The real cost of leaving the EU may be the dismantling of the UK

In a scenario of dislocation and disadvantage... after Brexit the UK will go the way of the USSR, writes Gerard Howlin

BETWEEN the Battle of Culloden and Brexit, Irish nationalism, or, more accurately, Irish separatism, was the dominant, disruptive threat to the union of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Since 1922, the Ireland in question was, in effect, Northern Ireland. Irish separatism took the forms of political movements for repeal of the union, Home Rule, and violent nationalism. With Brexit, English nationalism has now replaced it. The issue for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is no longer Irish separatism, or even Scottish nationalism, but English nationalism. In Brexit, the eventual threat, which may not be far off, is not to the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union, but to the unity, internally, of the United Kingdom itself. More than Brexit, it is this which will have an ultimate consequence for Ireland, North and South.