As has been widely reported since Thursday, the Prime Minister’s chief advisor, one Dominic Mckenzie Cummings, has left Downing Street for the last time, according to reports (at the time of writing).  Along with Michael Gove, Cummings has functioned as the ideological driving force behind the Brexit strategy.  He masterminded Boris Johnson’s December 2019 General Election campaign, and has since been instrumental in the lockdown and test-and-trace strategies.  He also initiated the war on civil service culture and on the BBC’s liberal-left bias.  He is an inveterate upsetter of apple carts and an anti-Establishmentarian par excellence.  But it is his dedication to the small band of Vote Leave activists who followed him into government which has angered Tory MPs as much as his abrasive personality and helter-skelter methods.

The capture of the leadership by Johnson and the excision of the europhile old guard did not signify a sea-change in the rest of the parliamentary party - not least because Central Office controls candidate selection, and the 29% of Tories who are new are not all ideological ERGers and closet Farageists giving voice to the people and challenging the power of the Establishment.  They are what Tories have been for almost two centuries: accommodationists and corporate servants.  As such, the second lockdown has brought unrest in the parliamentary party over covid strategy and the epic failure of test-and-trace to a head.  Rather than attack the Prime Minister whose electoral feat gave them their place in the Westminster sun they have allied with the group within and without the Downing Street machine who are “friends of Carrie Symonds” and gone after the head of communications Lee Cain, to whom Johnson had offered the job of Downing Street’s Chief of Staff.

Aside from being a Vote Leaver, Cain’s crimes included a clash with Symonds over his handling of her row with Johnson at their south London home in June last year, which led to vin rouge all over the sofa and a call to 999.  He also earned the antipathy of another Downing Street insider, Allegra Stratten who, despite arriving in post only a month ago, took an instant dislike to Cain and wouldn’t speak to him.  The witches coven was completed by another wonk Munira Murza, who directs the No.10 Policy Unit, and Home Secretary Priti Patel; albeit in their case most likely because Cain had boycotted the BBC and upset the press lobby by opening access to the new media.  We should not run away with the idea that Cain is entirely a victim here.  The Daily Telegraph has reported that he and the Vote Leavers have taken to calling Symonds “Princess Nut Nuts” behind her back; their reasons, apparently, being that she acts the princess, is of questionable sanity, and bears some facial resemblance to a squirrel.  Naturally, Downing Street firmly denies any such suggestion.  But imagine, while this blokish humour might have been safe from consequences in the last millennium, it probably wouldn’t work so well in this one.  It may also not be terribly clever, given that Symonds is Johnson’s fiancee and the mother of his child.

In any event, Cain has been forced out, and now the whole Vote Leave house of cards is falling.  Cummings was meant to move on by Christmas to create an organisation to parallel the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency in the USA.  This is his real ambition, not being holed up in Downing Street fighting political fires all day.  Johnson, meanwhile, is already adjusting to his new situation and signalling to the press that Symonds’ green, badger-friendly agenda will now influence his vision for a “global Britain” with his own foundationally liberal values.  The culture war against the civil service and the BBC will end.  It is rumoured that for Northern Ireland an extension to the transition period might be agreed with Brussels.

Most interestingly, Johnson will be “less dogmatic” than past Tory administrations in his approach to Scottish independence, replacing the denialist policy of Cameron and May with a policy of positive argument for Union.  Fat chance that has.  Anyway, denialism isn’t exactly dead.  It’s just that, to quote Johnson, “We’ve got to make it more than just about saying no to another referendum.”  Alister Jack, the Scottish Secretary, still says no; re-confirming that for this government any second Scottish independence referendum is some twenty years away.  Nobody really believes that.  On 6th May next year, and in the months after, that theory will be put to the sternest of tests. 

The immediate signs are a bit more hopeful for the London government.  SNP support has been declining steadily among Scottish voters since its peak in August of this year.  But it is doing so for clear reasons, among which only a general exhaustion with the SNP, after so many years of power at Holyrood, is helpful to London.  Public dissatisfaction with the Scottish government’s handling of the covid crisis will be resolved, politically at least, by the availability of a vaccine by the year’s end.  The Starmer honeymoon will come to an end.  What will really make or break the issue is the reality of the Brexit settlement and its reception north of the border.  If ... and it is a fairly sure if ... the settlement respects the British government insistence on our sovereign nationhood, and if in consequence all suggestion of legal oversight by Brussels and its institutions is forever banished, then the Scots will have to get used to a future in which only London dwells.  That probability is already driving support for independence higher.  One poll last month put it at 58%.  Nicola Sturgeon stated in 2015 that she would not seek a second referendum until support is above 60% for a period of a whole year.  It is reasonable to expect that if (a) the SNP achieves a majority representation at Holyrood in May and (b) IndyRef 2 support hits 60% just once, the press will be on. 

Both are within easy reach, which means that the meaning of Boris Johnson’s new policy of engagement can easily be turned against him.  What, after all, is the point of keeping the Scots in the Union if that is truly not the wish of the people of Scotland?  What is the point of talking up the Union if polling support for independence just continues as it is?  Th only advantage of denialism for London is if support falls as the Scots become more accepting of their junior status in the Union; and they won’t.  Denialism will only generate its opposite.  There is no happy, shared future to be had, only discontent, recrimination, protest.  London will not be able to hold the line for even two years, never mind twenty.

Now, I will explain why this is all so important for us, as nationalists.  Dealing first with the Scottish Independence question ...

The Union, the London government and its dismissal of the West Lothian Question, the great emphasis that both the Union and the London government place on the civic over the ethnic ... these all weigh against the freedom of the English, in particular, to develop a politics of self-expression and representation.  We labour under a heavy political yoke in which our identity is unrecognised and our natural right on the soil, our natural interests as a people are not just neglected but actively demonised.  It is made a hundred times easier for the British Establishment when we elect only a British government, and are fed only the politics of that government, with its totalistic global-corporate, neoliberal and neo-Marxist bias.  But what happens to Westminster if the Holyrood government secures and wins a second referendum?

If and when Scottish independence becomes a reality the Union will still be a Union of Crowns but it will comprise only England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.  The Northern Irish Unionists are ethnically Scottish, not English, and may one day lose the numbers or the will to maintain their union with us.  But for the purposes of this paper it is not the future of Northern Ireland which interests us but the future of England after Scottish independence.  The West Lothian question would be no more.  The Barnett Formula would be a thing of the past.  With 533 of the remaining 591 seats and, a further seven (at present) Sinn Feiners who do no sit, Westminster would become effectively an English parliament.

Conventionally speaking, the English electorate is predominantly right-of-centre but not economistic and not socially liberal.  The immigrant peoples, obviously, are left-of-centre. A political realignment with different and perhaps interesting points of tension beckons.  The tendency prevalent among the English to consider themselves British, which has been in decline since devolution, would collapse, and with a rising sense of Englishness should come some detachment from the foreign populations (who cannot claim our ethnicity, and who cannot switch overnight from being “black British, “Asian British” and so forth to English, though some may try).

The ground on which we fight, therefore, will be massively more favourable towards us.  Every one of us, if he or she is at all clear-minded, ought really to be a firm supporter of Scottish independence.  It would take us forward further than Brexit ever could.

In conclusion, let us quickly look at the other two post-Cummings signs and portents that Boris Johnson is communicating through the media.  Pulling back from the culture war which Cummings started will certainly benefit Laurence Fox’s new party, Reclaim.  As the race madness and the tranny madness and all the rest of the coercive, abusive neo-Marxist agenda will inevitable pursue its dizzy path to an absolute standard of social pathology, so the voices of commonsensical protest will be raised; first this one man Fox, then a handful of others, then an armful.  Whether the armfuls burgeon into a political movement is perhaps doubtful.  But a counter-weight has been placed on the wildly out-of-true cultural scale, and that is a start.  It behoves us not to be too churlish about it merely because Fox, like Farage, will not stand beside our people.  All work to level the political ground will benefit us too.

Thirdly, Johnson’s greener, more liberal global “vision”, with its infamous “Build Back Better” slogan, has more than an echo of Klaus Schwab’s plans for a totally toxic globalist hell of the commons beneath his paradise of the rich.  One looks at the outlines of the one and then of the other, and wonders.  But surely not?  It’s inconceivable, no?  Until one remembers Johnson’s liberal ideas about immigration and his coming destruction of the planning laws to sate the construction industry that helps to finance his party.  As usual with Tories it is hard to know where the corporate whoring stops and the ideology of The Globality begins.  No degree of corruption surprises the observer of British politics any more.  But, of course, if that is the journey on which Johnson and his party want to take us, even though we are out of Brussels’ grasp with its crystal clear pursuit of a globalised future and of the new-made globalised beings which will stand where once did Europe’s beautiful and creative peoples, then so be it.  Nationalists will have another clear target on the fat behind of the British Establishment.