Andy Burnham went to Belfast to listen. That’s what British prime ministers traditionally say they are doing when they arrive in Northern Ireland with a conclusion already prepared.
Asked whether he might be the one to finally call a referendum on Irish reunification, Burnham replied that he would take a collaborative approach. But he also made it clear that some issues would be “off the table”.
A border poll was one of them. Collaboration would require bracketing the constitutional question at the heart of Northern Irish politics for the last century.
Burnham’s reasons were not frivolous. The UK has spent much of the past decade coping with the impact of referendums. The Scottish independence vote did not resolve the question of Scotland’s constitutional position. Brexit settled Britain’s relationship with Europe so decisively that no one has stopped arguing about it since.
Referendums, Burnham observed, produce rifts that take a long time to heal. Northern Ireland, meanwhile, faces a cost-of-living crisis, failing public services and another struggle to agree upon a workable budget. It would be better, he suggested, to focus on the problems at hand rather than reopen a conflict over national identity.
This argument contains an important truth wrapped in an indefensible formulation. Northern Ireland needs its government to function. Hospitals, schools and public services cannot subsist indefinitely on the oxygen of constitutional drama.
That said, a referendum on Irish reunification is not a discretionary favour to be taken “off the table”. The Good Friday Agreement placed it there.
The Northern Ireland Act of 1998 gives the Secretary of State the power to call a referendum. It also requires calling one if a majority of voters would support leaving the United Kingdom to join a united Ireland.
Criteria for reaching such a judgment remain conspicuously undefined. Although polling, election results, demographic change, and votes within the Northern Ireland Assembly might all provide evidence, no published formula establishes a threshold for what would be sufficient.
This ambiguity gives the British government considerable room for judgment. It does not give the prime minister authority to take the possibility “off the table”.
After Burnham’s words had sparked predictable commotion, Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant explained that the premier had only been speaking about the present moment. The government, he insisted, remained committed to every provision of the Good Friday Agreement, including those governing a border poll.
This was less a retraction than an attempt to place more sensible words into Burnham’s mouth retroactively. “Not now” is crucially different from “off the table” in a political settlement whose legitimacy depends upon the understanding that Northern Ireland’s constitutional position is neither permanent nor unalterable.
Burnham’s statement was particularly unfortunate because he made it repeatedly. This was clearly not an extemporaneous slip produced by the peculiar atmospheric pressures of Belfast. His government evidently wanted to reassure unionists that it would not accelerate constitutional change.
That political objective is understandable. Unionism has been destabilised by Brexit, the Northern Ireland Protocol, the Windsor Framework and its own electoral decline. A new British government might reasonably wish to establish that it will not use Sinn Féin’s recent successes as an excuse to stampede the province into a referendum.
Unfortunately, reassurance bought in contravention of the Good Friday Agreement is unlikely to last.
Unionists heard Burnham’s declaration as a promise that the question had been put to bed. Nationalists heard it as another British government claiming powers it does not possess.
Each response hardened the expectations of one community while alarming the other. Within a day, Downing Street explained that the table had not been removed after all; the government merely did not want anyone to take a seat there just yet.
Then Gordon Brown wandered into the room and overturned the furniture.
Tony Blair’s successor, who was chancellor when the Good Friday Agreement was signed and prime minister when policing and justice powers were transferred to Stormont, told The Guardian that “in the long term, Ireland will be united”.
The clarity of this declaration was particularly striking because Brown remains passionately opposed to Scottish independence.
Scotland, Brown argued, is geographically, economically, culturally and socially connected to the rest of the United Kingdom. Asked whether Northern Ireland’s geographical connection to the Republic pointed in the other direction, he agreed that it did. Irish unity, in his account, was not merely possible but eventually inevitable.
Gordon Brown says a united Ireland is inevitable in the long term.“Of course, in the long term, Ireland will be united,” the former prime minister told the Guardian, though he stressed it would be “a long process” requiring people to “come together and find a way of agreeing.”
— Fared Al Mahlool | فريد المحلول (@faredalmahlool.bsky.social) 2026-08-30T22:33:33.974Z
Brown immediately qualified this prophecy.
Unity would be a long process. People would have to come together and find a way of agreeing. “Basically,” he said, “that is the issue: whether people can actually agree.”
Those words are far more consonant with the Good Friday Agreement than Burnham’s abrupt prohibition. But “inevitable” is nevertheless a dangerous word. It turns a democratic possibility into the verdict of history and reduces the people whose consent must be won to spectators at their own constitutional transformation.
Between Burnham’s veto and Brown’s prophecy lies the actual achievement of the Good Friday Agreement. It does not declare the Union permanent. It does not promise that Irish unity must eventually arrive. It simply establishes a process through which either outcome can possess democratic legitimacy.
Northern Ireland will remain within the United Kingdom for as long as a majority wishes it to remain there. It may join a united Ireland if majorities in the North and South freely approve that change.
Britain has surrendered the claim that the Union could be maintained regardless of the wishes of the Northern Irish population. The Republic has surrendered its territorial claim to the North and recognised that national unity could not be imposed without consent.
The principle of consent transformed how Irish republicans could pursue unity and the conditions under which unionists could defend the Union. Neither side was required to renounce its preferred future. Each had to accept that its future could be realised only through persuasion and democratic agreement.
Burnham is therefore entitled to his judgment about whether the statutory threshold for a poll has been reached.
On current evidence, it probably has not. Sinn Féin’s rise has fundamentally changed Northern Irish politics. But election results do not directly translate into referendum votes.
In 2022, Sinn Féin became the first nationalist party to win the largest number of seats in the Assembly. It subsequently became the largest party in local government and the largest Northern Irish party at Westminster. Michelle O’Neill’s installation as First Minister was a historic reversal in a state originally constructed to guarantee permanent unionist control.
Yet the end of unionist predominance did not signal the arrival of a nationalist majority.
The unionist vote has fragmented among the Democratic Unionist Party, the Ulster Unionists, Traditional Unionist Voice and smaller formations. The cross-community Alliance Party has grown. Also, more voters identify as neither nationalist nor unionist. Their constitutional preferences cannot be inferred from older communal categories. Even a Catholic background no longer produces an automatic vote for unity, just as a Protestant background does not guarantee unqualified enthusiasm for the Union.
Northern Ireland has become more politically fluid at precisely the moment when commentators want to reduce it to demographic destiny.
Opinion polls about Irish reunification are similarly unstable. Their results vary with the wording of the question, assumptions about taxation and public services, the timing of the transition, and whether reunification is explicitly linked to renewed membership in the European Union.
A hypothetical united Ireland costs nothing, disrupts nothing and asks no one to revise an identity. By contrast, a concrete proposal would have to specify institutions, tax rates, healthcare arrangements, pension guarantees and provisions for citizenship. Until these details are spelt out, polling about reunification cannot give clear indications of consent to a constitutional settlement.
Brexit has altered the terrain on which these attitudes form. Northern Ireland voted to remain in the European Union but was taken out by the votes of England and Wales. The ensuing struggle over the border exposed a contradiction that the Good Friday Agreement and shared European membership had allowed Britain and Ireland to soften.
If the United Kingdom left the European customs and regulatory order while the Republic remained within it, a meaningful economic boundary had to exist somewhere.
Restoring it across the island would threaten both practical cooperation and the symbolic foundation of the peace. Placing it in the Irish Sea would weaken Northern Ireland’s economic integration with Britain and intensify unionist fears that London regarded the province as conditionally British.
The Northern Ireland Protocol and the Windsor Framework were ingenious attempts to manage a problem that could not be solved cleanly. Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom while continuing to follow certain aspects of the European single market for goods.
This hybrid status may confer genuine economic advantages. It also shows that the United Kingdom’s constitutional integrity has already been qualified to accommodate Ireland’s political geography.
For nationalists, Brexit strengthened the argument that British sovereignty subjects Northern Ireland to decisions its people cannot control. For unionists, its implementation confirmed that successive British governments will compromise the Union when larger English political interests demand it. For the growing population attached to neither camp, it supplied a lesson in the hazards of constitutional improvisation.
Everyone was promised simplicity. Everyone received customs regulations.
That is why Burnham’s analogy with Brexit cuts in both directions. He is right that referendums can deepen divisions and produce consequences their sponsors have not anticipated.
But Brexit did not fail because voters were asked a constitutional question. It failed because they were asked to approve an undefined destination. “Leave” united mutually incompatible projects under a single word, after which politicians spent years pretending the contradictions could be overcome by sufficient enthusiasm. The lesson is not that constitutional referendums should be forbidden. The proposed change must be designed before the vote, rather than improvised after it.
The Good Friday Agreement specifies how the constitutional question can be decided, but not what a united Ireland would look like.
Would the North be absorbed into the existing Republic, or would reunification create a new state with a new constitution? Would Stormont continue? How would British citizenship be preserved? What would happen to healthcare, welfare, pensions and taxation?
Burnham does not need to answer these questions, and certainly not during a prime ministerial day trip. But anyone who wants a referendum to produce something more durable than a narrow majority and an administrative crisis must eventually answer them.
Gordon Brown’s intervention is useful because it places the long-term possibility of unity within the vocabulary of British political respectability.
A former prime minister deeply committed to maintaining the United Kingdom can recognise that Northern Ireland occupies a different historical and constitutional position from Scotland. British unionism need not depend upon pretending that the present borders will last forever.
But Brown’s certainty is no better foundation for policy than Burnham’s refusal.
Ireland will be one only if a majority in the North believes the new state offers a future in which they can live. A majority in the Republic accepts the obligations that follow from sharing that future.
People will have to come together and find a way of agreeing. Brown got that much exactly right. But before Northern Ireland can agree, its citizens will need to know what they are being asked to agree about.
Photograph courtesy of Allan Leonard. Published under a Creative Commons license.
