Hi David,
Thanks for that thoughtful response which justifiably raises longer term issues of the British constitution than the daily news as reported in the piece just sent in.
I met the US ambassador to France in the year the euro was launched as currency and he asked me if Blair would buy into the new single currency. I said the first question he faces is whether he'll have a country for much longer, never mind control over money. I listed a dozen features of the UK's "creeping constitutional crisis": Scotland, the two Irelands, Europe, London's dominance, the need for regional devolution, parliamentary absolutism (yes the PM, not MPs), the House of Lords, the shambolic electoral system, national currency, the lawless position of the City, church and state and on and on. He laughed and told me "The Brits always claim that we know nothing about Europe and should stay out it. Next time I'll ell them, what are you doing about your creeping constitutional crisis?" I have been banging that drum in half a dozen papers ever since, the last once being "Brexit: where once was an empire".
When Gandhi came to Britain in 1931, he was shocked by the poverty of London's East End and of Lancashire's mill towns. He said that Indian peasants were better off and would never put up with conditions like these. The London politicians got away with it because they persuaded the impoverished masses that they were masters of the world because they were British. Ever since Suez I have been waiting for the British electorate to own up to being what they are -- a middle-ranking people of little global significance. But something always gets in the way of that realisation.
Brexit would not have been possible if the little Englanders could not play on that fantasy of lingering imperial grandeur. If anything that card is even stronger now, as it in Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria and Austria, all dreaming of an imperial past however fictitious. The problem lies not with the MPs any more than with the denizens of the US Congress. It lies with popular delusions of Western global mastery that is no more.
Your posts from the front line have been a breath of fresh air for this expat.
Keith