Yorkshire 2034

New Labour has begun the task of dismantling the United Kingdom. The European Union is cock-a-hoop. Undermining the nation state and federalising Europe into administrative regions is right up its strasse.

We will see how long it takes the Scots to realise they are better off outside of any union...not just the union with England. A canny people, it should not take long.

But the redistribution of power needed to happen.

Setting up Scottish and Welsh assemblies is an excellent start. England is the next job for the Westminster Parliament. How should we start?

If I were Prime Minister I would start from where I am by handing out power just as fast as I could to the Lord Lieutenants of the Counties. Why not? Almost anything is better than the wedge the European Commission is pushing through England with its administrative megaregions whose sole purpose is to disable the English nation state by carefully cutting across traditional county boundaries.

It is the Yorkshires and Sussex who should be promoting 'national global champions'...just as Sweden has always done. New Britain is the wrong size. You cannot expect to do with a nation of forty four million Englishmen...half of them dependent upon the economic life of the London metropolis...what is possible with a nation of eight million Swedes. But you might be able to do the same with England's city regions as Sweden does with her city regions.

Sweden is already a confederate state. It comprises three city regions and 'Islandia'...a confederation of rural Icelands...Iceland's population is 250 000 with 150 000 of them in the capital Reykjavik...each one the size of an English county. England is like that too...a dozen or so city regions rather than three but otherwise the 'Offshore Islandia' bits are not that much different.

And if the three Yorkshire ridings want to get back together and use York Minster as a palace rather than a church, then so be it. Let them get on with it. Queen Diana of Yorkshire makes every bit as much sense as Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands or King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.

Size matters.

It is the bailiwicks and the hundreds that we need to rediscover. Instead of thinking 'national populations' we have to start thinking of people, families and households.

Villages and parishes instead of statistical aggregations of numbers with dubious validity.

In these matters the Chinese mandarins in Peking are already fifty years ahead of the self-styled elites in Brussels.