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Clive Pinder
Clive Pinder is a recovering global executive, former elected ornament and reluctant chronicler of Britain’s cultural and institutional drift.
The Telegraph splashed recently that Sinn Féin intends to work with the SNP and Plaid Cymru to “break up the UK”. Cue the usual outbreak of pearl-clutching from Westminster, where people who cannot run a railway timetable suddenly speak as if they are Metternich preserving the Congress of Vienna.
But perhaps we should all calm down and ask an awkward question.
What if they’re right? Not morally right. Not romantically right. Not Braveheart right. But economically, culturally and politically right.
Because here is the increasingly obvious reality. The United Kingdom no longer behaves like a unified nation-state. It behaves like an exhausted multinational holding company, held together by inertia, nostalgia, transfer payments and the BBC weather map.
Scotland increasingly votes as if it is a Nordic social democracy trapped against its will in Thatcher’s ghost. Wales leans permanently towards public sector socialism. Northern Ireland is basically a theological argument attached to a motorway network. Meanwhile England generates most of the tax revenue and carries most of the economic weight – then gets told by its own governing class that expressing the slightest English self-interest is somehow vulgar and racist.
England now feels like the chap paying alimony to three ex-wives who all say he was useless.
The economic numbers are revealing. England already accounts for roughly 85 per cent of UK GDP. Strip away Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and England would still possess an economy of around $3.5 trillion to $3.7 trillion. That would leave it roughly the size of France and still among the seven or eight largest economies on Earth.
More importantly, England’s GDP per head would remain among the richest major nations in the world. London would still be London – one of the planet’s dominant financial capitals, legal centres and cultural magnets. The Bank of England would remain. The City would remain. Most corporate headquarters would remain. Heathrow would not suddenly drift into the North Sea.
In fact, England’s fiscal position might improve. This is the part we are apparently not supposed to say aloud.
Public spending per head is already significantly higher in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland than in England. England effectively acts as the Union’s economic engine room while simultaneously being lectured about its alleged selfishness by political elites whose budgets depend upon English taxpayers.
The much-discussed Barnett Formula has long functioned as a mechanism by which England subsidises devolved administrations that often define themselves politically in opposition to England itself.
Now those same administrations increasingly wish to leave anyway. Fine. Let them.
The standard counterargument arrives immediately. ‘But Brexit damaged the economy!’
Possibly. The economic breathlessness of Covid not withstanding, economists continue to debate whether Brexit increased frictional trade costs with Europe and reduced investment.
But there is an enormous difference between leaving a continental trading bloc of 450 million people and ending a dysfunctional constitutional arrangement inside one sovereign island where 84 per cent of the UK population live.
England would still trade heavily with Scotland and Wales because geography exists. The Welsh economy is unlikely to declare holy war on English tourism and second-home owners simultaneously. Scotland leaving the Union would not suddenly turn Carlisle into North Korea. A United Ireland will still sell Guinness to us, just as the French still sell wine to Britain despite spending half their national existence despising us.
People trade with nearby prosperous neighbours. Switzerland trades with the EU. Norway trades with the EU. Britain traded with Europe long before Brussels invented itself.
Then comes the emotional argument. ‘But Britain is a great power!’
No. Britain was a great power. That distinction matters.
The political class still talks as though we are somewhere between Churchill and the Falklands Task Force. In reality we are a debt-heavy, ageing ailing state struggling to control borders, maintain infrastructure, police cities or build a runway without a judicial review and three diversity audits.
The UK increasingly resembles one of those stately homes open to the public. Impressive façade. Crumbling plumbing with bats in the belfry.
England, however, remains a potentially formidable country if it actually governed in its own interests.
Imagine an England outside the gravitational pull of perpetual constitutional management. Outside the endless need to subsidise competing nationalist projects. Outside the bizarre modern habit of treating English identity as faintly embarrassing.
Yes, perhaps eventually outside the ECHR as well. There. I said it.
One of the strangest features of modern Britain is that almost every serious conversation about borders, deportation, policing or migration eventually runs headfirst into supranational legal architecture that voters cannot alter.
Meanwhile the political class insists this represents ‘democracy’.
Holyrood has just elected a transgender Green MSP who is simultaneously applying to remain permanently in Britain while helping legislate for it. The same separatist movement demanding Scottish nationhood also champions border policies that render nationhood largely meaningless. You cannot build a serious country while treating borders, citizenship and national identity as optional social constructs. Nationalism without borders is rather like veganism with a side of brisket.
Only in modern Britain could someone arrive on a temporary visa, join a party that believes borders are essentially a colonial hate crime and women can have penises, then end up governing the country before his own long-term immigration status is fully settled.
An independent England could pursue a radically different model. Lower corporate taxes, a work not welfare culture, aggressive deregulation, serious infrastructure investment, controlled immigration weighted towards economic contribution, energy realism, faster planning approval and a legal framework rooted in parliamentary sovereignty rather than permanent judicial activism.
In other words, an England run more like Singapore than Brussels.
Of course there are risks. Plenty.
The break-up of the Union would create disputes over debt allocation, military assets, Trident submarines and borders. Financial markets dislike uncertainty. Constitutional divorces are rarely tidy.
Yet we must also stop pretending the status quo is stable, any more than a state built increasingly upon managed grievance can produce genuine solidarity and national pride.
The United Kingdom is already fragmenting psychologically. Devolution created four political identities without preserving one shared patriotic identity strong enough to hold them together. Westminster now spends much of its time arbitrating internal resentments while simultaneously importing millions of people from cultures with little historical connection to Britain at all.
It is difficult to build solidarity in a country that increasingly resembles an airport terminal.
Perhaps the real question is not whether the UK can survive technically. Of course it can.
The real question is whether the Union still possesses enough shared cultural confidence, democratic trust and reciprocal loyalty to justify its continuation.
Increasingly, the answer appears to be no.
If Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland genuinely believe they would flourish independently, England should wish them well.
Cheerfully. Calmly. Amicably.
Then quietly get on with becoming the most economically and culturally dynamic country in Europe.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
