Obsession with sovereignty risks destroying Great Britain

Your report on Nigel Farage gives vent to his erroneous and harmful ideas. Until relatively recently the world was carved into global empires – the British, Japanese, German, French, Portuguese, Russian and Austro-Hungarian – not divided into numerous nation-states. In fact the United States today is a world empire in all but name. It still has its overseas territories of Guam and Samoa and its troops are stationed in counties across the globe. President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, is intent on recovering former territories of the Russian Empire.
It was of course the world wars of the last century that brought about the demise of the European empires. But, in their wake, Africa and the Middle East were divided up by lines drawn on a map by their colonial rulers, in disregard of ethnic and tribal inhabitants. The Kurds, for example, were not given their own country. Generally in the Middle East, the idea of nation-states is not that strong.
Great Britain, in the words of post-war US statesman Dean Acheson, has lost an empire and not yet found a global role. This is as true now as it was in 1962. Yet Britain’s sense of exclusivism has lived on in the form of resistance to the building or retaining of any links to the rest of Europe. However, the negative work of Farage may well result in the breaking of the union and the creation of the democratic and independent nation-states of Scotland, England, Wales and a reunited Ireland.
Ian Martin