The potential break-up, or breakdown, of the nation state called 'The United Kingdom', is not separate from, but instead getting tied up with, both Covid 19 and Brexit. These two new UK landmarks will be presented by the Tory government and also by the opposition Labour Party, as the immediate reasons why the cohesion of Britain's various countries cannot and should not detach themselves from the UK. In Scotland, Northern Ireland and increasingly in Wales however, Covid and its government-led errors; plus the fatuous balls-up of Brexit 'deals' in Northern Ireland; plus decades of the collapse of both UK's major parties in Scotland itself; plus a big anti-Brexit vote in Scotland; - all of it stands entirely opposite to both of the different claims of the main Parties in Westminster. The parties that run the British Isles are virtually exclusively and absurdly English. A joke? The impact of Covid and Brexit suggest that Westminster cannot any longer hack it. That this is a final insult.
A mess, surely. And the Westminster leadership from both the Tory government and the Labour opposition are tearing their hair out. The Tories, prepared to demonstrate their benefits of an apparently cross-country UK style budget, are starting to move the heavy guns forward.
The demands from the Tory leadership in Westminster that British sovereignty in Scotland was essential for the success of their part of the pandemic is weak to say the least. Every politician in the West knows that Nicola Sturgeon out-managed the first three quarters of the Tories' failures over Covid; a failure with deadly consequences. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has finally applied Surgeon's approach over Covid's vaccines. It was the Scottish political leadership that forced the UK. And now the Tory budget might offer £ millions to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales but the real £ billions go mainly to the English centred corporations.
More serious - for its self-affliction alone - is the attack by Alex Salmond on Nicola Sturgeon. The first wobbles (see the ferocious campaign for UK unity, led by 'The Times' newspaper) across the majority for Scottish independence have started. Salmond's role now could effectively destroy the current platform for the independence referendum and inevitably open up the space for a new Scottish Tory Party leadership in the country. Salmond with his £ half a million is politically dead anyway. But if he carries on his vendetta he threatens one of the historically most significant opportunities to develop a new radicalism in Scotland and, finally, to help remove the dead-end imperial history which sustains the whole of Britain's rotting politics.
In Northern Ireland events may be slower and covered in the desperation of the Democratic Unionist Party's leadership's hysterics about the Brexit deal they accepted. But the course of NI's future as part of Irish unity is much more solid than the Scottish movement. In NI the DUP can only find its unionist way to victory after they experienced another raw 'sell-out' of the Tories. ( A regular feature according to hard unionist historians.) The DUP are straining to re-vitalise the battle call of 'the Union!' But life has changed in both NI and also in the results of the failure of Southern Ireland's economic globalism.
NI young people are now a majority that would accept Irish statehood. As with many young people across the West the idea of western unity has a strong appeal (despite necessarily its current EU construction.) An organised, radical and historically based party, Sinn Fein, who gained more support in Southern Ireland and came very close over the last unionist election in NI, are sophisticated, managing their historical view of the framework of Ireland as an oppressed nation. It has now turned towards a more modern radicalism. Frankly, the unionists are less and less able to manage a society they cannot lead. The danger of course is their possible turn to attempts of social violence. But the unionist base no longer sustains the weight to make that more than a marginal and rapidly abhorred, local, terrorism. Frankly, NI dissolving into Ireland will be most fought against by the two main Southern Irish parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail who will most likely link with the unionists - in order to try and stem Sinn Fein.
Behind these particular and detailed developments, in Scotland and in NI (Welsh independent national development is growing but is not yet politically defined or supported by a truly mass base) is a potential and enormous development across the West.
A new type of disorganised Western capitalism is emerging. And one of the oldest and most developed keystone in the capitalist system is beginning to dissolve.
Trump and Boris and Macron and...and...are not 'exceptional'. Trump et al are reviving national politics because of the political and economic failure of Western globalisation. This has many aspects; the dissolution of social democracy; the increasing role of state violence; dividing the working class by the need for 'national defence'; the rise of armaments etc. But, of course, these more obvious trends hide deeper shifts and movements. These are the changes and initiatives within general politics and economics as new ruling class defences in Western societies are being recreated.
A deep example is emerging in the growing dissolution of the UK. The US can still pretend that it will remain the leading country in the world. But, without a major war in the next decade, it won't. The EU is staggering on, trying to organise the politics of different nations in Europe based on the strength of its economic domination. This contradiction is only going to get brutally worse.
Not surprisingly the first main country (except the Netherlands) that became a capitalist nation was England in the 1640s and then Britain by the18th century. In due course its capitalist and imperialist economics resolved the parts of emergent nations and their global superiority in the West. The capitalist economics of the modern day is beginning to dissolve western nations. Fighting for globalisation via the strength of the US and the concentration of the EU has, first, used globalisation, but not at all for most individual capitalist nations (and not provided any success for the previously successful traditional western imperialism either.)
As the first capitalist nation, the UK, detached from the EU and without a coherent future except to become a fantasy Asia and California, under pressure from its different national parts, is beginning to break down. The call to split from the EU and its countries is a UK-based desperate response to 'reclaim' a national sovereignty. That is in effect unavailable to to the UK, in the globalisation system of the West. The UK's proposed sovereignty is contradicted by its actual, real own economic system. The exact reverse of its origins as a nation.
It is no surprise that the UK will disintegrate as imperialism weakens further. More generally, sections of societies in the West will begin to move (in a battle) to local political decision making, dragging down the apparatus of capitalist globalism. A new economics will therefore inevitably have to flow against the current offer of the capitalist system. A type of new (international) socialism could then emerge out of the local, radical political initiatives. The alternative is truly barbarism.
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