CARDIFF

SEEING THE NATIONALIST leaders of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales take matters into their own hands by demanding independence referendums without reference to London, has uncanny echoes of what happened in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1991.

“Suddenly, the central government is simply by-passed by the constituent parts. Instead of argument, they just ignore it and in doing so they demonstrate its impotence,” says Professor Yeltsin Slovenia, reader in secession studies at the International College of Statehood in Bhutan. “Countries die from the inside. Northern Ireland has been a semi-detached limb for decades, half in, half out of the UK; Scotland has been all but independent, running itself for years now. And Wales, the last to take up the cudgel of independence, is beginning to see the writing on the wall. They all have an eye on the European Union, and they know that nothing is going to happen as long as England has a veto on that subject. Brexit fractured the UK far more than was realized. Scotland and Wales have seen what the Republic of Ireland has achieved inside the European Union and they seem to want a piece of that kind of action. Attached to England, they feel like they are shackled to, if not a corpse, then a very sick polity. The UK has essentially outlived its usefulness. It was always England’s project; England’s empire. And England always kept the other nations in a position of benign dependence. With a hidden price. Well the empire’s all but gone and the price has become apparent. Think what Scotland could have done with all that oil her seas produced if she had been independent in the 1970s; it must cause some of her people nightmares when they stare across at Norway. The English drained Scottish oil and paid the Scots off with social welfare. Wales was simply crushed and absorbed. All those castles were not built as tourist attractions. And Northern Ireland? Well … Look, nothing is written in stone and the UK may limp on as it is, but the die is now cast. Let the people decide.”