Northern Ireland and Scotland Are on a Long Road Out of the UK
The Tory split over a new EU deal and — paradoxically — Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation were the latest evidence that the UK will come apart.
Breaking up.
Photographer: Jack Hill/Getty Images
It was a Frenchman who recently observed that every nation has its own massive, historically intractable problem. For France, he said, this is the stubborn popular opposition to raising the national pension age in response to ever-increasing longevity. For Germany, it is still the specter of Hitler. For the US, it is guns. For Britain, it is Ireland.
This week, fierce controversy broke out within the ruling Conservative Party about “John Bull’s other island,” threatening to rend Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government asunder. For more than five centuries, British rule over Ireland, almost unfailingly incompetent as well as cruel, inflicted misery on the Irish people and created military and political crises for England. The fact that the English were a Protestant society, while most Irish people were Catholic, made matters worse: Until the mid-19th century, England was in a state of almost permanent strife with Catholic Europe.