Harold Wilson famously observed that ‘a week is a long time in politics”. Well, we now have a week to go before the Scottish Referendum, and my hunch is that it will be the longest week in recent history. The Westminster political establishment has finally woken up to the thought that the Scots might actually do it! and blind panic would be a polite euphemism for their belated reaction to that terrible thought. Today the three party leaders are on their (separate) ways to Scotland to plead with the inhabitants not to break up the United Kingdom. Cameron has a pathetic appeal to the Scots in today’s Daily Mail, which makes me wonder what planet he inhabits. The idea that Scottish voters would be moved by anything in the Daily Mail is bizarre. The SDP leadership must be wondering if they are dreaming, because every intervention by Cameron in the debate has the immediate effect of boosting the ‘Yes’ vote.

What’s bugging the Westminster elite, of course, is the realisation that if the Scots actually do vote to opt out of the ‘United’ Kingdom, then the consequences for the rump that remains are profound. In particular, the post-imperial hubris that has enabled Westminster to pretend that Britain was still a world power, with a ‘seat at the top table”, will finally be exploded. Without Scotland, for example, UK-lite will struggle to maintain its fleet of nuclear submarines (once seen as the guarantor of that top-table seat). And the puncturing of post-imperial delusions will, no doubt, be a good thing.

But other consequences of Scottish independence will be less palatable. Cameron will be ousted as the Tory leader who conceded the vote that led to the break-up of the UK. He will most likely be replaced by Boris Johnson in a Tory party in which the so-called Euro-sceptics (i.e. Euro-phobes) hold the upper hand. Scottish secession also means that the Labour party (which has always had a lot of Scottish seats at Westminster) will never again be able to form a majority government. A Johnson-led Tory party will have an inbuilt majority in England and Wales, and will move to take the UK out of the EU. Which means that the ‘soft’ border between Northern Ireland (still part of UK-lite) and the Irish Republic will once again become a hard border — with frontier controls and all the other paraphernalia deemed necessary to keep foreigners out.

And then there’s the transition problem. If the Scots vote Yes, then Scotland will become a foreign country on March 16, 2016. But the next UK general election is in May 2015 — which means that for 10 months Scottish MPs will sit in Westminster, the government of which will be negotiating the details of the divorce with the Scottish government.

And so on. You can see why the folks in Westminster are now changing their underpants twice a day (as they say in Australia).

Which is why the Referendum really does deserve the adjective “historic”.

Remarkable Irish Times column by Fintan O’Toole.

Very quickly but rather quietly, Ireland is doing a remarkable thing. It is disappearing its young people. In April 2009, the State contained 1.423 million people aged between 15 and 35. In April 2014, there were 1.206 million in the same age group. That’s a reduction from one generation of more than the entire population of Limerick city and county. This is the age group of rebellion, of adventure, of trying it out and trying it on. It’s the generation that annoys its elders and outrages convention and challenges accepted wisdom. It is demography’s answer to the stultification of groupthink. It is not always right but without its capacity to drive everyone else up the wall, smugness settles over everything like a fine grey dust.

The biggest reason for this loss of nearly a quarter of a million young people in five years is emigration. People of my age remember the 1980s, the Donnelly visas and the flight of the Ryanair generation, and assume that what’s happening now couldn’t be as bad. They’re right – it’s not as bad, it’s much worse.

In the entire, miserable decade of the 1980s, net emigration was 206,000, a figure seen at the time as a shocking indictment of political and economic failure. In the last five years alone it is 151,000. And most of this emigration is of people between 15 and 44: in 2012 and 2013 alone, we lost 70,000 people in this age group. The percentage of 15- to 29-year-olds in the population has fallen from 23.1 per cent in 2009 to 18 per cent in 2014. And it’s not just that the young generation is physically shrinking. Many, even those who have stayed, have emigration in their heads as an active option. They are, mentally, half here.

Why are they going? Largely because they’re browned off. It’s been clear for quite some time now that most of those who are leaving are not, in a simple sense, economic refugees…

He’s right. Many of those who have gone had jobs in Ireland.

Lovely! Good example of liberal chutzpah.

From an interesting OpEd piece by Dmitri Trenin

The sanctions will not make Putin back off. He also knows that if he were to step back, pressure on him will only increase. The Russian elite may have to undergo a major transformation, and a personnel turnover, as a result of growing isolation from the West, but the Russian people at large are more likely to grow more patriotic under outside pressure—especially if Putin leans harder on official corruption and bureaucratic arbitrariness. If the Kremlin, however, turns the country into a besieged fortress and introduces mass repression, it will definitely lose.

It is too early to speculate how the contest might end. The stakes are very high. Any serious concession by Putin will lead to him losing power in Russia, which will probably send the country into a major turmoil, and any serious concession by the United States—in terms of accommodating Russia—will mean a palpable reduction of U.S. global influence, with consequences to follow in Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere. Ironically, the challenge to the world’s currently predominant power does not come from the present runner-up, but from a former contender, long thought to be virtually defunct. China could not have hoped for such a helping hand.

Interesting times ahead, alas.

General de Gaulle, when he was President of France, was once asked by a journalist: “what about France’s friends?” “Great nations”, mon General haughtily replied, “do not have friends. They only have interests.” I was reminded of this when contemplating the strange response of the Dutch government to the downing of the Malaysian airliner by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine. The Dutch public is, understandably, traumatised by the huge loss of (Dutch) life. Yet their government’s response to the atrocity seems strangely muted, confined mostly to insistence on a full and proper investigation of what happened and who was responsible.

At first I interpreted this as an example of Dutch reserve. I once lived and worked in Holland, and came to love the country and to value its quiet civility and modernity. Like the English, the Dutch do not go in for showy sentimentality, and there’s something admirable in that.

But now, a more insidious thought surfaces: is this an example of a government making a calculation that, whatever the level of popular grief, the Netherlands is in too deep with the Russians to risk offending Putin? What triggered the thought was a sobering piece in the Economist. The Dutch government’s cautious responses, it says,

reflect Dutch commercial interests in Russia, such as Shell’s huge investments in Siberian oil fields, as Thomas Erdbrin reports in the New York Times. The Netherlands is also one of the world’s premiere hubs for shell companies created for tax avoidance, which Russians have made liberal use of. As the Dutch investigative website Follow The Money reports, these Dutch-registered Russian holding companies have made the Netherlands, on paper, the world’s second-largest investor in Russia. (Another Dutch website noted that the Russian defence conglomerate Rostec, which most likely built the missile that shot down flight MH17, operates several shell companies headquartered in Amsterdam.) Dutch political attitudes are often described as a seesaw between de dominee en de koopman, or “the preacher and the merchant”: at times the Netherlands adopts a moralistic tone towards the rest of the world, other times its interests are purely businesslike. For at least the past decade the merchant has had the upper hand.

This suggests to me that the Dutch government is increasingly going to find itself trapped between a rock and a very hard place. All the evidence is that, far from pulling back, Putin is effectively doubling his bets in Ukraine. There’s no real sign of remorse from anyone involved over there. I’ll be very surprised if this doesn’t trigger a wave of inchoate anger and disturbance in the Dutch public analogous to the one that swept the country after the assassination of Pim Fortuyn in 2002. And who knows what the consequences of that might be?

What it all goes to show, of course, is that Ukraine is not, to use an infamous cliche, “a faraway country of which we know nothing”.