A Blue Ensign emblazoned with a shield bearing three lions and surmounted by Saint Edward's Crown. A flag for England which did not make everywhere that flew it look like an emergency medical facility. Suitably crowned shields would bear a lion rampant, a dragon and a harp as the respective flags of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, all following a classic Commonwealth pattern. In each case, there might also be room for a motto: Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense, Nemo Me Impune Lacessit, Cymru am Byth, Quis Separabit.
It is not only the spending of too much time online with American paleocons that has put the Bonnie Blue Flag in my mind. Regular readers may have detected a certain antipathy towards the dissolution of the United Kingdom, although it is not as if that is going to happen any time soon. If Alex Salmond though that he could win an independence referendum, then he would hold one. But the idea hovers permanently over and around the general debate.
If either or both of Scotland and Wales ever really were to secede, then a population significantly greater than that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined would be left subject, even more than is already the case, to the economic, social, cultural and political will of an area with little or no grasp of our leftish economic and our conservative social views at once serving and served by our agriculture, our manufacturing and our small business, and deriving from Catholicism, Methodism and the non-London, non-camp sort of High Churchmanship, so that they can be traced all the way back to the Jacobite roots of the British, and perhaps especially the English, Left.
All of this might as well be in Swahili to most people in London and the South East, and in fact there are probably more Swahili speakers there than there are people who would know what any of this meant. Although when the City needs to be bailed out, then that corner of the country is happy to take the money of people who have bothered to maintain as much as we can of a proper industrial base, in the teeth of governments of both parties over 30 years and more.
Not least, though not exclusively, because of the effect that it would have on arresting any slide towards the dissolution of the Union, might not the MPs and municipal leaders of the 12 ceremonial counties of Cheshire, Cumbria, Durham, the East Riding of Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Merseyside, North Yorkshire, Northumberland, South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, and West Yorkshire issue a Declaration that, in the event of the secession of either or both of Scotland and Wales, each of those ceremonial counties would become a State of the Union of the North of England?
Just so long as the identity of the Head both of the Union and of each of the States was made abundantly clear by the fact that, in best Commonwealth fashion, the flags of the Union and of each of the States were in all 13 cases variations on the Blue Ensign, each with an appropriate heraldic shield and motto emblazoned on it, surmounted by Saint Edward's Crown. The Bonnie Blue Flag, indeed.
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Surprised you are not insisting on the historic county boundaries.
ReplyDeleteDoubtless you would write in that Union law and State law at their respective levels took precedence over EU law wherever the two conflicted.
Would the Blue Ensign flag indicate that this Confederacy was the last outpost of, as you sometimes put it, "somewhere that was recognisably Britain"? I love the idea of the Royal Family still living in somwhere like York or Lancaster after Scotland, Wales and the South had all become republics.
But because anyone who knows you knows that this post is only half joking if that, yes you are spending too much time on line with the US paleocons.
Their small town agricultural and industrial protectionism puts them out of step with Middle America. Your small town agricultural and industrial protectionism puts you out of step with Middle Britain.
Their opposition to the war on terror puts them out of step with Middle America. Your opposition to the war on terror puts you out of step with Middle Britain.
Their traditionalist Catholicism and affinities with Eastern Orthodoxy and the old schools of Episcopalianism, Presbyterianism, Methodism and Lutheranism put them out of step with Middle America. Your traditionalist Catholicism and affinities with Eastern Orthodoxy and the old schools of Anglicanism, Nonconformity and Scotch Presbyterianism put you out of step with Middle Britain.
Their abomination of the name of Abraham Lincoln and their sympathy with Southern secession put them out of step with Middle America. Your abomination of the name of Winston Churchill and now your sympathy with a potential cause of Northern secession, with "Churchill and the miners" obviously in the background, puts you out of step with Middle Britain.
"Surprised you are not insisting on the historic county boundaries."
ReplyDeleteI love pointing out that Thatcher was in the Cabinet when they were torn up, and that Labour voted against it. But the States could probably do without the battles between the conurbations and the rest.
"Doubtless you would write in that Union law and State law at their respective levels took precedence over EU law wherever the two conflicted."
Doubtless.
"Would the Blue Ensign flag indicate that this Confederacy was the last outpost of, as you sometimes put it, "somewhere that was recognisably Britain"?"
It certainly would, if that were the case.
"I love the idea of the Royal Family still living in somwhere like York or Lancaster after Scotland, Wales and the South had all become republics."
They might head off to Australia, or Barbados, among a goodly number of other possibilities.