Paranoia or Schizophrenia?
The latest leaks from American diplomatic cables again confirm what the unrepresented UK public all along suspected. This is that UK government after UK government, at least since the Atlantic Charter of August 1941 between Roosevelt and the half-American Churchill, has been playing poodle to the American bulldog.
These leaks demonstrate to the much-betrayed UK public that, in their name but without their approval, UK governments one after another have acted in unprincipled ways, without any belief at all. Their only concern has been to sidle up to the most powerful – the U.S administration. Only this can explain why, for example, the self-justifying and quite unrepentant Blair government encouraged and took full part in the illegal and immoral US bombing of Serbia and its catastrophic invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. (According to other leaks, Blair’s private wars carried out with an underfinanced and ill-prepared British Army in Afghanistan, which together with Blairite laissez-faire ‘economics’ have bankrupted the UK, have not been of any use to the Americans in any case).
UK governments imagine that they have a ‘special relationship’ with Washington. They do not and have never had such a relationship, but are paranoid at the mere suggestion of this reality. Since UK dependence is still useful to Washington, it takes care not to tell UK governments this obvious truth and, for the time being, cultivate their illusion with selected words of flattery.
Thus, UK governments suffer from paranoia in their relationship with the USA. However, their relationship with Western Europe reveals yet another psychopathology. In 1962 the then US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, famously described the UK as a country that had ‘lost an empire and not found a role’. Since losing its Empire, the UK has indeed been leading a schizophrenic life, caught between Western Europe and the USA. Hence the UK government’s fanatical support for the ‘North Atlantic’ ‘Washington Pact’ (known as NATO), despite its uselessness since the fall of Communism. NATO, ironically, is currently bombing the foothills of the Himalayas, not protecting the North Atlantic. It seems as though it lacks maps.
Hence also, the belated and unpopular decision of UK governments to join and remain in the ‘Common Market’, now more honestly, though just as undemocratically, calling itself the ‘European Union’. The history of UK membership of this organisation has been one of continual friction, since UK culture is not that of mainland Western Europe, but that of the English-speaking world - a world to which in Western Europe only English-speaking Scandinavia and the Netherlands are close.
At the end of the last century, some European Union governments took the decision to impose on their peoples a common currency – the euro. Like some other countries, the UK did not take part in the euro project and those who like Mr Blair wanted the UK to take part in it have now made themselves invisible, realising that they were catastrophically wrong. A single currency can only work in a single nation. If the euro is to work, then there must be first a United States of Europe (USE), with a single, central government – presumably in Berlin, since the euro is in fact the euromark. If that reality is distasteful, then the whole dream, or for many nightmare, of a European Union should be abandoned. Honesty really is the best policy.
The inferiority complex of UK governments vis a vis their rich uncle in America is thus matched only by their insular superiority complex (rapidly becoming an inferiority complex, as reality dawns on them) vis a vis an alien Western Europe. Caught between the devil of Europe and the deep blue sea of the Atlantic, between schizophrenia and paranoia, what is the UK to do?
The solution is surely simple. True, it is not easy, because it requires something that is very unpleasant and very unnatural to governments obsessed with the fantasy of their ‘greatness’. This unpleasant something is called humility. Humility would mean taking the path of neutrality - that which Canada took long ago, that which Non-EU Switzerland and Norway took long ago. And none of them have done so badly. The prospect of being an offshore Switzerland, a ‘Southway’, as opposed to a ‘Norway’, or an ‘Elizabeth Island’ to the west of Prince Edward Island, is surely not so bad.
If a Sovereign Commonwealth of an Independent England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, were part of a neutral Northern Confederation, perhaps a lot of countries would feel a lot safer and a lot happier. It would leave a bankrupt USA and a bankrupt USE to sort out their problems. It would also open opportunities for membership to other countries and regions in the Northern hemisphere, such as Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and the Russian Federation.
What becomes then of the UK, founded in 1921? What becomes then of its unprincipled governments with their paranoia and schizophrenia, their old imperialistic reflexes and insular ignorance and arrogance, from which the English, Welsh, Irish and Scottish peoples have always been the first to suffer? It could quite simply go into that great dustbin of history, where already lie the corpses of Marx and Hitler and indeed most of the twentieth century. We are, after all, now in the twenty-first century.
