CALLS FOR ENGLISH INDEPENDENCE GROW

 

CALLS FOR ENGLISH INDEPENDENCE GROW

A few years ago you rarely heard anybody with any Establishment credentials talk up the idea of English Independence. 

The first really leading person to call for English Independence in recent times was Professor Sir Roger Scruton.  I set out the full transcript of his interview with the BBC in which he called for that and here is a link to that  >>> https://robintilbrook.blogspot.com/2014/02/re-english-independence-gaining-traction.html

Amongst various other calls that I have seen over the last few months, in many ways the most surprising one was last weekend in the financial Times by Louis de Bernières.

Only part of Louis de Bernières’ article is about England, in the latter half, but the whole article is very well written and of interest.  So I thought I would reproduce it here with all acknowledgements to the Financial Times.  Since most of us who do not either buy the Financial Times or subscribe to their on-line site we would not normally be able to read the article.  It is well worth reading. 

Here is the article:-

There is more to Europe than the EU — now the English need to reclaim their sovereignty

     

January 24, 2020 5:00 am  by Louis de Bernières     

         

At the age of 20, in June of 1975, I became one of the young people who voted to confirm our membership of the European Union. In 2016, my generation voted to bring us back out. Why did we change our minds? There are several reasons, but the main one is simply our loss of sovereignty.

I was personally comfortable with “sharing sovereignty”. The European states were democratic, I felt there was common cause between us, we had a shared interest in an enduring peace between us, and nationalism seemed an unmitigated evil, especially when combined with an ideology.

My own comfort gradually disappeared as it became clearer that our lives were increasingly being shaped by officials whom we had not elected. We had joined the “Common Market” and been told that it was all about free trade, which always sounds like a good thing.

Half the Labour party was opposed to it, however. Remainers have enjoyed depicting Leavers as little Englanders and rightwingers, but there are also impeccable leftwing reasons for opposing membership. I remember the big posters enjoining us to “Say no to the Bosses’ Europe”, and the Labour manifesto of 1983 declaring that we would leave if they were elected. They were worried about food pricing, the Common Agricultural Policy and restrictions on socialist industrial policy. 

I also remember that the Scottish nationalists were against membership, perhaps because it was obvious to them back then that being governed by an unelected government in Brussels was even worse than being governed by an elected one in Westminster.

In any arranged marriage a couple sometimes makes the most of a bad job by working hard at pretending to be in love. Even after I perceived the deception, I was arguing that we needed to be part of something that could counterbalance the US and the Soviet Union. My parents had campaigned to join but became sceptical long before I did. This was because they had not anticipated such things as the damage to our fishing industry. More importantly, they felt outraged at having endured two world wars only to end up being subject to laws not drawn up by our own parliament. It was easier for continental Europeans to compromise on democracy because they do not have the advantage of being protected, as we are, by the mere fact of being an island.

As time passed, I came to share my parents’ anxieties. Having researched and written extensively on the two world wars, I increasingly developed a sense of the vastness of the sacrifice, and therefore of how sacrilegious it would be to erode our democracies. I once took my father to visit the battleground in Italy where nearly all his comrades were wiped out in one heroic and doomed attack; 20 tanks destroyed in five minutes. It was a war for the right of nations to self-determination.

Since reunification Germany has become the hegemonic power in Europe; in view of what happened twice in one century, is it unnatural that some people are wary of this? I used to think that one day we would have a proper European parliament. Now I realise that, small-minded as we are, many people would only ever vote for a candidate from their own country. 

Like a lot of people who are still Remainers, I had committed a category mistake. I thought that loving the EU was somehow the same thing as loving Europe. I loved Europe’s great cities, its cuisines, its landscapes, its composers and philosophers. I wanted to be Sartre and Camus rolled into one, I wanted to sit outside a taverna on the Plaka, being Theodorakis. If people asked me what I was, I would say “European”.

I am European by culture and inheritance. Perhaps unreasonably I rate our continent’s culture more highly than anyone else’s; I speak French fairly well, and Spanish and German rather badly; my favourite composers are Bach and Beethoven. When I was 18, I travelled all over Europe with a piece of pink card that I bought at the village post office. Now, in part thanks to Islamist terrorism and Angela Merkel’s quixotic humanitarianism, the Schengen arrangement may have to come to an end; the free movement that we all loved the most about the EU may be lost because of the threat to security that is built into it.

Free movement was a double-edged sword in any case. It was fabulous for middle-class families who wanted cheap nannies, gardeners and cleaners, but it alienated the working classes because their neighbourhoods were suddenly and radically changed. There is an area of Ipswich, for example, where there seems to be nobody but eastern Europeans, hanging about, smoking in little knots. To many locals it looks threatening, even if it isn’t. In places such as Lincolnshire it became normal not to recruit from local employment exchanges, but directly from Romania. It is probably true that the indigenous British did not want to do most of that kind of work anyway, but it still sparked resentment. 

My daughter Sophie (aged 12) recently asked me if after Brexit Europe would be further away, as if we might be towed into the distance on a steel hawser. She doesn’t know that you cannot be towed away from more than 2,000 years of cultural, social and historical entanglement.

What you can row away from is a troubled political and economic project that has never surmounted the difficulties left behind by the 2008 crash. The eurozone contains incompatible economies, and so it is impossible to fix an interest rate or a general economic policy that fits them all. Greece could have got out of its difficulties expeditiously if it had retained the drachma and been able to devalue.

You can row away from delusions, such as that the EU has maintained European peace, when it was very obviously Nato, with the US providing the majority of the manpower and funding; or the delusion that we cannot rebuild our links with the Commonwealth countries we so shamelessly left in the lurch in the Seventies; or make new agreements elsewhere quite quickly; after all, we will not need the unanimous agreement of 27 other countries.

You can row away from an economic area that is not so much a free-trade zone as a protectionist one. Although today the EU offers preferential terms to many developing countries, it has traditionally helped to keep the developing world undeveloped by charging low tariffs on raw materials, and high tariffs on manufactured goods. The US does the same thing. That’s how the west prevents developing countries from industrialising and competing with us. The EU is still encumbered by the CAP.

You can row away from an economic zone that since reunification has been dominated by Germany. Euros pour into Germany but are not recycled to the periphery. You cannot, however, blame Germany for having the largest economy in the eurozone, and for finding other countries too exasperating to subsidise any further. The French, of course, will be delighted by our departure, because they will become correspondingly more important.

I bumped into David Owen last year. The former foreign secretary told me he had become a Leaver because of what had been done to Greece. That is exactly what finally did it for me too; a whole country reduced to penury for years on end; a country that elected a government on an anti-austerity ticket and was instantly overruled and humiliated by Brussels. 

For people like me, with an old-fashioned classical humanist education, Greece holds a special place in the heart. At one time Greece was the only country in Europe that still stood beside us in the second world war. Greece’s humiliating defeat of Mussolini was the beginning of his downfall. After that, his troops lost their confidence and their ideological certainties. During the second world war, the Third Reich looted Greece so thoroughly that they even collected up all the pianos, but, some few years afterwards the Greeks forgave the Germans their war debt. Corrupt as Greece was, she deserved better than to be punished so severely for the crime of having been admitted to the eurozone before she was ready for it. 

Now the Conservative party has a new start, as does the country, which at last has a leader who exudes energy, good humour and optimism, and pulls impossible rabbits out of hats even as his detractors scoff. The next rabbit may be a decent trade settlement. No doubt this will be difficult, but it is evident that it only will be accomplished by someone who is positive enough to assume that it can be.

The logic of Brexit should take us further. It has been increasingly obvious to me and fellow Leavers for many years now that the English would be better off on their own. It seems ever more likely that Ireland can be reunified, because all the very good reasons for the North resisting this have gone; the Republic is no longer a corrupt, backward country, it is an energetic vibrant place where anyone would love to live, including me. We are an important trading partner; if Ireland were being strictly rational it would also leave the EU and opt for an Anglo-Irish economic zone.

England has no good reason for wanting to cling on to Northern Ireland, or to Scotland either. The English attachment to Scotland is a sentimental one, but the Scots have fallen out of love with us, and inevitably the English will sooner or later have had enough of the grandstanding of the nationalists. The English have noticed that their own nationalism is the only one that is routinely denigrated and despised, and that also grates.

The English have developed their own “cultural cringe”. I search my memory for its origins and think that it dates from the time when English football fans were notorious all over the world. The flag of St George became the emblem of chanting, rioting, racist rightwing oafs, and so the rest of the English renounced it. I couldn’t travel in France without people wanting to reproach me with les ooligans anglais. Being English was a matter of shame.

In Scotland the Saltire flies everywhere. The English should have reclaimed their flag and thought more about what Englishness is. It is at one level a love of landscape, a rubbing along of like-minded people, a shared language rich in dialect and figures of speech, a love (like the French) of the absurd. The English have lost their sense of themselves as an ancient shared culture, however. In Ireland, Wales and Scotland, the children learn their national dances and songs at school and at home. In England, I doubt if a single child could recite the first verse of “Greensleeves” or knows what a maypole is. In English schools history is taught in a strangely episodic manner — Roman, Tudors, second world war — so students have no continuous historical narrative and get by on what they pick up from misleading historical dramas that they find on their screens. They don’t know how much they don’t know, or how one thing connects to another.

The English don’t even know their country geographically. Most southerners have little interest in what goes on Up North, and most northerners wouldn’t be able to find Guildford on a map.

The trick is to know the difference between nationalism and patriotism. Nationalism is always at somebody else’s expense, whereas patriotism depends upon nothing but itself. “My country, right or wrong” is a road to Hell. “I love my country anyway” is something altogether different.

How the Scots would prosper without the pound, and outside the EU, with possible tariffs between us on the border, is anyone’s guess, but that would not be England’s problem. With any luck even if the Scottish do leave, it seems likely that the Welsh would stay in the union, either out of sentiment or self-interest.

England’s attitude should be like that of any sensible lover: if you love me, stay; if not, I am better off without you. The English should shrug, and agree that it’s understandable that everyone should prefer their own mess to somebody else’s order, because, after all, that’s how we feel ourselves. The English have never formally been asked whether or not they would prefer independence from the other countries of the UK, or even if they would like their own parliament, and it is high time they were.

And so at last, we leave the EU, despite the tireless rearguard actions of ultra-Remainers. We are the rats that left the EU first, and we are probably not the last. But we are not leaving Europe. That is an inconceivable impossibility.

The end of Great Britain also seems to be a distinct, and perhaps even a desirable prospect. However, our neighbourhood of nations will remain a family, bound together by the dialectic of our history, by the uniting in death of far too many of our soldiers, and by our shared cultures. This kind of union is far more valuable, deep and durable than any faltering economic and political experiment could ever be.

People are talking about a “new relationship” between the UK and Europe. If you think that a relationship is all about trade agreements and extradition treaties, then clearly something “new” must be come up with. But the EU is not Europe. Let’s not be confused. Our relationship will be as it always has been, more than 2,000 years old, an oscillation between the polarities of love and hate, respect and disrespect, admiration and contempt, co-operation and churlishness, fascination and disregard, depending upon what providence throws in our path.

No family is constituted and determined by written agreement. The Germans and the French, the Portuguese and the Spanish, the Scottish and Irish, we’re a family whether we’re in the EU or not. Rearranging the fences between our houses does nothing to alter the fact that we are, and always have been, in the same village.

Louis de Bernières’ latest novel ‘So Much Life Left Over’ is published by Vintage

Re: English Independence gaining traction!

           Re: English Independence gaining traction!

The Independence campaign has moved on and up, now  that one of the leading English intellectuals, Prof Roger Scruton, has come out for English Independence. 

Click here >>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djrYRZe889E

Here is a transcript of what Prof. Scruton said:-

"In all the complex changes leading to the Scottish bid for independence the English have never been consulted. The process has been conducted as though we had no right to an opinion in the matter. It was all about Scotland and how to respond to Scottish nationalism.

As an Englishman I naturally ask why my interests in the matter have never been taken in to account. When the Czechs and Slovaks achieved their amicable divorce it was by mutual agreement between elected politicians. What is so different about Scotland that it decides everything for itself.

The Union of England and Scotland was formerly declared in the Act of Union in 1707 but it had been an emerging reality throughout the preceding century. In the conditions and conflicts of those days it was impossible for the two nations to regard themselves as fundamentally distinct. They shared an island, a religion, a language and a Monarch and both had its vows to the protestant cause. It is true there was a border between them and things one side of the border were not always replicated on the other. Scots law remains a separate system from the English. Styles of dress, architecture, popular entertainment and speech were for a long time quite distinct, in part because of the striking difference in climate and since the Reformation organised religion has taken a very different form in the two countries. The lowland Scots opting for the Calvinist and Presbyterian version and remaining largely hostile to the elaborate episcopal offices that appeal to the English. But the differences were less important than the history and geography that held the two nations together. It is true that the Union was resented by the Highlanders, many of whom had retained their Catholic faith, their Gallic language and their loyalty to the deposed Stuart Kings. The cruel suppression of the Jacobite rebellions, the forbidding of the tartan, the persecution of the Catholics and the expulsion of the crofters from their homes, all these things are well known and don’t cast credit, either on the English or on the Lowlanders, who principally benefitted from the Union.

Nevertheless during the years of Empire building merchants from both countries combined to reap the benefits of British naval power and to explore the far corners of the earth in search of profit and in their wake they brought the imperial government that they shared. Moreover empire building had to be backed up by military force. The Napoleonic wars sealed the Union between the Scots and the English who happily adopted Great Britain as the name of their united country.

Neither people could have survived the wars of the 20th Century had they not fought side by side and with total commitment to the Union. As a result of those wars however, the Empire was lost and an entirely new political landscape emerged from beneath the smoke. It is no longer possible for us to see the Union as it was seen throughout the course of the 19th Century as something natural and unquestionable. The enterprise that joined us has vanished. So too we hope have the military threats. Each nation is, for the time-being at least, wrapped in its own internal problems.

It can be said that the Scots are still reeling from the effect of Margaret Thatcher’s radical economic policies and her introduction of the Poll Tax. They are bound to ask themselves whether they have had a fair share of the prosperity that is visible nearly everywhere in the south of England and the English tend to blame the migrations that threaten to overwhelm them on a succession of Labour Governments by allowing mass immigration into England and refusing to confront the European Union’s commitment to the free movement of peoples.

The Governments of Blair and Brown seriously undermined the English sense of identity. At the same time through the creation of a Scottish Parliament they gave a new identity to the Scots. The effect of the Scottish Parliament however, was not only to ensure the Scots would govern themselves, but also to make it more likely that they would continue to govern the English. The Labour Party did not want to lose those Scottish MPs, since it was thanks to them and the Scottish vote that the Labour Party had achieved such a large majority in Westminster. Scots were disproportionately represented in the cabinets of both Blair and Brown. Tony Blair owed his position in the Labour hierarchy in part to the networks that had grown in that country. Elections to the Scottish Parliament showed that the Scots had shifted their allegiance from Labour to the SNP, but they still want the English to be governed by the Labour Party. Hence they vote to place Labour politicians, who they don’t particularly want at home, in Westminster.

As a result of this the English, who have voted Conservative more often than Labour in all post-war elections have to accept a block vote of Labour Members of Parliament sent to Westminster by the Scots. The process that brought this about was one which the Scots themselves were given the final say in a referendum from which the English were excluded. In other words the process of devolution has an air of gerrymandering. The effect of which has been to secure a Labour bias in the Westminster Parliament while allowing the Scots to govern themselves in whatever way they choose. And the process continues. In response to Alex Salmond’s bid for independence the people of Scotland have been granted another referendum, but again the people of England have been deprived of a say. Why is this? Are we part of the Union or not? Or are the politicians afraid that we would vote the wrong way? And what is the wrong way? What way should we English vote, given that the present arrangement gives two votes to the Scots for every vote given to the English. Should we not vote for our independence given that we risk being governed from a country that already regulates its own affairs and has no clear commitment to ours?

The Scottish economy is subsidised by the English, but this does not mean that England would be better off without Scotland. You give subsidies to your dependents because you depend on them. Subsidies are also investments which have returns in the long run but they more than justify the cost. On the other hand it could be that the Scottish economy has suffered from the Union overall. Boswell attributes to Dr Johnson the remark that “the noblest prospect that a Scotsman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England”. Johnson’s purpose was to ridicule the romantic adulation of the Scottish landscape which was all the rage at the time, except perhaps among those that have to live there. But he touched without intending it on the principle cause of Scotland’s economic problems which is the loss of human capital. Educated Scots have constantly taken Dr Johnson’s high road to England, carrying with them their knowledge and their energy and investing it outside the borders of their homeland. In just the way that the EU is syphoning away the young middle class from Poland and the Czech Republic so that our union served to deprive the Scots of some of the people that their economy most needs.

The security that we have enjoyed in Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union has brought with it a certain complacency in the matter of Defence. During the Cold War the Scottish land mass was absolutely fundamental to our strategy and our nuclear deterrent is housed in Scottish waters. And the Scottish air bases were constantly called upon to deter Soviet violations in our air space. Scottish regiments are at the forefront of our campaigns today and without them we would be much less capable of defending ourselves in a serious crisis.

In my opinion defence is the sole reason for thinking that the break-up of the Union might be bad for both our countries. The Union would have to replaced by a strong and committed alliance but I think this would happen just as the colonial administration of America transformed itself in time into the Western Alliance which brings the British and the Americans together and fighting side by side in every major crisis.


Suppose then we English were finally allowed a say in the matter. Which way would I vote? I have no doubt about it. I would vote for English independence as a step towards strengthening the friendship between our countries. It was thanks to independence that the Americans were able at last to confess to their attachment to the old country and to come to our aid in two World Wars. Independence is what real friendship requires and the same is true for those like the Scots and English who live side by side."