Former prime minister Gordon Brown has declared that Irish reunification is a matter of when, not if — even as he doubles down on his long-held conviction that Scotland should remain part of the United Kingdom.
The remarks, made in a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian’s Saturday magazine, carry particular weight given Brown’s central role in the Northern Ireland peace process. As Tony Blair’s chancellor, he was in office when the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998. A decade later, as prime minister, he oversaw the devolution of justice and policing powers to the Stormont power-sharing executive — another landmark moment for reconciliation.
A United Ireland: ‘Inevitable’ in the Long Term
Pressed on whether Northern Ireland’s geographical connection to the Republic of Ireland made reunification logical, Brown did not hesitate.
“Yes. Well, of course, in the long term, Ireland will be united.”
He was quick, however, to caution against any notion of a rushed settlement. The process, he insisted, would have to be deliberate and consensual.
“A long process where people have got to come together and find a way of agreeing. Basically, that is the issue: whether people can actually agree.”
The intervention is striking not only for its clarity but for its source. Brown has spent much of his post-Downing Street career championing the union, and his opposition to Scottish independence is well documented. Yet on Northern Ireland, his tone carries the unmistakable weight of someone who helped broker peace in a place where old wounds still surface.
Scotland: A Different Argument
Brown drew a sharp distinction between the constitutional futures of Northern Ireland and Scotland. Where Irish reunification, in his view, flows from geography and demography, Scottish independence, he argued, would run counter to deep-rooted ties.
“Scotland’s got to find a way of living in cooperation with other countries, and independence would not be the right way forward,” he said. “We’re geographically, economically, socially, culturally linked to the rest of the United Kingdom, whether it’s Wales, England or parts of Ireland.”
It is a familiar refrain from a politician who has framed unionism as a matter of practical interdependence rather than abstract sentiment. But the juxtaposition with his Irish comments is bound to attract scrutiny, not least from unionists uneasy about any prediction of eventual reunification from a former Labour leader.
North Sea Oil, Andy Burnham, and the Energy Debate
Away from constitutional questions, Brown used the interview — published to coincide with his new book, The Future Starts With Us — to wade into one of the most politically combustible debates of the moment: the future of North Sea oil and gas.
He insisted he had no intention of telling Andy Burnham, his former cabinet colleague, how to handle the issue. But he could not resist making his own case for continued extraction, even as consultations on the controversial Rosebank and Jackdaw fields have recently closed.
“I think you can support renewables as the future for British energy and support the development of the North Sea to use some of the existing oil and gas,” Brown argued.
In his telling, the debate has been wrongly framed as a straight fight between fossil fuels and clean energy. The real question, he suggested, is how to manage the transition — and how to repurpose the infrastructure, engineering know-how, and skilled workforce already embedded in the North Sea basin.
“The way to use the North Sea for hydrogen, for wind — it could be floating wind — and for carbon capture and storage, which are three energy products that could come out of the North Sea, the way to make that happen is to keep the infrastructure and skills that you have in the development of the North Sea for oil and gas.”
He proposed a “European consortium” involving Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark as a vehicle for managing that shift. And he pushed back against the idea that environmental policy was a drag on growth.
“It’s quite important that renewable costs are coming down all the time,” he noted. “So, 20 years ago it would’ve been cheaper to produce coal and oil and gas, but now of course you have the advantages of solar power and wind power and everything else. So, investing in the environment is potentially a money-saving thing.”
Environmental policies, he concluded, “got to be seen as a benefit and not just a cost.”
Why it Matters
Brown’s comments land at a delicate moment for both Northern Ireland and Scotland. His prediction of eventual Irish reunification — even hedged with caveats about consent and timescale — will embolden nationalists and unsettle unionists, particularly coming from a former prime minister who was instrumental in the Good Friday Agreement. His simultaneous defence of the union with Scotland underscores the increasingly complex constitutional picture facing the UK, where different nations appear to be on distinctly different trajectories. And his intervention on North Sea energy, while carefully framed, signals that the debate over Rosebank and Jackdaw is far from settled — and that Labour figures of the Brown era intend to keep shaping it.
