Welcome to the website of the Federal Union, an institution created in 1938 to help to build a better British and European polity.
We welcome members from all democratic political parties and none.
Our eyes are firmly on a better British future.
We also, elsewhere on this website, cherish and record much of Federal Union’s past.
Over the years, Federal Union has enjoyed both the support of the UK’s political leaders – for example prime ministers – and leaders from the arts as well as a mass membership. I hope we can re-build both.
We were influential in helping to build free Europe’s Post War constitutional settlement.
The only British President of the European Commission – Roy Jenkins – credited Federal Union with having made possible the UK’s Accession to the European Communities in 1973.
While our Country evolved common law and while our history offers a series of occasional landmarks such as the Magna Carta of 1215, the Bill of Rights of 1689 and more recent devolving of power to Scotland and Wales, the UK does not have a codified constitution. This is an eccentricity in the modern democratic world and it is one which the evidence increasingly suggests we can ill afford.
The UK’s political system is manifestly failing too many of our people for too much of the time.
To preserve the best of our past, we need rapid implementation of a New Constitutional Deal.
We the British people must be empowered and trusted to control much more of our own destinies.
We need a political system that more reliably places our constitutional institutions above political parties.
Brexit – which has destabilised devolution and resulted in ever higher levels of secondary legislation and associated undesirable practices such as further enhancement of centralised power within Whitehall – arguably evidences a significant escalation of failure of the British State.
As if that were not bad enough, now even human-rights laws, which the British helped to write, are under threat in the UK.
Too many decisions are taken without transparency and Whitehall controls too much of the UK’s money.
Too many people rightly feel too many decisions impacting on their lives are too hard to influence: so people, being logical, too often do not bother to try.
This is unhealthy for the future of British politics. Avoidable discontent opens the door wider for populists whose rhetoric both divides rather than unites and also offers more than can or, sometimes, properly should be delivered.
While there may be a role for big city mayors in a federal country, the existence of mayors does not in itself offer the necessary invigoration of bringing politics closer to people. Bristol is a city with a long tradition of vigorous civic politics and the decision of Bristolians to dispense with their mayor should command wider respect and understanding.
If we the British people can realistically believe ourselves to be in charge of more of our destiny, this needs real transfer of powers not gesture politics.
We need a significant transfer of tax revenues from Whitehall to localities and sufficient invigoration of local democracy for local people credibly to believe they have local powers.
We all need realistically to feel we own our democracy, local and national.
We the British people need a New Constitutional Deal: two core components of this are much fairer votes and much more power much closer to where people live.
The UK needs a formal constitution entrenching human rights and a federal structure. The free world, including leading democracies within the British Commonwealth, is not exactly short of templates!
One crucial component of such a federal structure is to accept that England cannot be regarded as a single entity.
For example, as our late Deputy Chair Harold Elletson strongly articulated, the North of England needs much more control over its own affairs.
As Harold also understood, we also need to engage with the government of Ireland to work towards more amity and more sustainable outcomes on both sides of the Irish Sea.
Had he lived longer, he had intended to develop both policies within Federal Union. I hope the baton will be picked up.
Federal Union has always been profoundly internationalist.
We have a strong tradition of being active members of both the European Union of Federalists and of the World Federalist Movement/Institute for Global Policy.
Please do not feel you have to agree with all of the above to belong within Federal Union.
All federalists of good faith are pushing on Federal Union’s open door and we of course welcome new Members from all over the UK regardless of age, gender, religion, sexual orientation and so on.
We want to build a voice for a federal UK that will be clearly heard across the UK.
I am acutely aware of both the debt we owe to those who founded Federal Union – not all of whom survived the fight for freedom in the Second World War – and also of the moral obligation we owe to the UK’s successor generations to offer a better polity than we inherited but which instead we have recently allowed to deteriorate.
More than a century has elapsed since Winston Churchill – arguably building on Joseph Chamberlain’s views a generation earlier – unambiguously advocated federalism across the UK, including within England. This view was later advocated at a European level by Clement Attlee.
Like other necessary constitutional reform, federalism is long overdue. In so many aspects of our lives, we the British people are paying an avoidable price for the resulting suboptimal polity.
Please join us in helping to make tomorrow better than today.
Dirk Hazell
Chair, Federal Union