You’d never know it, but the future of the United Kingdom is at stake | Martin Kettle

The upcoming election could trigger the breakup of the union, and yet the main all-UK parties have barely mentioned it

If the Conservatives win a majority on 12 December, as they are favourites to do, they will claim a mandate to “get Brexit done”. As a result, there is an extremely real possibility that, by the time of the next scheduled election in 2024, the United Kingdom as we know it will no longer exist. Scotland may by then have voted to become an independent country. Northern Ireland may have voted to unify with the Irish republic. But you would hardly know any of this from the general election campaign so far.

In the leaders’ debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, there was much discussion of Brexit. But there was no discussion about Brexit’s consequences for the parts of the UK – Scotland and Northern Ireland – that did not vote for it. Nor was there a single word about Brexit’s effect on the unresolved divides in Ireland. This was genuinely remarkable. For the past three years, the issue of Ireland has been at the very core of the argument about Brexit. But now, from the leaders of Britain’s two main parties, there was absolutely nothing. Not for the first time in British political debate, it was as though Ireland simply did not exist.

There is a black hole not just in the election campaign, but in our politics where a unified nation is supposed to be

Related: Majority of Scottish voters feel ignored by UK ministers on Brexit

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