Scots, Irish

Scottish and Irish Nationalism has each negated itself.

Scottish Nationalists now place all faith in an exercise of the sovereign will of the Scottish people which establishes once and for all the supremacy of the Westminster Parliament by enshrining its right to enact supreme legislation in any policy area and in any part of the United Kingdom. Anyone who does not like this should have voted No to devolution. I bet they didn’t.

Similarly, Irish Nationalists now place all faith in an exercise of the sovereign will of the Irish people which renounces any claim by the Republic to Northern Ireland, and which establishes that the constitutional status of Northern Ireland cannot be changed unless the majority of those voting No (and identifiable by no other means) votes Yes. Anyone who does not like this should have voted No to the Good Friday Agreement. I bet they didn’t.

Alex Salmond has now been sworn of the Privy Council, an Oath of which he would be in breach if he ever made any serious effort to dissolve the Union, as is in any case pretty much impossible in view of the above, and in view of the fact that any First Minister has to be so sworn.

And following the successful dry run with Ted Kennedy, expect Gerry Adams, who cannot now have too long to go before he retires, to collect an honorary knighthood. All those deserving SDLP councillors who have felt obliged to decline the MBE will be humiliated, but that is hardly going to bother him. Everyone calls Bob Geldof “Sir Bob” anyway. And everyone will call Gerry Adams “Sir Gerry” anyway. In private, they have probably been calling him it for years. Jan Smuts will never die.

The importance of Scottish cliques and factions across British politics is well-known. But that of Northern Irish ones is almost completely ignored. Yet there was Enoch Powell, of course. And the world of the Monday Club, Western Goals and so on, out of which has come the New Tories just as New Labour came out of the sectarian Left, included at its very heart figures such as Robert Bradford and Martin Smyth.

It also overlapped considerably with the legacy, of which I have never come across a full study in English, of all those international divisions of the SS and the Waffen SS after they had gone home at the end of the War. The movements that they became are now pillars of neoconservatism from Denmark and Flanders to Bosnia and Kosovo. No wonder that David Cameron wants to link up with the Latvian one. He knows his own. To understand this is to understand why he and his associates didn’t become Lib Dems in the first place, as it is perfectly respectable, and not just in the tolerated eccentric way that attaches to Labour, for upper-class people to be. They were no more likely to become Lib Dems than the creators of New Labour had been likely to join the SDP.

Which brings us to the fact that some examination is long overdue of the British and Irish Communist Organisation, seedbed of such neoconservative stalwarts as Paul Bew (of the Henry Jackson Society, and one of the striking number of old Hard Leftists now on the Cross Benches) and John Lloyd (of the Euston Manifesto). Extremely offensively, it has a history of calling itself the Ernest Bevin Society. It still exists, but is now as Nationalist and as pro-Palestinian as any other such body, so one really does have to wonder why it still bothers.

The Bradfords and the Smyths, and their mainland counterparts, blazed the trail for supporting all three of Ulster Unionism, hardline Zionism, and the old South Africa and its Rhodesian satellite, causes in fact entirely unrelated. What could be further from Unionism than terrorists who hanged British soldiers with barbed wire and photographed it? Or than a Boer Republic set up as an explicit act of anti-British revenge in a former Dominion of the Crown? Or than that Republic’s sponsorship of an act of treason against the Queen, herself purportedly deposed early on in that project?

What was the B&ICO’s position on South Africa and Rhodesia? I think we should be told. In the meantime, its members have gone on to great, or at least very influential, things, without the slightest evidence that their ends, rather than merely their means, have changed in the least. The B&ICO has made sympathetic noises about Declan Ganley and Libertas, which has very strong links to the American nerve centre of neoconservatism, and whose vision of a “reformed” but thoroughly federal EU is straight out of the Statement of Principles of the Henry Jackson Society.

I suspect that, although she is sometimes linked without confirmation to the International Marxist Group, Kate Hoey is in fact, via Mark Langhammer’s Newtownabbey Labour Party (of which she was undoubtedly a member), the B&ICO’s One Who Got Away, as Scott McConnell went on to edit The American Conservative, or as Peter Hitchens went on to become Peter Hitchens. Good for her. But what about the rest of us?