The simple answer to the first question is “no, although it has been moving in that direction since the 1990s”. The devolved status of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales resembles true federal constitutions like the USA and Germany only superficially. Furthermore, the new redrawing of parliamentary constituencies tends to reverse the drift towards federalism.
The problem, of course, is the overwhelming predominance of England. In real federal nations there are of course great inequalities between one unit (state) and another, but there are mechanisms deliberately put in place to enhance the power of the smaller units. The most obvious version of this is devolution – certain powers are refused to the central authority and reserved to the units. The UK has been slowly and unevenly moving in this direction since the 1990s.
In a bicameral legislature there is usually a more subtle form of minority power, such that the lower house (US House, German Bundestag) is filled by election in proportion to the population of the units, but is kept in check by an upper house (US Senate, German Bundesrat) in which the smaller states are over-represented. In Britain the lower house (Commons) is elected according to population, but the upper house is filled by appointment. There is no mechanism by which Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are guaranteed a veto over the overwhelming power of the English in the lower house.
The election of upper and lower houses in a federal system can be thought of mathematically as depending on the population of each unit to some power. Lower houses, whether or not using the first-past-the-post system, are typically represented in direct proportion to the population of the district, i.e. as (population)1. An upper house which is weighted towards the smaller districts goes as a power less than 1. In the US every state has the same number (2) of Senate seats, there is no dependence on population at all – mathematically, this is (population)0.
There is a slight federal tendency built into the current (“old”) Britih lower house, where seats are not exactly proportional to (population)1 :
Nation Old seats New seats
England 533 502
Scotland 59 52
Wales 40 30
N. Ireland 18 16
Total 650 600
The new seats are as close as possible proportional to (population)1, but a close look at the old seats shows that, relative to England, Northern Ireland follows (population)0.99 while Wales and Scotland follows about (population)0.93. These powers are far from the values (population)0-0.5 which would be acceptable in a federal system, but even this small measure of federalism has now been taken away.
Whether the UK should be a federal state is of course a matter of opinion. On the one hand a defined federal constitution would give more protection against the overwhelming power of England; it would also give the smaller nations a limited say in issues such as defence and foreign policy which are outside the scope of devolved legislatures. On the other hand, a federal constitution will usually be set up by a mutually binding agreement whose basics cannot be altered. In particular secession by the sub-units is specifically forbidden (this was proved in America by the outcome of the Civil War). Federalism should therefore not be seen as a half-way house to independence – divorce can only occur by mutual consent in this marriage. Federalism is an end in itself. So, is half a loaf better than no bread? My opinion, for what it is worth, is that federalism is no substitute for Welsh independence, and that out-and-out nationalists should be very wary of accepting a binding federal constitution for the UK even as a compromise.
It’s one of the great scandals of Welsh politics, but the Liberal Democrats, everlasting proponents of electoral fairness and proportional representation for once never mention it.
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