Royal weddings and a Scottish uprising - quite the week for the constitution.
For the second time in too few weeks I found myself listening with interest to the views of David Starkey (shame on me, this will never do). He was being quizzed by Jon Snow on the Royal Wedding (you must have seen it – it was on all the channels, esp Fox). So why my interest in what this little English constitutional historian had to say? In short he was concerned with what the Royal Wedding had highlighted – a country of two halves. I hadn’t much thought about Will’s and Kate’s wedding TBH - and that was his point. With no street parties above the Solway Firth or Tweed the evidence of an Un-united Kingdom was more than apparent – and the Royal Wedding in his words missed an opportunity to unite.
Fast forward not quite a week, and the political map of the UK suddenly changes its colour palette. The place at the top of the artists palette normally reserved for Paprika Red had been hijacked by a rather vulgar Sunflower Yellow. Scotland had ditched its Labour habit for Alex Salmond’s SNP – and in some measure.
So in a week when all the UK should have been waving the Union Jack, buying Royal Wedding souvenir mugs and eating ice cream & jelly in the street the Scots were quietly getting ready to appoint oor Eck the next King of Scotland (would that be Alexander IV?). Seems David Starkey was more right in his view, that we are an un-united Kingdom, than he probably thought a week ago – at least then the Scots voted Labour as they always could be relied on to do.
So what next? Oor Eck is a shrewd cookie so he’ll want to play a steady as you go game if he wants to re-establish the Jacobite monarchy - but of course as we know any government with a majority quickly slips on banana skins, builds Duck Houses and generally behaves like…. well… like a government. But if Mr S can keep his troops in line – you never know where we might be in 10 years time.
As for David Starkey – I wonder if he knows where the descendants of the Auld Pretender are, because if we do the independence thing we’ll need a Scottish royal family so we can have a scottish royal wedding, buy the souvenir mugs and eat ice cream and jelly on the street. Then we can marry one of the royal Jacobite offspring into the english monarchy, unite the parliaments, then wish we hadn’t and complain about it for 300 years. All we need is a latter day Darien Scheme to trigger the parliamentary union – but I suspect we wont have to wait long for a suitable crisis (they seem to happen every weekend at the moment).
In the meantime, regardless of your political views (and mines are suitably confused) remember to look at the stars, see how the shine for you, and they were all yellow.
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