Is this the end of the UK? Very possibly

Perhaps the most exquisitely stupid alliance since the formation of the United Arab Republic of Syria, Egypt and Gaza in 1959 was announced last weekend. The United Kingdom’s three nationalist parties, representing Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, announced they would join forces to end the union with England, before separately joining the EU. 

An excellent idea, save for a couple of points. Firstly, the EU would welcome the further fragmentation of Europe’s existing states as much as the US Fleet off the Iranian coast would rejoice at the arrival of troop reinforcements aboard the MV Hontius. Might not Brabant, Catalonia, Brittany, and the Basques be tempted to follow the example of former UK states? Secondly,  all of them are economically unviable. Thirdly, joining the EU is rather like being consumed by an obese slug whose primary defence is its army of lawyers. If Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, the EU is an edict wrapped in smugness and enfolded in litigious slime.

What helped bring the UK to this tragic pass was just the latest (but probably not the last) gift from that benefactor that keeps on giving: The assassination in Sarajevo, 112 years ago next month. The resulting war helped create an enormously-centralised UK metropolis that stripped power from the semi-autonomous city-states such as Birmingham, Manchester, Bradford, Newcastle, Glasgow and Cardiff. Not merely did Westminster thereafter control almost every part of Britain, it created a vast administrative class centred in London. In the 21st century, this authorised immigration policies that brought demographic ruin on the unconsulted outlying regions. It also fought Brexit while populating the Labour Party with loyal apparatchiks. Labour thus became the natural party of government, being no less than the political manifestation of the elite that runs the Westminster statelet.

Somewhere over the horizon are the “Celtic” lands where the natives are not just restless but also feckless and reckless. In neither Scotland, Wales nor Northern Ireland in last week’s elections did nationalists get majority endorsements, but since when did reason or an understanding of arithmetic enter British politics? Since all three of the subordinate British statelets are massively subsidised by the English taxpayer, this was the intellectual and fiscal equivalent of Nevada boycotting Las Vegas and Reno. After all, the letters IQ do not feature in Ulster, Scotland or Wales. Each one of these peripheral fragments  of the UK elected a  minestrone of  successful candidates, which in essence rejected the legitimacy of Westminster rule, but without electing viable alternatives: So immersing Britain in the soup.

The election produced some curious victors, but none more so than in the  consituency of Lothian. This is the part of Edinburgh made famous in Walter Scott’s novel, The Heart of Lothian, set against the background of a lynching and an extra-marital pregnancy, which in turn became the inspiration of the all-Protestant football team, Hearts of Midlothian. Bizarre, possibly, but a blend of lucidity and logic in comparison with the  latest person that Lothian has elected to the country’s regional assembly, namely Dr Q Manivanna, a transgender Tamil. He answers to they and them, and even their, even though they does not even possess a residence-visa. (He can change pronouns, but he absolutely cannot change the rules of English grammar).  

In Birmingham, the electorate (or rather its Islamic component) voted into local government Dr Kamel Hawwash, Professor of Civil Engineering at Birmingham University, whose basic platform was that Israel committed the genocide of October 7, 2023. Indeed, right across England, Muslim electorates returned candidates representing the hitherto little-known county of Gazashire.

That county’s spiritual capital would appear to be London’s Tower Hamlets, which again returned as mayor Luftur Rahman, a man of a quite enchanting pedigree. Just over a decade ago, the British government took over key departments of this constituency after a report accused Rahman, who was also mayor back then, of presiding over an administration that was “at best dysfunctional” and “at worst riddled with cronyism and corruption”.

A senior judge ruled that Rahman’s election in May 2014 had been secured with the help of bribery, intimidation, the casting of invalid votes and false statements about his rival. But otherwise, an irreproachable character, and an embodiment of all that is good about Bangla Desh. Perhaps the most delightful aspect of the Islamist campaign there was the picture of “an Israeli  soldier”, a caricature, half-simian ringleted religious Jew, who would not have been out of place in the Nazi anti-Semitic rag, Der Sturmer. 

How has the British Prime Minister Starmer responded to the virtual destruction of his Labour Party? This was the party that created and then protected the welfare state that has drawn millions of people to Britain’s shores, and on whose idiotically generous benefits, nine million people now live and even prosper. His masterplan has involved digging up two political corpses, propping them up with the best Downing Street scaffolding and stitching smiles on their withered old faces. One is the former Chancellor Gordon Brown, the man behind Britain’s two aircraft carriers, neither of which work and which have duly bankrupted British defence budgets. The other is Harriet Harman, a woman of sublime vapidity who rants the halitosis of brainless feminist doggerel, and who believes that Britain’s woes are all due to an epidemic of misogyny that previous governments apparently endorsed. These are not sensible people, but deeply. deeply stupid members of Britain’s intelligentsia, compared to whom Luftur Rahman is Einstein.

Is this the end of the United Kingdom? Very possibly, for something terrible happened last weekend. It was the sound of a heart being ripped from its ribcage. Can surgeons repair the damage? Hmm. To be sure, the politically impossible has been done before. Did not Bismarck and Cavour bring about the unity of their countries against massive odds? Indeed. But who can repair that which has been so enthusiastically shattered? Will the English even want to court again those who now have so rudely rejected it? Or will they heave a huge sight of relief and secure their borders? Which is when their troubles really begin….

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.