United Kingdom Independence, Indeed

At where is Trident aimed? China, with whose economy ours would go down? Or Russia, which has bought up great tracts of our capital city?

Each of those countries has far more of its citizens resident in the United Kingdom than there are British citizens resident in the Falkland Islands, and between them probably more than there are inhabitants of all the British Overseas Territories put together.

By all means take on the EU's threat to the national and parliamentary sovereignty that is the only means to social democracy in this country. But it is a relatively small part of the problem.

America, China, Russian oligarchs, Ukrainian oligarchs with neo-Nazi connections, the Gulf monarchs, Israel, Rupert Murdoch, Lynton Crosby, Narendra Modi, over-mighty civil servants, over-mighty diplomats and intelligence agents, over-mighty municipal officers, politicised judges, ownership by foreign states of infrastructure that was once owned by our own, growing political interference by the Armed Forces, a state within the state in the City of London, and so on, and on, and on, and on, and on.

Whenever a country opens its economy to anywhere else, as it very often needs to do, then it also opens its political system to that somewhere else, and it therefore needs to safeguard itself accordingly. Britain has entirely failed to put in place any such safeguards.

The fawning over Modi and over Benjamin Netanyahu is because we have a governing party with a tiny majority and several seats that it won or held only because it supported one or the other of those foreign Heads of Government.

India was an example of a very common phenomenon, where a colonial possession is far larger and more populous than its colonial possessor. Such is now the relationship between the United Kingdom and the Falkland Islands.

They are the colonial power, and we are the colony. The question is how long we are prepared to put up with that before we exercise our right of self-determination and assert our independence.

We left India a mere two years, to the day, after VJ Day. That had nothing to do with whether or not the people there wanted us. That had never had anything to do with anything.

It was because we could no longer afford both an empire abroad and the progressive measures for which our people were crying out at home. We left people behind in India, and almost everywhere else that we left for the same reason. That never bothered us for one second.

As part of the general reassertion of our national and parliamentary sovereignty in order to restore and expand our social democracy, we need to cast off our colonial master by declaring ourselves independent of the Falkland Islands, and therefore probably of the other Overseas Territories as well (even though they cost us nothing to defend), while continuing to pay each of them one billion pounds per year in perpetuity, a considerable saving on the present cost of the most expensive empire in history.