Suppose the United Kingdom really has become, as he characterised it, “an exhausted multinational holding company held together by inertia, nostalgia, transfer payments and the BBC weather map”. Suppose Scotland really does vote like a Nordic social democracy, Wales like its run by public-sector socialists and Northern Ireland like a theological argument attached to a motorway network. Suppose England really does carry most of the economic weight, only to be lectured by its own governing class for the impertinence of noticing.
Suppose the diagnosis is exactly right: Pinder has pinpointed the rot accurately. He has then drawn precisely the wrong conclusion from it.
The first thing he gets wrong is the confusion of the British state with the British settlement.
The state is the political class, the supranational creep, the regulatory accretion, the judicial activism, the BBC, the Civil Service that signed off tens of billions of pandemic-era fraud and waste without anyone in particular being held to account. The settlement is the 1707 Acts of Union, the shared Crown, the common law, the Parliament, the British identity built across three centuries on top of those. The state has spent the past three decades betraying the settlement. The settlement has held up rather better than the state has — through industrial revolutions, two World Wars, the loss of empire, devolution and Brexit. Its institutions still work. Dissolving the settlement to fix the state is amputation on the theory that a missing leg is less trouble than a sore knee....<<<Read More>>>...
