats in the Westminster Parliament, Sinn Féin's MPs set up an alternative government in Dublin
29:02and declared an Irish Republic.
29:05The war that followed lasted until a truce was called in 1921 and peace negotiations began.
29:16What emerged from those negotiations was a border that created two new states.
29:24One state that would become the Republic of Ireland, an independent and majority Catholic state.
29:31And the other, Northern Ireland, which remained part of the Union.
29:36That little stone wall, that is a tiny section of the border across Ireland in the 1920s, the border we've
29:45now lived with for a century.
29:47Where I'm standing now is in the Republic of Ireland, and just over there is Northern Ireland.
29:53And this map from 1911 shows where the two communities lived.
29:59The areas marked red were majority Protestant.
30:01The areas marked green, majority Catholic.
30:05But the patterns on this map, like the line of that border, don't just reflect the demographics and the politics
30:13of the early 20th century.
30:15They also speak to an older history, that of the 17th century, when the government of King James I of
30:22England and Wales, 6th of Scotland, awarded land to English and Scottish settlers to create their plantations here in Ireland.
30:32300 years before that border was drawn.
30:37The drawing of the border meant that the union between Great Britain and Ireland that had been forged in 1801
30:45came to an end.
30:47And for the first time, the process of building a union went into reverse.
30:54Irish independence meant that at a stroke, the land mass of the United Kingdom shrank by 20%.
31:01And almost 3 million people, who had been citizens of the United Kingdom, now became the citizens of another independent
31:12state.
31:14Even after partition, the ancient divisions between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland continued.
31:22There were waves of violence through the 1920s.
31:25And then, in the 1960s, another conflict erupted.
31:36The Troubles left over three and a half thousand people dead.
31:41And led to the deployment of the British Army onto the streets of British cities.
31:51That conflict officially ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement.
31:57But the peace wars, built in Belfast during the Troubles, to keep the two communities separated, remain.
32:05And today, the legacy of the 20th century and of the longer histories of settlement, partition and conflict continue to
32:15shape lives.
32:18Partition has shaped the last century here in Ireland.
32:24It has shaped how our history has gone.
32:26It has shaped my life.
32:27That I've grown up in a state that was never meant to be equal.
32:33It was literally carved out.
32:37I think there's been times where the British community here has felt very much neglected or under-sieged.
32:44But the strength of the community in Northern Ireland is that, you know, we come together at difficult times.
32:49And it shines through when it is difficult times, when our backs against the wall.
32:54History climbs into everything in Northern Ireland.
32:58We've still got the institutions in place to keep us separate, like the peace walls, like the separated schools.
33:06Even just the unspoken things, like the separate pubs.
33:11I didn't meet a Catholic until I was 16 or 17.
33:14Any other part of the UK that would seem mad, but that was the reality here.
33:18It's not a positive.
33:20And I don't think it lends itself to the kind of society we want to build.
33:28The union that had first brought Britain and Ireland together into a united kingdom.
33:35The union that ended with this border lasted for 121 years.
33:42That union had come about because of the threat of invasion.
33:51Two decades after the partition of Ireland, the new state, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,
34:00found itself facing a new enemy and, again, the possibility of invasion.
34:063681, friendly, 137. Change Southeast X for X-rays.
34:12This is one of the actual operation rooms used by fighter command of the RAF to fight the battle of
34:22Britain.
34:22It was from right here that the fighters defending Britain were coordinated.
34:27It was later from this room that the struggle against the bombers of the Blitz was organized.
34:34And what you realize is that the Second World War was a war for national survival.
34:41A war fought on such a scale, a war that made such demands, that inevitably it was going to change
34:47Britain and its people.
34:57What emerged from the Second World War was a new national mythology.
35:03Legends that took their place alongside those of the past, like Trafalgar and Waterloo.
35:09But what was also forged during the war years was a strong sense of unity and togetherness.
35:17The war was at times called the People's War.
35:21And there was also a sense that when peace finally came, that togetherness was in some way going to be
35:29fundamental,
35:30not just to rebuilding the nation, but also to reimagining it.
35:48The servicemen who returned home in 1945 arrived in a land badly damaged by the Blitz,
35:55and exhausted by the effort of fighting a total war.
36:01But the damage was unevenly spread, with the devastation concentrated in cities like London, Liverpool, Birmingham and Coventry.
36:15What emerged out of the war was the belief that what had to be rebuilt and reimagined was not just
36:22the cities and the buildings damaged by bombs,
36:25the borders, but the relationships between the peoples, regions and nations of the United Kingdom.
36:33In the days to come, we must feel that it is not every man for himself,
36:38but every man for the good and happiness of all people living.
36:47And to build that more equal society demanded that the nation avoid one of the mistakes of the past.
36:56There is a pattern in British history where repeatedly after the wars against France and Napoleon after the First World
37:02War,
37:03armies came back not to a land fit for heroes, but to unemployment and division.
37:08Now, there is a real sense coming out of the Second World War to avoid that happening again.
37:13Absolutely.
37:14There's a change of government, but much more importantly a change of mood.
37:17There's an opportunity of building a new nation, a nation without unemployment, with less inequality.
37:24So, for example, there was a health service for all, not different health services for the poor, for the middle
37:30classes and for the rich.
37:32It's a nation that is going to be transformed by state action.
37:36It's a takeover of the coal mines from inefficient private owners
37:40and hand them over to a national coal ball that's going to modernize them.
37:46Between the wars, there had been huge regional inequality.
37:51The depression had hit certain areas extraordinarily badly and left other areas less badly affected.
37:57We've seen the effects of the legions being what we today call left behind, avoiding that at the heart of
38:03this moment, isn't it?
38:04Yes, absolutely.
38:05And it wasn't just the depression that created these regional inequalities that existed before then.
38:10But they came to be seen, rather, as a kind of blight on the nations.
38:14After the war, there were really determined efforts to spread wealth around the country, to spread industry around the country.
38:20So, here we are in Coventry, the car industry was booming, engineering was booming.
38:24But the government intervened to make sure that Scotland got a car plant,
38:28and had to distribute the productive capacity of the nation.
38:32They're concerned about making the country more equal.
38:36And this sense that the nation has got to find a way of being unified,
38:41that we can't have the divisions of the past, that's not just the Labour Party.
38:44There is a political consensus.
38:46There most definitely is that everyone has agreed that we're not going to go back to a world of mass
38:50unemployment,
38:50as it existed in the 1930s.
38:53How does that affect people's sense of Britishness?
38:57Being able to access free healthcare, for example, a free education,
39:01differentiates you from people in other countries.
39:04It really did make a difference that you were born in Britain, or brought up in Britain,
39:08or become a British citizen, living here.
39:11It makes you different.
39:12Historians often debate about when the union is at its strongest, when is peak union.
39:18Would you think it was this period?
39:20Absolutely.
39:21Peak union is somewhere between 1945 and 1973.
39:29In 1973, the United Kingdom was one of the most equal societies in the world,
39:35with income inequality at an all-time low.
39:41But the global economic crisis of the 1970s reawaken dormant forces in British history.
39:51The ancient divisions between nations and regions, and the appeal of nationalism.
40:00One of the industries that had boomed after the war, but that was now left vulnerable, was the steel industry,
40:07which had been nationalized and become especially vital to the economy of Scotland.
40:16This is Motherwell, near Glasgow, once home to the vast Ravenscraig steelworks and the Gartcosh steel mill,
40:26which secured employment for 20,000 local people.
40:32But places like Ravenscraig and Gartcosh not only provided work,
40:38they demonstrated to the people of Scotland the benefits of the union.
40:44And so, in the 1980s, when it was proposed that Gartcosh close,
40:49putting the long-term future of Ravenscraig in jeopardy,
40:53local campaigners re-enacted a tradition from the Depression of the 1930s
40:58and marched on London to deliver a petition to the Prime Minister.
41:06That's my fate.
41:08That's you.
41:09It is indeed, yeah.
41:11And as you can see there, the weather was pretty harsh.
41:14Their journey to the capital took them through the once-thriving industrial heartlands
41:19of both Scotland and England.
41:23You couldn't go anywhere in Scotland, any level, management or whatever,
41:27where people were saying, oh, Ravenscraig could be closed.
41:30People were saying Ravenscraig must be kept open.
41:33I was in the Conservative Party at the time.
41:35I was the chairman of the Conservative Candidates Association.
41:38I was a businessman.
41:39I wanted to satisfy myself.
41:41Is this plant economic?
41:44I studied it and I came back and I said,
41:46I believe this plant has a future.
41:48I believe it's crucial to Scotland.
41:51We'd carried down a petition with us,
41:54which we wanted to hand in to Margaret Thatcher
41:57and have a meeting with her.
41:59And they were refused, basically.
42:02I think even the most staunch British Unionist
42:06would be shaken by what happened with Ravenscraig.
42:10And a lot of people, like me, felt they'd been betrayed by Britain.
42:21This is what is left of the Ravenscraig steelworks.
42:30The closure of places like Ravenscraig and there are deindustrialized wastelands just like this across much of the United Kingdom.
42:40That was devastating, of course, for local communities, but it's also proved damaging to the Union.
42:49Because back in the 19th and the 20th centuries, the Industrial Revolution transformed cities like Belfast and Glasgow and Cardiff,
42:58as well as Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle into industrial megacities at the centre of regions that saw astonishing economic booms
43:08and attracted waves of migrants.
43:10And this had the effect of spreading wealth and employment across the country.
43:16And to some extent, it counterbalanced the ancient dominance of London and the South.
43:22And then, within the space of just a few decades, those industries either declined or disappeared.
43:30For many people, the economic benefits of Union were harder to find and the case for the Union, therefore, harder
43:39to make.
43:41The decline of the great industrial regions of the United Kingdom in the 70s and the 80s and the emergence
43:49of a new sort of economy led to the return of one of the forces that runs through the story
43:55of the Union.
43:57The dominance of London.
44:09In the 1980s, London began to look and feel like a different country.
44:14What was going on economically under the surface to explain that?
44:18It was the decline of the North at first.
44:21So London didn't have that decline, so it began to look better.
44:25Relatively?
44:25Relatively better.
44:26And then, by the middle of the 80s, you have the Big Bang and the celebrations.
44:34The 1980s saw what was only just beginning towards the end of the 70s accelerate beyond anything seen anywhere else
44:42in Europe.
44:43Every year in the 1980s, inequality increased massively.
44:47We went from being this most equal country to becoming one of the most unequal in ten years.
44:54And people in the south of England, and particularly in London, benefited.
44:58People in the north watched in shock as the jobs disappeared and youngsters leaving school couldn't find employment.
45:06Underlying the success of the Union has been money.
45:09It's been the financial opportunities that came with joining the nations of these islands.
45:14It was a marriage of convenience.
45:17We married because the money together could be greater than the money if we'd stayed separately.
45:22And as the riches came in, the arguments for keeping the Union became stronger and stronger.
45:30Victorians talked about renaming Scotland Northern Britain.
45:34Because the British project was working so well.
45:36Yes.
45:36It was working.
45:37We spread out the money.
45:38We built grand train stations on the edge of Britain.
45:43That's the exceptional period.
45:45What's happening in the 80s in some ways is a return to the historic norm.
45:49That this city is dominant in a way that is just astonishing.
45:52Yes.
45:53There isn't a long history of power being spread out in Britain.
45:58If you look at the starting dates of universities in the north, many are just over 100 years old.
46:04If you look at the big civic buildings in northern cities, again, they're not that old.
46:09So there isn't a history of power outside of the capital.
46:13So it was the 80s that was the moment when this thing, this phrase we use today, left behind.
46:18That's the moment when those cities and regions were left behind.
46:21Yes.
46:21That's when you could see it.
46:22That's when it began to become obvious.
46:26Today, as in past centuries, the power and the wealth of London and the level of investment that flows into
46:34the capital divides opinion.
46:37It's London or nothing else.
46:39And everybody on the edges just get forgotten about.
46:42Without London, the rest wouldn't survive.
46:45Very controversial for me to say, but I feel like London is really important.
46:49The perception that they have and we don't creates this animosity which gives birth to stronger regional identity.
46:58Is it fair? It's just what is.
47:02A lot of people's resentment against London is actually towards Parliament and to the Westminster system.
47:13Over 400 years and to each act of union from 1707 onwards, more and more power was concentrated in Westminster.
47:22But a quarter of a century ago in the 1990s, a moment arrived in which some powers were devolved to
47:30new national parliaments.
47:32In Northern Ireland, a new assembly was created.
47:36In Cardiff, a Welsh assembly was brought into existence.
47:41And in Edinburgh, the ancient Scottish Parliament, closed as part of the active union between England and Scotland, was re
47:53-established.
47:54The Scottish Parliament adjourned on the 25th day of March in the year 1707 is hereby reconvened.
48:05The creation of the national parliaments and assemblies was in part a recognition of the fact that the bonds that
48:13tie the union together needed to be strengthened.
48:20Today, the question of where the union goes from here is being debated and contested as it always has been.
48:28Just as Britishness, the identity that slowly emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, exists today as it always did
48:38alongside other competing identities.
48:41I would describe myself as both Scottish and British.
48:45I'm a Londoner, then I'd say Black British Caribbean.
48:49Northern Irish or British.
48:50British Sikh.
48:51Both British and Scottish.
48:53I'm British, but also English, Northern, from Yorkshire, from Leeds.
48:58Where we find ourselves today is a reflection of the fact that many of the forces that brought us together
49:06and helped build the United Kingdom are now in decline.
49:12British identity was always strongly linked to religion and the Protestant faith.
49:18And yet, the United Kingdom today is one of the least religious states in the world.
49:24The acts of union that brought the nations together were both passed to secure these isles from foreign invasion.
49:33And British identity was also forged through war.
49:41We had to really knuckle down and get through these terrible times together.
49:46And they supported one another, and I think that's the length and breadth of the country.
49:51We are absolutely at our best in adversity.
49:54But after generations of relative peace, are those memories still strong enough to hold us together?
50:02The huge industrial booms of the 18th and 19th centuries that spread wealth across the four nations are over, as
50:12is the Empire.
50:14And while over 60% of us still see ourselves as British, that identity is one that today many people
50:22reject.
50:24I'm not British.
50:26I'm Scottish, full stop.
50:28I'm a Welshman.
50:29I'm Irish.
50:30Totally English, 100%.
50:34Perhaps, in the end, it does come down to history, our long shared story.
50:41Is it enough to keep the United Kingdom together?
50:44That history did, after all, create one of the wealthiest and most successful states there has ever been.
50:51Have we simply been through too much together, been united for too long, have too much in common for us
51:00to separate?
51:01Or, in such a changed world, are the forces that always pulled against the idea of union simply becoming too
51:11strong?
51:13The answer to all of those questions and the fate of the union will be determined in the decades to
51:21come by the generations who are now emerging.
51:52I'm a elder.
51:53I've been doing a lot of things I, for now, have a great way to go.
51:54In a long term, a big third, way to be in the long term, I'm gone.
51:54I'm a third, if I'm a 성공 mate.
51:54I've never used to be in the long term.
51:54The other thing that I've ever been doing is pleading, the most successful friends,
51:54I've never done a long term.
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