Brown: Irish reunification inevitable, but Scotland must stay in UK

Gordon Brown, the former prime minister who helped shepherd Northern Ireland toward peace nearly three decades ago, has declared that Irish reunification is not a question of if but when. In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian, he acknowledged what many have long suspected: that the geographic and cultural logic pulling Northern Ireland toward the Republic is, over time, irresistible. Yet he was careful to frame this inevitability as something distant and conditional—a process that would unfold slowly, requiring the consent of the people involved, not imposed by political will.

Brown's position carries particular weight because of his direct hand in the architecture of modern Irish peace. He was Tony Blair's chancellor in 1998 when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, the treaty that ended decades of violence and established the framework for power-sharing in Northern Ireland. Twelve years later, as prime minister, he oversaw the devolution of justice and policing powers to Northern Ireland's government, another crucial step in the long work of reconciliation. His voice on this question is not that of a distant observer but of someone who helped build the institutions that made coexistence possible.

What makes Brown's remarks striking, however, is the sharp distinction he draws between Northern Ireland and Scotland. When asked about Scottish independence—a cause he has opposed with considerable force—Brown insisted that Scotland must find its future within the United Kingdom. Scotland, he argued, is woven into the fabric of Britain through geography, economics, culture, and social ties. The union makes sense and should endure. But Northern Ireland, he suggested, occupies a different constitutional space. Its geographic proximity to the Republic, its cultural and historical ties to the island of Ireland, create a different calculus. When pressed on whether those links made unification logical, Brown did not hedge: "Yes. Well, of course, in the long term, Ireland will be united."

He was emphatic, though, that such a union could not be rushed or imposed. It would be "a long process where people have got to come together and find a way of agreeing." The mechanism, in his view, is consent—the willingness of people on both sides of the border to choose unity together. That consensus, he implied, does not yet exist and may not for years or decades. But the direction of travel, in his assessment, is set.

Beyond the constitutional question, Brown used the interview to weigh in on another fraught issue facing the current government: whether to permit new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. He rejected the framing of this as a simple choice between fossil fuels and clean energy. Instead, he argued for a managed transition in which existing North Sea infrastructure and workforce expertise could be repurposed toward renewable energy production—wind, hydrogen, and carbon capture technology. He proposed a European consortium involving Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark to coordinate this shift. The argument was pragmatic: keeping the skills and systems already in place, rather than abandoning them, would make the transition to renewables faster and cheaper. Brown also noted that renewable energy costs have fallen dramatically over two decades, making investment in clean power increasingly economical rather than merely idealistic. Environmental policy, he suggested, should be understood not as a burden but as an investment that saves money over time.