What is the greatest strategic threat facing the UK? Is it the next letter of the Greek alphabet Π [Pi] giving us a new more deadly variant of Covid? Well assuming that Π doesn’t offend the Chinese masters of the World Health Organisation like Ξ [Xi] did, it would still be no threat to the UK. An illness would have to be very deadly indeed before it led to the destruction of a country.
If the Russians invade Ukraine or even if they decided
to annex the Baltic States and reabsorb Poland into the Russian Empire, it is
still unlikely that the UK will go to war with Russia. If NATO has a red line,
it is not in Eastern Europe and indeed it may not be anywhere.
The Western Media has created armed forces that cannot
fight wars and cannot win peace. We are unwilling to accept more than tiny
levels of dead and wounded on both our own side and on the side of the enemy.
This is why we were defeated both in Iraq and Afghanistan. How on earth could
NATO take on Russia?
Putin would not care if he lost ten thousand troops
taking back the former Soviet Union and his people would accept it without much
of a murmur. He would not care if he killed Western civilians or bombed our
cities flat. All NATO can offer in defence is technology. So, we will do
nothing if either Russia or China decides to use serious military force,
because the only alternative is to use everything, i.e., nuclear weapons. We
are not going to blow up the whole world over Ukraine, nor indeed anywhere much
east of the Elbe.
But this means that the Russians are no threat to the
UK. We will do nothing and they may even be no more threat to Ukraine if Putin
decides he has already won merely by parking his tanks on the border and
demonstrating the impotence of NATO.
The EU is no threat to the UK, because we have already
demonstrated that we don’t require it. If Britain can get through the worst
pandemic in 100 years, then we can weather whatever Mr Macron wants to throw at
us. The EU will merely damage its own tourist industry by trying to make it
difficult for Brits. Its attempt to punish Britain has merely meant that we
have pivoted away from Europe towards the rest of the world, which will long
term be beneficial to us rather than to the EU.
The greatest threat to the territorial integrity of
the UK comes from the EU’s semi-annexation of Northern Ireland which has become
a sort of Danzig not so much run by the League of Nations as by Brussels. But
Ireland’s manoeuvring its metaphorical tanks (it doesn’t have any actual ones)
onto the Northern Ireland border always comes up against the problem that the
orange part of its flag does not wish to be with the green part and requires a
white peace wall to keep it apart.
Even if Ireland could afford to absorb Northern
Ireland, which it could only do if the EU decided to fund it, there would still
be around half of the population who have been resisting incorporation into a
united Ireland since the nineteenth century. These people are not going to go
away unless Ireland uses Serbian methods and their British identity is not
going to change either if it hasn’t done so in more than one hundred years.
The uneasy peace in Northern Ireland will not change
until Scottish independence destroys the UK and then like the Former Yugoslavia
partition continues further until even Cornwall, Mercia and the Isle of
Anglesey gain their independence.
It is for this reason that Irish nationalists pin
their hopes on Scotland. With the destruction of the UK there would be no
reason for English people to subsidise Northern Ireland and perhaps not even
Wales. The damage would be no worse if Wales and Northern Ireland were
jettisoned after Scotland and at least there would be no more nonsense about a
country made up of countries with devolved parliaments.
Northern Ireland would then be someone else’s problem.
Wales would have to accept either that it was part of greater England, which it
has in reality been since the Middle Ages, or it would have to go its own way.
I cannot imagine English people having much patience with Welsh nationalism if
Scotland departed.
Just as Ireland’s problem is that a large number of
people in Northern Ireland have a different identity, so too the structural
problem in the UK is the lack of a common identity. Unusually in Europe people
in Britain have two national identities. French citizens are French, without
subnational national identities. The idea that we can have both Scottish and
British national identities only exists in Europe where there are strong
separatist political forces.
Scottish nationalists routinely reject the identity
that corresponds to their citizenship, but it is becoming more common even in
England for people to reject what unites the UK. The bond that holds us together is financial.
Neither Scotland, nor Wales, nor Northern Ireland
could leave the UK without losing the large sums they get from the Treasury and
it is hard to imagine how they could do so without suffering a huge reduction
in living standards. But English people have come to resent the subsidy which
they see as English, when it is used by devolved parliaments to undermine the
unity, even the coherence of the state.
While the threat from subnational nationalism in the
UK is the greatest threat we face, far greater than any other, indeed greater
than any we have faced in our history, in the short term it has rather
lessened. Scotland is divided evenly between those Scots who are content to
remain in the UK and those who are not.
Those Scots who voted to stay would be justly furious
if an independent Scotland made their standard of living decline and even the
Scottish nationalists might regret and blame an SNP that made them poorer. An
overwhelming majority might be willing to endure privation for the sake of a
new Scotland, but Scottish nationalists are not a majority at all.
Scotland is as divided as Northern Ireland in our aims
for the future and the part that wants to remain British would only be content
in an independent Scotland if financially, we would be as well off as now.
The SNP would do well to focus on improving the
reality of the financial case for independence rather than continually trying
base its argument on the economic ignorance of its own supporters. Scots will
only ever vote for a separate Scotland it really would be economically no worse
off than now.
The Pro UK argument can legitimately reflect that
British history has been poor at creating a common identity and that this is
its greatest failing. But there is no point regretting where we are now. The
key is to create a UK where most people are content to have a shared British
identity alongside their other identities.
I am neither a muscular unionist nor indeed a
unionist. Muscular Christianity brings with it absurd images of cold showers
and stretches for Jesus. The UK is not a union like the European Union, it is
the result of a union. It is a single unitary nation state that for historical
reasons has parts that are also called countries.
Devolution is here to stay. There is no majority to
get rid of it. There is nothing even close to a majority. But devolution is
directly responsible for the rise of nationalism in the UK to the extent that
we are continually threatened by an SNP that wishes to destroy our country.
It is necessary to work out a way in which the UK can
both be a single sovereign nation state and have devolved powers equally so
that every British citizen has the same amount. Some of us have votes for two
parliaments, some of us only one. That is unfair.
It must be pointed out to Scottish nationalists, that
fiscal transfers depend on a shared national identity. An independent Scotland
would not expect fiscal transfers between itself and people who were not
Scottish. Well, if you think you have nothing in common with other British
people then your acceptance of Treasury finance amounts to theft.
If the SNP were honest, it would refuse all British
money and raise all its revenue in Scotland alone before asking for another independence
referendum. If Scotland can afford independence there should be no problem, if
it can’t why have a referendum on it. If
you really think that you have no identity in common with other British
citizens, why do you expect them to give you money any more than you expect it
from the French.
