Friends And Neighbours?

The news that a pub called "The Saxon Shore" in Herne Bay down in Kent is at the centre of a row because it used the Union Jack instead of the flag of St. George on 23 April, St. George's Day, is another cobblestone on the road to the Scottish Referendum.

The whole issue is now into the realm of a Neverland of fantasy, imaginative storytelling and a world far removed from reality.  Alex Salmond decided to reprise his role as the Tinker Bell fairy of politics by venturing south to Carlisle while David Cameron was off somewhere being a less than convincing Peter Pan.

For those uncertain of the meaning of Neverland, Tinker and Peter go to Wikipedia.  All this was once the stuff of childhood in the days when we all needed to be removed from reality as often as possible.  Those days may be about to return.

After decades of stoking up resentments, picking fights and indulging in quasi racism against anything English and taking as his model the dynastic and tribal atrocities of the past Salmond has suddenly turned coat.

He now proclaims, mindful of the marginal voters, that all will be well on the divorce and we will be a happy couple, friends and neighbours, living in the same social housing in a sharing new relationship.

The Union was born in 1603 in a political and economic shambles with the accession of King James VI of Scotland to the throne of England during a plague epidemic; the previous monarchs of England having slaughtered many of the other possible candidates.

A century of upheaval and strife in Europe and Britain led in 1707 to the union of the parliaments with the Scottish elite essentially buying into the expanding English empire, renamed British.  Again it was a time of political and economic shambles.  Broadly, it was religion, money and Empire that kept the show on the road.

If anyone thinks that this separation or divorce is going to be friendly, easy and all done and dusted in a couple of years or so then it will not.  There are all the makings of a long, nasty, dispute ridden, costly and dangerous continuing political crisis.

This is not because it is a purely local matter.  It is of interest to too many others with interests and with a stake in the eventual outcomes.  To expect to be free of outside interference or complications is to be both naive and very stupid.

To add to that it will all happen in an uncertain world riddled with economic and financial weaknesses as well many locales at risk of flaring up into violence and conflict.  Because we are now prisoners in a globalised world where the money flows are out of our control.

Our politicians would all do a lot better to tell us what could be coming and the costs.  This is because we are not just going into one Neverland, there are too many parallel ones.  The EU is one, the United Nations another and there are many of them that we are connected to.

What happens if we cannot borrow our way out of the consequences?  Will we find ourselves being ruled directly by Commissioners from Brussels, or the UN and the cohorts of the IMF?