The Northern Avenger

Posted as a comment on the American Conservative piece linked to, by the Southern Avenger, a youthful figure of the Old Right, about his lunch dates with a rather less youthful figure of what was once the New Left, secessionist sympathisers both:

I read with interest Jack Hunter’s account of his friendship with Kirkpatrick Sale.

Here in the North of England, we have a combined population significantly larger than that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and a highly distinctive culture of economically leftish social conservatism serving and served by agriculture, manufacturing and small business, with its roots in Catholicism, Methodism and a form of High Churchmanship very different from that in the South. All three of those reach back to ancestrally Jacobite doubts about the legitimacy of the Hanoverian State and of its capitalist ideology, also a significant factor in the emergence of the American Republic. Even the Tories here are mostly like this, and sometimes especially so. Not unlike the American South, really.

All of that 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 it meant. They hold us in undisguised cultural contempt. But when their wretched 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. Again, does this sound at all familiar?

What if either or both of Scotland and Wales ever really were to secede from the United Kingdom, something to which I must add that I would be opposed with every fiber of my being? Without the farming, fishing, manufacturing and shop-keeping land of an economically leftish social conservatism rooted in Catholicism, Presbyterianism and Episcopalianism; without the farming, manufacturing and shop-keeping land of an economically leftish social conservatism rooted in Catholicism, several varieties of Nonconformity, and the sane High Churchmanship that provides the background music to the Church in Wales, as the Anglican Church there is called; then what, exactly, would there be in the Union for our enormous population and, compared to the South East, our vastly more reliable economy?

Not least in order to arrest any slide towards the dissolution of this Realm, the Members of Parliament and the 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 should 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. Both the Union and each State would be headed by the monarch, as in Australia. Here as there, the relevant heraldic shield would be imposed on the Blue Ensign in order to produce, in this case, the flags of the last outposts of the Britain and the England in which most British and most English people grew up. The Bonnie Blue Flag, indeed.