What is the American interest in the events that are taking place now in Britain? Start with the fact that a referendum on Scottish independence is set for September, and the other day a columnist for the London Financial Times wrote that “week by week Scotland seems to slip away.”
What he means is that the Scottish nationalists, a leftist lot, have been gaining in the opinion polls. The latest estimates put the pro-secession votes between three and seven points from victory. “With five months to go,” the FT reports, “the Yes campaign appears to have all the momentum.”
This strikes me as a major moment, and not just because England and Scotland have been united for more than three centuries. A separate referendum could be held in the next few years that would lead to Britain leaving the European Union. That campaign, led by the United Kingdom Independence Party, is gaining ground with astonishing speed.
The Guardian reported yesterday on a new poll predicting that the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, is “on course to achieve an emphatic victory” in this month’s elections to the European parliament.
The British establishment, left and right, tries to paint UKIP as “loonies” (to use Prime Minister David Cameron’s phrase) and UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, as an eccentric. The charges are proving hollow, though. Even in the estimation of his critics, Farage keeps winning debates. The question seems to be whether he can avoid the fate of, say, Ron Paul.
President Obama ought to be all over this, yet he seems to be scared of change and blind to the opportunities all of this presents to America. He has actually warned Britain that leaving Europe would hurt its relations with America, even while Europe hangs on our foreign policy like an albatross.
This came into view with startling clarity earlier this month, when the first minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, was in America. The leader of the Scottish secession movement, he appeared on “Morning Joe” and gave a particularly illuminating TV interview to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker.
View videoSalmond made it clear that what he wants is not so much independence per se but independence from England. If he gets the divorce he wants, he’d turn around and seek to have Scotland made, in its own right, a full member of the European Union.
If Scotland joins Europe and England leaves it, what does that mean for America?
It strikes me as an opportunity to create a new alliance of countries committed to the ideas of classical liberalism. Scottish secession would unburden England of a largely leftist population, and set the stage for England to be governed by conservatives for, conceivably, generations to come.
Meantime, Canada has emerged as a conservative success story. Australia, too, is a potential partner in a new arc of countries whose heritage is not so much a common language but common ideas of liberty and economic freedom that formed in England and reached their greatest flowering in our own revolution.
President Obama doesn’t seem to appreciate any of this. On moving into the White House he famously removed the bust of Winston Churchill. At one point things got so bad between Britain and America that the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee actually issued a call for an end of the use of the phrase “special relationship.”
Britain’s current leadership seems to have bought Obama’s notion that Britain would lose influence if it were to leave the European Union. But Obama is all for the kind of European statist dirigisme that is the reigning ideology in Brussels. So where are the rest of America’s leaders, including the Republicans in Congress and those eying the presidency?
A year hence, Britain is due to elect its 56th parliament. Prime Minister Cameron has promised that if he wins it, he’ll hold a referendum on whether to leave Europe.
Now is the time for America’s leaders to join this fray and let England know that if it’s abandoned by Scotland and if it wants to escape from European socialism, it will have a partner across the Atlantic.