We put out this video this lunchtime:
This is the transcript:
Latest opinion polls are showing that in both Scotland and Wales, there's a very high chance that pro-independence parties will form the next governments after elections in May 2026.
In Scotland, against all expectations, the SNP is riding high, and with the Greens in that country, they will almost certainly be its next government.
The same is true in Wales, where Plaid Cymru is doing better than it has ever done before in polls in that country, right at the top of the opinion poll and looking as though, again, with Green support, it could form the next administration in that country.
Add in Northern Ireland, where Sinn Féin are, of course, in charge and likely to remain.
So we face the prospect that right across the UK, three of the four countries that make up this supposed United Kingdom will, after May 2026, be governed by parties who wish to leave the Union.
What does that say about the future of the UK?
What does it say about the future of England?
Is it time that England came to terms with the fact that the countries that it now governs from Westminster don't want to be there? They want to be independent countries managing their own affairs in their own right, and it's time for England to go its own way.
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My immediate comment might be is why are English politicians not responding to this and either wondering why The Union is at risk or better still looking at what they can do in a positive way to hold it together
I cannot see Scotland accepting greater devolution powers. This is what was promised just before the 2014 Independence referendum, Gordon Brown’s “The Vow” is widely believed to have swung the vote Remain wards. The UK government reneged on promises then and I don’t see Scots being fooled a second time.
You are right. Scotland was caught out once. I very much doubt that it will want to be caught out again.
God forbid.
And I tell you, this is not England ‘going it alone’.
This is England effectively being sanctioned and kicked out of its own Union. This is England being rejected by those whom it claims it rules.
Bravo to them I say and woe be to England (say this reluctant Englishman – I wish Dad’s ancestors had stayed in Scotland).
You will be welcomed anytime you choose to make the move, you don’t even need your Scottish ancestry.
Pilgrim, you’ve hit the nail on the head: we all have our limits about how much ignorance, scorn and dismissal we’ll take from annoying people and the same goes for the “lesser” constituents of the United Kingdom. Speaker Lindsay Hoyle’s breach of parliamentary convention to prevent the SNP’s motion on a Gaza ceasefire was a classic example, but there have been hundreds of others going all the way back to 1707 and the statement by John Smith, the then Speaker of the English Parliament: “We have catch’d Scotland and will bind her fast”. That, and the deliberate absence of any right to secede, demonstrate that the “Union” was always intended as a colonial venture.
At some point, England may need to face an uncomfortable truth: the countries governed from Westminster increasingly do not want to be governed from Westminster.
Scotland has had a live, electorally significant independence movement for over a decade, one that Brexit did nothing to settle and arguably poured petrol on. Wales is not there yet, but support for independence has grown from almost nowhere, driven less by flag waving and more by frustration at how power and resources are hoarded at the centre. Northern Ireland is a different case again, with its place in the UK already conditional and an ever more serious conversation under way about Irish reunification. The idea that the Union still enjoys unquestioned consent looks increasingly like wishful thinking.
And here is the irony: England does not really have a political voice of its own either. Westminster pretends to be both an English parliament and a UK parliament, and ends up doing neither job well. English voters are blamed for decisions taken in the name of the UK, while voters in the devolved nations are overruled by a system structurally tilted towards England. Nobody feels properly represented, but everyone is told the Union must be preserved at all costs.
Of course, not everyone in Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland wants independence. Opinion is divided and sometimes finely balanced. But that is not an argument for pretending the question does not exist, or for using procedural tricks and inertia to suppress it. A union that survives only by blocking democratic choice is not a strong union, it is a brittle one.
What really needs challenging is the lazy assumption that the UK is the natural, permanent state of affairs, and that keeping it together is always the highest political good. If a multinational state no longer reflects the democratic wishes of its parts, forcing it to endure may be more dangerous than managing an honest break or a radical overhaul.
So the choice is stark. A genuinely federal UK with real, entrenched powers. Acceptance of independence or reunification where there is a clear democratic mandate. Or continued drift, denial, and obstruction in the hope that nothing finally snaps. History suggests it always does.
Thanks.
Declaration of interest.
As a Glasgow-born Scot with a Scots-born maternal family and a N Wales father and grandfather lineage, and not a drop of English blood that I know of, I would welcome getting 2 more passports. But of course that also make me vulnerable to deportation from England, after being picked up by Reform UK Ltd.’s ICE Stormtroopers. Would they pay my train fare?
I’ll see you in the departure lounge.
I’m not convinced that an independent England would survive either. I suspect that many of England’s regions would want independence from Westminster too.
Would Westminster ever relinquish enough autonomy to England’s regions to contain that. Something along the lines of Switzerland’s Cantons?
I can see a ‘Celtic Union’ developing between Ireland, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. I could see that Cornwall could make a claim. As for the rest? The disabling power of London within England is the issue that England will be forced to address.
That’s tricky for many people. I think lots of people who came to UK from the remnants of the empire since 1945 called themselves British, and certainly not English.
There are so many versions of English. As kids in West Yorkshire we more often than not thought English meant southern softies, or public school toffies. Test cricket – very much England, world cup football – very much England , but in other contexts not ‘English’ but maybe ‘British’, or possibly Yorkshire.
This issue seems to go along with the whole business of the UK Britain and England being ill-defined, with definitions overlapping and meaning different things at different times. It seems of a piece with the fact that the ‘constitution’ doesn’t exist in a coherent document but apparently does exist across a plethora of documents, acts, traditions etc etc
Talk about a can of worms. Discussing it will open up issues such as the Monarchy, King Charles and Tommy Robinson Yaxley Lennon.
England is welcome to Charles. I would suggest that the others should be looking for a very different form of head of state.
As a northerner, I am also sick of England politics being for the rich and the south. It’s not only Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that are fed up of the lies, the lack of responsibility and pandering to vested interests.