British unionists struggled to adapt the legitimising foundations of their political project to the realities of a post-Brexit UK

How did key unionist actors articulate the legitimising foundations of the Union in the four years following the EU referendum? And to what extent did they set out a renewed case for its continuation? Drawing on parliamentary debates, party documents and conference notes, Daniel Cetrà and Coree Brown Swan find that, despite the profound nature of the challenges posed by Brexit, dominant legitimising claims continued to be instrumentalist defences of the Union rooted in economics and welfare. These were underpinned by ideas of social union around shared solidarity and belonging and supplemented by an invocation of common British values.