The Right Dishonourable

Political elites have spent much of the past decade worrying about why voters are revolting against globalisation. However, no political programme has proved as effective at grounding the global citizen as the apocalyptic horseman we’ve been living with for the last year.

Even open borders advocates have seen a use for port controls as the pandemic has rumbled on. Some Scotsman hope to make such arrangements permanent once the crisis is over. At such times it’s worth asking why we draw our state lines where we do, as well as who qualifies to live within them.

It has become a cliche in British politics to say that Scotland will leave the United Kingdom sometime soon. Such cliches are usually a sign of lazy thinking, but cynics are right to warn that our country is at risk of breaking up. It has been for several years.

Over the weekend the Scottish National Party (SNP) set out its plan to make North Britain independent again. I’d assumed that the party’s attempts to hold a referendum would end with a simple refusal from Westminster, but the nats have other ideas.

There is always a great deal of squabbling over who the true heir is. Pretenders to a successful leader will always want to inherit legitimacy, while critics will draw unflattering comparisons with less fondly remembered predecessors.

Selectively reading history is thus an inevitable part of politics. But while readers will be familiar with debates over whether Donald Trump is a literally Hitler, a more obscure quarrel has begun in the British press about whether leavers or remainers are the real Whigs.