Very well then, let us talk about Scottish Independence. But please, let us do it thoughtfully. I really do not think that my views on this subject will influence anyone north of the border, and don’t see why they should.
Nor am I as distressed as I probably ought to be about the possibility of a Scottish secession. The main thing that annoys me about the prospect is that it might just save the Tory party from what would otherwise be unavoidable and well-deserved slow death.
In a parliament from which Scottish MPs had been removed, the Tories could win a majority, not through any merit, but simply because a large number of their opponents had vanished. It is the only way the Tories ever could win a Westminster majority again.
One has to wonder if the Tory Party’s notably feeble defence of the Union has something to do with this fact.
Anyway, back to the deep subject of the splitting of the United Kingdom:
Many years ago I was interviewed by Adam Boulton of Sky News about what was then my new (and first) book ‘The Abolition of Britain’, published after some difficulty but attracting a certain amount of attention.
Mr Boulton had at first assumed that the theme of the book was devolution, then getting under way thanks to the Blairites’ unprincipled decision to try to head off Welsh and Scottish nationalism ( growing threat to their own party) by encouraging local parliaments. That went well, didn’t it?
As it happens, I don’t think I did more than touch on the subject (I am currently recording an audio-version of ‘Abolition of Britain’, and have so far not noticed any mention of it at all).
Of course it wasn’t about that at all. Those few who have read it (rather than the hostile reviews of it from which most people have formed their opinions) will know that it’s a series of essays about how deep moral and cultural changes in Britain were achieved or came about. The links between these essays are that these changes, added together, amounted to a cultural revolution as devastating as that which convulsed China during the same period – but without the violence, and so largely unnoticed.
It is mostly unpolitical, in the party sense, though it contains some rather tinny reflections on the Euro and the approaching general election in which this was expected to be an important issue( it wasn’t , as it happened) . If I rewrote the book now, I’d remove these, as they subtract from it.
But I was reminded of this today by an article by Al Johnson here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/11080893/Scottish-independence-Decapitate-Britain-and-we-kill-off-the-greatest-political-union-ever.html
in which he reflects, generously :‘About 15 years ago people such as John Redwood and Peter Hitchens produced books called The End of Britain or The Abolition of Britain. They saw the principal threat as coming from the EU, I think; and though they were obviously right to be concerned about the erosion of sovereignty, I don’t think either of them expected the constitutional annihilation of the country. Now those book titles look prophetic, frankly.’
I can’t speak for Mr Redwood, who bafflingly remains in the Tory Party, shunted insultingly into a remote siding and cut off from any position of importance.
But I’d say that while I didn’t expect this in detail, I was pretty much prepared for anything. You see, I’d seen catastrophe in Moscow in the early 1990s, and I knew that countries can fall apart far faster than people think they can, especially countries which are, in essence, federations. Shortly before I went to work in Moscow. Boris Yeltsin began to assert the existence of Russia as distinct from the USSR. I remember talking to British diplomatic experts on the Soviet Union, and asking what the rules permitted, and how far it could go. They were unsure, and reasonably regarded my speculations about frontiers and control of law-making and armed forces as premature. So it seemed then. But not for long.
After the 1991 putsch, I watched many of my wildest speculations take solid shape with amazing speed. I recall a trip in autumn 1991 to the Estonia-Russia border between Narva and Ivangorod, a picturesque setting in which twin castles glare at each other across the water, and being able to cross the bridge between two increasingly separate countries, with minimal formalities. It seemed a bit of a joke to me and my Muscovite colleague (though the Estonians gave him – but not me – a bit of trouble on the way back) . Within a few months it had hardened into a proper guarded frontier, as had many others which had for decades been no more than a forgotten line on a map.
The departure of Ukraine, within absurd borders, was one of those wild speculations (What, we all wondered, would happen to the Crimea, so very Russian yet ‘given’ to Ukraine by Krushchev in a thoughtless gesture). And we see the consequences to this day.
As usual, in the Cassandra zone of combined prophecy and powerlessness in which I live and move and have my being, I sometimes fall victim to the desire to pronounce on what should be done about current events, and set out manifestoes and prescriptions despite having no power or influence, and no means at all to insert my ideas into the sprockets, chains and cogwheels of power.
This, I suspect, is because I resent being no more than a safety valve for other disenfranchised people, whose frustration and rage are assuaged because I express them on public platforms, and yearn to have some actual effect.
But – as I now openly recognize - all reliable indicators suggest that I am on the losing side in all major moral, cultural and political battles, and am likely to remain there until I die. My books and articles may sometimes call faintly for action, but in general they are just the last rites pronounced over the corpse of my country, muttered mainly as an act of commemoration.
If I could find a publisher now, I would try to combine all my books so far into one, under the title ‘The Obituary of Britain’.
I admit I didn’t think devolution would lead so rapidly to what we see now. It was only later that I grasped the key thing about it – that it is an aspect of the EU threat, rightly mentioned by Mr Johnson.
It was Ireland that first made me aware of the EU’s involvement in the break-up of the United Kingdom. I recall during an Irish general election in the 1980s suddenly realising that the EU provided a flag under which Dublin could become genuinely independent of London, and a flag under which a deal might be done over Northern Ireland, a deal which somehow bypassed the great wall of Unionism. But it was only a foggy apprehension. The later creation of the Euro, and all that has followed, seem to me to have made it seem sharper and more real.
About the same time, I became aware that the European Parliament had published a map (I still have a copy somewhere) of the whole EU, showing regional boundaries in every country. It had two key points of interest.
One was that, of all the countries of the UK, England was the only one subdivided into ‘regions’ with romantic, faraway names rooted in our history, such as ‘South East’. In fact, the map of England showed only these regions, though most English residents are unaware of their existence, and have the vaguest idea of which one they inhabit. The counties were of course unmentioned. The word ‘England’ did not appear anywhere on it. This truthful expression of the EU’s real attitude was later ‘corrected’ after protests. The correction was less honest than the original. Modern EU maps carry the word ‘England’, though there is in fact no such political unit, nor does the EU (or anyone else in power) ever intend there to be.
Scotland and Wales, meanwhile, were not cut up into regions at all, though in fact there are very distinct regional differences within both of them
The other was the EU recognized two separate sets of borders in Ireland. It marked the frontier between Northern Ireland and the Republic, but it also marked (just as clearly) the four historic provinces, of Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connaught. I don’t think there was anything comparable on the map, outside the British Isles
This, taken together, looked to me like a challenge. The EU was saying that its idea of federation on this patch of soil was different from the UK’s idea. It envisaged Ireland as an island in the EU, destined to become four regions under Brussels, in which Dublin would fade into mere symbolism, a sentimental capital rather than a real one; whereas we envisaged Ireland as an island containing two distinct entities - a UK province called ‘Northern Ireland’ and an independent sovereign state called ‘the Irish Republic’.
The EU, as Sinn Fein alone has recognized, was therefore as much of a threat to genuine Irish independence as Britain.
On John Bull’s other Island, Scotland and Wales would be permitted to have sentimental symbols of nationalism – they would be called ‘Scotland’ and ‘Wales’, have capitals and flags, maybe even token armed forces and national assemblies with limited powers, and governments ( after all, Luxembourg has all these things) . But their true unsentimental status would be as regions of the EU, the equivalents of the French Aquitaine or the German Brandenburg, again owing ultimate fealty to Brussels.
When the EU used to end at the river Oder, on the bridge between Slubice and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, I recall the interesting signage as one drove Westwards. First, I think, there was blue and yellow sign saying ‘Welcome to the EU’. Then you saw a rather grand one saying ‘Welcome to Brandenburg’, and eventually a tiny little blink-and-you’ve-missed-it thing in the bushes saying rather squeakily ’Welcome to Germany’. The EU and regional signs may have been the other way round, but it doesn’t matter. It was the insignificance of the ‘Germany’ sign that I thought most interesting. The nation I was entering (using my EU passport, as the British one had been abolished) was not Germany but the EU. The province was Brandenburg. Germany was a memory, an interlude between 1870 and 1989, to be allowed to fade away in time. The sense that the end of the Cold War meant the triumph of the EU was also very strong. I think that understanding is essential to grasping recent developments in Ukraine.
By the way, mention of the Ukraine affair reminds me to express my gratitude here to Pavel Stroilov, in the current London ‘Spectator’ (6th September 2014, p. 14 , here http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9304652/russias-nato-myth/ )
for providing useful notes on US Secretary of State James Baker’s own accounts of his 1990 conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev, in which he wrote :’NATO, whose juris[diction] would not move eastward’, plus an account of a letter Baker wrote at the time to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, also saying he had offered the USSR ‘ assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its current jurisdiction’.
I have never doubted that such assurances were given. Mr Stroilov, in an effort of journalistic stretching so great it almost qualifies as Pilates Yoga, says that this can’t be right, as he cannot find any Russian records of such assurances in the Soviet records he has seen. One might suggest that perhaps they are somewhere in records he has not seen, that Mr baker would have been unlikely to have made this up and that Mikhail Gorbachev was far from the only Soviet official dealing with the USA at the time, though he may have been among the more naïve of them, as his general record shows. Mr Stroilov also manages to take seriously what is obviously a provocative Gorbachev speculation about Russia itself joining NATO, a self-evidently absurd idea which has never been remotely likely.
I am not digressing here, though I know it looks like it. The re-ordering of European frontiers is what we are talking about, and even the fate of Scotland is bound up in the same story as the Ukraine crisis, the Georgian and Moldovan border disputes, the Kosovo secession, the Cyprus partition, the splitting of the Czech republic and Slovakia and perhaps above all the break-up of what was once Yugoslavia.
Even Vladimir Putin’s attempt to impose a different federal structure on Ukraine is a sort of mirror of EU tactics. If he can make the Ukrainian provinces more autonomous and less dependent on Kiev, he can also make borders between the east and the centre more significant, so increasing Moscow’s power over the east, and over the whole of Ukraine. If he does this, which is plainly his aim, he wins twice. Not only does he enable open Russian influence in the Don basin.
He can count on such an arrangement accentuating the borders between Kiev and the far West, and so promoting strife there. This will not necessarily be hard, as the nationalist militias, now well-armed and battle-hardened, will not take kindly to being stood down by President Poroshenko, and his own official forces are weak and demoralized. There could be trouble between Kiev liberals and the (armed and angry) ultra-nationalists who trace their ancestry to Stepan Bandera and the days before 1939 when a large chunk of Ukraine was under Polish rule.
Then there’s the Yugoslav lesson. Another former federation, Yugoslavia was not very like the UK. But it had one similarity. It was a federal state on territory coveted by the EU, but a federation of a very different kind from the EU, centred on Belgrade and with some lingering connections to Moscow. If its orientation was to be changed, and a century-old German/Austrian policy desired that end, then Belgrade had to be nullified. Hence the concentration upon (undoubted) Serb atrocities and the general willingness to forget (equally undoubted) Croatian ones.
There was also the accelerated recognition of Slovenia, so as to return it to its pre-1918 German/Austrian orbit. And there was the 1992 EU recognition of independent Croatia, Roman Catholic and Romanised in faith and alphabet, loyal Habsburg subject until 1918, client of Berlin in 1941-45, invariable foe and rival of Serbia, by contrast Orthodox and Cyrillic in faith and alphabet, ally of Russia, ferocious foe of Vienna in 1914, and of Germany in 1941-45.
None of this outside interference in a former sovereign state ever seems to be counted as an attempt to alter the borders of Europe (though it certainly did) , the thing for which Russia gets into trouble in Crimea and elsewhere. For some reason abolishing borders (normally a sign of conquest) doesn’t seem to get you into the same sort of trouble as shifting them. But of course the EU, as well as advancing (democratically, of course) into many countries where it previously did not rule and abolishing the borders of all Schengen members, has also created borders between the Czech Republic and Slovakia (promptly nullified by Schengen) and between former members of the Yugoslav Federation.
Confronted with people who don’t see how important all this is, or who argue that because the local elites were bounced into rapid support of it, it’s not actually an expansion or a border revision, one is reminded of poor, dim Jemima Puddleduck, who does not suspect the Fox’s intentions towards her even when he mentions his pressing need for Sage and Onion. Those who have not read Beatrix Potter’s powerful fable of naivety versus realism are strongly advised to do so. Charm is all very well, but in the end it can be just as dangerous as naked force.
Anyway, the EU’s intentions towards the United Kingdom are, it seems to me to, encourage the secession of Scotland and Wales, and to encourage the incorporation of Northern Ireland into a four-region, EU dependent Ireland, so diminishing Great Britain and the UK, and then to (how shall I put this?) Balkanize England into ‘Regions’ which will increasingly be oriented towards Brussels and Frankfurt. The recent quiet transformation of London into a sort of presidential republic, multicultural and very separate from England, seems to me to be a key step towards this.
When the process is over, England and Britain will be no more, having no political, legal or economic significance, remembered only in Shakespeare festivals and Morris-dancing.
Without the EU’s enormous challenge to the pre-existing nations of Europe, none of this would be feasible. Alex Salmond would never have been heard of, the SNP still an eccentric gaggle of Gaelic-speaking fanatics, and there would be no referendum approaching. Without the collapse of British patriotism, Protestant, maritime, monarchist, liberty-loving in its bones, a collapse which I documented in 1999, none of this would have been even thinkable. Following that collapse, what force or ideas is there to stop it? Please don’t anybody mention an ‘English Parliament’. The worst thing about this terrible idea is that it might actually come about - some modern-architecture shed in Milton Keynes, in which the ‘regions’ of England are represented by party apparatchiks chosen from closed lists, and are allowed to debate the drainage budget and the number of windmills per hectare.
As it is, the threat of a victory for the ‘yes’ campaign may for the first time alert the people of England and Scotland to the immense scale and importance of the political revolution which has been storming and stamping across Europe from the Atlantic to the River Bug for 50 years now, and shows no sign of ending.
