Semper Unum? Plus Ça Change?

Especially if it wishes to go down the "neverendum" road, the SNP should learn the lesson of the Bloc Québécois, in best Canadian fashion recently reduced on a single day from dominance in Quebec and Official Opposition status at Ottawa to displacement on both counts by the NDP, some of whose newly elected MPs for Quebec ridings had been so much paper candidates that they have allegedly been packed off to learn French so that they can now represent their wholly unexpected constituents.

Where people get the idea that Canada is boring, I honestly do not know. But I suspect Canadians of liking that idea, because it provides them with the cover under which to get away with all sorts of eye-popping things. Still, Québécois separatist demonstrators against the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will now be about as significant as anyone who might bother, if anyone does, to turn out and protest against the Queen when she visits the Irish Republic.

Ah, the Irish Republic, yet another nail in the coffin of separatism anywhere else in these Islands. Bring on a Scottish independence referendum, because we all know what the result would be. That said, the United Kingdom is as much my country as it is anyone else's, and I do not see how anyone would have the right to take it away from me without my consent, a principle which would hold even if there were any serious danger that anyone might come close to doing so.

The SNP might also learn the lesson of the once-mighty Ulster Unionist Party, now vying for fourth place in Northern Ireland, and even by the standards of these things a loose federation of local franchisees: liberal-Left intellectuals, industrial-municipal machinists, agricultural-municipal machinists, Monday Clubbers, and so on. By all accounts, the Monday Clubbers, in particular, are regrouping.

But all the while, no party is able, or apparently even willing, to stop Sinn Féin from trial-running its desired banishment of the Catholic Church from the schools throughout Ireland by banishing Northern Ireland's Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist clergy from their role in the schools that, after all, they set up. For what are the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and the Methodist Church in Ireland to the DUP? As little as mainstream Irish Catholic culture is to Sinn Féin, so is mainstream Ulster Protestant culture to the DUP; the Orange Order's ban on Free Presbyterian ministers as Chaplains may have been lifted, or it may now be widely ignored (like, lest Paisleyites gloat, the ban on alcohol in Orange Halls, and the ban of attendance at Catholic weddings and funerals because the Mass is celebrated), but it certainly used to be in place and in effect, well into the recent past.

As a comment here recently put it, the carve-up between two lunatic fringes stops bombs from going off in England, though not in Northern Ireland, but who asked them?