One former
Secretary of State for Wales has been sharing his pessimism
about the future of his party this week.
Whilst I might share his view that his party could be about to tear
itself apart, I see that more as a cause for rejoicing than pessimism. Still, each to his own.
In the detail of
his comments he made the observation that “When
you go outside London as I was at the weekend you hear more and more people in
the street saying we just need to leave without a deal. I think we're in quite dangerous territory as
a country where certainly a chunk of my party, a wing of my party is fomenting
that kind of opinion. It's deeply, deeply irresponsible.” On that, I
certainly do agree with him (although I wonder what has become of him that ‘going
outside London’ seems to be exceptional).
And not just because of the potential economic consequences; the
underlying attitude which allows people to hold such a view is deeply
concerning.
It argues, in
effect, that we can and should simply disregard the concerns of the Irish, on
both sides of the border which the UK imposed on the island. Indeed, May’s persistence in going back to
Brussels to demand change to the backstop arrangements is part and parcel of
the same attitude. Egged on by Johnson, Rees-Mogg
et al, she is effectively demanding that the EU sacrifice the interests of one
member state in order to give a better deal to a non-member. It shouldn’t surprise us; we already know
that at least one senior Tory has openly been saying that “The Irish really should know their place”;
and we know only too well that the UK government would willingly sacrifice the
interests of Wales or Scotland (and the outlying regions of England too, come
to that) in order to serve what they see as the ‘greater good’ but which we
might choose to call ‘the south-east’.
I can understand
how and why Anglo-British not-nationalists-at-all have become conditioned into
such an attitude (although it’s rather more worrying that so many ordinary
people are following them so readily). They
inhabit a world in which it is entirely natural that the biggest and richest
get what they want and the interests of the smaller and poorer are brushed
aside. That is the way they would
instinctively treat the outlying parts of their own ‘precious union’, and they
really can’t understand why the EU is not simply putting Ireland in its place
and doing the deal that the bigger countries want. They don’t understand, in short, why the
European Union doesn’t work in the same way as the British Union does.
From the point of
view of an independentista, however, the
situation highlights, very starkly, the difference between the two unions. A union based on historic incorporation and
expansion is not the same as a union based on voluntary association by
independent member states. The latter,
of necessity, will strive to protect and promote the interests of all its
members when dealing with ‘third parties’ which is what the UK decided to
become. It could not be otherwise; if the
interests of one of the smaller member states were to be sacrificed, the other
small members states could no longer have faith in the whole and the enterprise
would be endangered. Just because the
word ‘union’ is used in both contexts doesn’t make them the same thing at all.
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