Once upon a time there was a Roman province called Britannia, but it did not include Ireland, or Scotland north of Hadrian’s Wall. What does exist today is a state called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is not a nation state like France or Denmark. It is a multinational state, like the former Yugoslavia or the Austro-Hungarian empire.
It is also a distinctly odd state. It contains four nations, one far richer, more populous and more powerful than the other three. England contains almost 84% of the UK population, Scotland has just under 8.5%, Wales just under 5%, and Northern Ireland just under 3%. The state populations of Germany and the United States vary widely, but none towers over the rest to remotely this extent. To judge by what they say and do, the London-centred political and media elites are blind to the tangled history this oddity reflects. As a result the union state is now heading for break-up. [...]
Like a mortar bomb crashing into a building infested with dry rot, the EU referendum has torn great holes in the structure, the operational codes and the underlying assumptions of the increasingly rickety union state. Two of the union’s four nations voted to leave the European Union; two voted to remain. There were dramatic differences within three of the four. The Scottish vote to remain was pretty uniform across the nation. But in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin areas voted to remain while DUP areas voted to leave. England voted to leave but London, Liverpool and Manchester voted to stay. Wales also voted to leave but Cardiff, the Vale of Glamorgan and Monmouth in the south, and Ceredigion and Gwynedd in the north, voted to remain.
No comments:
Post a Comment