Is The UK Heading For Divorce?

Hi there and welcome to the Byline Times Podcast from the Byline Times with me Adrian Goldberg and this time the Unmaking of Britain with James Hors, whose latest best seller the shortest history of Ireland follows similar concise histories of England and of Germany. I was struck by a line in Jim's Ireland book about how the idea of Britain was initially a militaristic one. He writes that the British army is older than the British state and it was born in the Ulster colony. The year he identifies is 1641. Now many states are confections. One bit is added to another over time. They had regurgues and coalesce Belgium being a prime example and nation consisting of three distinct linguistic communities, French, Dutch and German, which somehow hangs together. But in the case of the UK there are growing signs of a desire to disunite the kingdom, witness the success of the S&P and blood comrade in the recent elections. So I can't wait to chat this through with Jim. Jim, welcome once again to the Byline Times Podcast. Great to have you on. Great to be back Adrian and I'm delighted you started there because I think it's one of the strangest things about the state we live in is the various names it's chosen for its identity. The simple historical fact is that what we call British identity, the notion of British identity which is so precious to so many people was in fact entirely invented by King James I and specifically for the Ulster plantation. The royal documents concerning the Ulster plantation refer to rather entertainingly with two teas, the British undertakers, whereas in fact the documents on the ground talk about the Scottish and the English undertakers for the very good reason that they were in fact entirely separate kingdoms still linked only dynastically through James himself. And when these two groups of settlers first got together, they were kept very separate in where they were put in Ulster as well and they only got together in 1641 at the time of the great Ayah Shrebellion and they formed an ad hawk thing which they themselves called the British army at a time when of course no such state existed. So uniquely in the world I suspect we have the British army predating the British state and to me this brings home very very viscerally something which I think we forget and that is in our ordinary everyday politics in this country are very very largely run in a subterranean way almost by these national constitutional concerns and they have been from the start and we underestimate that I think that's been thrown into really start relief by the results of the elections in Wales and Scotland just last week. The undertakers that you refer to they were not carrying out dead bodies they were undertaking a task weren't they on behalf of the English state I guess as it was then or on behalf of the monarch anyway of James in 1641. So before we get into how that leads to the creation eventually of a British state just explain what was going on in Ireland at that time and why it was felt important to create this umbrella idea of a British identity. Well that was King James's own pet theory and the fact is really it wasn't so much what was going on in Ireland as what was going on between England and Scotland. King James having taken the throne of England as well immediately or almost the first thing he did was he made this official proclamation that he intended to abolish that was the word he used. The notions of England and Scotland and that he would quote assume the title of King of Great Britain felt with two teas and this was of course thrown straight back in his face by the Westminster Parliament because they had no intention they were flex they'd been flexing their muscles under Elizabeth and they had no intention of allowing this Scottish king to rule over them with a power base in Scotland over which they had no control and King James was furious about this. The Parliament's own website says quote he never forgave the English Parliament for this and then what happened was suddenly with the so-called Flight of the Earls in 1608 he suddenly has a chance to reboot this project to create a thing he calls Britain in Ireland so and the idea is it will be directly loyal to him and paying money to him without him needing to go to the Westminster Parliament cap in hand for grants every year votes of money and so forth which he had to do and so from the start it's a royal project about creating a brand new identity which will be separate from and not in fact totally controlled by the Westminster Parliament it's much stranger than we think it's a foundation of Britain. So James is the architect of Britain and I think one of the themes of your shortest history of Ireland is that so much of what happens in Ireland both before that and in the years since then has been determined by the political battles the divisions that have existed on this side on the English side of the Irish Sea that so many of those conflicts that have blighted out in Ireland are conflicts that have actually originated here. Absolutely and one of one of my favourite quotes in the book is from a gentleman called the O'Connor Don who was the descendant of one of the high kingly families of Ireland but who was by now an O'Connor light MP in Westminster in 1844 so on just on the verge of the famine and he makes this lovely speech where he says to the comments you know none of you care at all about Ireland you're just using it as a proxy battlefield his own quote is you treat it like you describe it like a battle of the field of Waterloo it's two English parties fighting out and making Ireland into a safe proxy battlefield this is nowhere clearer than in that extraordinary period of the third home rule crisis on the right on the verge of World War One where Britain itself almost comes to a state of civil war and you have you have Bonelot and particularly Winston Churchill at that stage obviously a big liberal beast both talking outright war but keeping that war talk safely concentrated in Ireland because what you have and this is the essence what I want to what I really want to talk about today is that that that that point of incandescence is reached because of national struggles within Britain what's actually happened in 1910 is that in two elections the Liberals have failed to gain a majority in England and they only governing with the support of the Celts and in particular the Irish this will recur in 1974 in the two elections and whenever that happens the Tories are incandescent because what's really going on is is this warfare between two different tribes in England the South and the North and when the South of England finds that it's outvoted by a combination of the Northern and the Celts you get this extraordinary sense of outrage in the South of England that it has almost no bounds it will radicalise that conservative party whether it's 1910 or of course in 1974 leads to Thatcher and Thatcher I did the Thatcherism the breaking of butth skilism and the whole new era of British politics and so that Ireland is this proxy battlefield for English politics which both of course has a terrible effects in Ireland but also has effects on us here in that we're constantly using it as a tool in this mad unresolved battlefield which is basically English politics extended to the archipelago. Yeah and we'll come to how that plays out in modern UK politics I'm worried whether I should even use that phrase that I can but we'll talk about how that kind of has worked out in a post-Brexit context but given that your most recent book is the Shorty's History of Ireland I just think it is worth reflecting on how terribly that has played out at times in the in Ireland itself and most obviously with the great famine and 1847 and the interests of anglicised farmers in Ireland versus the interests of the people I hesitate to say the indigenous people because as you show that there have been these great flows in Ireland as elsewhere but the the Gaelic speaking people in Ireland whose interests were just ignored Rayleigh or sacrifice to the interests of the English or anglicised farmers and at the time. I think that I very keen in the book to try and get people away from sort of Esno crisis you know the idea of an English versus Ireland as a kind of popular French romantic conception of nations and the villain of the piece is in fact the Tory party in the first home rule crisis for example could have transformed Ireland completely and Home Rule was being pushed and almost brought about by James by Charles Stuart Parnell, who was of course an Anglican landowner in charge of Irish nationalism, with the backing of the American fiends. Now, had the Tory party not stymied the first home rule bill, which, let's we forget, was far more modest to more Scotland now has? Home Rule would have been introduced to Ireland by an Anglican landowner, and it would have changed the entire colouring of the narrative of who's delivering in Ireland. That whole sort of Patrick Piers blood sacrifice, the Catholic Church leading us business, would have never happened, had home rule being granted under Parnell, between Parnell and Gladstone, which of course was stymied largely by Churchill's father, who came to Belfast and revitalised the then near Moribund, or in Jordan, by absolutely promising them to the extent of civil war, quite openly, that the Tory party would back them to the hilt, really restoring that whole colonial promise. Thus initiating the whole series of home rule crises, which had this extraordinary climax in 1913, when you have the leader of the Conservative Party, Bonne Law, saying famously, "I know of no limit to else to resistance, which I would not support, publicly." And Churchill, extraordinarily, this is one of my favourite things in the whole book, Churchill actually is recorded as having told Sir John French, the leader of the Imperial General Staff, that if there was any opposition to moving troops to crush the loyalist militias, he would, quote, "reduce Belfast to rubble in 24 hours," by using the Royal Navy. That's the state has, how things have got to with this pattern. It's the intransigence of the Conservative Party, when faced with any prospect of reform, again and again, the villain of the peace. I mean, very few people, in my opinion, have understood when you're looking at the troubles in Ireland, in the 1970s and '90s, that the real spark of this is a 1970 election in Britain. If you look at anyone can do this, you check out any of your listeners, check out the manifestos of the Labour Party and the Tory Party for 1970. The Labour Party manifesto refers to the Ulster Union simply as Tories, and it says, "50 years of one party Tory rule have brought us to this past, we're going to insist on reforms." The Tory manifesto says, "We all deliver law and order with the UDR and so forth." It can tie any different conceptions of what's about to happen, and of course, Heath wins. And within weeks, the whole picture has changed. That's the immediate buildup to things like Bloody Sunday in Termant is the change of government in England in 1970, that in effect, Harold Wilson says this himself. This isn't Jerry Adams talking. Harold Wilson, it says, in September 1970, "The Catholic people of Derry and Velfast have seen the orders of Mr Brian Falkenner," the leader of the unionists, "rubber stamped by the British government." That's Wilson, not Jerry Adams or so. You might be argument in the book. I think this will be controversial, but effectively, you say that from that point on, the British Army or control of the British Army is handed over to the R&J order. It is briefly, the dead doesn't continue, but in that vital period, which includes the leader to Bloody Sunday, the control, the initiation of security measures, is handed over to Stormont. In Termant, for example, is purely a Stormont policy. It's not backed by the Army. And the Tory government, in fact, pleads with Falkenner, would at least round up some loyalists as well. And he says, no, point blank. They've nailed their flag to their unionist mass there. And it's probably clearest and most tragically so in 1981. Again, I'm not really aware of anyone who's pointed something that's very important about why the hunger strike became what it was. And that is, in the very month, the Bobby Sands started the hunger strike, which was the second one. There'd been a failure one in the previous October, and no one had noticed it even. They started again against the advice of the IRA command and Jerry Adams, because everyone thought it would be hopeless. But what the vital point was in that very month, Mrs. Thatcher was, wait for it, less popular than Keir Starmer is now, less we forget. Her popularity rating, her approval rating, in March 1981 was 16%. So yeah, so it's a good perspective for now. She was more disliked than Keir Starmer is now. She desperately needed a win, and she needed to get those 10 Ulster unionists and peace back onto the Tory whip, because she was facing people like Jim Prior, who were threatening rebellion against her, she was so unpopular. That's the root of why she chose to make the hunger strike a fight. It's entirely to do with British politics. And Bobby Sands being the most high profile of those hunger strikers who passed away as a result of his hunger strike. And he and the other hunger strikers were campaigning for something that the British state, as you relate, had granted it in 1972, a form of special status. They wanted to be regarded as political prisoners. The British state had previously granted this status, then withdrew it in 1976. And you make the argument, as you've just outlined there, that really Margaret Thatcher needed a fight that she felt she could win. She needed a Kazasbelli, something around which she could garner her support and consolidate her position. Yeah, and this is the same politician who, of course, three years later was talking about the enemy within, meaning the striking miners of the UK itself. Yeah, there's no doubt she picked a fight here. And it could easily have been fudged. I mean, the relatives of the dead hunger strikers have come out publicly and said they've been told how secret negotiations were going on. Sometimes Steinway, by Thatcher, sometimes Steinway, by Shinfane, for their own interests. But how the whole thing need never have happened, really. And the Irish state found a fudge to it. You know, it was really quite easy, as I said, the original more than it had accepted it in 1972, Roy Mason had taken it away in 1976. Why to keep the Elster Unionists propping up the minority labour government? And it could, and a fudge could easily have been found, in which case, no one here would remember the 1981 hunger strike. It would be a little footnote. Instead, it gave a whole new generation of radicalisation to the IRA. Bringing things up to, well, not quite up to date, but nearly up to date, you talk about the way in which the Elster Unionists have been used by UK politicians and primarily the Conservative Party for their interests. And the more recent example of that is Brexit. Absolutely. I mean, we, apart from the fact of Boris Johnson's famous trickway, started going on about building a bridge between Elster and Scotland. And then you have May's famous bung of a billion pounds to Ali and Foster to keep her on site when she needed her. In that extraordinary period of parliamentary chaos we had between 2017 and 2019, when Boris Johnson effectively purged the Conservative Party and turned it into the Brexit party, which is the root of where we stand now. The root of Faraj's success is that under Johnson, no longer became, it was no longer possible to not be a hardline Brexit here and the Conservative. You, at least publicly, it became a touchstone issue, like guns to mega-Americans or like believing Trump was cheated of the election. You had to believe this to be a Tory and that's what's opened the door for reform. I mean, you only have to look at the actual personnel at the top of reform, because it's simply a rebrand of the ERG. That's all it is. I mean, I'm amazed that people don't see that more clearly. If you were to come from, it would appear that, for example, in Wales they took, they get two-thirds and in Scotland, they get about two-thirds of their votes, unless it's straight from Tory voters. That's what they are, is a radical rebrand of the Conservatives. Yes, but Northern Ireland voted to remain and thanks to what we call the good Friday Agreement or the Belfast Agreement, as it's known on the other side of the Irish Sea, that agreement had given a kind of a way out, hadn't it? It had given a means for Northern Ireland to allow people from two different traditions to coexist. If you were somebody who felt Irish, you could have an Irish passport, while still living within the United Kingdom in Northern Ireland, equally if you wanted a UK passport, you could be a British passport holder, still living in the UK or under the umbrella of the European Union. And the sense, I think, that English politicians either didn't grasp that that would be lost, or even more disturbingly didn't care that that would be lost. I think particularly in the case of Boris Johnson, it seemed to me, he just didn't care, he would say anything to ram through. these post-Brexit agreement was just really quite shocking, I think. Yes, so if you remember the way the way some of the brexit is talked in sanity about having restoring cameras to watch the border and so forth. And anyone who knows anything about Nordow, my wife comes from Donniegold, would know that if you stuck a camera on the border, it would last five minutes before someone took a shotgun to it, and then you'd have to have a cop to guard it, and then you'd have to have the army to guard the policeman, and we'd be right back to a hard border. It was always insanity. There was this idea, there was some easy technological fix to all this. Now what we have at the moment is a fudge, which has actually worked very well for Nordow, and but God knows how long that was last with the reform government, because we've had generic, again, recently spouting off, not generic, what's his name, the South African name, a big, big, big, big, big who's gone over to reform. He sounds like a South African. I can't remember his bloody name now. Anyway, he's been spouting off, anyway, about restoring full of sovereignty with a real border between the North of Ireland and the EU, in other words, a hard border again. Kruger, Donnie Kruger. This readiness to talk, can almost war talk when it comes to Ireland, in order to fight your battles in England? That's precisely what Wolf Tone meant, I think, when he talked about the English connection, having been the disastrous Ireland. Yes, and Theresa May, I think, who persuaded the Ulster Unionists to support her Brexit deal, there was a huge, there was a billion pounds, some promise of investment in Northern Ireland, but in so doing them, in the Ulster Unionists, you can argue, thereby betrayed the votes of the people of Northern Ireland, who, as I say, were pro-remain, for the very good reason that within Northern Ireland and on the island of Ireland, it had helped to secure and guarantee peace. Well, this idea of ignoring votes is something which is really central. Again and again, you found a situation where really the Conservative party, or elements within the Conservative party, let's say, have been instinctively ready to ignore the wishes of the UK Parliament, which they affect to be the great supporters of law and order of, if that contradicts the will of what they call England, which means southern England, and during the third home rule crisis, for example, General Henry Wilson, the most political general of the day, said he was going to back mutiny among the troops against the UK Parliament, because, quote, "England qua England is opposed to home rule." The cover story of it being Britain or the United Kingdom is dropped sometimes, I mean, Conservatives feel that England is being ignored. We saw this at the whole of this modern iteration of Brexit really began with the shock and the trauma of those three Blair victories. By 2005, and you had Michael Howard, using that little England rhetoric, you had the telegraph saying, "This couldn't go on anymore, because by then, by 2005, Blair was no longer winning the popular vote in England." The only held 45 out of 190 seats across the whole south of England. So you had, again, this toxic phenomenon where the Tories south of England feels that it's being governed against its own wishes by the UK. And I think one of them really unspoken things about Brexit, which future historians will see quite clearly, is that it was as much a revolt against the UK because against this notional thing called Europe. And there were those spectacular Yugav Polesdown in June of 2019, which revealed that not just majorities, but two-thirds majorities of conservative Brexit voters would see the union end rather than give up Brexit. They were quite happy to see Scotland go and aren't going at an even most spectacularly, a majority of them were prepared to envisage the destruction of the Conservative Party in order to quote, "Get Brexit done." That was the question, I think Yugav put to them. And which is about, maybe getting their wish, Jim, I'd say again, the reform is simply a populist iteration of the Conservative Party. And yet, it is the Conservative and unionist parties, isn't it? I think that the desire to maintain the United Kingdom in its present form, I would say, is most closely associated with those on the basis of Brexit. That is really truly fascinating. I'm glad you're well out of the agent because it's one of the great mysteries of the heart of British politics, is this. If you look at it rationally, if you were at a Tory spad at any time from the Third Reform Act to now, a rational one, you would say, "Look, why don't we just jettison the UK because we will almost always win England? We'll be looking at power forever in England, essentially, if we can jettison the Scots Welsh and Irish, which we did partly." And why don't they say that? Because it's the ideology of what's left of the British Empire? It's what presses you at war, it's called, you know, the untied Kingdom. It's we're still haunted, certain elements among us are still haunted by this idea that England has got to be more than just England. It's a very weird, it's almost a case for a psychotherapist, this notion of what is English nationalism if it no longer has the cover story of the Union Jack. And this goes way, way back in our history. It's something I'm wrestling with at the moment, it's such a profound story. I mean, just to remind your viewers, listeners, that the last time, the only time that any English regime has publicly and openly said in word and imagery that it is an English Empire, that it rules the Acafélego by force of arms and intends to gather an empire in the same way in the name of England, that was the same regime which killed the King of England, in other words, the King of the Energy and banned Christmas as a pagan festival briefly. There is something very, very strange and uncanny almost about this notion of what actually is England. But is that, is that explained by the fact is, has England become associated with an idea of the Empire of colonialism and that for the people who feel Englishness most closely and most fiercely, the decline of empire has made it very difficult to countenance in England, that is not in some sense an imperial nation. And we can't govern India anymore, we can't govern these far-flung parts of the world. But if you're that kind of English nationalist, where can you govern? Well, you can keep the Scots in line, you can tell the Welsh what to do. A little part of the island of Ireland will still be yours. I may be simplifying it. I don't know, but I do want to talk to you. I think it's even more complicated and strange than that because the question of people like that is that in their own heads they cannot conceive of what Englishness actually is. If you look at the poets, the writers of that great phase, you know, of the late Victorian Edwardian era, when England was commonly used as simply a synonym for the entire British Empire, I believe, like Kipling, and by foreigners incidentally, every all foreigners just called it Angolan, or Anglothaea, meaning the Empire as such. And what they saw as England was nothing to do with an ethnic state. It was an assembly of kind of elite spaces like Oxford, Cambridge, the Inns of Court, Parliament, cows, the boat race week, all these things, the lords, they came together in this set of images, which they called England, public schools, that sort of thing, and all based in the South East of England, but not actually an ethnic state at all in the normal way. It was simply Imperial HQ is what they meant by England. And I think this is rooted very deep in Englishness itself in that England itself was for centuries in uniquely in Europe, itself colonized by a foreign French-speaking elite. This goes on much longer than people think. Even in the English Civil War, you had stories of Cavalier, Battalion's galloping through cities, and more times shouting "Vivleroi", their war guys were still French, the Chromeweils men, the levelers particularly, went on and on about the Norman Yoke. It was still a live issue 600 years after the conquest, and culturally, I think it probably still is. The people are uncomfortable, the elites of England are deeply uncomfortable because the evolution of an actual ethnically defined English nationalism, because historically, they have inhabited a different culture and being of a different caste almost. And I don't know where people stand on that. I think even people like Farage feel the need to mask what is effectively English nationalism. I'm only quoting people like Michael Pesseltine here, by the way. And under this flag of the United Kingdom, because actual ethnic English nationalism has not been allowed since Tomlö's day, because it was felt to be too dangerous to the ruling elite of England itself, never mind anyone else. It's an extraordinary story, and unfortunately, excessive as this sounds in that psychological sense, I'm afraid that my English compatriots are in that sense most like the Russians, in that they cannot conceive of themselves without owning something that isn't theirs. It's often been said that Russia is not a state, it's an empire or nothing, and that seems to me to be the key to this conundrum of Englishness as well. When people wipe away the St. George's flag, how many of those people actually can conceive of what they mean by Englishness unless that involves owning something else that isn't theirs? - I think this is a just really fascinating conversation, Jim, that I'm of immigrant stock, and I've always lived in England, but if you said to me, what is my identity? What is my nationality? My nationality is British, and my partner, who is of South Asian heritage, and has spent all of her life in England, too, would say that her identity is British, and many other people I know of migrant heritage, like ourselves, hold that view, because there is something about Englishness, or at least about the way Englishness is expressed, that would appear to resist people like us to push us away. And yet it can't be a purely ethnic nationalism, because you say the ethnic heritage of Englishness, he's mixed, he's obviously mixed by the Normans, and it's even going beyond that, it's mixed. So it's not one single ethnic nationality, but it is perhaps a shared worldview that people like me are difficult to engage with. - I think it's rooted in a colonial trauma, the English meaning, the people who were once Saxons, or Vikings, whatever, I mean, I firmly believe DNA is bunk, by the way. So the people who were once a nation called England, although that had only been christened by a clut of Denmark, in fact, it was always a slightly fracture place, they had this experience of colonial trauma, which I believe exists to this day, and it exists in the very language we speak. I could say to you right now, if I was addressing a hustling, I could choose to say, I address you with my compatriots on this profound matter, employing words solely derived from the French language. Which is what remained it basically, or I could say to you, my fellow countrymen, I want to talk to you in words our forefathers would have understood using only Anglo-Saxon words, and that sense still infects our views in England of who is on our side and who isn't. I've done this in creative writing classes, if you make someone speak French, essentially, French-ified English, the audience will react to them negatively. If you haven't speaking good old, Mark Twain type Anglo-Saxon, people are gonna love you. And what's so extraordinary about this is it's passed over with the English to America, where it's still there in America. You cannot be an American president and sound clever, because to the Anglo-Saxon, in verticals, I mean culturally not DNA, mind. Being too clever is associated in this deep way with you existing within a basically foreign culture, and thereby being at some level, potentially a traitor. As fast as I can't go on, I can't, I can't, it's such a profound issue. (laughing) - No, no, no, no, no. - And I think also the transference of that mindset to the United States, and the kind of, that weirdly kind of chippy supremacism that Trump embodies, the belief in superiority, but also that underlying insecurity that makes that superiority messes their way. - My favorite one of all of them, I have to quote this one, it's in the book on England, but it's just such a lovely one. Your viewers or listeners will know Star Trek. Now in Star Trek, and in every other science fiction film, the bad is talk Norman French. The bad is say resistance is futile, you will be assimilated. And the good guys talk Anglo-Saxon, the good guys say their hell it will harder starve or open fire shields up, which is bloody, 10,000, that is Anglo-Skandinavium, which any Viking would have spoken. There's a good guy speak Anglo-Saxon, the bad guy speak French. It's a kind of universal field theory of social relations in Anglo-Saxon politics. - So go back to your excellent book about Ireland, the shortest history of Ireland. I just wanna touch on that one more time. I've mentioned the famine, which you suggest, and I think most informed historians would now suggest was an utterly preventable disaster. And it was a famine visited upon the poor and the dispossessed of Ireland to the benefits of those who looked to England and had been derived their wealth and their land from English patronage. You look at the actions of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland. Now to talk about these things in England is still I think to invite, if you talk about them openly and talk about the pain and the trauma that was inflicted by England in history upon millions of people in Ireland. It, you stand accused of wokeism, you stand accused of betraying in some sense what it is to be English. Of course not every English person would say this, but I think those who associate with English nationalism do not like these things being talked about. And yet they're profoundly important. And I speak as somebody by the way, on one side who has Irish heritage, profoundly important in the Irish psyche and the Irish experience. And yet they are, they're things that the fierce English nationalist would rather sweep under the carpet. - Yes, and they are the products, let's get this out of the history, they are not the products of any ethnic collision between the English and the Irish. It's about politics. And politics is about choices, about parties, it's about divisions within, cultures is about people who claim to represent nationalism as the whole point of populist politics, but all politics is populist in that sense, of modern politics. And yet I'm talking about talking bath tomorrow, for example, and this being the city of Jane Austen, I will ask my viewers, my audience there, who will know that we well healed members of bath in their lovely Georgian city, where I also live. And to think about this, literally at the very time, Jane Austen was writing Pride and Prejudice. One of her brothers was cruising as a captain of Royal Navy, more Royal Navy ship, part of the squadron's trying to interdict a French help for the Irish in what was brewing up to be their great rebellion, which was put down with extraordinary brutality by the British army, the same people who Jane Austen describes as officers doing quadrilles and so forth, were just across the Irish sea. They were well attested. I mean, not totally uncontentious accounts of Irish rebels being shot by the hundred having surrendered in good faith and so forth during that period. And yet that's the very period, which most English people associate with, you're Mr Darcy and is lovely man as his beautiful Georgian Vicarage and so forth. - Yes. - And much more than a Vicarage in Darcy's case. - When you talk about ethnicity though, I think a distinction is to be drawn as well. And this relates to Cromwell, is that there were waves of English settlers in Ireland. And I mean, you seem to describe it really across centuries that those people who traveled from England to Ireland then become embedded in the local community. They become Irish really in many respects. But there was a particular hatred and a viciousness towards those people of English heritage again. I'm using these words sort of in inverted commas, but they were seen as degenerates by Cromwell and they were viciously treated in a way that was not, there was a viciousness that was not meted out to those who Cromwell perceived to be in inverted commas authentically Irish. - Yeah, I mean, that word, that really surprised you in writing the book, but it just jumped up again and again to you. That actual word degeneracy is used again and again. The earliest version is 1297. It's in Latin in the records of the first kind of formal double impalement. And it says the English colonists are becoming degenerate. That word is used again and it was used obsessively by Lisabethan's particularly. And it's used right up until the penal laws, the preamble to one of the penal laws at the height of apparent success and domination of Ireland buying them says English families have become degenerate. It's there in black and white. And this was this was this terrible fear, which is common to every colonial power. [BLANK_AUDIO] identically, that the people who you think should be loyal colonists might go bloody native. And they're where would you be? Because so, of course, they are the people you really hate. Are the people who you think of as inverted commas naturally, yours who have turned into theirs. They are they are traitors to you. They have actually they are unnatural. They lose a bit and often use that term to describe this. They've lost their nature and become degenerate, become members of them rather than us. And thereby inciting huge hatred. That incident is one of the backgrounds to the Holocaust, of course, is that when the Germans invaded Eastern Europe, they perceived the Jews of Central Europe who spoke Yiddish as a kind of horribly degenerate Germans. That's why the special hatred reserved for them because they perceived them as almost sort of like us, but gone wrong, which is what every colonist hates. Where does that leave us now then in 2026 in terms of Clyde Cymru and the S.M.P. and the sense of a united kingdom, looking at these reasons, election results, of course, they're not definitive and they are not neither the election for the Welsh Assembly or the Scottish Parliament. Neither of those was a referendum on membership of the United Kingdom. But it's right me as reform grows in its presence and potentially will grow its presence in the UK Westminster Parliament that the sense, even though they do clearly have supporters in both Scotland and Wales, the desire for Scottish nationalists and Welsh nationalists to say, 'We're not part of this, this does not represent us.' That was surely an intro. Absolutely. I mean, these are not my words with the words of Simon Dixon who was for many years a leader, chief leader of the Times, who says this is coming up and he's talking from a sort of unionist perspective, saying this disaster, as he sees it, has come about because of quote, 'mindless aggressive English nationalism,' which has been released by Brexit. Here's a pin he only tweeted that a couple of days ago. It's not my idea, this is former Times-led columnist. Simon Dixon, yeah, it's a good friend of this podcast, yeah. Right. Well, there you are, you see. So it's not, you don't have to be a mad trotskist, which I'm not either, to say these things. It's been coming for a lot longer than people think. Let's wind the clock a bit back and remember that probably the only reason Harold Wilson managed to scrape a majority together of any kind in the second election of 1974 was by promising, at the first time as a manifesto commitment, that there would be devolution for Scotland and Wales. That probably got him over the line. He won one extra seat in Scotland, which considering his majority's only three was quite vital. He also, of course, promised a Brexit referendum, a little toad in order to win. I was back by, you know, how are you doing so? So it's very toxic time in English politics there. But the SMP at that election won 111 seats because it was clear that they did not want to be run from England anymore. Now, I happened, so I was at a conference in Denmark at the end of last year. And I happened to share a cab back with Nicholas Sturgeon, who'd been at the same conference. And I don't know her at all, of course. I said to her after I said, you know what, tactical voting is going to make, is going to put you back to 2015 at the next general election. And she said, what do you mean? I said, I said, either the Conservative Party or the Reform Party, or possibly a toxic alliance of the pair of them, is going to be so scary to people who are not English that everyone is going to be voting for the most likely candidate to defeat them in any given constituency under first pass, the post. And with the collapse of Labour, that's going to be you guys in Scotland. Now I'm delighted to say that since then, the latest and electoral calculus predictions, which very carefully weigh, as much as they can, the possible tactical voting are predicting basically an SMP clean sweep again on that basis. So sometimes history can commit you call things right, you know. I think the same way he implied, come, I mean, the electoral calculus at present today predicts it would be a dead, dead heat at the next general election in MPs between Clyde and Reform. I think that as that decision time looms, that tactical voting impetus will become stronger and stronger. And I am actually put money on the table here and say, I am predicting a virtually clean sweep for the SMP and Clyde becoming the biggest single party in terms of MPs. Now that is absolutely, it's already, and that's another way of extrapolating from the Senedd and Scottish Parliament elections, that they, that that will actually be reflected at the first pass, the post elections at the next general election. And that will be a situation we've never had. You know, we are used in this country, although we've seldom realised it, to having huge areas of the country essentially unrepresented. You know, thatcher and major governed with respectively only 18 and 17 Welsh and Tory MPs between them. In other words, there was actually no representation they had and they governed. Less often remember is that Blair and Brown governed with only 45 MPs in the entire south of England, which is 190 MPs, which is almost the same scale of non-representation. We're used to, without thinking about it, to sit to our politics being this huge sense of national struggles, but this will become manifest. For the first time when there are actually people who are not part of an, not part of an anti-torial alliance with the north of England anymore, which was what the Labour Party was in effect, with the fifth column in London always from the start. But they are actually explicitly saying we are not part of you. That has not, that has not been the case in this country ever. In fact, since St Owen Lindu was revolt, frankly. And we are approaching unparalleled times in this country. And if anyone thinks that the United Kingdom is some ancient state, which must be preserved at all costs and couldn't possibly collapse, let's just remember it was only founded in 1801. And it was founded for one reason and one reason only, which was to control Ireland. It's not some ancient natural ethnic state. It was a political thing cobbled together by Pitt, for God's sake, in order to suppress the Irish, to make, as he thought, make the Irish safe into a safe minority within this big new construct. Just as Great Britain was only created because the Westminster was terrified, the Scots might not ratify the next king. It might reopen England's civil war, which loomed in 1688 to 1689. So the idea that the UK could not possibly collapse, that's fairyland. It can easily collapse, things collapse. The whole bloody Russian Empire collapsed in a couple of months in 1989. And if we think the United Kingdom can't go the same way, we're in Cloud Cookooland. And that will have obviously one obviously huge effect is that if Scotland breaks up the UK, which will, by the same token, break up, break Britain, that Irish, that British identity which we began by talking about, will mean nothing anymore. And to whom then will the loyalists of the North of Ireland be loyal? They will have no British needs to be loyal to. Their whole pitch will just disappear in a puff of smoke. And they will, I think, like all colonists in Irish history. Once the colonial deal is withdrawn, they will rapidly come to terms with the fact that they happen to be living on an island called Ireland, which is where they are born, and where they want to die and all those quite correct things. My wife's community, she's an Anglican from Donnegoal. Her entire community had they be given the chance, would no doubt have voted to stay British in 2024 to 25. They weren't given the chance. They are all, and they're not one of them, thinks of British. Now, they actually have arranged marches still. They go around with fife and drums and union jacks and sashes and lambbegs, but none of them identify as British anymore. The link between culture and politics has been broken. And thank God, frankly, when people say to me, but the UK might fall apart. I actually tend to say, do we actually, on what grounds do you think it is a good thing? I was rationally speaking, from the point of any of the nations, is it not better for the English for God's sake to at last be free of the imperial thought and actually have to sit down and work out who they are as a nation, stripped of this notion of being imperial HQ. Then if fascinating chat, Jim, thank you so much. The book, Jim's most recent book, a best seller, by the way. You won't necessarily see written about too much for whatever reason in the mainstream papers. I do not know why it's a brilliant read. It's an easy read. It's a fascinating read. The shortest history of Ireland, it's out now, and it's previous books as well, which I've spoken about here on this podcast. I think the shortest history of England and the shortest history of Germany, both great reads as well. Thank you so much for your time, Jim. And thank you for listening. 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