Her Britannic Majesty's Realm or the European Union?

Scare stories about the horrors of the European Union have been commonplace in the tabloid newspapers since the 1990s. If those Johnny-Foreigners aren’t threatening to ban the Prawn Cocktail crisp or the double-decker bus (both of which, mysteriously, still seem to exist), they’ll be meddling with some other pillar of British life, at least according to the English tabloids. Yet the fact is that the English-dominated Westminster parliament has been controlling, regulating and generally poking it’s nose into the “nooks and crannies” of Scottish affairs for 300 years now and we’ve never complained anywhere near as much as the English have over Europe in the last 30 years.

The European Union was founded over 50 years ago in 1958 with the formation of the European Economic Community. It started with 6 member states and has since grown to 27 members, with countries still on the waiting list to join. In comparison, The United Kingdom, with its 300 year history, has not had one single country even expressing an interest in joining*. Indeed, since Ireland left in 1921, the only concern has been not who should be allowed to join, but in who will be next to leave.

*On 10 September, 1956, the French Prime Minister, Guy Mollet, is said to have raised with the British Prime Minister the possibility of a union between the United Kingdom and France. Crucially, however, he did not propose joining the United Kingdom itself, rather a union with it. Regardless of this, no record of the proposals is thought to exist in French archives and it seems unlikely that he had the backing of the French Government.