Everyone in Britain knows that it is just a matter of time before Scotland becomes independent and reverts to medieval chaos. The English Labour Party’s plan of establishing a devolved but subordinate parliament in Edinburgh to be dominated forever by inept Labour MPs recruited from the decaying slums of Glasgow has failed. The secessionist Scottish National Party will clearly win a large majority in the new local Scottish legislature at the next election, and the tartan wings of the three English parties—Labour, Liberal, and Conservative —will be destroyed. Labour cannot even depend on the votes of its traditional ethnic minority supporters, the Hibernians and the Muslims. Scottish secession is certain, either after a series of Quebec-style salami referenda or through a unilateral declaration of independence by an inebriated Edinburgh legislature.

Americans may believe that the English will be distressed at losing Scotland in the same way they still regret losing the United States; on the contrary, this is wonderful news. The current English subsidy to Scotland probably costs each individual English taxpayer more than the vast subsidies they hand out to European peasants through the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy. When Scotland goes, not only will the English lose an uncouth neighbor, but every taxpayer will be many pounds a week better off. What is more, England need never again face the menace of a socialistic government, for the Labour Party has won a majority of purely English seats only twice this century. Socialism has been a Scottish tyranny thrust upon England. The English will not even lose access to Scotland’s only two worthwhile assets, its oil and its whiskey, for the Orkney and Shetland islanders who have the oil and the best whiskey will want to remain part of England rather than be exploited once again by rapacious Scots. (The islanders still call Scotland the land of “bad grain and greedy ministers.”) The depth of Edinburgh’s ignorance of the Orkneys can be seen in the Scottish Office’s decision to subsidize the use of Gaelic in the islands, even though their original language was Norwegian. For the Scottish bureaucrats in Edinburgh, one distant island looks much like another; the decent, quiet, peaceful folk of Viking descent in Orkney get confused with the tartan-wrapped, predestinarian. Sabbath-obsessed trolls of the Gaelic-speaking Western Isles.

When Scotland secedes, the English will move fast to ensure that the Scots depart with a proper dowry. First, they will insist that conflict-ridden Northern Ireland is a Scottish responsibility. Most of the Protestant majority in Ulster emigrated there in the 17th century from the self-governing kingdom of Scotland, which is only 12 miles away from Northern Ireland’s County Antrim by sea. Every year, huge contingents of tough Presbyterian Orangemen arrive in Ulster from Glasgow for the annual sectarian marches wearing tartan bonnets and waving Scotland’s flag, the white on blue diagonal cross of Saint Andrew, the canny Calvinist saint who discovered the wee laddie with the loaves and fishes. Northern Ireland is Scotland’s problem, not England’s.

The other part of Britain that rightly belongs to Scotland is the region known as Geordylandia, the old Northeast March of England consisting of Durham, Middlesborough, and Newcastle, the southern half of the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, which once stretched all the way from Northern England to Edinburgh and beyond. It is perhaps best known to Americans as the home of the syndicated cartoon- strip character Andy Gapp. There are no differences in ancestry, speech, or drinking habits between the inhabitants of Northeast England and the Lowland Scots. The Scottish annexation of Northeast England would rid the English of yet another subsidy-gouging, economically and socially moribund region with a history of municipal corruption that rivals Scotland’s. They deserve each other. The Scots can hardly refuse this expensive gift, for all the great Scottish military defeats by English armies have been the result of incompetent Scottish attempts to seize this domain. The English will now extend to the Scots the generosity they have always shown to other tiny, defeated, bigoted peoples and hand over the disputed territory, just as they did South Africa to the Boers after the Boer War.

The final gift England will bestow upon the Scots is to veto any future attempt on their part to join the European Union. The Scots deserve to be a truly free nation and to stay outside Europe. Exclusion will be good for the Scottish character. It will force the Scots to rekindle their economy by their own efforts rattier than by wallowing in eurosubsidies as Ireland has done, which has caused the sudden and unexpected collapse of Irish moral standards. Merely to slide from living on handouts from London to living on handouts from Brussels would prevent the Scots from developing the sterner virtues so needed and so lacking in their previous history, in which a belief in predestination has led to an amoral antinomianism.

Americans will not be surprised to learn that we English are already hard at work eliminating all traces of the Scots from our history and culture. In particular, we are erasing all memory of the oppressive Scottish Stuart dynasty, the one that drove the Pilgrims into exile, from our history books and are considering reverting to the old royal coat of arms of Elizabeth the First, the Virgin Queen of Virginia. The English lion, which has long fought the Scottish unicorn for the crown, has finally driven it out of town. All traces of kilts, tartan, bagpipes, and other Scottish paraphernalia are being eradicated from the new purified realm of England. Tartan-wearing American preppies should adjust their dress before their next visit to London.