Three Into One

As it was once put to me, "At least the EU's atheism is Catholic atheism, whereas the UK's atheism is Protestant atheism".

Well, I shall leave the EU for another day. But the United Kingdom has always been significantly more Catholic-friendly than any of the Three Kingdoms that I suppose any serious Jacobite would have to say still existed.

And yes, that certainly does include the Kingdom of Ireland as constituted on the eve of the Union. That was why those running that Kingdom signed up to the Union. Yet within thirty years, a consequence of that signing up had been Catholic Emancipation throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

We have not yet seen it fully in England, although we will soon enough, but it has long, perhaps always, been the case in Scotland and Wales that Catholics are at least as Unionist in relation to their own parts of the Kingdom as Ulster Protestants are in relation to theirs. And for the same reason: Catholics have no more desire to go down the road of who is or is not "really" English, Scots or Welsh than Ulster Protestants have to go down the road of who is or is not "really" Irish.

Even in Northern Ireland, voting for candidates and parties is one thing, as is voting for something that you know is not going to go through. But who on the Falls Road is ever really going to risk casting the vote that brings about their own transfer out of the United Kingdom and into a country where you have to pay to visit the doctor? No one.

A (not very likely) independent Scotland would probably become a Jacobin republic pretty quickly, while such an arrangement from the outset is Plaid Cymru's stated policy for a (really most unlikely) independent Wales. The Irish Republic, of course, already is one, even complete with a tricolour.

There is actually quite a high probability that an independent England would follow suit, certainly if the other Commonwealth Realms had done so, as New Zealand very well might, and Canada certainly would, if Scotland did. The only thing that could save the monarchy in an independent Scotland would be its continuation in Canada.

And these would not be, just as the Irish Republic is not, expressions of the pre-Revolutionary Catholic republicanism of, say, Venice, or, insofar as it is still operative anywhere, the Catholic half of Switzerland. These would not even be republics capable, with a lot of work, of becoming such expressions, as the American Republic is in principle, since 1776 came before 1789. No, these would be pure products of the Revolution, in all its Terror.

God Save The Queen.