By The UK is in turmoil with a central government in Westminster neither listening to people in the devolved countries in that union nor having a case for holding it together. This union is called a ‘kingdom’ with a monarchy that is not absolute but more influential than some people think, making thesupposed democracy nothing like a true democracy. The word‘united’ would be laughable if it was not so seriously inappropriate. Wales, Scotland and Ireland were all taken by force, pacified by deceit, lands distributed to the people closest to the monarchy until Cromwell’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 that was a coup d’état dressed up as something else, thereafter people closest to government were given those lands, people in the three countries murdered in their many thousands, later cleared and deported and garrisons established to control them. Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are as much distinct countries as they were before England invaded them neither regions nor property or part of England with funny accents.They are countries thathave cultures and languages of their own, at least should have them. These are living and thriving cultures that despite laws and influences imposed on them by England survive as countries in their own right, unlike the waning, insular anglocentric, bitter, post imperial England that lost its role as the seat of an empire, cannot accept or live with that and for lack of any other way of dealing with their bitterness cling on to the three countries they consider part of their union.
When we read the history of how that union was assembled we only need to look at the castles along the Welsh Marches built after the bloody conquest of Wales by Edward I between 1277 and 1283, read a bit about the incursions into Ireland starting with the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 until independence in 1921. That was 752 years of invasions and occupation of different parts of Ireland until the siege of Drogheda, better known as the Drogheda massacre, in 1649, when the Cromwellian final conquest of Ireland began, 272 years before independence.Then they became unified with the UK in 1801, 120 years before all but six counties in the northeast of Ireland gained statehood.
Scotland has had a chequered history that supposedly ended with Acts of Union in 1706 and 1707 that made it part of a united kingdom as an equal partner, which it has never been. Then read about Butcher Cumberland’s barbaric leadership in the 1745 uprising after which the population was depleted by murderous occupiers or transportation into more or less slavery in the colonies. It is not, has never been, a union of choice but England refuses to see that, thus acknowledge its shameful history.
The big talk about the role of the diminished UK in the war in Ukraine and the City might give an illusion of significance in the worldin which it was once very influential.In fact it is a treaty breaking state that does not listen to its constituent countries; it is a tax haven for robber barons and international tax evaders for all over the world with an elite of about 1% in their gated and guarded mansions who keep their money, not in the City but offshore financial havens,who clearly care nothing for an increasingly impoverished population that is ever more controlled by a police state that is run for the benefit of the 1%. That elite influences, directly controls and governs the people of a progressively more authoritarian disunited union. History shows us that empires crumble and eventually fall as rotting, corrupt and dissolute centres, such as London, with ultimately all they once ruled lost. It is time for England to give up its pretence of imperial greatness and pre-eminence, let their discontented colonies choose their own future then settle into its nostalgia for a grandiose past without holding countries that wish to go alone hostage.
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