So far, so Ulster. Yet if this warm summer day is like many others in Carrickfergus’s history, commemorating William’s “Royal Landing” at the harbor in the summer of 1690, look a little closer. There, amid the pomp of marching season, is a sight that many visitors might not be expecting: countless young people dressed in orange. There they are, the boys in collerettes and sneakers, the girls, grouped together, swapping the traditional bowler hats for skirts and tights. All walk in lockstep, breaking composure briefly to wave to school friends watching from the outdoor seats at McDonalds. Their lightweight sashes, more sparsely strewn with pins than those of older members, flutter in the breeze.

These youthful cohorts stand in stark contrast to their fellow bandsmen, and what many regard the Orange Order to be: a social club for old men to relive the sectarianism of yesteryear. Yet as the province gears up for “The Twelfth” — the anniversary of William’s final victory over his Catholic enemies on 12 July 1690 — it remains unclear if a more sprightly Order can truly salvage Ulster Unionism.

The Orange Order started life around a century after William’s landing at Carrickfergus. In the 1790s, sectarian violence stalked both Ulster and Ireland as a whole. Drunken brawls were commonplace, fights that often descended into armed conflict, especially as the tensions unleashed by the French Revolution crossed the Irish Sea. In September 1795, following one particularly vicious battle, the victors founded a Protestant defense association: the Orange Order.

Two centuries on, the Order has an international membership body of over 1,400 lodges. Members commit themselves to upholding Unionism, loyalism, broadly conservative beliefs — and, of course, the Protestant faith. Yet despite these long-held values, as well as provocative marches through “contested” neighborhoods with large Catholic populations, membership is surging: particularly among young Protestants. One young member, Tristan Morrow, says that his generation has brought a huge spike to membership of his local lodge. Living in a County Fermanagh village, local numbers have swelled from just 10 in 2002 to over 50 two decades later. Internal figures from the Junior Orange Order show a similar rise: since Covid, they have opened 26 new lodges, with membership increasing by over 70% in the four years from 2021.

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This comes as somewhat of a surprise to outsiders — myself included. The dominant account of Ulster Unionism, repeated ad nauseum in local media and Irish Nationalist politicians, is one of inexorable decline. With the 2021 census in Northern Ireland revealing, for the first time, more Catholics than Protestants, and with Sinn Féin becoming the region’s largest party at the last general election, some suggest that Unionism in Ulster is “dying out”.

In the broader culture, too, the Order has a reputation of being a drinking club for bitter old men, like a working-class equivalent of the Cavalry and Guards Club, albeit for paramilitaries rather than hussars. For people unfamiliar with the organization’s parades, certainly, it’s difficult to distinguish between the Order and the more rowdy, paramilitary-adjacent pipe bands; they all get tarred with the unfortunate brush of drunkenly emptying bladders on the wall of whoever’s house is nearby, or else snorting drugs in full view of bystanders.

Watch the Order in action, though, and things look rather less sordid. Two weeks before this year’s reenactment of the Royal Landing, over 2,000 young members of the Orange Order paraded through Donaghadee, another pretty coastal town not far from Carrickfergus. These young people, many of whom don’t look old enough to have left primary school, marched in jackets and ties. One lodge’s shrunken lambeg drum, processed near the front of the parade, seemed far more manageable than the adult alternatives.

For Joseph Magill, grand master of the Junior Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, this enthusiasm is partly social in nature. “I think the growth we have seen in recent years is largely down to the range of experiences available to boys through the Junior Orange movement,” he says. “Our members take part in competitions, educational initiatives, charitable activities and social events, bringing together boys from across our jurisdiction.”

In a world where so much interaction now happens digitally, these activities are strikingly offline — and old-fashioned. Magill highlights the popularity of lecturing, where young people are taught to recite questions and answers from memory. Given working-class Protestant boys are by far the most disadvantaged demographic in Northern Ireland, these activities have the potential to be useful far beyond the lodge.

Talking of which, religion inevitably plays a role in youthful Orangeism too, though perhaps not in the way you might imagine. There’s a tendency among outsiders to view the Orange Order as reflecting a distinct kind of cultural Protestantism. Just as the general perception of being Catholic in Northern Ireland has morphed from having 10 children and eating fish on Fridays to advocating for abortion and the boycotting of Israeli quinoa, so too does Northern Irish Protestantism have its own stereotypes — mostly involving cheap booze and Rangers.

Yet if Christianity doubtless matters here, Magill sees it less as a politicized label and more as a genuine matter of faith. “Through my involvement I developed a deeper understanding of my faith and a personal relationship with God,” he says, “which has been a positive and important influence throughout my life.” Jay Basra, a young Unionist activist who joined the Orange Order when he turned 18, makes a similar point, noting that his fellow Orangemen help him live a Christian life.

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This, in itself, is striking. In England, the so-called “quiet revival” is usually seen as a Catholic phenomenon. But in Northern Ireland — by far the most religious region of the United Kingdom — young people are still active adherents to their Protestant denominations. Here, some 46% of people who identify as Protestant attend church at least once per month, with residents aged 18-24 much more likely to hold a positive view of Christianity than their elders. In other ways, too, Protestant belief is much more embedded in ordinary life than elsewhere in the UK. Hundreds of young people attend various Christian youth festivals each year, and it’d be naive to imagine that the Orange Order doesn’t play a role here.

Given all this, it might be tempting to see a correlation between young Orangeism and Unionist politics more generally. But, again, any link isn’t straightforward. “A lot of Northern Ireland’s young people are switched off from constitutional politics, particularly people of a similar age to me,” Jay explains. “Regardless if a young person is in the Orange Order or not, the onus is on political Unionism to engage with them. It is high time Unionism began to fully appreciate that it cannot take young people’s votes for granted.” That’s reflected more broadly: faith in Northern Ireland’s political institutions has hit rock bottom, especially for young people, with knowledge of how the government functions here lower than in any of the other devolved nations.

How to explain this gap? Just look at the news. Jeffrey Donaldson, a household name in Ulster Protestant politics for years, is now a convicted pedophile. Gavin Robinson, the current leader of Donaldson’s erstwhile Democratic Unionists, has admitted it’s “clear” that other figures in the party knew about the abuse but kept it secret. This recent scandal follows a never-ending succession of controversies that defines the incompetent Stormont Assembly, which has only functioned, in the loosest possible sense of the word, for around 60% of the time since the Good Friday Agreement was signed 28 years ago.

For young people keen to express their Unionist beliefs, but who find conventional politics too depressing a vehicle, the Orange Order offers an alternative. In the end, though, it’s hard not to return to the demographic question. As Sam* concedes, part of the reason that Order membership is growing is precisely because some Nationalists think they can secure a united Ireland simply by waiting for Unionism to disappear.

To be fair, the numbers aren’t clear cut. The 2021 Northern Ireland census showed a larger number of Catholics than Protestants for the first time, with 45.7% of the population coming from a culturally Catholic background. Yet this represents an increase of only 0.6% in a decade, casting doubt on whether a majority of the population will ever fit this definition — something proponents of Irish unity often tout as a trigger for a border poll.

Still, some young Unionists would rather not be complacent. That, of course, raises another question: is the Orange Order a political institution after all, albeit one you can’t cast your ballot for? Magill still doesn’t think so. “Boys do not join the Junior Orange movement because of political debates, and we do not exist to promote party politics.”

That’s the formal line. But for other young Orangemen, being part of a lodge is clearly about more than faith or lectures or even sticking it to the DUP. As Sam puts it: “Zoomers will not be the generation to fail Ulster.” And, whatever the numbers say, it’s institutions like the Orange Order that could offer Unionism some hope. Irish Nationalists don’t really have any equivalent organizations, even if their representatives are often as shambolic as their Unionist rivals.

All the while, it’s clear that young people, of both communities, want stability, order, and a basic sense of normalcy in their politics, after decades of violence then decades more of sclerosis. It’s partly for this that people are flocking back towards the moderate embrace of the Ulster Unionist Party, the oldest political party on the island of Ireland, and whose new leader Jon Burrows has shot to the top of opinion polls. And it’s for similar reasons, perhaps, that young Protestants are joining the Orange Order.

Back in Carrickfergus, the parade ends in the late afternoon. Old men, exhausted, remove their dark jackets and wipe sweat from their brows. Their coaches, parked along the main stretch of road leaving town, provide the first seats they’ve sat on since the early morning; several fall asleep before the journey home even starts. Across the road, though, a group of young Orangemen have met up with their friends. They laugh and run back towards the site of William’s landing. For them, the day is still young.

*Name has been changed.

Many there will have paid little attention to the confirmation last week of a new leader of the Senedd. Vaughan Gething has often pinned his allegiances to the trade union movement. But will his attention, like so many before him, shift away from these industrial regions? On a joint visit to North Wales yesterday, Gething and Keir Starmer vowed to “turbocharge jobs and growth”, but how many in Port Talbot were listening? The steelworks’ fate represents more than just the closure of another foreign-owned company, the latest in a long line to vacate these towns. It signifies the final nail in the coffin of South Wales Industry.

This story reads all too familiar to people from this part of the Isles. Since the birth of industrialisation, the Valleys have been continuously weathered by a collective system of manufactured depression, which has shaped and damaged the psychological condition of the Nation. Indeed, the very first signs of what is now commonly referred to as the Great Depression can be traced back to the economic collapse witnessed in the Valleys of South Wales in the spring-to-summer period of 1924. While only 2% of the population was unemployed at the start of that year, the impact was so profound that, by August 1925, it had risen to a staggering 28.5%. While numerous factors contributed to this, two stood out, both products of the raw realities of global economic and political conflict.

The first was the Treaty of Versailles, whose terms required a defeated Germany to supply cheap coal to Europe as part of its reparations. As the British representative on the Council of Four, the Welshman David Lloyd George was thus a signatory to a settlement that effectively pulled the rug of profitability from under the South Wales coalfields: the price of Welsh coal fell by nearly 50%. The second was a turn in the United States to more exploitable markets for energy in the Southern Hemisphere. By the time the Wall Street Crash had bankers and investors jumping from buildings in 1929, the Valleys of South Wales already had 45% of its workforce conscripted into the army of the unemployed.

The use of the military metaphor is not unintentional. As some 241 pits closed by 1936, resulting in the now familiar pattern of outward migration form the region of the fit and able, the only moment of reprieve would be the outbreak of the Second World War, resulting in the need once again for the region’s coal to help motor to machineries of warfare. What must it do to the psychology of a people knowing the survival of their own communities was tied to the continuation of a war as local boys and men continued to fight and dig for yards back home?

If the Valleys were subject to abandonment and social neglect in the decades that followed, by the end of the Eighties and the defeat of the miners, it was clear the industrious way of life which once sustained these communities had been largely destroyed. Port Talbot was in many ways an exception to this, though it should be added that many of its workers were descendants of miners from nearby collieries and still tried to carry the socialist spirit of defiance, which was somewhat captured in Michael Sheen’s The Way.

Abjection would soon become a defining term, which could be routinely applied across the entire coal-face region. The figure of the hardened miner was replaced by the steroid-using gym worker, a grim contrast to the emaciated bodies seeking quiet refuge as they administered heroin into their dejected veins. Stories started to become more commonplace about adults and even teenagers taking their own lives. Soon we all knew of somebody who could no longer face the reality of an abandoned world. Like most things in the Valleys, the more time passes, the greater the problem becomes. And the realisation these towns were facing a suicide epidemic captured international media attention in 2008, as the tragic loss of so many young teens in quick succession within a 10-mile radius of Bridgend led many to question the causes and possible solutions.

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Government statistics continue to document rising numbers of suicide, with Wales home to the highest percentage of any region in the United Kingdom. While the most convenient explanation for this often focuses upon the mental health of the afflicted, and invariably advocates more therapy and intervention at an individual level, less attention has been given to the idea that depression should first and foremost be seen as a social phenomenon — that is also inseparable from the lived conditions, the ecologies and atmospheres, into which a community is thrown.

Having said this, what is also peculiar about the Valleys is how the exponential rise in suicide corresponds to the regreening of the landscape, posing a direct challenge to those who primarily correlate wellbeing with environmental recovery. Recovery means nothing if people feel like they have no value or purpose to their existence, regardless of how many daffodils are growing.

While suicides among young girls (as in Bridgend) have become a growing problem — indeed I have lost two cousins this way — it is the vast rise in young male suicides that registers as the most pressing of concerns. Again, while there are many explanations offered for this, given how the figures compare to other social groups (notably black and Asian), surely such a phenomenon can only be properly explained by attending to the crisis of white male subjectivity.

Today, what we look upon are social systems in which young white men are struggling to find any meaning let alone political agency. As other groups are being encouraged to find a sense of purpose and belonging through a shared sense of historical outrage, such an identity has been denied them. The same men have also been thrown into a cultural milieu in which they are being asked to embrace their vulnerabilities, while stripping them of the very qualities of passion and fight that might allow them to deal with difficult times. Should they have the gall to question the status quo, often they are accused of exhibiting white male fragility, which is a rather peculiar way of defaulting back to a desired framing of brokenness.

Because people are not born vulnerable. Systems produce them that way. And if there is a violence to speak of today in places like the Valleys, it’s not one of masculine hardness — it’s a violence of the vulnerable.

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Young white men are continually being told they should aspire to whatever the new digital world has to offer, knowing full well to be born in the Valleys means the chances of escape are less with each rotation of the clock. This reminds of how static the empty time of social depression can truly be. Yet still some have the temerity to call them privileged. If such a word has any meaning, it should be linked to the luxury of time — or to properly separate those who inhabit a dead time that has no prospect versus those with the luxury of time to fire off social-media missives, day after day, without it having any impact on their material welfare.

Back in Port Talbot, meanwhile, as the spring rains fall and the furnaces that give life to the town are slowly doused, it’s hard not to be pessimistic. If a century of mass industrial closure has seen very little to replace it, the speeding up of automation and artificial intelligence promises to leave farther behind those who weren’t even at the starting line to begin with. Faced with these conditions of social depression, should we be surprised when desperate young men try to find a lasting way out? I know personally what it’s like to live through seasons marked by the weight of absence. It’s suffocating. It’s debilitating. And it’s soul-destroying.

***

The Oliver is Cromwell: the man who founded what became the modern British army, as well as playing a notoriously brutal role in the 1649-1653 conquest of Ireland. And while the song is a long way from either nerdy military history or tub-thumping patriotism, it does take for granted the permanence of the military: “Oliver’s army is here to stay.”

But is it? Recruitment to Oliver’s Army, and related naval and air forces, is at crisis levels. The Tories are reportedly retiring two amphibious assault vessels, in a move critics have called “the end of the Royal Marines”, due to a shortage of sailors to operate them. Recruitment and retention are so poor that recently the Navy was reduced to advertising on LinkedIn for a rear-admiral. And the Army had to move hundreds of troops from the front line to recruitment because people aren’t joining.

According to Ben Wallace, a former defence secretary, this shortage is because Gen Z is not signing up. But why? Conservatives sometimes suggest that the culprit is some combination of wokeness, or women, or sexual minorities attenuating the Forces’ warlike masculinity. The real driving force, though, may be deeper and harder to reverse: the long, slow demise of the modern nation-state as a basic unit of geopolitics.

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The history of Europe’s armed forces is inseparable from the development and reach of the states that command them. The reason for this is obvious: an independent state unable to plausibly threaten retaliation if attacked is unlikely to remain independent for very long. But such forces have not always been patriotic in character. In premodern times, peasant soldiers fought out of obligation to a feudal lord, or mercenaries for money.

The idea of fighting for an ideal “King and country” is, by contrast, relatively modern — and coincides with the 17th-century birth of the modern nation-state, as a by-product of religious conflict after the Reformation. In England, Oliver’s Army was founded in 1645 to fight for the Parliamentarian cause in the English Civil War: a series of religiously inflected political convulsions that would culminate, in 1688, with the adoption of constitutional monarchy and the inauguration of modern Britain. Roughly concurrently, in 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia ended the unimaginably brutal Thirty Years’ War, with a settlement that broadly established the modern European community of sovereign states.

Such states were implicitly, if not exclusively, conceived of as ethnic — in the sense of providing a political vehicle for a “people”. Indeed, such “imagined communities” were, paradoxically, sometimes at least in part conjured into being by the “nation-state” that emerged to represent them. But the question of what came first, the “peoples” or the nation-states, is arguably secondary to the reality of the political entities themselves: competing powers, complete with armed forces whose size grew rapidly even as their tactics and weapons became more sophisticated.

Modern European history is the story of these standing armies, nation-states and national “imagined communities”. The history of the one military division that survives from Cromwell’s original force — the Coldstream Guards — captures this in a nutshell. It was an age of imperial expansion, national fervour and great-power rivalries; it reached a cataclysmic crisis in the two 20th-century World Wars, where the Coldstream served in Europe and the Middle East.

Popular history today, especially in America, often recounts the two World Wars as a defence of abstractions such as “freedom” or “democracy”. But many in Europe at the time understood the wars in the more prosaic terms of rivalry between Europe’s post-Westphalia states and their sprawling global empires. For A.J.P. Taylor, for example, the First World War was a consequence of Great Power competition, with the aim of determining “how Europe was to be remade”. The Second, far from being an epic confrontation between good (the Allies) and evil (the Nazis), was more accurately “a repeat performance of the First”.

Compared with the First, Taylor views the Second World War as having changed very little. But with seven decades’ additional hindsight, it is clear that, even if Taylor was right to see both World Wars as in essence the same conflict, taken together the wars changed everything. For they ended the age of European nation-states and empires. And the real winner of both wars was America: the empire that has dominated since 1945, and whose defence spending and military priorities have, under the guise of the “rules-based international order”, governed Europe ever since.

Britain’s military atrophy, then, is less an effect of wokeness or of female soldiers than of this colonisation of Europe by the United States — in the course of which, under the banner of “national self-determination”, the battered European empires were dismantled, to America’s benefit. This became clear in the 1956 Suez crisis, when Elvis Costello was just a toddler. Here, Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt to recover control of the Suez Canal, only to be pressured into backing down by the United States. Now widely understood as a pivotal moment in which hard-power supremacy very clearly shifted to the United States, it was a shattering blow to the British self-conception, revealing the state of its military enfeeblement.

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It had consequences for Oliver’s Army, too. Thomas Fabyanic recounts how, immediately after the Second World War, Britain was spending some 10% of British GDP on defence, and allocating a huge proportion of public effort and material resources to the military. Six months after Suez, a White Paper was presented to Parliament calling for scrapping conscription, and moving to an all-volunteer armed forces.

The post-conscription British Army has suffered recruitment shortfalls ever since. And as Britain’s relative economic and military standing has continued to decline, so our armies have shrunk too: a slow withering again epitomised by the Coldstream Guards, now down to a single battalion and serving mostly ceremonial functions in London and at Windsor Castle. And why would European defence not atrophy, when peace continues to be underwritten by the Pax Americana?

We might, perhaps, argue that military recruitment has only lagged behind the loss of Empire because the memory of a political order takes longer to die than the order itself. The Forces continued running on patriotic fumes, long after after Suez and the subsequent quiet decision to abandon the nation-state. What’s replaced the older Europe of patriotic, implicitly ethnic “imagined communities” is — at least in aspiration — a dream of post-national rules, post-ethnic harmony, and maximal economic growth.

This is usually presented as simply “modern” and self-evidently positive. In reality, though, it’s an ideology that extends as far as, and no further than, the American empire. This entity is no less real for governing via rules and “international courts” rather than colonial administrations, and has had much to recommend it: the period of peace in Europe since 1945 is matched, for instance, only by the period of peak British imperial dominance, from 1815 to 1914. But at the very point where the defeat of the nation-state seems complete, in favour of post-national Pax Americana, things appear, once again, to be changing.

For one thing, the 20th-century war America waged on European empires, in the name of “decolonisation”, has now rebounded, in the form of a challenge to the American founding itself as “settler colonialism”. By extension the American project itself is no longer self-evidently morally good; the result of this turn is a youthful American elite increasingly hostile to many of the founding presumptions of American hard power, and reluctant to enforce American borders, join American forces, or support American military adventures overseas.

Thus we find the hegemon facing both internal and external challenges — even as financial pressures see some on the American Right suggest mothballing support for European security altogether. If this happened, what would it mean for European security and, by extension, European sovereignty? Having embraced American-style civic nationalism, itself now under attack, it’s far from clear that we could still rely on our youth to defend our nations voluntarily. Would the crowds of often very young people who gather in London every weekend to protest the conflict in Gaza accept conscription into the British armed forces on the grounds of patriotism?

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It’s hard to say. But it seems unlikely that a country can dissolve Westphalia-style European sovereignty and European peoples in a bath of international treaties, while denouncing national identity and history as shameful, and simultaneously ask what Costello called the “boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne” to continue signing up to fight for their country in extremis. After a while, even the most unobservant will notice that “country” is growing increasingly difficult to define, let alone who might claim such an entity is “theirs”.

So, then, governed by uncertain, porous and habitually post-national elites, and absent the noble promises of patriotic common identity, what would happen if conflict returned to Europe? Well, even if the nation-state model is dead, and unlikely to be re-animated except in the conservative imagination, it’s hardly as though there were no wars or armies prior to the nation-state era. These were simply recruited and justified differently: the mercenaries who fought in Machiavelli’s Italy, for example, or the feudal peasants obliged to arm at their own expense and turn out for their landowner when required.

I suspect a breakdown of European security would, in practice, look like a mix of existing armed forces, conscription, and ancient forms of militarism updated for the present: private armies, neo-feudal military obligations, perhaps armed activists or religious groups. Indeed, perhaps we’re already there: the role of the Wagner Group, for example, has been much-discussed in Ukraine, as have relations between its leadership and the Russian government.

Assailed from one direction by the legacy of Flower Power pacifism and from another by a consensus in favour of diversifying citizens’ ethnic heritage, demoted in political importance by Pax Americana, European nations’ “imagined communities” have been under fire for some time. Now, we find ourselves contemplating at least the possibility of retrenchment in the Pax Americana that succeeded it. In the wake of such shifts, the question of who will fight, and for whom, is not far behind — even in currently peaceful Europe. But an important corollary of the post-national ideal we embraced is that you can’t then appeal to national identity if you need to raise an army.

In that vacuum, the question of who in Europe, in an emergency, could be induced to lay down their lives — and for what cause — is an open and profoundly troubling one. We can only hope we continue to avoid the need to answer it.

This stunningly beautiful archipelago off the north-easternmost tip of Scotland is also supposed to be the “happiest place in Britain”. And yet all is not well. On Tuesday, with a show of a dozen or so hands, the islands’ local council gave its support for “alternative forms of governance”, which could reframe its relationship with Westminster in line with crown dependencies such as Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, or overseas territories like the Falklands. It could attempt to go even further, declaring its independence and reviving its historic links with Norway to becoming a self-governing territory, like the Faroe Islands, an autonomous region of Denmark.

While discussions about going back to their Scandinavian roots are at the exploratory stage — even newspapers haven’t yet settled on whether such a move should be called “Orxit”, “Orkxit” or “Orkexit” — Orcadians seem to be sold on the idea. Reasons for the disgruntlement with Westminster and Holyrood are various, but include under-subsidised ferry fares, a miserly dividend from four decades of North Sea oil exploration and underinvestment by central governments into potentially lucrative wind power projects. As Scotland’s smallest council, it also receives hundreds of pounds less per person than the others.

Certainly, Orkney — and Shetland to its north — is distinct from the rest of the United Kingdom. Geographically closer to Oslo than Edinburgh, the islands retain a strong Nordic character, even though they were last under Norwegian and Danish control in 1472. And life on the archipelago certainly has its upsides. It has good schools, affordable houses, clean air and abundance of space, but its winning edge is a form of Scandinavian communitarianism that instils a profound sense of safety and social trust among its 23,000 residents.

Here, crime is rare — the sort of place where farm equipment is shared and a builder’s yard won’t charge you for half a bag of sand. Nearly 40 years ago, my parents bought a property overlooking Scapa Flow which, with a few short intermissions, had been held by our wider family for centuries. On requesting the door key, the estate agent replied that one didn’t exist. (Despite soaring local house prices, which rose 8.5% last year, the average cost of a property on Orkney is just £221,000.)

“Bleak” is a word only our opponents use to describe the place. True, the first view of the high cliffs and red sandstone of Hoy can seem forbidding. Frightening even, particularly if shrouded in sea fret. And the weather in the Northern Isles is changeable, and best described in quantitative terms. The total absence of trees can upset people — but Orcadians reply, I think correctly, that they would only spoil the view.

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It is a quirk of medieval history that the Orkneys — for centuries, a central hinge in a Nordic chain linking Scandinavia with Iceland and Greenland — ever found themselves to be a peripheral province of Scotland. Last month, while raising the prospect of greater autonomy, financial security and economic opportunity for his islands, James Stockan, leader of the Orkney Island Council, noted that “we were part of the Norse kingdom for much longer than we were part of the United Kingdom”. And Stockan believes the islands are being “failed dreadfully”. He recently told BBC Scotland: “The funding we get from the Scottish government is significantly less per head than Shetland and the Western Isles to run the same services — we can’t go on as we are.”

Scotland’s acquisition of Orkney in 1472 was accidental. In 1468, the daughter of King Christian I of Norway and Denmark was betrothed to King James III of Scotland. The marriage treaty promised a dowry of 60,000 Rhenish Florins, but the impoverished Nordic King didn’t have this sum immediately to hand. Consequently, the archipelagos of Orkney and Shetland were pawned to Scotland with the intention of being later redeemed once the cash could be found. Alas, this never happened — a tragic turn for Orkney, which found itself a peripheral province of Scotland. Formal sovereignty was never transferred, and historians have long made the case that Scotland holds Orkney and Shetland in pledge rather than by sovereign right. To this day, Orcadians continue to make this point.

Would Orkney fit back into the Norse realm? Well, Orcadians do wear their Viking heritage with great pride. Norn, the local language of Orkney and similar to Icelandic and Faroese, was gradually replaced by Scots, but survived on the outer islands until the late 1700s. The modern Orkney dialect has a noticeable “sing-song” Scandinavian quality, characterised by a rising intonation at the end of a word (known as “the post-stressed syllable”).

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The island also enjoys a strong sense of local patriotism and a separateness to the rest of Scotland. Orcadian poet Edwin Muir once infamously disparaged Scotland as “a sham nation”. In his History of Orkney of the late 1700s, George Low noted that Orcadians were reserved in their sentiments, honest in their dealings with one another, but “studious to conceal their gains”, while also being tenacious in their preservation of old customs. A politeness and civility also seems to pervade the islands, one now sadly absent in many other parts of Britain.

By modern standards, Orkney remains basically monocultural. Of course, the very idea might seem impolite and déclassé in a society where diversity is now promoted as a foundational value. For progressives, monocultures seem unacceptable, exclusionary things, in need of correction. However, Orkney’s monocultural strength makes it far easier for incomers to fit in. Unlike most of Britain, Orcadians set a cultural tone into which new arrivals can assimilate. The setting of clear rules and norms make it easier for outsiders to find a place in the community. It’s not uncommon for settlers from the south, called ferry-loupers, to give their Orkney-born children names such as Erland, Thorfinn and Mangus.

As large states like Britain become increasingly divided, I can see the attraction to Orcadians of re-uniting with their Nordic brethren. There’s a reason the UK government would resist these ideas out of hand though. The oil might be running out, but Orkney played a pivotal part in Britain’s naval operations in both world wars. It was in Scapa Flow that naval aviation was born in 1917, when Squadron Commander Edwin Harris Dunning first landed an aircraft on a moving ship at sea. The loss of the Northern Isles would be a serious strategic loss to the United Kingdom.

While it is difficult to imagine any circumstances in which Orkney would be permitted to leave — only last week, the Prime Minister’s official spokeswoman said: “There is no mechanism for the conferral of crown dependency or overseas territory status on any part of the UK” — an exit from a newly independent Scotland would seem much more promising. After all, if arguments of history and self-determination are ever to grant independence to Scotland, the very same would apply to Orkney. And this is where an even more practical issue would emerge: resources. A fledgling independent Scotland would struggle to balance its budget. Indeed, it may even be uncertain of how to pay its pensions — and in what currency? Without the unwarranted fiscal largesse of the Barnett formula, used to calculate the overall level of funding allocated by the UK Treasury to devolved governments, so-called “Highland economics” would be brutally applied by Holyrood.

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It is in these circumstances that the prospect of self-governing status, similar to that enjoyed by the Faroe Islands, might suddenly suit Orkney very nicely. Who wouldn’t wish to be part of a Norwegian state that boasts a $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund?

Orcadians are acutely aware from their surroundings that kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall and that political jurisdictions are transitory. The archipelago resembles a pin cushion of archeological sites spanning from the 5,000-year-old Neolithic Stones of Stenness to Pictish brochs from 200 BC, to Viking drinking halls from a mere thousand years ago. What an irony it would be if an Orkney earldom lost to Norway in 1472 through lack of money was lost centuries later by Scotland for the very same reason.

After years of drifting apart, the United Kingdom suddenly felt united again. It couldn’t last, of course, and it hasn’t: a new UnHerd Britain poll reveals that while 55% of UK citizens agree that it’s a good thing Britain has a monarchy, in Scotland only 45% do.

Yet while the results are unlikely to put a smile on King Charles’s face, they are not, in the end, all that surprising. If anything, they represent a reversion to historic norms, following the fever dream of grief that broke out upon the Queen’s death. Previous surveys on Scottish attitudes to the monarchy have also shown that the Royal Family is not especially popular: shortly before the Platinum Jubilee, for instance, a poll found that fewer than half of Scots supported keeping the monarchy, while the Royals were similarly unloved four years before that. On a visit home last summer, I found that while Tesco had decked out even the frozen meat aisle with “happy and glorious” banners to mark the Queen’s jubilee, it was a lot harder to find signs of celebration in Scottish shops and institutions. The management of the purportedly “Royal” Botanic Garden in Edinburgh had tucked their jubilee sign away in a corner, while at the celebratory garden party in my hometown of Dunfermline, there were no royal souvenirs, not even a mug — although there was a cut out of John Forbes, a long-dead local worthy who founded the city of Pittsburgh.

It may be tempting to connect increasingly negative attitudes to the monarchy with the rise of nationalist sentiment since devolution. Prominent cultural figures, such as the author Alasdair Gray and the SNP politician Margo MacDonald, espoused republicanism. Nicola Sturgeon’s anointed disciple, Humza Yousaf, has vowed not only to break up the UK using “any means necessary”, but also declared on Monday that within five years of independence, he’d expect Scotland to find a new head of state. But republicanism isn’t merely an SNP talking point; Scotland’s bad relationship with monarchy goes back a long way, at least as far back as the Reformation, nearly five centuries ago.

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Calvinism, the national philosophy that came to dominate afterwards, is an innately levelling creed, with its cheerful teaching that God has already decided who is saved and who is damned and there is nothing you can do about it. Post-Reformation, the inhabitants of Dunfermline managed to forget where they buried no fewer than seven Scottish kings, including one of the greats, Robert the Bruce, who was only rediscovered by accident in the 19th century. In Scotland, the monarch was not the head of the church; the ministers elected their own leader. John Knox, who spearheaded the Reformation, neither admired nor feared monarchs and reduced Mary Queen of Scots to tears in front of her own court. George Buchanan, the tutor of Mary’s son James, was the author of The Law of Government Among the Scots, wherein he wrote that “the people have the right to confer royal authority upon whomever they wish”, and that they were free to overthrow — and kill — tyrants. Buchanan freely admitted to having “whipped the king’s arse” when the heir to the throne annoyed him.

Chafing against the ideas that his Calvinist tutor had tried to impose upon him, James threw off any restraints on his power as soon as he could, describing monarchy as “the supremest thing on earth” after he became king of England as well as Scotland. His son Charles I attempted to rule in the same way, but when in 1637 he tried to bring the Scottish church to heel by forcing it to accept the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the people did not meekly comply but rather rose up in anger, resulting in two wars of rebellion. Taking a leaf out of George Buchanan’s book, the Scots did not accept the King’s authority if it conflicted with the will of God (although they later agreed to fight for him when he agreed to support Presbyterianism).

But if the Scots were less than keen on monarchs, then the feeling seems to have been mutual. For a period of almost 200 years, following a brief appearance by Charles II in 1650, no king bothered to make the journey north of the border until George IV (described by Robert Burns as “a witless youth”) toured Scotland in 1822. This trip, in which the portly King appeared in a mini-kilt and pink tights, appears to have presaged a kind of thaw, and inadvertently laid the seeds of today’s heritage industry. Sir Walter Scott, at least, was very excited, and the pageant he organised cobbled together so many Scottish tropes that one resident of Edinburgh complained that he had “ridiculously made us appear to be a nation of Highlanders, and the bagpipe and the tartan are the order of the day”.

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However, it was with the ascension of George’s granddaughter, Victoria, to the throne that Scotland really seems to have become integrated into the cult of monarchy. Prince Albert purchased Balmoral for his Queen in 1852 while Glasgow, today the most anti-monarchical place in the UK, was referred to as the Second City of the Empire, a title its inhabitants welcomed with pride. Indeed, the whole city was transformed into a monument to Empress Victoria; a statue of the Queen riding a horse (the first equestrian statue of a woman in the UK) stands close to the City Chambers (which she opened in 1888) to this day. This is easy enough to understand: in those days, Britain was winning at geopolitics, and the Scots wanted to be part of the winners’ club. While nationalists today may sometimes complain that Scotland is England’s last colony, the truth is that the Scots were enthusiastic colonisers themselves, proudly extending and administering the power of the British Empress across the globe.

Yet within a few decades of Victoria’s death, that sense of shared triumphalism vanished. My grandmother grew up in Clydebank in the heyday of the radical Red Clydesiders and remembered red flags flying at rallies in the Twenties and Thirties, while my father recalls attending a birthday party in a “communist chapel” in the early Fifties. He also remembers people booing Churchill when he appeared in cinema newsreels, and yet despite this radicalism, he has no memory of anyone booing the Queen. Indifference rather than hostility was the rule; she seemed “remote”.

Similarly, by the time I was growing up in Fife in the Eighties and Nineties, it was a given that the Royal Family were ludicrously posh and rich and out of touch, but we also accepted that that was kind of the point. Prince Charles may have liked to stride around Lochnagar in a kilt and paint landscapes of the Scottish wilderness, but this did not endear him to the masses; indeed, all that stuff about talking to plants inspired mocking impersonations at my school, and beyond. The Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson took his exceptionally cruel portrayal to the US, where it became a regular feature on his late-night chat show.

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By Alwyn Turner

For all the talk of the Queen’s love of Scotland, which was emphasised after she died at Balmoral, it does seem that this profound emotional attachment was more than a wee bit correlated with that majestic estate. Although I do not doubt that the Queen was absolutely sincere when she spoke of her “deep and abiding affection for this wonderful country”, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that anybody who spends every summer in a castle surrounded by beautiful forests could reasonably be expected to love it. Indeed, I might never have emigrated to the US if Balmoral were my holiday home. By contrast, the Queen spent much less time at her official residence, the Palace of Holyrood House in Edinburgh.

Yet for all that, I do not recall meeting many vocal republicans until I went to university, and they were all English. The nationalists that I knew in the Nineties — and I knew somebody who ran (unsuccessfully) for the UK parliament — never talked about the Queen or her family. They weren’t fans, of course, but they didn’t care that they weren’t fans: the Royals were simply irrelevant. It is not until 2004 that the republican “Declaration of Calton Hill” — a spirited call for “an independent Scottish Republic built on the principles of liberty, equality, diversity and solidarity” — was issued, to coincide with the Queen’s visit to open the Scottish parliament. It attracted support from significant Scottish cultural figures such as Iain Banks, the poet Edwin Morgan, and Irvine Welsh. But it was organised by the Scottish Socialist Party, which currently has zero seats in the Scottish parliament. Ever since the days of Alex Salmond’s leadership, the official position of the SNP has been to retain the monarchy.

None of this is to say that I don’t think republicanism could become a serious force in Scottish politics. If Scotland were to become independent, then the lowest hanging fruit for nationalists to go after to maintain their sense of existential purpose would be the abolition of the monarchy, as Humza Yousaf’s sudden interest in republicanism makes clear. But until that day comes, the Royal Family simply will continue to be unpopular in Scotland, and poll after poll will reveal that they are unpopular, but it will not matter at all. Always “there” but never actually present, they will drift by on TV screens, occasionally turn up to open a building, and then go away again.

And Scottish apathy might, in the end, be for the better. Because although it is nice to think that we have an inherent aversion to authority, Scots were actually quite respectful towards Calvinist preachers for many centuries, and — as the willing submission to an extended lockdown revealed — the pursRed-lipped, finger-wagging, moralising style of leadership still has quite a constituency in the country. If not King Charles, then who? I’ll take my chances with the Royals, thank you.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Granted, opinion polls in Scotland show that voters there could favour independence in a referendum as early as autumn next year. However, Northern Ireland — geographically the furthest away of the UK’s wayward offspring — is likely to emerge from Britain’s ongoing political upheavals as the unloved child that clings with grim determination to its detached motherland.

Who, then, is to blame for this misleading narrative? Mary Lou McDonald, the leader of Sinn Féin, has called repeatedly for a border poll on the issue of a united Ireland. Tipped to be Ireland’s next Taoiseach, her success in the Republic of Ireland’s 2020 general election — in which her party won the popular vote — has brought the question of a referendum to the forefront of Irish politics.

Even so, a vote would be difficult to justify. Under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, a plebiscite can be called at the discretion of the Secretary of State when he or she believes that “a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland”. That day is unlikely to come soon: an overwhelming majority of opinion polls in Northern Ireland suggest that a referendum proposing a united Ireland today would be decisively defeated.

That there are now more Catholics than Protestants in the region won’t tip the balance. The old sectarian assumption that all Catholics would vote to end the border was discredited long ago: many Catholics are prospering in Northern Ireland and, for now, wish to retain the status quo. They may hold traditional, even tribal, views on the border, but the peace dividend — the improved economy — has benefited them.

McDonald senses hesitation from nationalists on both sides of the border, and has toned down her rhetoric as a result. After the 2020 election, she called for an urgent referendum from the British government. But her demands have since become more nuanced. At Sinn Féin’s recent Ard Fheis (annual conference) in Dublin earlier this month, she more modestly requested a “Citizens’ Assembly on Unity”. Now is the time, she bellowed, “to plan for constitutional change”. It was hardly a radical message: Citizens’ Assemblies are a handy way to delay decisions on politically-explosive issues. Her plan for the time being is to kick the holy grail down the road.

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Not only is McDonald dampening republican ambitions, but her conference speech had none of the inflammatory language of the past. Speaking to an audience that included many IRA veterans, including her predecessor Gerry Adams, she was remarkably restrained. For the first time in recent history, she failed to invoke the names of republican war heroes like Adams himself or the late IRA chief-of-staff Martin McGuinness, a time-honoured device guaranteed to set the all-Ireland crowd alight. The IRA rallying cry, “Tiocfaidh ár lá” — (Our Day will come) was noticeably absent.

McDonald knows that her electoral successes, in both North and South, are not due to her championing the cause of a border poll. The border issue, while firing up true believers, spooks many citizens in both jurisdictions: no advocate has ever convincingly explained how the economy or the health service will benefit from a united Ireland. Instead, McDonald’s live televised speech at conference, pitched to the people of Ireland, emphasised the chronic housing needs of Ireland’s youth, the cost-of-living crisis, and the continued health crisis. Similarly, in May’s Northern Ireland election, there was a shift away from the republican battle cries about the border towards identical bread-and-butter topics.

This suits McDonald just fine. Today, she wants conversation, not conflict: which a border poll would inevitably bring. Her plan is to keep the issue on the boil, but not to force it to a premature finale; to persuade Sinn Féin’s republican base that they are marching on the road to paradise, but not enough to scare off potential supporters with other priorities. The border poll is political titillation with consummation postponed.

McDonald’s greatest achievement has been to rid Sinn Féin of its pariah status and bring it into the political mainstream. Her tireless populism has almost eliminated rival opposition parties in the Republic, while sidelining the other nationalist flag bearer — the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) — in Northern Ireland. Although she never wore a balaclava, McDonald’s endless lip service to the “armed struggle” and “the patriot dead” reassured the IRA veterans during her charm offensive on the South. She has managed to persuade an initially-sceptical southern electorate that she is a modern constitutional reformer without paramilitary baggage — all the while maintaining the trust of Sinn Féin’s northern hardliners, who see her as their best hope for a united Ireland.

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McDonald is poised to gain power in both parts of Ireland; becoming Taoiseach is now almost a fait accompli. The next step is harder. She has understandably courted popularity by haranguing and harassing unionists and the British government, by skilfully painting them as intransigent villains of the piece. She picks her enemies carefully: convenient targets to unite her cocktail of followers.

However, McDonald, the master of the polemic, will soon be forced to adopt the politics of persuasion. Her victory in establishing Sinn Féin as the most powerful party on the entire island will be seen as an existential threat by those whom she has vilified. It will be hard for her suddenly to play the role of unifier: she is unlikely to be seen as a healing force.

With that in mind, expect the border poll to be mentioned frequently, but in a more muted voice. It will remain on the agenda: a useful symbol to dangle, a declaration of intent. But the reality is that few politicians holding significant political positions in Westminster or Leinster House want a border poll. It is a phantom political battleground. Far from providing a democratic decision, a referendum on the sectarian issue that has divided Northern Ireland since its foundation could mark the return of the old antagonists to the streets of Belfast and Derry; and to restore ebbing enmities in South Armagh and other border areas. No one wants that.

“Hello CQ, hello CQ. This is Two Emma Toc, Two-ooo Emma Toc. Writtle calling… Well, I think we’re ready to begin now, and the first thing I’ve got to introduce is a record entitled — Why are records always entitled, why aren’t they just called something? So here it is, a record entitled…”

Four years earlier, Captain Peter Eckersley had been a wireless operator in the Royal Flying Corps. Now, as an engineer with the Marconi Wireless Telegram Company, he was launching Britain’s first weekly radio station, broadcasting under the call sign 2MT (“Two Emma Toc”). Eckersley was a joker, a character, a bit of a card. And every Tuesday, radio enthusiasts across south-eastern England would tune their sets to catch his latest offering: a quiz, perhaps, or a spoof weather forecast.

Eckersley and his pals put on Britain’s first ever radio play, an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. They persuaded some of the capital’s most popular singers to trek out to Writtle and perform into the ether. On one memorable occasion the world-famous Danish-American baritone Lauritz Melchior even agreed to trudge across the fields to the Writtle army hut and sing to an audience of… hundreds? Thousands? Who knows?

What happened at Writtle a hundred years ago isn’t just a lovely little tale about the triumph of the amateur spirit. It’s the origin story of one of Britain’s most beloved and controversial institutions, the BBC, which celebrates its centenary this autumn. And since the BBC’s future has never been more contested, with Boris Johnson’s government publicly contemplating the end of the licence fee and a turn towards a subscription model, it’s worth looking back at how it all began.

To its defenders, the BBC represents the collective national good over selfish private interest. But is that really true? If you were feeling cynical, you might argue that it began as a commercial monopoly to promote the interests of the major electronics firms. Its champions celebrate it as modern history’s greatest vehicle for popular cultural uplift. But you could just as well see it as a massive exercise in selling radios.

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To the BBC’s fans that probably sounds like sacrilege, so let’s go back to that man in the hut. Peter Eckersley didn’t just happen to work for Marconi. The fact that he worked for the Marconi Company, one of the most innovative, ruthless and expansionist firms in the land, was absolutely crucial. Since the end of the First World War, Marconi’s engineers had wasted no opportunity to promote the latest wireless technology. It was Marconi, for example, that organised Britain’s first live radio broadcast on 15 June 1920, when the soprano Dame Nellie Melba performed at its Chelmsford factory. This was a landmark in broadcasting history, with people reportedly tuning in from as far away as the Champs-Elysées. These days, though, the BBC makes little of it. Why not? Alas, it was sponsored by the Daily Mail. Quelle horreur!

You can draw a line directly from Dame Nellie’s performance, via Eckersley’s hut, to the formation of the British Broadcasting Company on 18 October 1922, and the Marconi name is there at every turn. In one crucial memo, the firm’s publicity manager, Arthur Burrows, argued that they could make an awful lot of money through the “radiation” of entertainment to the public, rather than by merely selling hardware to the government. So perhaps, in some parallel universe, there’s a Britain in which the Marconi Company really did establish its own private radio service, and where the papers are currently badgering the Marconi streaming giant to cancel Jimmy Carr.

But as we know, things didn’t work out like that. In a world obsessed with the danger of political and cultural disorder, the men who ran the General Post Office were anxious to avoid the “chaos” of the United States, where hundreds of radio start-ups had blossomed in 1921 and 1922. What was more, state control had been legitimised by the experience of total war, covering everything from military conscription to pub opening times. Much better, they thought, to have a single authorised broadcaster, a state-approved consortium: a British Broadcasting Company.

So in the autumn of 1922 the six largest firms, led by Marconi, formed a monopoly, authorised by the General Post Office and funded by a 10-shilling radio licence fee. And everybody won. The BBC set out on the path that would lead to Fawlty Towers, I, Claudius, Blake’s 7 and Eldorado. Arthur Burrows became its first director of programmes. Eckersley became its first chief engineer. And Marconi sold thousands and thousands of radios.

Why isn’t this story better known? The BBC’s centenary website, barely mentions it at all. Its timeline begins in the autumn of 1922, erasing poor Dame Nellie and skipping the Writtle story entirely. The explanation is obvious. The Marconi story just doesn’t fit. The history of the BBC is supposed to be an object lesson in paternalistic liberalism and public service, but the Marconi story is all about private enterprise. Marconi meant novelty; Marconi meant disruption. But today’s BBC is the guardian of continuity, a reassuring comfort blanket in a world of change. How do Dame Nellie and the Daily Mail fit into that?

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By Dominic Sandbrook

It’s easy to see why the BBC has forgotten its entrepreneurial prehistory. By the time of its 20th birthday in 1942, it had transcended its buccaneering origins to become a genuinely national institution, the voice of a people standing together against the horrors of Nazism. For the next few decades, it was one of the chief pillars of the social democratic consensus, the broadcasting equivalent of the NHS.

This BBC didn’t just influence the national conversation; it was the national conversation. Famously, the very last show Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise made for the corporation, which went out on Christmas Day 1977, was watched by more than 20 million people. The supporting cast — Elton John, Michael Parkinson, Penelope Keith, Richard Briers, Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier, Frank Bough, James Hunt, Angela Rippon — was a Who’s Who of the British imagination, every name immediately recognisable. When you walked down the street the next day, almost half of the adults you met had seen it.

In his novel The Rotter’s Club (2001), Jonathan Coe uses that Morecambe and Wise Christmas special as a symbol of national consensus, the teenage hero realising that everybody he knows is watching it too. “It came to him,” writes Coe,

“that he was only one person, and his family was only one family, out of millions of people and millions of families throughout the country, all sitting in front of their television sets… all of them laughing at the same joke, and he felt an incredible sense of… oneness, that was the only word he could think of, a sense that the entire nation was being briefly, fugitively drawn together in the divine act of laughter.”

There’s an underlying melancholy to that scene, though. By the time Coe wrote The Rotter’s Club, the BBC’s paternalistic monopoly was already under siege. The first blow came in 1955 with the launch of ITV, followed by the advent of Channel Four in 1982. British Satellite Broadcasting arrived in 1986, Sky three years later. We all know the rest: the internet, Amazon, Netflix, Disney. Or to put it another way, change — the kind of technological and cultural innovation previously embodied by the men in that Writtle hut.

It’s change, not Conservative hostility — and certainly not Nadine Dorries — that represents the real threat to the BBC’s survival. In the last few weeks its defenders on social media have circulated a wonderful advert from 1986, in which pub bore John Cleese curses the licence fee and wonders what the BBC “has ever given us for fifty-eight quid”. Up pops a host of famous faces — Sir Michael Hordern, Barry Norman, Alan Whicker, Sir Patrick Moore — to put him right.

It’s heart-warming, nostalgic stuff. But to anybody under the age of 30 it must be completely irrelevant. Most of those people have long since died, retired or been cancelled. They’re relics of a vanished age.

It’s telling, then, that when people try to defend the BBC, they typically point to Strictly Come Dancing and Doctor Who — two shows that, one way or another, could have been watched by Sir Winston Churchill in his dotage. Strictly’s current incarnation dates from 2004, but in its original form, as plain Come Dancing, it dates from 1949. As for Doctor Who, it dates from 1963 and is now attracting its lowest audience since the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. In a bid to revive its fortunes, the BBC have just persuaded its former writer Russell T. Davies, who ran the show more than a decade ago, to return to the helm. You can’t get much more backward-looking than that.

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I take no pleasure in pointing this out. For anybody like me, born in the Seventies or earlier, a world without the BBC seems unimaginable. I have merely to hear the opening bars of Grandstand, a staple of my Saturdays for decades, and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. But Grandstand has been dead for 15 years, rendered obsolete when the BBC’s commercial rivals snapped up all the sports rights. And although Match of the Day endures, it’s easy to imagine a future in which Amazon bags the Premiership highlights. How long before that jaunty theme music vanishes forever? Five years? Ten?

Against that background, talk of the current government’s “attack” on the BBC strikes me as fundamentally inconsequential. Even if Boris Johnson’s successor kneels in penance outside Broadcasting House and promises to preserve the licence fee till the end of time, the basic problem remains: the BBC was designed for radio and television sets, not for mobile phones and iPads. It’s a national institution in a globalised world, a product of the twentieth century struggling to stay afloat in the twenty-first.

A few weeks ago a YouGov poll found that only one in four people aged 18-30 watch the BBC every week. A third of them never watch it at all. No doubt some will graduate to the BBC’s output as they grow older — but surely not all of them. What about today’s primary-school children? Will the Marvel and Mandalorian addicts be watching Newsnight in the year 2040? Will they really still be clinging to Grandad’s comfort blanket?

To some readers, I know, this probably sounds like heresy, a premature obituary for a much-loved institution. But I do like the BBC. (I don’t “love” it, obviously, because I’ve worked for it, and nobody who’s been a victim of its taxi-booking system is ever going to love it.) And because I’m a nostalgic, backward-looking sort of person, I want it to survive. I adore In Our Time, I love The Apprentice (I know, ridiculous) and I still watch Doctor Who, albeit out of a joyless sense of duty.

Much of what the BBC does, it does brilliantly. I’ll be sorry, then, when it goes. But it will go, eventually. Or rather, it’ll probably fragment into its constituent parts, some of which will charge for subscriptions. No doubt it’ll be a gradual process, and many people will barely notice. On Twitter, the BBC’s champions will lament the death of a common national culture. But our common national culture has been fragmenting for decades, which is why Jonathan Coe lamented its passing more than 20 years ago.

Cultural moments come and go. Institutions are born and they die. In fact, everything dies; that’s how history works. The future belongs to the ambitious, the disruptive, the change-makers — people like the engineers in that hut. But these days, people like that don’t work for the BBC. They work for Amazon.

After my little stint on camera, I chatted to my interrogators. The politician representing the Irish nationalist community told me how closely Scotland’s referendum debate was being followed across the Irish sea. A Yes vote, I was informed, would do more for Irish unification than any bombing campaign during the troubles, or any politics since. If Scotland were to go, Northern Ireland would be next.

A decade on, UK constitutional politics is still obsessed with the Scotland question, yet events in Northern Ireland remain relatively underreported. The Stormont Assembly was suspended for nearly three years, from 2017 to 2020: a significant piece of our country’s political apparatus was broken. And barely disturbed the bulletins. Had MPs all been sent home from the Commons on full pay for three years, had Nicola Sturgeon sat around in Bute House while civil servants ran Scotland without political direction or control, news editors would have got hours of content out of it.

The almost complete silence on Northern Ireland ahead of the Brexit vote was a disgrace. All those 1.8 million lives, hundreds of businesses and millions of pounds worth of trade upturned — without discussion, dissection or negotiation, until after the fact. The imperfect patching currently underway won’t mend this constitutional tear.

A mega poll of more than 3,000 voters by Lord Ashcroft, published last week, shows the Irish Nationalists, Sinn Fein, winning the next Northern Irish election at a canter — and most people in Ulster believing that a border poll in 10 years’ time would deliver a united Ireland. It is not an outlier.

Perhaps our gaze needs to shift from Scotland — where even the sustained, bellicose sabre-rattling of our First Minister has seen her move not an inch closer to securing a second referendum in her seven years of leadership — to our neighbours across the Irish Sea. New and resurgent political parties and movements, along with the great disruptor of Brexit, mixed with some good old-fashioned political regicide, has created all the ingredients for a generational shift.

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Many Brits don’t realise that the power-sharing requirement of the Good Friday agreement means that both the leading Unionist and Nationalist parties must be represented in Northern Ireland’s government, with the offices of First Minister and Deputy First Minister occupied by a member of each. The DUP has been the major Unionist force in the region for almost two decades, recording between a quarter and a third of overall votes at Assembly elections, in a five, six or even seven-party system.

The pro-Brexit party was instrumental in sinking Theresa May’s proposed EU deal, which would have avoided extra checks and red tape for goods travelling between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and minimised disruption between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The protocols agreed following Boris Johnson’s deal gave no such protection, and are currently being renegotiated. But the anger in Ulster contributed, in no small part, to the defenestration of the DUP’s leader, Arlene Foster, earlier this year. Her successor, Edwin Poots, lasted just 21 days in post. The DUP’s chaotic transition has resulted in a current party leader who does not sit in the Stormont Assembly and therefore cannot be the First Minister of Northern Ireland.

To me, there is a sour, bleak, almost Old Testament defensiveness to the DUP’s unionism. And as someone who believes in the UK, and has spent all my political life espousing the positives of co-operation within wider unions (whether that is Scotland in the UK or the UK in the EU), I worry that defensive unionism does nothing but harm its own cause.

But the DUP are not the only pro-UK force in Northern Ireland.

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Enter the most popular leader in the province, who has a Boys’ Own backstory to send any spin doctor into raptures. Born in barracks, the son of a soldier, he suffered childhood trauma when he accidentally shot a friend in the head with his father’s service weapon. At 16, he joined up as a boy soldier, rising through the ranks to become regimental sergeant major, and later commissioned as an officer. In Afghanistan, he was awarded the Military Cross for retaking a town from the Taliban.

There is an earthiness about the man, and a wicked humour. He passes the “pub test”, of whether voters would want to go for a drink with him, with ease — not least because he sends out plenty of pictures of himself on social media enjoying a pint of Guinness or large dram of good malt whisky. Commenting on an internal squabble between DUP MP Sammy Wilson and party leader Jeffrey Donaldson last week, he suggested a “bare belly fight to sort it out”. He has the highest approval ratings of any political leader in the country. And yet he is practically ignored by a UK political press happy to dissect every word, action, belief or motivation if the source is Keir Starmer or Boris Johnson.

But, still, Doug Beattie is the man, quite probably, who will save the Union.

Beattie took over as leader of the moderate Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in May. In making his pitch, he said he was “able to reach out to all people in Northern Ireland regardless of what your religion is, sexual orientation or ethnicity”. In the last six months he has done just that, convincing Cllr Julie-Anne Corr-Johnston, NI’s first openly lesbian elected Unionist, to quit the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) and join his party. In Autumn, Beattie was pictured smiling next to Stephen McCarthy, introducing him as the UUP’s first working-class Catholic candidate for an Assembly election. Mr McCarthy, who grew up in a nationalist household and whose grandfather was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries, says there are many “de facto unionists within the Catholic community”, and that the only way that Unionism would win a future border poll was through “reaching out to people like me”.

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Beattie’s unionism is expansive, seeking to embrace groups that have often felt excluded. He also wears his unionism lightly, knowing that not everyone is as passionately entrenched as some of the representatives sent to Stormont. He seems to instinctively understand that his impeccable unionist credentials — military service for the crown, his uncle’s death at the hands of the IRA, the fact that he grew up on Union Street in Portadown — give him much greater licence to talk freely and generously about Irish identity.

He can face down hardline unionist critics by declaring, “I always viewed myself as Irish … clearly I’m British as well but my whole life I’ve identified as Irish”. On talk radio in Dublin, he’s confident enough to dive into that identity:

“I’m Irish. I’m an Irishman. .. I’m also an Ulsterman. You know, I’m British, I’m a European. I’m all of these things and I’m multilayered … God Save the Queen represents me, as does The Sash My Father Wore, Ulster rugby. But so does the shamrock, so does Gaelic games. So does Guinness. So does St Patrick’s Day. All of these things are part of my identity.”

He talks about “the union” not as an immutable object, preserved in aspic, but as a “Union of People” with all the scope and contradiction that entails. He wants little short of a complete transformation of Northern Irish politics — reshaping the devolution architecture to allow for what he calls “working power-sharing” and “power-sharing opposition” — coalitions that bring unionists and nationalists together in order to get things done, rather than (as he sees it) forcing them together in a way that means mutual vetoes often result in stasis. He wants what the rest of us in the UK take for granted: the ability to vote politicians and parties out of office, which he believes will make them work harder and concentrate on voters’ priorities over their own constitutional posturing.

And his confident, positive vision is transatlantic. In Washington DC, recently, he spoke to members of Congress, who are more used to seeing Sinn Fein and the Irish-American organisation Noraid making their nationalist case before passing round the hat. In seeking to address this one-sided view of Northern Ireland, he said: “Unless we engage, they will only hear one story. And it will not be our story.”

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Beattie’s mix of statesman and soldier, parliamentary chamber and sergeant’s mess hall has struck a chord. In August, a LucidTalk poll for the Belfast Telegraph saw the UUP overtake the DUP in voting intentions for the first time in more than 20 years. Of all the party leaders in Northern Ireland, Doug Beattie was the only one to record a net positive rating of +20%. Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill recorded -16%, while the DUP’s Jeffrey Donaldson recorded -20%. For context, Boris Johnson recorded -70%: even if most people in Northern Ireland want to remain in the UK, they don’t think much of the person leading it right now.

With the DUP regularly dropping in the polls to half of their 2019 general election high of 31%, it’s clear that there are thousands of Northern Ireland Unionists feeling politically homeless right now. Doug Beattie’s message to them at party conference was clear: “We have self-belief. And that self-belief is contagious. The public are picking up on it and tuning back into the Ulster Unionist Party … We are confident unionists, we are positive unionists, we are inclusive unionists, we are welcoming unionists. We are the Ulster Unionist Party and we are back.”

And, as someone who believes in our union, I breathe a sigh of relief to see a modern, moderate voice making its case across the Irish Sea.

For me, the fabric of the UK is always in tension. And the “otherness” of my part of it, is, in part, offset by the “otherness” of Northern Ireland. What I couldn’t say, all those years ago, to the nationalist politician impressing upon me Scotland’s potential role in Irish reunification, was that they were probably right. I see the counterbalance that one province provides the other and can accept that Scottish secession, had it occurred, may well have helped tip majority opinion in Northern Ireland towards Irish reunification.

And if I accept that, I must push myself to acknowledge the counter may also be true. That were Northern Ireland to go, and part of that fabric in tension rip, desire in Scotland to be a northern outpost of an English and Welsh block would be less strong than desire to remain part of a four nation union.

So those who believe in the union must turn their gaze west. Scotland is no nearer another referendum than it was the morning after the votes were counted in 2014; but Northern Ireland is probably less than six months away from having its first ever nationalist First Minister. And if the Scottish example is anything to go by, a Sinn Fein victory would give the party a platform to campaign relentlessly to end the UK, just as the SNP have done.

The fight for the future of the UK is about to enter a new phase.

We’ve stolen your land, they say, and we’re very sorry about this terrible injustice — but we’ll keep it all the same. Similarly, when purveyors of political discourse claim that America is now a white supremacist or even Nazi state — as in this response to the Rittenhouse verdict — you wonder why they aren’t urgently fleeing to some safer location, or at the very least organising some kind of underground armed resistance movement. People say all kinds of wild things, but if they don’t follow through on the logic of their claims, then it’s very hard to actually believe them.

A similar dynamic is observable in terms of climate change discourse, particularly with the Extinction Rebellion movement and its offshoot, Insulate Britain. Both their activists and spokespeople make the most alarming claims about the imminent end of civilisation, perhaps within the next couple of decades. But their revealed preferences don’t seem to match the intensity of their predictions. 

Personally, if I genuinely believed that Britain was going to become a post-apocalyptic wasteland within the next twenty years, I wouldn’t be campaigning for the Government to retrofit British houses with insulation: I’d be selling everything and fleeing to the hills in a desperate effort to keep my family alive. And yet they don’t. I have friends who go on XR demonstrations, and repeat their most apocalyptic prophecies, yet show no inclination of altering their middle-class lives in London: their revealed preferences therefore cast great doubt on their stated beliefs.

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By Aris Roussinos

It seems that, with climate change in particular, there are only two modes of thought for most people: either nothing will change at all, or everything is about to collapse in horrible and world-destroying ways. There is a more obvious conclusion that people seem resistant to thinking about: that things will change, in many ways for the worse, but life will go on. As the Green philosopher Rupert Read asks: “why do we find it so hard to think about a world where the climate has changed massively, veering between ‘it won’t make much difference, everything is going to be fine’ to ‘it’s the apocalypse, the end of the world, there’s nothing we can do’, but refusing to think about the awful, but more middling realities?” 

It would seem more productive, then, instead of continuing with the path of climate change mitigation — which is probably now too late to succeed — or of giving everything up for lost, to instead focus popular attention on adaptation: on making the best of a situation we cannot change, but which is far from an apocalypse, at least for the UK. 

The issue at hand is that Britain is responsible for a mere 1% of global carbon emissions, so that even if we achieved Net Zero tomorrow, nothing will change in terms of arresting climate change. China’s increase in coal production this autumn alone is already greater than Britain’s total carbon emissions: halting this process is, in the real world, almost entirely out of our hands. 

But if we can’t change what is about to happen, we can at least prepare for it. If you read the Climate Change Commission’s risk assessment for the rest of the century, it assumes that Britain’s temperature will rise by two degrees by 2100, in the worst scenario as much as four degrees. Such an outcome will be disastrous for much of the world’s population, and I am not dismissing the gravity of the situation for billions of guiltless people.

But I live in Britain, and for Britain having a similar climate to central France will not be the end of the world — but we should start planning for it now. Just as no-one now starves their families in solidarity with the hungry of the Global South, it is absurd and irresponsible to not plan a resilient and comfortable near future for our own country out of fatalism or an inchoate sense of global solidarity.

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A rise of two degrees will return Britain to its climate during the Roman Warm Period, when an admittedly lower level of civilisation functioned perfectly well. The risk assessment highlights the risk of flooding in low-lying areas, the risk of drought in summer, and the risks of disruption to international trade. But its observations are all, with sufficient planning and adaptation, perfectly manageable. It even observes that there are opportunities as well as risks, and promotes a vast expansion of vineyards on British soil, which with appropriate planning could become a £50 million annual industry. In just such a way, if the British government cannot change what is about to happen, it can at least start shaping the inevitable near future in ways that are beneficial for this country. And by doing so, and by being seen to act as if they believe what they claim to believe, the Government is far more likely to convince people about the inevitability of climate change.

To understand why, consider the early days of the Covid crisis. When governments and newspapers were dismissing the severity of the coming pandemic, I was convinced to take it seriously by witnessing friends stockpiling masks (while we were being assured they were useless and even harmful) and laying in stores of food and other essential goods in case of trade disruption. Seeing people whose opinions you respect take a potential crisis seriously, and planning how to navigate the changed world that comes with it, is a convincing signal that you should take action yourself. It means far more than hearing the government warn about doom on the horizon and then doing absolutely nothing — like closing the borders — to mitigate against it. Deeds are convincing in a way words are not.

In the same way, I personally take climate change seriously. I believe in the predictions of the vast majority of the world’s scientists, and thinking through the potential outcomes of such a world-changing process, I am planning how to adapt my lifestyle to best manage what is seemingly inevitable. In the New Year, barring some unforeseen eventuality, I will sell my house and buy a smallholding somewhere hilly (and so at less risk of flooding than the coastal town where I currently live) and with enough land that I can ensure my family’s food supply in case of trade disruption or rising prices. Already, in suburban Kent, we produce our own eggs and grow our own vegetables, but I want to be self-sufficient in meat and milk, beer and cider, clean drinking water and bread. (I intend to document our progress in this column.) 

It’s a way of living some are calling Doomer Optimism: I don’t believe that society will collapse within my lifetime, or that starvation will soon stalk the land. But I do think there’s a strong possibility that the cost of living will become significantly higher within the next two decades or so, just as the after effects of Covid are now manifesting, to such a degree that it makes sense to rethink my family’s way of living now to ensure a decent future quality of life in the years ahead. 

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The question here isn’t one of survival in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but of ensuring an atmosphere of comfort and plenty in a likely world of consumption taxes and restrictions brought in through poorly-thought out climate change mitigation efforts, the intervention of corporate interests, and occasional disruptions to international trade. The current discourse around radically limiting food consumption presents such a dystopian and wildly unattractive future that it is no wonder people reject it, especially when it does nothing to address the over-consumption of the world’s richest. I will not, as they say, live in the pod, and I will not eat bugs, and neither should you. We should demand better, and there are alternative futures. 

But first we need to show that we’re tackling the problem seriously. As Rupert Read remarks in the recent book Deep Adaptation, “every time we are seen to be preparing for possible/likely hard times ahead… we are making it possible for people and politics to start to really face climate reality.” As he observes, if you act as if you mean what you say you believe, people will believe you. If you don’t, they won’t. In this way, Read argues, “it is a political act to act as if collapse is possible”, even if you don’t believe it is likely, just as you still install fire alarms even if you don’t believe your house will imminently burn down.

As with individuals, so with government. The Government’s push for Net Zero is expending a great deal of political capital on a mitigation effort that, whatever its moral worth, will do nothing to alter the risk of climate change one way or another. In doing so, it is alienating many people who appreciate, even if only subliminally, the vast disjunct between what the Government claims is about to happen, and its broader actions. If the threat is so real, people naturally think, why isn’t the nation mobilising to deal with the coming effects? The narrow focus on Net Zero, along with the attempt to prioritise individual, essentially meaningless mitigation efforts like eating less meat, is at this stage wildly counterproductive. 

Instead, the Government should, like my family, say that they can’t change what is coming, but that we can at least adapt to it now so that the wrench is less painful when it comes. What would that mean on a national level? If we accept that flooding is likely on Britain’s most productive agricultural land in East Anglia, we should be planning to open up currently marginal hill pasture for crops to ensure a more stable food supply. What would that look like? It would probably be less mechanised, and smaller scale, simply due to the topography: so we should be relearning how to manage such a mid-20th century form of agriculture at sufficient cumulative scale, which we are currently not doing.

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If the Thames floodplain is at risk of occasional but devastating flooding, not from the sea but from built-over inland rivers, we should discourage building in flat estuarine land — as insurers are already warning — and instead rezone hilly land in London’s outer suburbs for housebuilding, as well as improving London’s overwhelmed Victorian drainage infrastructure. 

If the Government is incapable of building HS2 properly, it is surely poorly-equipped to deal with the amount of adjustment that will be necessary to maintain currently functional levels of infrastructure. We should be making railtracks more resilient to flooding, building viaducts where necessary and digging new water features and marshlands to absorb sudden deposits of water. We should be overhauling our water supply to minimise the risk of drought and prevent avoidable water losses through leaky pipes. We should be pedestrianising and planting trees in cities now to make them cool and shady in twenty or thirty years time, and building clean new transport infrastructure to take the place of cars. We should be building more houses, relaxing planning restrictions for family homes in the countryside so that more people are affordably able to take control of their personal family food supply. If we claim that disasters are on the horizon, yet do not build up the infrastructure now to cope with them, why should anyone take these claims seriously?

There is a great deal of ingenuity in this country only now being focussed on technologies such as nuclear fusion, which may soon provide clean sources of almost limitless energy, or on fast electric aeroplanes and capacious electric airships, which may be better used for freight than for human transport. The medium term may be uncomfortable, but the long-term future may be very good indeed, if only for Britain. 

To manage this will take a certain frontier spirit, a willingness to make the best of and thrive in a harder situation than we are accustomed to. Instead of prophesying doom and then doing nothing about it, we should be imagining a positive vision of what a Britain adapted to climate change would look like: a country of high-speed trains hurtling across tall viaducts between new hill towns, with lush vineyards overlooking the broad new wetlands on what was once farmland. It is not too late to make the Britain of the near future not just liveable, but an improvement on what we have now. Life will go on: it is our duty to make it as comfortable and prosperous as possible, not just as individuals, but as a nation.

Adopting a belt-and-braces approach, the council placards feature not one but two silhouettes of caravans — the traditional bow-top variety and its modern successor — with red crosses struck through each. That is not to say that all of the incomers are ungrateful for the welcome. Some set up camp next to the posts, and use them for firewood.

In case the signs sprinkled around the town like confetti did not communicate the message, they are often punctuated by large boulders plonked on to verges. This year, one farmer went even further, spraying cow manure across his field and the public byway beside it.

The river in which the steeds of the Appleby Horse Fair are ritually washed may be called the Eden, but this market town — slap bang in the middle of the North Pennines, Lake District and Yorkshire Dales — has not quite been an idyllic paradise over the past week.

The fair, which has been taking place annually since 1775 and returned over the weekend for the first time since the pandemic, attracts an estimated 30,000 people (mostly tourists) to an area with a population of just 3,000.

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Appleby is historically about buying and selling horses, some for up to £30,000. They are ridden into the river — watched eagerly by RSPCA officers — before being washed with Fairy liquid and groomed for market. Then they are raced down a section of road known as Flashing Lane (“flashing” means showing off a horse). Finally, the bartering takes place with a patter as breakneck as the galloping, before the sale is secured with a slap of the hand (in an era of Covid hygiene protocols, the time-honoured spitting on the palm appears to have fallen out of favour).

However, the largest Gypsy gathering in Britain, and perhaps the world, is about so much more than mares and stallions. With the majority of the pilgrims (of all varieties, from Romanies, who trace their history back to 11th century India, to English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish Travellers) now living in fixed accommodation, this is an annual chance to reconnect with their heritage and meet up with old friends and extended family.

They congregate over meals of bacon pudding (a steamed suet roly poly) or Joe Grey stew (a sausage and potato goulash). Many youngsters come here to meet their future spouses. The young women arrive dressed to the nines and freshly fake-tanned, marrying their ancient culture with a more modern, bling aesthetic. One older Romany tells me she calls them the “Oompa-Loompas”. She adds that this is the only chance she has to wear her gold earrings, traditional hairstyle and flowing skirts, as she hides her ethnicity from friends and colleagues.

“It’s literally sacred to us,” says Billy Welch, Britain’s Shera Rom, or Head Gypsy, as he walks around Fair Hill, the farm on which his people have camped for centuries. “Nowhere in the world do we feel welcome. Except here. This is our Jerusalem. This is our Mecca.”

But legislative clouds hang over these misty moors. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, going through the House of Lords, would turn trespass, currently a civil matter, into a criminal offence. A person with a vehicle who resides or intends to reside on land without consent of the occupier; who has caused “or is likely to” cause significant damage, disruption or distress; and who refuses to move on when asked to by police could have their mobile home — containing all their possessions — seized, and face three months’ imprisonment or a fine of £2,500, or both.

Liberty has described the “potentially unlawful” proposals as “a direct attack on the way of life for many in these communities”, who could be rendered homeless. The Jewish Board of Deputies and Stand Up To Racism have also rallied to the cause.

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Many fear the new law, covering England and Wales, could spell the end of Appleby, and therefore centuries of Gypsy culture, as some travel with their horses for up to 400 miles, from as far afield as Cornwall, making a journey lasting days or weeks. They need to rest on the side of the road and, with nowhere legal to stop, risk having their priceless hand-gilded “vardos” seized by police.

Labour peer Baroness Whitaker, who opposes the bill, will speak at its second reading. She tells me: “The Government justifies its trigger for this hostile action as the causation of ‘significant damage, disruption or distress’. But these are highly subjective terms, and given the widespread prejudice already evinced, open to cruel abuse.” She argues it is “clearly a discriminatory provision” that “looks suspiciously like a dog-whistle appeal to prejudice and racism”, adding: “We do not force other minority ethnic peoples to forgo their lifestyle.”

Strikingly, one Gypsy charity’s analysis of police forces’ submissions to the government consultation found 75% felt current powers were sufficient and 84% did not support criminalisation, while 65% said lack of site provision was the real problem.

But a Home Office spokesperson was resolute: “Unauthorised encampments can cause misery to those who live nearby, with excessive noise and littering, and people unable to access their land.”

Certainly a law that keeps the hordes away from Appleby would please some locals — who have to bear the cost of policing, road closures, toilets and rubbish clearance, and endure the inconvenience of their population growing tenfold over the course of a weekend.

After a public meeting in 2018, Cumbria’s police and crime commissioner Peter McCall, who said some residents felt “as if they had been invaded”, admitted: “At one point, I did say that if I had a magic wand I would ban it. But I went on to say that was not going to happen.” Many pubs and shops simply close for the duration, missing out on a boom in profits in favour of avoiding feared vandalism and disorder.

None of the locals opposing the fair — so vocal on Facebook groups and at town meetings — would speak on the record, presumably worried about being accused of bigotry. One local says that when Channel 5 made a 2019 documentary, with the understated title The Town The Gypsies Took Over, the only voice producers could find to give an extended criticism of the fair lived in a different town.

But one B&B owner in a neighbouring village tells me — anonymously — that she is “absolutely furious”. “It’s the only time of year we lock our doors,” she says. “It’s the ones who want to do what they want, where they want and not have to pay for it. Many shops close because of theft. I especially mind at the moment, when there have been so many restrictions on the rest of us.” Perhaps she is right to be angry; the number of arrests at this year’s fair was its highest in seven years.

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To Britain’s estimated 500,000 Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (who have been in England since at least the 16th century), such opposition is nothing new. Read any official report on the communities and you will be struck by a catalogue of state-sponsored discrimination and stunted life chances.

Indeed, the Government admitted in 2019 that they “are among the most disadvantaged people in the country”. They have relatively low literacy rates and the worst school attainment of all ethnic groups. One in five Gypsy Traveller mothers will suffer the loss of a child, compared with one in 100 for the rest of the population. And their life expectancy is 10 to 12 years shorter than average.

Welch says the collective memory of the murder of an estimated 500,000 European Roma during the Holocaust — or Romani Porajmos — is “very fresh in our minds”. The reason Appleby is so central in the calendar, he says, is because so many other gatherings across the world have vanished. “The erosion of the other events is a result of these kinds of laws all over the world. In recent years, we’ve noticed a big rise in racism. But we’ve been here 500 years. We’re as British as anybody else.”

Hertfordshire-based Sherrie Smith, co-founder of the Drive to Survive campaign against the bill, knows all about the long tail of unwanted interventions into Gypsy life. Her family has lived in fixed accommodation since her grandmother was forced off a site in 1959.

But she says the proposed legislation “will affect us all – in hate, prejudice, the narrative. The government has failed us for decades, so why are they adding to it? There’s not a day you’re not treated differently, but it’s definitely worse now than it’s been, ever.”

Sitting in her hired caravan, Smith details a series of housing Catch-22s that she wants solved, instead of what she sees as an act of legislating her people’s nomadic culture out of existence. In January, there were reported to be 1,700 families on waiting lists for pitches on public Traveller sites, with 59 permanent pitches available. (A statutory duty to establish authorised sites was repealed in 1994.) And if a Gypsy, Roma or Traveller can afford to buy their own land and seeks planning permission, a social media campaign will begin, along with local politicians who “spit venom”.

“So, what do we do, then?” she asks with her hands in the air. “You’ve got no social housing.” Smith sees the proposals as a cheap piece of populism with chilling implications. “It’s cultural genocide. It’s forced assimilation.”

Meanwhile, over the clip-clop of passing hoofs, a group of pensioners sitting on the steps of a house overlooking the river say they enjoy the spectacle provided by “all the carry-on with the horses”.

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A trio of women who volunteer at the Age Concern charity shop in the town centre are similarly unfussed. “They’re very friendly, the Gypsies,” says one. “It livens us up a little bit. You only hear people who are running them down.” Her colleague chips in: “It’s the one time of year when people in Appleby think they’re a lot better than everybody else. And in reality, everybody’s the same. It’s no worse than a bunch of people going to Blackpool.”

The first adds: “We’re perfectly happy, especially the people that’s lived here a long time. There’s a lot of new housing estates now. Really, they know the fair’s here every year and they still buy a house, but they twine like hell.”

The only thing she resents, she insists, is funding superfluous signage. “We’re paying for the council to go about putting posts everywhere.”

Child marriage is merely a subset of the wider problem of forced marriage, which is staggering in scale. In 2016, the International Labour Organization found that “15.4 million people were living in a forced marriage to which they had not consented”. 37% of those victims are under the age of 18, and 44% of those children were “forced to marry before the age of 15 years”. “While men and boys,” the report states, “can also be victims of forced marriage,” 88% of victims are female. That figure rises among child victims of forced marriage: 96% were girls.

For me, the subject of forced marriage is personal. When I was living in Kenya, my father arranged for me to marry a man I had never met. His name was Osman Moussa. He was 27. When we were introduced, only six days before the marriage, I found that he was bald, dim and expected me to give him six sons.

Before the nikah ceremony, which would legally wed us, I begged my father to reconsider. I had no interest in the man he had chosen for me and dreaded a lifetime with him. My father insisted and when I continued to resist, he reminded me of my place. In the end, my father married me to Osman when I wasn’t even there — which might have been an issue had my participation been a matter of concern. But the arrangement was a mere transfer of ownership from one man to the next; my presence, let alone my consent, was not required.

Fortunately for me, I was not a child when this happened. I was 22 and had the self-confidence to flee to the Netherlands to escape my future with Osman. What if I had been 15, without the wherewithal or determination to flee?

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But while my story might sound exotic, forced marriages and child marriages do not occur only in far-away countries. They are happening in the West today. This April, Unchained At Last, an organisation fighting child and forced marriages in the United States, released a study that found “nearly 300,000 minors, under the age of 18, were legally married in the US between 2000 and 2018”. The victims’ religious and ethnic backgrounds varied, but the vast majority were girls. Some were as young as 10.

In the United Kingdom, the situation is hardly any better. Here, child marriage is “thriving”; according to official data, between 2008 and 2017 more than 2,740 minors were married in England and Wales — a disturbing figure which doesn’t include minors wed in traditional ceremonies or taken abroad for the ceremony. Karma Nirvana, a British charity, recently reported “it had seen a 150% increase in teenagers calling about forced marriage since lockdowns began on March 23”. They expect that figure to rise now that the UK has removed most of its Covid-19 restrictions and gatherings are allowed to take place.

It’s encouraging, then, that UK introduced a bill this year that would close the child marriage loophole, which allows 16 and 17-year-olds to marry, with their parents’ permission. Health Secretary Sajid Javid, for what it’s worth, has committed his support, stating that “child marriage is child abuse”. Meanwhile, several states in the US are also fighting to end this practice within their borders; eleven states introduced legislation this year that would ban all marriages for those under 18. (New York and Rhode Island have already succeeded.)

All this has caused me to reflect on my own experiences and the countless stories I’ve heard from women and girls who have come to my Foundation seeking to escape or prevent a forced marriage. But at the heart of each of their tragic stories lies a simple question: what constitutes a marriage?

These days, in much of the Western world, it is a legal union of two human beings in pursuit of love, companionship and personal fulfilment. It is an agreement into which both parties willingly enter and from which they may leave if the relationship breaks down. The word “marriage” conjures up ideas of romance, love, desire, but also of partnership, posterity and security.

But for those legally locked in marriages they didn’t want, the word has a very different meaning. Fraidy Reiss, the founder of Unchained At Last, was forced into a marriage in 1995 when she was 19 years old. It quickly turned abusive. She came from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community and eventually escaped her abuser, which led her family to shun her. When I asked her about it, she told me: “The day I was forced into my so-called marriage to a stranger, I lost all sexual, reproductive and financial rights. My family handed me over to the stranger for a lifetime of rape, forced motherhood and domestic servitude. What part of that sounds like a ‘marriage’?”

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Naila Amin was forced into a marriage with her 28-year-old cousin when she was just 15-years-old. Her parents brought her from New York to Pakistan for the ceremony and left her there. With the help of the US State Department, she was able to escape about five months later.

“I can only explain my marriage as a gun to my head,” she told me. “I literally had no choice but to be married or die as a result. I was a prisoner in my own body. Even though it belonged to me, it wasn’t mine.”

My friend Yasmine Mohammed escaped a forced marriage to an al-Qaeda terrorist in Canada. I recently asked her on my podcast how she viewed her relationship. Did it really constitute a marriage?

“Absolutely not. The reason is because I don’t constitute a human being, so I am a thing. I am a possession that is owned by my family and I am given to him for him to now own.”

Humans beings — often young girls — treated as property. Individuals unable to leave a situation on their own accord. These descriptions call to mind another institution which also dates back to ancient times: slavery. From antiquity onwards, countless civilisations have been built upon slavery. And it still exists in many forms today, including in these so-called marriages.

Because when an adult man — whether he is in his 20s or 50s — marries an 11-year-old girl, she inevitably gains all the essential attributes of a slave: she has no real power to leave — unless she accepts total destitution, permanent ostracism, or even honour violence. She is subject to the arbitrariness and capriciousness of an authority with absolute power over her life: her husband. And she is profoundly vulnerable to physical, sexual or emotional abuse.

Behind these forced marriages lie any number of dark motives. Girls may be trafficked, perhaps after false employment promises made to families living in dire poverty, perhaps after being kidnapped. Sometimes, a girl is married to satisfy a debt. Sometimes, a girl is married to solidify a certain tribal alliance. Sometimes, a girl is married to protect a family’s honour.

Sometimes, a girl is forced to marry the man who raped her because no one else will marry such a “tainted” girl. I’ve seen first-hand how families pressure women and girls into marriage. There are many possible motives, but the manipulation — and the absence of true consent — is a constant.

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In cases of forced marriage, particularly where honour plays a cultural role, extreme coercion can be brought to bear to ensure compliance by one or both parties. It is true that men can also be the victims of honour violence (particularly as it pertains to sexual minorities), but in general women are the more common victims: they’re generally seen as embodying the sexual honour of their tribe and community through their perceived sexual purity. Hence the need to marry them off quickly and quietly.

“Marriage” is, of course, a misnomer for these horrific situations. For a marriage to be an ethical union between two free parties, both persons have to make the decision without duress and through the use of reason. Preventing the formation of such marriages, like ending slavery, is an imperative of decency and humanity.

Yet, this year, headlines like “Victory Against Child Marriage in New York State” contrast starkly with others, like this: “Some NC lawmakers let child marriage ban stall because they or someone they know married as minors”. In North Carolina, children as young as 14 (the legal age to marry in North Carolina if a girl is pregnant) are being forced into “marriages”.

Last month, Judy Wiegand came forward to testify for a ban of child marriages in North Carolina, recounting her own experiences of marrying in northern NC in 1996, at the age of 15. Her husband turned 18 soon after they wed and became her “guardian”. As a minor, she was not able to “go to medical appointments by herself, she needed [her husband’s] permission to be on birth control, which he denied, and she couldn’t sign for utilities, rent an apartment or get a driver’s license without his approval”.

Yesterday, the NC House considered the “SB 35” bill, which would raise the age of marriage to sixteen, with no more than a four years age difference allowed for those marrying at sixteen or seventeen. The bill passed unanimously — but despite these efforts towards progress, this bill remains inadequate. Sixteen and seventeen-year-olds are still minors and also need protection, as illustrated by Judy Wiegand’s experiences above.

Indeed, it’s striking that the North Carolina House passed over their own brightline bill, HB 41, which would raise the age of marriage to 18 years old, no exceptions, to instead let the focus sit on the watered down SB 35. We would not ignore a brightline bill if it were a slavery ban that was stalling in North Carolina — or any of the other 44 states where child marriage is still legal.

So perhaps what’s needed here is a shift in terminology. To reflect what’s truly happening when a family offers up their 12-year-old daughter to a 27-year-old distant cousin — and to stop people turning a blind eye for fear of being culturally insensitive — we need to call child marriages what they are: slavery.

Why, if people in Britain feel that they have a moral responsibility to march against Donald Trump, are they not also breaking the lockdown to protest the crushing of liberty in Hong Kong — a city that was, unlike America, a British colony as recently as 1997? Why, when the death of a black man in Minneapolis can provoke such anguish among minorities here, has the detention of a million Muslims in Xinjiang — and a systematic attempt by the Chinese government at cultural genocide — failed to provoke a matching storm?

Why, when China has come to rival the United States as an economic, a military, a geopolitical power, does the outside world continue to find America — Trump, racist cops, and all — so very much more interesting? What is it about the murder of George Floyd, in a year hardly lacking in tragedy and suffering, that has struck a chord so resonant that it has briefly toppled even coronavirus from the top of the news?

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What I learned about freedom in Xinjiang

By Geordie Stewart

Britain has been in hock now to American narratives for at least a century. Sharing as we do a common language with Hollywood, we have always been readier than other nations to be seduced by its mythologies. Today, in an era of computer games and box sets, these mythologies have become more potent, more influential than ever. If it is true, as Bruno Maçães has brilliantly argued, that life in the United States today “continuously emphasises its own artificiality in a way that reminds participants that, deep down, they are experiencing a story”, then the challenge of disentangling fiction from reality becomes all the more difficult. The racist cop, the innocent victim, the violence-shadowed city: these are stories that we experience simultaneously as reports on the news and as series on Netflix.

Donald Trump, a malevolent huckster straight out of Gotham City, is a president perfectly in tune with these disorienting, disturbing times. He is not the only person, however, to have bent reality to his own purposes, moulding it to fashion a narrative in which, like Joker, he can then star as the hero. Dystopia in America is not merely an expression of cultural pessimism. It is also — be it in the form of movies, TV shows or computer games — a brilliantly successful consumer product. That the streets of New York and Los Angeles currently resemble scenes from science fiction as much as they do TV footage from 1968 enables anyone taking to them to feel that they are entering a narrative with its own internal grammar, its own teleology. Fighting evil, sticking it to the bad guys, taking on a super-villain: who would not want to be part of such a story?

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The Republican Party's descent into darkness

By Ian Birrell

Yet if we in Britain feel familiar with America’s self-mythologising in a way that we do not with those of any other country, it is clear that there is more to the motivation of those who marched through London and Manchester this week than a longing — Cliff Richard-like — to feel themselves part of something bigger and more compelling. There are stories older than HBO, older than Hollywood, older even than the United States itself, that are part of the common heritage of Britain and America: stories that continue to shape the assumptions and ideals of both.

When the Pilgrim Fathers set sail for the New World, they did so because they saw their own reflection in the book of Exodus. If England, which they had left 15 years before, had been Egypt, and Holland, where they had settled, the wilderness, then the land that awaited them across the ocean could only be a Promised Land. Planting their colony on the shores of New England, the Pilgrims did so as people who knew themselves the protagonists of a story already written. From that moment on, it was the destiny of America to serve as a palimpsest, inscribed upon by generation after generation of people who, believing themselves actors in biblical narratives, believed themselves as well protagonists in a mighty cosmic drama.

The God who had brought his Chosen People out of slavery in Egypt, and whose son had washed feet and suffered a death of humiliating agony — so redeeming all of humanity from servitude — was not a God who necessarily promised easy solace. To wallow in moral complacency was to risk betraying His purposes. This was why, repeatedly over the course of American history, a summons to repentance, an awakening to a sense of grace, would be experienced as a mass movement capable of sweeping across state after state.

“Two persons while preaching were so overcome with the Sence of the wrath of God ready to fall on them that they died away with fear and sorrow and were with Difficult bro’t to again, and when Sermon was Ended a great Number Cryed out in such anguish as I never See it.”

So a Connecticut lawyer in 1741 described the impact of what in due course was commemorated as the Great Awakening: the first in a long series of Awakenings that served to join America and Britain in a shared sense of spiritual fervour.

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Has Boris had a sickbed conversion?

By Tom Holland

This was the tradition that Martin Luther King, in the 1950s, employing his unrivalled mastery of the Bible and its cadences, invoked to rouse white pastors and their congregations from their moral slumbers. The day before his murder, he gave a sermon in which he declared himself ready to die in the cause of redeeming his people from the chains of the slavery into which their ancestors had been brought. “Like anybody,” he told his listeners, “I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land.”

The allusion, of course, was to Moses: the great prophet who, guided by God, had led the Children of Israel out of Egypt, and then, before he died, climbed Mount Nebo to gaze across at Canaan, the promised land he was destined never to enter. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”

Today, although Martin Luther King’s people may remain stranded in the wilderness, the Bible no longer structures the dread and the dreamings of Americans in the way that once it did. The book which for King had been a supreme inspiration has chiefly played a role in the current crisis as a prop held upside down by President Trump. Yet the tracks of Christian theology, as Nietzsche once complained, wind everywhere.

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Trump's biblical power play

By Giles Fraser

“The measure of a man’s compassion for the lowly and the suffering comes to be the measure of the loftiness of his soul.” It was this — the lesson taught by the redemption of the Children of Israel from slavery, and by the death of Christ on the cross — that Nietzsche had always most despised about Christianity. Two millennia on, and the discovery made by Christ’s earliest followers — that to be a victim can be a source of power — has brought thousands onto the streets of America and Britain alike.

Steeped in the language of intersectionality and postcolonial studies though the protests may be, the slogans derive ultimately from a much more venerable source. A dread of damnation, a yearning to be gathered into the ranks of the elect, a desperation to be cleansed of original sin, had long provided the surest and most fertile seedbed for the ideals of the American people. Repeatedly, over the course of their history, preachers had sought to awaken them to a sense of their guilt, and to offer them salvation. Now, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, there are summons to a similar awakening.

As minorities mass on the banks of the Jordan to attempt yet again to ford the river, white liberals — often literally kneeling and raising their hands in prayer as they do so — confess their sins and beg for absolution. Only through repentance, their conveners preach, is there any prospect of obtaining salvation. The activists, however, are not merely addressing those gathered before them. Their gaze, as the gaze of preachers in America has always been, right from the very first voyages of the Puritans across the Atlantic to New England, is fixed on the world beyond. Their summons is to sinners everywhere — in London as in New York, in Amsterdam as in Los Angeles. Their ambition is to serve as a city on a hill.

The hypothetical structure has been dismissed from the start as a vanity project, a folly, even “bonkers”, most virulently by enemies determined that Boris Johnson should fail — at being Prime Minister; at Brexit; at bridge-bridging in both the emblematic and literal sense — but also by those with an attachment to fiscal prudence, who know that the Irish Sea isn’t bottomless but fear the money needed to raise a bridge across it just might be. Assuming that the sums add up, though, would it really be such a dreadful idea?

The latest study of opinion in Northern Ireland, conducted on behalf of four universities, including Queen’s in Belfast and the LSE, offers a timely counterpoint to the growing body of opinion that Irish unity is now inevitable in the wake of Brexit. The survey found that fewer than a third of people in Northern Ireland would vote for reunification with the South if a border poll was held tomorrow. What better time for pro-Union voices to speak up for a bridge which would join the United Kingdom in physical as well as constitutional form?

Bridges are not only practical, but symbolic. They connect places, and have always been seen in both poetic and political language as representations of healing and partnership.

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When the daily packet steamer between Portpatrick and Donaghadee was under threat in 1845, the Earl of Northampton reminded the House of Lords that they were their object ought to be “to tighten the bonds which united the two countries — not the bonds of force, but of attachment and loyalty — and in order to attach Ireland to the connection with this country, he thought they ought to show a willingness to sacrifice a reasonable amount of the public money.” Most of Ireland gained its independence a century ago, but Boris Johnson is, to all appearances, of like mind when it comes to showing commitment, in steel and concrete, to the six remaining counties.

Most British people don’t really think of Northern Ireland as an integral part of the UK, but a bridge might make it feel more accessible, less alien. National psychology is an unpredictable thing. The Channel Tunnel ultimately failed to increase Britain’s fondness for the EU, but it certainly made parts of it feel more European.

If it’s a stretch to hope that a mere bridge could help the Brits love Ulster, which has never exactly made an effort to be loveable, it’s not hard to imagine ways in which it might work some alchemy on the mindset of Northern Ireland itself. Nationalists will feel no more British, but it would reassure Unionists that they’re not being left behind in whatever new United Kingdom ends up being built after Brexit. Ulster Protestants have long had a sentimental attachment to a tribal dreamtime memory of Scotland. Now it would be made tangible, and, if it brought economic benefits to a region too often bypassed by booms, all the better.

Whether those benefits would be equally shared is unlikely. Larne, where those crossing the bridge would most likely first set tyres on Irish soil, being Boris Johnson’s preferred route, and the one he (optimistically) costed at £15 billion, is a very different prospect to the picturesque harbour of Donaghadee, where Victorian travellers disembarked.

Nearly a million people pass through the town’s existing ferry port every year, but it remains a deprived and grim locale, with unattractive architecture, and high rates of unemployment, drug abuse, alcoholism, and ill health in general.

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Brexit will accelerate the inevitable in Ireland

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Despite the peace process, parts of the town are still haunted by the presence of the Ulster Defence Association’s South East Antrim Brigade, and there have been a number of feud-related murders in recent years. Chances are that, most of those crossing over on any bridge would continue to zip through the town on their way to Belfast to the south, Derry to the west, or more enticing destinations such as the Giant’s Causeway to the north. It could be that Larne gets landed with most of the inconveniences of the bridge, and few of the upsides.

The economic advantages for the rest of Northern Ireland would, however, be huge. The UK mainland is already used by exporters across Ireland as a land bridge to Europe. Joining up Scotland to the island next door has the potential to turn Northern Ireland into a land bridge to the land bridge, increasing traffic north and south. For a region reliant for its survival on a block grant from Westminster, and still with a higher than average number of public sector workers, a large scale infrastructure project on this scale could be transformative.

Getting to that stage would, of course, necessitate overcoming Northern Ireland’s ingrained cynicism.

The average Ulsterman is not inclined to positivity. Grand infrastructure projects are all for very well for Hong Kong or Bahrain, but any bridge over the Irish Sea would be expected by most locals to either fall down, or run out of money half way, leaving the two halves poking out from their respective landmasses, almost but never quite touching, which would be symbolic in its own way. Recent storms hardly make the thought of driving across the Irish Sea in a Force 9 gale, with nothing for protection but a few girders, appealing.

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That’s no reason not to do it. The prophets of doom were equally gloomy about the Channel Tunnel, at least in the short term. The difference is that the tunnel brought closer two great capital cities, London and Paris, whereas a bridge over the Irish Sea would connect a brace of farther flung regions of the UK with mixed feelings about their place in national life.

Unionists should tread carefully. Increasing links might over time stitch Northern Ireland more fully into the consciousness of people in the Irish Republic, who have an equally semi-detached attitude towards the troublesome region as most Britons. The bridge may well make people in the South think of the North as a more normal member of the family, rather than a dysfunctional distant relative.

The bridge could in that sense herald a different sort of unity. Not one of all the British Isles, as envisaged by Boris and the Earl of Northampton, but one bringing closer the restless fringes in a new power base. Edinburgh and Dublin have already started to tentatively explore joint interests post Brexit. Add Belfast to the chain, and a bridge could become another way to avoid England entirely as pro-EU Gaels edge towards Scottish independence and Irish unity. There are some who suspect Boris Johnson would secretly be satisfied if Northern Ireland did finally wave goodbye to the United Kingdom, allowing him to concentrate on grander international visions, but that’s probably taking conspiracy theories too far.

In a long career with the pen, the Prime Minister has been prepared to think the unthinkable and challenge cherished tradition on numerous matters, but he has always seemed to value the Union, even when the love was not reciprocated.

It may be best all the same for the bridge to remain a tantalising thought experiment rather than reality. In Celtic lore, islands are places apart, separate, special, magical. That’s partly why Irish nationalism is such a potent force, because it seems unnatural that an island should be divided. Geology now confirms that Ireland was never joined to Britain, as Britain was to Europe, and one needn’t be a raging nationalist to be slightly disappointed at the thought of stapling it to its neighbour now just for the convenience of some trucks. What God has put asunder, let no man, not even Boris Johnson, join together.

Stage one was shock. I didn’t stay up for the count. I went comfortable to bed believing my side would prevail. I woke at 3 and checked the news. I didn’t sleep again: the shock wasn’t about the practicalities or about the policy. It was that I didn’t know my country. Was this my beloved home, suddenly now so unfamiliar?

I couldn’t knuckle down to proper work so I trundled off to Ikea to buy furniture for the new office my charity was moving into. Because what more European place is there than Ikea? They even have the right brand colours: blue and yellow. Just as in Harry Potter the cure for a brush with the dementors is chocolate, so the cure for a brush with the Brexiteers is surely a Swedish meatball.

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Accept it Remainers, you've lost

By Douglas Murray

Stage two: denial. I spent a couple of months expecting that we would leave but not really leave. So many leavers had said we’d stay aligned, we’d stay close, we’d still have perfect access to the single market and frictionless trade. I believed them. We could just duck out of the institutions of the EU but play along as if little had changed. Boris Johnson himself helped sustain this fantasy — his first article in the Telegraph after the referendum spelled out a vision of our future as the closest of buddies with our erstwhile partners.

Stage three: anger. All that came to a juddering halt when Theresa May gave her Lancaster House speech, full of red lines, incompatible promises and economic incoherence. I raged about David Davis turning up in Brussels without any papers. I was furious with Liam Fox for his pointless job as Secretary of State for Trade-Deals-We-Aren’t-Legally-Allowed-To-Sign-Yet. I drafted and deleted endless bitter tweets at pundits who thought it would be easy to run a Midlands car factory without just-in-time access to goods, simply because they could ski across the Swiss border on holiday.

Stage four: bargaining. This is when the false hope started to dawn. In the psychological literature, bargaining is the stage where you obsess about what you could have done differently — and try to strike a deal with God (or the universe): “I’ll be different, I’ll pray every day, I’ll be kind to my sister. Just make it go away.”

In Brexitland, bargaining was when we devised a thousand strategies to trip us into another referendum, another election, another chance to roll the dice again and get a different answer. I wasn’t part of those campaigns but I dared to hope. “If we stop Brexit it will be because of them, and their intransigence,” I told myself, almost ashamed that I hadn’t stood with them — that I was the sort of capitulator who assumed that a referendum, when lost, was lost.

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Stage five: depression. This started to creep up my spine during December’s general election. The debate was shifting away. The activists in their blue and yellow robes still thought we could stop Brexit but the voters didn’t. They wanted it over, even though few thought it would do any good. Boris Johnson offered relief from the trauma, the opportunity to end it all.

Depression’s power is immense. It brings with it a desperate yearning for sleep, for peace, for finality. As Edward Thomas, one of the most depressed poets England has ever produced, put it: “There is not any book, or face of dearest look, that I would not turn from now, to go into the unknown.” So in our depressive state, unable to summon the energy to fight any more, we allowed the end to come.

Stage six: testing. We asked ourselves: might it be ok? Might it be alright in Northern Ireland? It’s just a little more paperwork. Can the Union with Scotland hold? Will this new government adopt a liberal immigration policy, and an active industrial strategy to alleviate the damage of our departure? Will the new Conservative seats in the North give the party impetus to govern differently? Would it be better for all of us if we found a way to get along? Were we ready to forgive?

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Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

Stage seven: acceptance. To end the grieving process, acceptance has to be unconditional. It isn’t whether Brexit is better, or worse, or better than it could have been. It simply is. An unchangeable, immutable fact.

The prayer used at Alcoholics Anonymous is well known: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Well, I have lived in politics for nearly twenty years. Politics is about training yourself to file almost everything in the “things I can change” box. It’s about never settling for a world less perfect than you can imagine. So accepting this loss is hard. It goes against my soul. I loved my place as a European citizen. I loved the freedom. I loved the belonging. I loved the solidarity. All this is lost to me and to my friends, and my countrymen. But worst of all, this is a thing I cannot change.

Some people will laugh at this article. How could I possibly equate the process of leaving a multilateral organisation as equivalent to losing a loved one? Laugh away, if you like. When I spoke about my sadness a couple of years ago, on Newsnight, the Express wrote that I had “sparked anger” by doing so. Someone emailed to tell me that my “liberal tears” tasted sweet.

I know it is not easy to be gracious in victory. You have put your all into fighting, and you deserve a moment of glory, and celebration. But the others fought too. Their tears are not sweet. They are as bitter as yours would have been. Don’t demand grace from the losers, the ones with nothing to show for all their work, ambition and hope. Their hands are empty; yours are full. So show compassion.

To all those who raise a glass as Britain leaves the European Union: you have your Brexit. Leave us our grief. It’s the least you can do.