The Brexit mirror cracked from side to side under the weight of simple, sheer reality this week. The fissure in the Brexit mirror began to appear when Norway’s Foreign Minister told the world that no, the UK could not re-enter the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) just because it fancied the idea. The UK was … Continue reading The Brexit Mirror — cracked from side to side
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Theresa May, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has said, several times now, that ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ The problem is that nobody is quite sure what that means. It would appear that even Ms May is somewhat vague on what Brexit means. Does Brexit mean what the likes of Redwood and Cash mean, … Continue reading Brexit means Brexit
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The first signs of widespread panic amongst the UK’s hard-right, swivelly-eyed Brexiteers have begun to appear. In our last Friday Politics we pointed out that Brexit, as promised by the triumvirate of swivelly-eyed-ness, Johnson, Gove and Farage, is dead. It can’t happen. Now that realisation has got through to those whose eyes are usually so … Continue reading Swivelly-eyed Brexit panic.
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Less than a moth ago, the UK went to the polls and voted to leave the European Union. It was called Brexit. Today, Brexit is dead. What on Earth happened? The reality that Brexit could not be delivered became apparent even in the hours after the result. Why did David Cameron, the then Prime Minister, … Continue reading Brexit is dead.
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In the little white-painted town of Santa Westminstera, havoc had broken out. The town was ruled by two gangs of ruthless bandits. But both of these had begun fighting amongst themselves. The rule of the bosses had collapsed and anarchy reigned. In an adobe house in the main street huddled one of the last remaining … Continue reading Scene from an Imaginary Western
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The internationally known UK law firm of Mishcon de Reya has moved to block any unconstitutional attempt to trigger the UK’s early departure from the EU. In a piece by Owen Bowbott, The Guardian newspaper today reports that Mishcon de Reya ‘has retained the services of senior constitutional barristers, including Lord Pannick QC and Rhodri … Continue reading Mishcon de Reya moves against early Brexit
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When is a referendum not a referendum? Answer — when it is a politically convenient device used by a slippery Prime Minister in trouble with half his MPs. The EU Referendum held on the 23rd of June was phony. It has no legal consequences. That in turn means that it has no effect. Whoever becomes … Continue reading Cameron’s Phony Referendum
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Who governs Britain is the question we must now answer. One week ago, the British people voted, by a slim majority, in favour of leaving the European Union. The voters gave their opinion. That is all they did. But by doing so they provoked a Constitutional crisis for the United Kingdom, which may yet turn … Continue reading Who Governs Britain?
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In the UK, Parliament is the ultimate authority. All power is held by it. While technically, sovereignty resides with the people, in the UK this is ceded to and implemented by a group of elected representatives called Members of Parliament. The UK is NOT a plebiscitary democracy; it is a representational one. Elected Members of … Continue reading Parliament is Sovereign in the UK
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The British Project was — and is — simply this: to make the world England. To profit from it and get rich on the military colonisation of other, weaker people, yes, that was its stimulus. But its philosophical motivation was to make the world England. When I was at school, we had maps on the … Continue reading The British Project: the sun goes down
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Finesse might be David Cameron’s middle name. He was a long-time and successful PR man before entering politics, and, having been one myself, I can assure you that this is a training that makes you grasp every opportunity to show how good you are. And of course, how stupid, incompetent and generally just bad your … Continue reading Finesse: Cameron’s booby-trap
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Captain of the UK ship of State, Dave ‘Mine’s a Pint’ Cameron nailed his colours to the mast and finally had the worm-eaten hulk torpedoed from under him. And what did it? His own insufferable Tory hubris and his barrow-boy addiction to gambling. Thanks to Cameron, the end of Europe as we know it has become likely. The voters in Britain just pulled out the props and the sky fell in.
Well, that was what it felt like this morning as I turned on my pc and suddenly realised that the UK had altered the course of history. The sky has not actually fallen in, of course, but apparently it is dark with the bodies of money-men throwing themselves off tall buildings in the City of London. They will soon be joined, I should not wonder, by the corpses of Tory grandees caught on the wrong side as the traditional ‘Night of the Long Knives’ is enacted.
We have just seen the biggest single political event since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Not just in European, but world terms. The echoes of the cataclysm are booming through the corridors of power from Washington to Moscow. Vlad ‘The Slayer’ Putin must have chuckled in his morning bath of chamomile leaves as his aides brought him the good news.
Wot no pint Dave?
Having narrowly escaped being the PM who oversaw the end of the UK, Mine’s a Pint Cameron looks likely to be the one who oversaw the beginning of the end of both the EU and the UK. Capital effort, old boy. Spiffing.
Certes, rarely has luck conspired against a politician to the extent that it has Cameron, but we are reminded of the old saw: ‘those who live by the sword, die by the sword.’
Cameron chanced his arm on Scotland and only just got away with it. He gambled again, that he could offer a meaningless promise of a referendum on Brexit when it looked like he would have to share power with the Liberal slimy-say-anything party.
That whole disgrace to politics has not enough spine between its entire membership to complete one functioning vertebral column. Nevertheless, Cameron knew it could be relied on, after a couple of quiet phone-calls promising ministerial posts to incompetent Liberal dishrags, to kybosh the idea of a referendum. Oh dear no, against our ‘principles’, that is. Home Office, Dave, I think we just earned that.
But Cameron’s own party, the Conservatives, actually won the 2015 General Election outright and guess what? Its voters remembered that little thing about the referendum.
Which, by the way, is what being ‘hoist by one’s own petard’ means, children.
So now, because of his big floppy opportunistic mouth, Dave ‘Mine’s a Pint’ Cameron becomes a laughing-stock of an ex-Prime Minister, while some very ugly people whoop and cheer his long-deserved defenestration.
Nobody knows. This is the quintessential leap in the dark. Nobody actually thought it would happen; even I believed it would be a narrow ‘Remain’ victory. I don’t think anyone was prepared either for the decision or the strength of it.
In fact the decision is not legally binding and will have to be ratified by Parliament. Then the procedure for leaving the EU — called, bureaucratically enough, a Section 50 process — will have to be put in motion by the UK Government. But woe betide a Parliament that tried to overturn such a clear indication of popular will.
Then, the EU is not monolithic and consists of a spider’s-web of treaties. While the 1972 Treaty of Accession — which subordinates the UK’s sovereignty to the EEC and its successors and formalises membership — will be repealed early on, there are literally tens of thousands of words in myriad subsequent treaties and accords that will have to be gone through line by line.
Wildly optimistic estimates suggest that it will take two years to complete the exit process; more sober ones five; those familiar with the EU might suggest, ‘try ten.’
For the immediate future then, nothing will happen; it’s business as usual, quite literally. But major changes are a-coming and people need to prepare themselves.
However, this is not the end to the shenanigans. The UK is not the only member state of the EU that is fed up with its relentless centralisation and the way Germany in particular has used its apparatus to silence all opposition. There may well be calls in other EU states for referendums.The EU itself looks distinctly queasy this morning.
The Euro, that painted sepulchre of its hubris, is now on far shakier ground than it was yesterday, which is probably why the pound, at time of writing, was holding against it — and both were plummeting against the US dollar.
We should be prepared for a spate of calls by pro-EU stooges in the UK and also from other nations — and yes, I do mean the Germans — for a re-run of the referendum. After all, the standard EU method of dealing with referendum results it doesn’t like is to coerce the relevant nation into holding another one, while large numbers of snarling goons, er, ‘senior politicians’, promise every calamity from simooms to plagues of locusts, should the voters make the same mistake again.
Domestically, things have got very confused. England voted overwhelmingly for Brexit but Scotland, by an even bigger majority, to Remain. The Scottish Government, which is nationalist and seeks a new referendum on Scotland’s membership of the UK, has already stated that it is bringing forward plans for just that.
In 2014, the Scots voted, by a fair margin, to stay in the UK; but they voted last night by an even larger one to stay in Europe. This difference between the two primary partners in the UK may well cause their divorce. We do have to say that none of the potential candidates for Mine’s a Pint’s job look even remotely like they could persuade the Scots to stay, in a future Scottish independence referendum. Meanwhile the pox-raddled old hoors of the Labour Party that played Unionist poodle last time are laughing-stocks, after every promise they made turned out to be as empty as Balliol’s cloak.
The Damoclean Sword of Independence has two edges and it cuts both ways. Last night it may have been unhitched from the rafters to plunge relentlessly down at the British State, while slicing a chunk off the EU on the way.
What interesting times we do live in to be sure.
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In 1973 a referendum led to the UK joining the European Economic Community, as it was then called. Then, because Harold Wilson was unhappy with he membership terms, after the Labour Party that he led came to power, a second referendum was held in 1975.
Many people, like me, voted ‘yes,’ in both referendums. Under the same circumstances, given the same choice, I would vote the same way again now; but the circumstances have changed beyond all recognition.
In order to avoid the accusation of blinkered thinking, I will state that I actually live in France. I have, in total, lived here for 9 out of the last 23 years; and I have loved most of it. I love France, I like the French and I like the place I live in. I am fluent in French and I have profited from the arrangement, there is no doubt.
Nevertheless, my vote is to to leave and I strongly advise everyone else to do so too. Let me explain why.
At root the question being asked in the referendum is this and only this: do the benefits of being a part of the EU count for more than the loss of sovereignty that it has entailed? Has it delivered democracy, powerful economic growth and security in sufficient measure to make up for its centralisation of power?
The UK has a Constitution formed by several discrete documents, of which the earliest and most important is the 1707 Treaty of Union between Scotland and England, which brought it into being. However, neither Scotland nor England themselves have written Constitutions and they have completely separate legal systems. (All laws applicant in both jurisdictions are effected by two separate Acts, one for Scotland and one for England.)
Within these separate jurisdictions, the individual national Constitutions depend on two things: jurisprudence and Acts of Parliament. In other words, court decisions under Common Law form one part, while specific Acts approved by the Parliaments form the other. One function of an ‘Act of Parliament’ is to change, modify or repeal existing laws which no longer, in the collective opinion of Parliament, represent the view of the broader society or a fair and reasonable position in the light of present knowledge.
While countless thousands of words have been written about the British Constitution, it may be summed up like this: within a structure of partner nations defined by treaty, an extremely flexible, transparent and accountable structure of Common Law and Parliamentary Acts established through the courts and by public Parliamentary debate, defines the civil state of the people.
If this sounds like what you imagine the EU to be, you may be in for a nasty shock.
In essence, the Commission is the Government of Europe. But not one single elected politician sits on it. Every Commissioner, including the President, is an appointee. There is no democratic sanction on or requirement for accountability on any of them. No European Commissioner, ever, has been called up in front of their nation’s own Parliament and required to publicly explain themselves.
Laws are passed by national politicians acting out of role; the Council of Ministers. None of these campaign, during the domestic elections that select them, on their performance on the Council; so there is no accountability for their actions there.
The ‘European Parliament’, is but an expensive talking shop; it is an advisory body with limited powers of examination of and regulation over the Commission, the bureaucracy and the laws being passed. The EP may not propose Laws, as that is reserved to the Commission, although it may scrutinise them. However, no one nation may block any law through the EP; it always requires multinational cooperation. Most of the laws that the UK’s European Parliamentarians voted against over the last five years were passed anyway.
So while the British peoples are used to and have over centuries developed, a system of Parliamentary democracy that does provide transparency, that does provide accountability, that does protect minorities and which is able to minutely scrutinise and, ultimately, have democratic and public sanction over the Government, in the EU this is far more the ideal than the reality.
The ‘democratic deficit’ produced by this is the consequence EU’s origins as a trading bloc. It was never intended to be a super-state, which is what it now is.
As if this were not bad enough, successive enlargements of the EU have removed an already distant decision-making apparatus ever further from the people it governs. From the six original members of the EEC, which were France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, the EU has bloated to twenty-eight. In part, this was the fault of successive British governments, which saw enlargement as a foil to deeper integration.
Unfortunately, we got expansion alongside deeper integration, just without the democracy. All the British rejection of the so-called ‘European Constitution’ — which did propose some democratic control over the runaway behemoth — did, was to exacerbate the problem. This delighted the European bureaucrats, who had been shaking in their boots in fear that the prospect of a democratic Europe might actually become reality. The 2009 Lisbon Treaty, the cobbled-together surrogate for it, contained all that was bad in the proposed Constitution and little that was good.
As well as this, the dreaded ‘two-speed’ Europe has, likewise, come into existence. The Euro project has provoked rapidly greater integration between the nineteen countries of the so-called Eurozone. This has led directly to an explosion in laws, regulatory structures and, of course, because this is the EU, bureaucracy.
Worse — if it could be — because there is a legally-binding presumption that all member states will eventually join the Euro, those laws, structures and bureaucracies affect all the non-Eurozone EU member states too, including the UK — despite the fact that it has an ‘exemption’ from ever joining.
The democratic crisis has finally come home to roost in this last year. Greece, a sovereign nation, has collapsed in all but name and must now dance to the tune of money-lenders in Berlin. Italy is not far behind and could fail at any time.
These nations have been ruined because they are part of the Eurozone. Were they not, their currency values would have fallen, their goods and services would have therefore been cheaper and they would have seen inflows of money, leading to jobs and wealth. But the powerful German economy keeps the Euro too high for this.
At the same time the presence of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain in the Eurozone keeps the Euro lower than it would otherwise be. Were it not so, Germany would today have priced itself out of competition, especially with Italy, a formerly (pre-Euro) successful manufacturing nation. So the Euro drains money from the southern European countries and gives it to Germany and the northern ones.
The EEC and its successors, the European Community (EC) and the EU were never designed to deal with a re-unified Germany. For the first decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany sought economic assistance from its European ‘partners’ to help with the reconstruction of the bankrupt former East Germany. But those days were over fifteen years ago and today, the economic power of a unified Germany has once again destabilised Europe.
That Britain was right to avoid joining the Euro is now crystal clear. Southern Europe will soon be bankrupted by it, with the exception of Greece, because it already has been. What was not clear, fifteen years ago, was the extent to which the European bureaucracy would proliferate on the back of the introduction of the common currency. If it had been bloated before — and it was — today it is beyond even Orwellian nightmare. This phantasmagorical monster is the result of a failed dream. And, yes, the EU has failed.
The promise of a Europe run by transparent, representative government and elected politicians is dead. We — through our national governments — said we did not want elected European officials. We did not want a proper European Presidency. We rejected the so-called ‘European Constitution’ that was at least an attempt to lay the foundations of a democratic Europe. And now we must drink the sour milk that we are left with.
The moment of reductio ad absurdam has arrived. Without an elected and transparent supranational government, what we have is the Soviet Union, German Capitalist version. The EP may, as happened in 1999, vote ‘no confidence’ in a Commission, but, crucially, it cannot choose the replacement.
It is not, now, a question of a ‘democratic deficit’. The EU is a democratic vacuum. And just as happened in the Soviet Union, the cumbersome behemoth we have created is dragging down the European economy. Its flagship, that painted sepulchre of hubris, the Euro, has already ruined one member state, as others teeter on the brink.
This is not what we were promised; Thursday’s referendum gives us the chance to correct that.
The economy was not the only thing we had in mind when we voted to join the EEC, however. Then, the Cold War was at its height.
We lived under the rules of three: the three minutes between the air-raid sirens going off and our being incinerated and the three days it would have taken the Red Army to cross the Rhine. At that fateful point we would launch nuclear Armageddon ourselves and be likewise vaporised. We were on the cusp of the final conflict; batteries of Bloodhound missiles looked east along the coast like grim sentinels, painted, incongruously, angelic white. European war was both recent and imminent.
In the 1970s, joining ‘Europe’ was the only sensible choice, not just in the interests of the UK, but in order to preserve and promote the Europe we believed in from external threat.
It is not like that any more. Anyone who thinks Vladimir Putin, for all his faults, desires to see Russian tanks on the streets of Berlin or Paris is delusional.
Today, the threats are different. An unprecedented wave of sexual assaults on women is sweeping Europe right now, and the perpetrators are incomers who not recognise, indeed even despise, our culture. ‘Security’ is not just defending against nuclear war or terrorist attack; it is also making the streets safe and, while policing is a national issue, the EU has signally failed to coordinate an adequate policy to address uncontrolled migration from outside. Germany, indeed, has broken every protocol of Europe by negotiating directly with non-EU states over the migrant crisis an, by doing so, drastically worsened the plight of the other EU states. That was why the protocols were in place; and Germany need not pretend that it is a ‘good European’ now.
While the German behaviour is inexcusable, the EU’s ‘response’ to the Syrian migrant crisis has been piecemeal and positively counter-productive. Its agreement with Turkey means that the most educated and qualified individuals leaving the Syrian conflict zone are resettled there, while Europe has to take those who are of least use to us and who cost the most.
While this is happening, the very states that are bearing the brunt of the assault of economic migrants, are left floundering, bankrupted and completely unable to resist.
On security, then, as on democracy and economic management, the EU has failed.
There is a possibility that a referendum vote for the UK to leave would lead to the collapse of the EU. Today it has pauperised whole nations and spawned a bureaucratic monster that even Joseph Stalin could not have dreamed of. One would have to say that its demise is long overdue.
The EU has shown that it cannot contain German economic power; rather it has become the instrument of it. Without the EU, European nations would be free to make new international agreements that would allow them to redress the imbalance, just as free nations always have. For example, the southern nations, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, might form one such bloc. The former Communist nations, which also share a common cultural heritage, might form another. Nations would be free — as they should be — to negotiate agreements where they desire and not to, where they do not.
Such initiatives would help to counter German economic dominance and, with the termination of the Euro project that would be a pre-requisite, allow such new blocs to develop and operate economic policy in their own interests. This would be a good thing, not only for Europe in general but also for Germany, which can have no long-term interest in seeing its neighbours go bankrupt. Yet this road is blocked by the simple existence of the EU, lying like a monstrous pile of scrap in the way.
My late brother, who had a pithy way with words, would describe something so ruinously clapped-out as to be unrepairable as needing to be ‘rubbed out and drawed in again’. That is exactly where the EU now finds itself; but it will not do the necessary deed alone. Someone has to pull the trigger. Somebody has to let the curtain fall on the farce that it has become.
Referendum voters in the UK just might strike a blow for liberty and fairness. They might deliver the shock that puts an end to the insanity, like the crazing of a car windscreen penetrated by a single pebble. They might even be the saviour of a free and democratic Europe; and lest we forget, not for the first time.
To do that, they must use their referendum vote to leave the EU.
At its best, Europe is a collection of fiercely independent but interdependent states. This dynamic is what gave us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. Our culture is at once flawed and disparate but beautiful. Europe is more vibrant, diverse and colourful than any other continent. European is what we are, but it is our differences that make us who we are.
By contrast, the Kafkaesque monstrosity of the EU has made a Europe with all its anarchic liberty and zest excised. It propels us, inexorably, towards a grey, anodyne, ersatz pseudo-Europe with no colour and no life, because it absolutely intends to remove all the very differences that make us who we are. It cannot do otherwise; that is what it was set up to do and, like a driverless juggernaut, it will not be deflected from its path. We have to ask ourselves, urgently, if what it has been designed to achieve is really what we want.
By voting, in this referendum, out of an EU that has failed to deliver democracy, failed to deliver strong economic growth across its territory and failed to deliver security, Britain could, as it has done before, give Europe the opportunity to realise its potential.
Therefore we must vote to leave in the referendum, for while it may be cathartic in the short term, by doing so we might rekindle the flame of European freedom in the longer. A little revolution from time to time is a good thing, don’t you think?
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This must be the conclusion of any mythical, dispassionate, possibly extra-terrestrial viewer when examining the current state of political affairs in the disUnited Kingdom. Less than two years ago a referendum was held which was explicitly intended to slay the nationalist monster for once and for all — sentiments reflecting those of the spectacularly unforesightful George Robertson when this whole journey began and his party found itself obliged to offer Scots a parliament of their own. Yet the genie is far from banished and if anything is more bumptious than ever.
The ‘wee pretendy parliament’ just growed and growed and now its roars — if still distant and ill-understood — have begun to frighten the gentle people of the far south, the colonial overlords of the disUnited Kingdom. Yes, frighten: for the first time since Churchill sent tanks and troops to quell the people of Glasgow, the English establishment has been rattled by events in Scotland.
For them the Scots’ discontentment is a profound mystery, one which they will probably never grasp. For the southern English, the Union is indeed a great thing. It achieved most that it was intended to. It established a militarily secure platform upon which the British Project — to make the world England — could be built and for centuries that project was a success; the Anglo-Saxon patriarchy was spread across the globe by it, taking, somewhat unfortunately, all the prejudice and insecurity of the English middle class with it.
Then again, for the southern English — and not a few Scots who have joined them — London and the south-east of England is the finest place in the world to live. It is a land of fabulous opportunity where all one has to do is work hard and one’s personal streets will be paved with gold. And they are not mean with their largesse: why anyone, from whatever uncultivated backwater of the disUnited Kingdom, may move to London and there spend their days serving the Great British Project, to the betterment — so their apologists attest — of all. Why, look at the money these people can send back to their poor relatives still living in frightful places like Inverurie or Campbeltown.
And this arrangement ideally suits the southern English who are approaching the end of their working days. London’s economic primacy over the disUnited Kingdom means that they can sell their ridiculously overpriced two-bedroom maisonettes and with the money thus liberated, buy a manor in Dunkeld or Aberfeldy. After all, the poor indigenes of these places have not the resources to compete. And if they should complain, then they must come to London, where they may, after a lifetime of slavery to the British Project, earn enough to buy homes for themselves in the places they were born and raised. That is the free market. Yes, the system is equitable and works for the benefit of all.
Look you, the English even build roads and railways so that the impoverished Scots can travel south to where they should be, and there serve the British Project. How could anyone complain or deny this generosity?
Scotland is useful though; it gives the southern English a place to put their nuclear weapons. In truth these will never be used and represent an extravagance of obscene proportions, as well as being illegal. But they are the Imperial sabre that allows the English to pretend that ‘Britain’ is still a world player and that Vladimir Putin really gives a monkey’s what the Great British Prime Minister thinks. Once it was Nelson’s navy, now it is a fleet of submarines equipped with the most horrific killing systems the patriarchy has ever invented. Plus ca change…And in return, taxpayers (who are, of course, all English, since the Scots are all feckless spongers) even give poor Scottish peasant farmers actual real money to work on these obscenities. The fact that if anything ever goes wrong, those peasants will become irradiated flying mince, along with most of the rest of the Scots, is neither here nor there; it is not as if it were London, after all.
Meanwhile, the British Home Office decides who may enter the disUnited Kingdom, in order to protect the interests of everyone in it…or at least, the interests of the south-east of England. But then, the Scots clearly have not the competence to make such decisions: they weren’t born in England, poor things. And since the whole point of the British Project is to make everywhere England, then this too is reasonable and logical.
This is what our space-alien visitors might think, reading the crop of English and Unionist media in the run-up to the Scottish election next month. The Scots are a miserable, ungrateful shower who should be glad of the crumbs of English largesse that drop into the squalid, sordid swamp they live in. England’s generosity and magnanimity towards this backward, miserable wasteland to the north is unsurpassed and ongoing. How dare the Scots protest it?
But then our aliens, being scientists, as they must be to have got this far, would have to take another sample. They would come to Scotland and there they would hear a very different story.
The Scots do not, in the main, want an opportunity to compete for stratospheric wealth. They just want a comfortable life, thank you. The Scots do not hanker for the fair vistas of Tottenham or Islington; they prefer their own cities. The South Downs pale when compared to the Lairig Ghru and beaches? Who would choose Brighton over the magnificent strands of Scotland?
Scots do not appreciate that their children are priced out of living where they grew up and they certainly do not accept that it should be necessary for a person, well qualified and prepared to work hard, to have to go to another country in order to find a decent job.
The Scots, in the main, do not seek to pretend that they can dominate world affairs; by and large they would be happy to play a constructive role in Europe –although their ability to do so must, of course, be decided by the English. They do not respond warmly to the rattle of imperial sabres, partly because those sabres have been used, all too often, on the Scots themselves; but also because they do not covet militaristic glory.
Scots abhor injustice, discrimination and the kind of divide between rich and poor that apparently delights the hearts of their southern neighbours (and, at least till now, masters.) They are intrinsically an egalitarian lot, contemptuous of airs and graces and mocking of hereditary – or otherwise – titles. One of the greatest compliments a Scot can pay is that a person is ‘unassuming’. Their reaction to inequality is to try to make the system more fair and distribute wealth more equitably, rather than blame those trapped in poverty by it.
For a marriage to work, both partners must share a great deal in common. That which divides them – and there is always something – must be far less than that which draws them together. In many marriages, what binds the couple is their children, usually conceived in the early days. Frequently the desire to have children is the motivation for marriage. Then they have to be brought up and this implies a commitment to do so. It is no surprise that so many marriages come to an end – often amicably – when that responsibility is discharged. There is not enough in common left to make up for the differences and people do change over the years.
For the disUnited Kingdom, what bound the unlikely and disparate partners together was not children, but the British Project – making the world England, by force. For centuries this was a success and on it was built the empire upon which, famously, ‘the sun never set’.
Well that sun did, in the end, set. There is no British Empire now. It is defunct and while the world still suffers the consequences of its imposition, the disUnited Kingdom has little power to influence the global future. The British Project has run its course. It is the subject of academics and historians. Britain remains economically important but militarily it is spent. Even the operation that wrested the Falklands back from an invader, only thirty years ago, could not now be carried out by the British armed forces. The child of the disUnion, the British Project, is not only grown but has lived and died while those that begat it still sup at the same table, one of them increasingly aware of how little now brings them together and how much divides them, while the other blithely hums ‘Rule Britannia’ and fills in The Times’ crossword. ‘Eight letters, a cold place of discontent and strife…oh yes, Scotland.’
The disUnion is dead. It is defunct. It has hopped the twig, kicked the bucket, passed away, gone tits-up. It is like those marriages lived in cold sufferance of each other, where the parties stay together because it is familiar and they fear change. Our aliens, if they did not know the history behind it, would be asking themselves why on Earth two partners so completely different in so many ways would ever have come together in a union of any kind.
That is why, in the Scottish case, the aspirational nationalist genie cannot be put back into the bottle. It is an idea whose time has come. It will not go away and in the end, Scotland will be independent, one way or another. It is really up to the English, now and alongside their Unionist stooges in Scotland, to decide how much ill-feeling they wish to leave behind once the inevitable parting of the ways arrives.
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Pic: Rod Fleming
During the 1980s, Scotland’s political scene was polarised by a cathartic and visceral detestation of the UK Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. This, for perhaps the last time, caused a genuinely British response, in that many Scottish opponents of Conservatism, badly discouraged by the calculating and dishonest way which the Home Rule that Scots had voted for had been snatched away by a self-interested Westminster, fell back to old loyalties, and threw their weight behind the familiar Labour Party, in an effort to rid themselves of the hated Tories.
A campaigner in the 1979 Scottish Devolution Referendum
Pic: Rod Fleming
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