This England No More

The dissolution of the Union on this side of the Irish Sea would be the end of England as a political rather than a cultural entity. Indeed, even culturally, sports teams could continue to be fielded, as a well-supported cricket team still bears the name of Middlesex. Beyond that, what, exactly, is there that pertains to England as a whole and to nowhere else?

A unified Kingdom that in principle, and not only in practice, existed only on this side of the Channel, and the court language of which was English rather than any sort of French, is really only a creation of the Tudor Period, and integral to its creation was the formalisation of the Union with the Wales from which the Tudors themselves had very recently emerged. 

The Union of the Crowns with Scotland followed shortly afterwards, and the Tudors had never made any bones about their aspiration to incorporate Scotland into their Realm eventually. Such can be the limitless ambition of people who had got lucky beyond their wildest dreams in the first place.

As we see today, England is barely a functioning polity. Backed by a London non-Opposition, a Home Counties Government rules even major conurbations by decree, assuming them to be tiny villages a thousand miles away, the inhabitants of which are accustomed to subsisting on practically nothing, and in any case deserve no better than that.

The Union with Scotland and Wales holds England together politically, insofar as anything does. Otherwise, it is the name of a football team that is supported by the inhabitants of areas that know very little about each other, and which do not like even what little they know. But the Union with Scotland, and even the Union with Wales, have never looked weaker than they do now. I do not want any of these things to be true. But they are.