The question is whether or not the differences are at all relevant. The strategy to date has been giving away powers in hope of buying off separatist sentiment. The federalist strategy looks identical.

Academic constitutional taxonomy is not the slam-dunk federalists suppose. https://twitter.com/NJ_Timothy/status/1284064258800660480

Devolutions failure can be explained practically: politicians who have no interest in preserving the Union use the pulpits and treasures ceded them by Westminster to undermine the Union.

Federalism's different theoretical basis isn't going to compel them to behave differently.

Before we let federalists divorce themselves from devolution's failures, we should demand from them a proper intellectual reckoning with *why* devolution hasn't worked and a much clearer explanation of why a switch to federalism will change the above dynamic.

The thing to remember is that the electorate a) do not care about the theoretical underpinnings of the constitution and b) are often pretty hazy about who has what powers in any event.

Salient point is how powers will be wielded by activist minority and how this 'looks'.

Federalism usually means further enhancing the devolved legislatures' rights against the centre, even to the point of scrapping parliamentary sovereignty.

This is a recipe for clashing mandates, deadlock, and deep dysfunction, all of which the SNP will both cause and exploit.

This will undermine the Union on both axes: its utility will be diminished as its internal mechanisms get fouled up, and its essential foundation - a British national community - will be worn away as shared government is further replaced by balkanised 'inter-governmental' rule.

An actually optimistic case for the Union involves arguing that the Union is good, and should do things! Say what you like about the EU but at least its partisans on the continent grasp (to the point of dogmatism) that belief in the EU means belief in the EU *doing stuff*.

Under either theoretical variant of the 'more powers' orthodoxy, unionists are expected to make an enthusiastic case for an institution which they are simultaneously proposing should be seriously weakened.

We then wonder why the Nats' troops are all fired up and ours aren't.

The below illustrates the problem nicely. Actual federal systems include countervailing centripetal factors, including a muscular central government and even *bans on secession*. They also lack a vastly unbalanced unit, such as England would be. https://twitter.com/stephen_wigmore/status/1284068615680135168?s=20

Because UK federalism tends to be rooted in the same retreat-and-pray tradition as devolution, its advocates are extremely squeamish about anything involving asserting the rights and prerogatives of the centre.

The result is something more like confederalism, which is doomed.

(Nothing illustrated this quite like when I was debating the Constitution Reform Group at @These_Islands's conference. Their initial discussion doc referred boldly to a zero-based approach to constitutional responsibilities. Their final paper proposed re-centralising nothing.)

It is not sufficient to point out that something calls 'federalism' works in other countries with different conditions. It is certainly not adequate when you're actually cobbling together a chimera out of the most centrifugal elements of different systems with no counterweights.

And all of this is neglecting the thing unionists too often neglect: is a 'federal Britain' what we actually want? Is that what we want our cause to be?

Too often we end up defining Unionism as merely opposition to separatism, and thus anything short of separation as a win.

But notwithstanding its severe shortcomings on a tactical and strategic level, I don't want some threadbare confederation to be our objective. Such a constitution does no justice to Britain.

We have as much right as the Nats to fight for the fullest realisation of our goals.

The Nationalists fight for independence. If they're not strong enough to acquire it, they take what they can.

Unionists, on the other hand, are obliged to pretend that the latest compromise is actually what we want - to feign excitement about a 'new United Kingdom'.

This trashes our leverage and drags our position continually Nat-wards, which means the clever-clever triangulators keep formulating new compromises closer and closer to the Nationalists' end goal.

Result? Demoralised troops, intellectually incoherent positions, retreat, defeat.

That's how we end up with articles *from Unionists* suggesting that the constitution be reworked so the British Government handles only stuff like "defence and foreign affairs".

I'm not in this for a British Isles Defence & Foreign Affairs Community. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/after-brexit-we-need-to-reinvent-our-political-system-k8kw2m0hv