Interesting. My group of friends seem to routinely come back to the topic of the UK becoming a federation of city-states.
Seems we're not the only ones thinking that way.
Seems we're not the only ones thinking that way.
Look for instance these two articles: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023039195045775226... https://mises.org/library/politics-johann-wolfgang-goethe
> London as a separate federal part
Not the first time I've heard the suggestion of ejecting London from the Union :)
This impressed me on several levels. :-)
To make it work properly would probably require a different currency, so London£ could free-float to the sky like the Swiss Franc while the rest of the UK had a weaker £ more suited to export-driven economy. A large chunk of the economy would be exporting power and water to Londonistan.
London would become even more like Singapore or Dubai than it already is: skyscrapers for the mega-rich surrounded by immigrant guestworkers.
Any attempt to balance things out would require devolving powers to the English regions, which nobody seems to want.
Absolutely not, the separation of powers is both unclear and inconsistent among the devolved nations. It's also not really constitutionally guaranteed. The devolved assemblies have very limited powers over taxation and welfare spending.
I loved this description of the UK:
"an archipelagic supergroup comprised of four variously willing members."
mentioned in this article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/the...
The thirty or so years of recent low-level civil war in Northern Ireland are not mentioned there, or indeed anywhere in mainstream UK politics.
The 19th century Empire was run centrally from Whitehall. Gradually it rolled back in the 20th century: Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Israel, various Arab middle eastern countries, and so on. This has left the country with an imperial-derived system suited for paternalistically ruling people it considers inferior from a distance. It's just that the distance has scoped down. People within the UK and even within England are starting to regard it as distant and uninterested, especially in the recent floods this year and the last. It's on a much smaller scale than the Katrina disaster but I think the resentment is starting to build in a similar way.
Small-government conservativism in the UK means considering abandoning Liverpool as it's too far away.
Westminster still very much holds the leash, and reserve the right to yank it at their leisure.