Every meeting on every day is, I suppose, historic in a literal sense. However we are asked by nationalists around the British Isles to regard Monday’s meeting between the leaders of the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Fein to believe that their get-together in Cardiff was historic in a rhetorical rather than simply a literal sense.

Time will tell, but for the moment both prudence and evidence would lead us to think that it will struggle to make a footnote in a Wikipedia entry on Celtic nationalism. However, for all that the rather contrived Cardiff Agreement looks rather like an essay in search of a commission, rather than one created in response to demand, that is not true of the electoral events which led to it.

When Welsh nationalists won control in the Senedd in May, they joined Scotland and Northern Ireland in having nationalists in the highest devolved offices who wish to remove themselves from the United Kingdom. That really was historic, it really does matter, and because of the Westminster psychodrama around the then Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, and now Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s ongoing attempted coups, it has not received the political attention by Britain’s unionists that it ought to have had.

Before I submit my view about what that unionist response should be, it is important to address the inherent difficulties in the nationalist case. Because it is difficult, I think, to dispute the fact that nationalism’s key deficiency all over the British Isles (albeit to different degrees) is that it simply isn’t popular enough.

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