Red, Not Orange

Why doesn’t the Irish football team march down the Garvaghy Road while the Orange Order played Israel at the football? But in 1981, although an IRA bomb went off at an oil terminal in Shetland while the then Queen was nearby, it caused nothing more than minor damage to the boiler. Unlike the UVF, the IRA never otherwise bombed Scotland. It never bombed Wales at all. So it is not for nothing that the Sinn Féin of Northern Ireland’s First Minister is now identified as a sister party by the SNP of Scotland’s First Minister, never mind by the Plaid Cymru of Wales’s First Minister, both a party and a politician that have in their time been what the young people would now call adjacent. Since we see the form that English nationalism also takes, then the case for the Union needs to be made here as it is made everywhere else.

There are no prescription charges in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, so there should be none in England. There are no hospital car parking charges in Scotland or Wales, so there should be none in England. Eye and dental checkups are free in Scotland, so they should be free in England. And so on. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control. None of that is true of the eurozone, which an independent Scotland or Wales would have to join in order to join the EU, and into which incorporation into the Irish Republic would incorporate the Six Counties.