Rumours of Wars

David Cameron and the great majority of the House of Commons sentenced Alan Henning to death. That sentence has been carried out.

If we find public beheading so abhorrent, then why are we at war alongside, and on behalf of, Saudi Arabia?

Meanwhile, what of Jeremy Clarkson and the Falklands War? It probably was a coincidence, making it all the more amusing that someone, somewhere has finally reacted to him in this way.

A programme in which a Sun columnist talks about cars and emits saloon bar right-wingery is simply out of place on the BBC, in the way that The Polly Toynbee Show would simply be out of place on Sky.

This time, its days may finally be numbered. Its natural home beckons.

But more broadly, and I write as someone with relatives in the Falkland Islands, the Falkland Islanders, like the Ulster Unionists, presuppose far more public sympathy in the Motherland than they actually enjoy.

If there ever were to be a Second Falklands War, then at least a large proportion of the British population would regard them as the three thousand people eight thousand miles away, where they were maintained at enormous expense, and who had somehow managed to take this country to war not once, but twice.

For those who do not happen to have any family connection to the place, as of course most people do not, attitudes to the Falkland Islands are bound up with attitudes to Margaret Thatcher, whom far more people still hate than still quite love.

And towards whom, which is much more dangerous to the Falklander cause, ever-more people are indifferent. There are already Members of Parliament who were born after the Falklands War. There will soon be MPs who were born after Thatcher left office. Perhaps there will be such as early as next May.

The coincidence of the Clarkson carry-on with the events in Hong Kong does serve to remind us that there was no referendum, or anything remotely like that, when one of the great cities of the earth, a metropolis that was wholly a creation of the British imperium, was transferred from British to foreign sovereignty. Nor was there any public consultation whatever in the Chagos Islands.

It seems that the rules are different for white people. White people, like Jeremy Clarkson.

The Saint Helenians working in the Falklands are useful, because they are brown, and because they do not have the slightly out-of-time Southern English accents with which people whose families have lived there since the nineteenth century still somehow manage to speak.

Putting the Saint Helenians on television would go some way to suggesting that this was a contemporary British cause, and not merely a defence of the last outpost of the rural South in the 1950s on the premise that that was being British meant.

Something very similar applies to Northern Ireland. Nothing about Ulster British culture strikes almost anyone from Great Britain as especially British, and much of it is profoundly alien to almost everyone here. 

Likewise, nothing about Nationalist culture in Northern Ireland strikes almost anyone from the Irish Republic as especially Irish, and much of it is profoundly alien to almost everyone there.

But Northern Ireland is now so very comprehensively devolved that what was once the ultra-Right fantasy of an independent state there is now more or less in place, albeit in a very different form from that which its original proponents envisaged.

In Northern Ireland, there is as little chance of the adoption of mass privatisation as there is of the adoption of same-sex marriage. The first such reticence already differentiates it both from Great Britain and from the Irish Republic; the second very soon will.

As the Union is redefined, a new Bill of Rights within a new Treaty of Union needs to specify that no ruling of any foreign court, whether pursuant to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or pursuant to the European Convention on Human Rights (or anything else), must have effect in the United Kingdom without confirmation by a resolution of the House of Commons, the High Court of Parliament.

Nor must any such ruling have effect in the area of any devolved body without confirmation by a resolution of that body, as an exercise of its devolved parliamentary authority. That, too, needs to be specified in and by a new Bill of Rights within a new Treaty of Union.