It was typically very daring of John O’Sullivan to select a title that has become provocative because of the sacralisation of minority nationalism.

The Celtic Fringe is a handy description based on the dodgy claim of supposedly common lineage and common mistreatment at the hands of the dread Saxon foe.

In 2014 a lot of metropolitans were listening respectfully as separatists — Indy Scots — lustily proclaimed: “Stop the world, we want to get on”.

Given the rumbling from a seemingly dynamic periphery, the idea of a Celtic fringe seemed obsolete and offensive.

Ireland was heading inexorably towards unity, wonderful experiments seemed imminent in Scotland under the Wizard of the North Alex Salmond and his Girl Friday Nicola Sturgeon.

But fast forward a decade and almost wherever you look there is entropy and decay.

Devolution has led to a stultifying centralism.

There is an educational agenda which creates unhappiness and confusion among children and young people, recruiting them for woke tribalism instead of the Scottish variety.

Small cliques of people appoint one another to civil service jobs, distribute truckloads of state money to mates in the charity sector, impose unwanted and harmful social engineering schemes on the young, choke motorists, and make war on farmers.

A form of national self-determination has arrived but it is strictly for insiders — the permanent stage for any project offering progressive deliverance disguised as a new form of imposition by the few on the many.

David Starkey has already trenchantly shown how the unitary state was to be broken up, starting with the devolution scheme of Messrs Blair and Brown. Henceforth, political elites were supposed to be answerable to Scotland’s voters but instead voters have become answerable to grotesquely unrepresentative elites.

The unwise 2014 referendum that was gifted to the SNP revealed there was no plan to implement separatism. The late (and much missed) Alistair Darling, the head of the pro-UK “Better Together” campaign forced Salmond to concede the figures for the Indy nirvana didn’t add up.

Instead, as the Scottish National Party went to work erecting a de facto one-party state, the emphasis has been on constant agitation without there being any clear end point.

An endless appetite has been revealed for self-promotion, colonising the state and disrupting society on the part of peripheral figures who have risen high in nationalist ranks, keen to use their new-found power to replace societal cohesion with madcap experimentation at every level.

During the 9-year rule of Nicola Sturgeon (2014-23), she and her cohorts behaved little differently from their predecessor movement with an unrealisable blueprint for modernisation but an unquenchable appetite for interfering in everyday life.

The years in which power was abused, often for bizarre ends, show that SNP don’t like Scots, wish to punish them, or take them in hand for withholding enthusiasm for their various pet projects.

In the process, the last dozen years of SNP have seen a retreat from Scottishness. What has replaced it has been a shallow absorption with the latest progressive gimmicks from London and America.

Perennial ones like the Palestinian issue. No other issue has been debated as frequently in the Scottish Parliament.

Transient ones such as the Me Too Movement.

Dystopian ones destructive of Scottish jobs and l standards: the Drive for Net Zero.

Diabolical ones like gender self-identification.

The determination with which the devolved state imposed whole swathes of policy around these ideological planks was reinforced by the active compliance of the civil service. A devolved bureaucracy supposedly still part of the main civil service in Whitehall became an enthusiastic backer of the SNP’s separatist project, discarding in the process its central tenet of political neutrality. This initially caused incredulity, but the way that much of Whitehall has been suborned by exponents of critical race theory reveals a wider trend at work. An inefficient civil-service, now increasingly dominated by campaigning groups with militant agendas for social change, is a dangerous tool enabling zealots to go far in their journey to transform Britain out of all recognition.

As irrational ideas promoted by newly-respectable fringe activists swept the civil service in Scotland, the basic functions of government were neglected or else twisted into the opposite of what they were intended to be, at the hands of radical niche groups.

The appalling quality of political representation on the separatist side (as shown on an almost daily basis at the Scottish Parliament) enabled maverick leaders ready to abuse their power to cling on in the face of mounting policy failures.

The quality on the pro-UK side of politics is undoubtedly better but not dramatically so.

The crisis in the Tory party leadership … made painfully clear how a self-absorbed opposition has enabled the SNP to get away with so much

The Scottish Conservatives have some good representatives but the leadership shrinks from daring to challenge the bloated and inefficient state with policies like vouchers for education or cuts in income, corporation or dividend tax and, above all, often loses the opportunity to assert a self-confident British identity. The crisis in the Tory party leadership which erupted early in the summer election campaign made painfully clear how a self-absorbed opposition has enabled the SNP to get away with so much.

Labour in Scotland is relaxed, to an alarming degree, with much of the social engineering agenda of the SNP but without the same level of in-your-face Stalinism.

What’s different from the unsettling 2014 referendum year is the quality of the extra-parliamentary opposition. Numerous smart, innovative and tough-minded people now exist who have cut their teeth online and in battles against gender recognition and hate crime law.

I’ll give a plug for @theMajorityScot which has rattled the SNP over the past 4 years with low-cost but highly original and effective campaigns, highlighting its abuse of office and general misrule. Benefactors concerned to see the British Union survive should back its efforts with donations. It is likely to be money well spent.

The Majority Scot is currently campaigning for the scrapping of the Scottish Parliament, an idea for which there is currently around 20 per cent support in different opinion polls.

Turning to Wales…

What’s happened in Scotland has excited neo-nationalists like Mark Drakeford, the left-wing Labour Party member who was First Minister from 2018 to 2024. He could see that separatist nationalism bestowed virtue and impunity from the normal restraints of politics. It gave wilful politicians the right to interfere, impose, wreck and ultimately destroy.

Labour has sought to prolong its decades ascendancy, marked by deep-seated policy failures that have plunged post-industrial Wales into headlong decline by plugging into territorial nationalism.

Separatism enjoys much weaker backing than in Scotland, but the media and Woke education planners have pushed young people towards separatism. Nevertheless, there has also been active resistance from producer groups like farmers and car drivers, outraged by the Net Zero zealotry of the local establishment. Among newly-redundant steel workers in Port Talbot, there is no love lost for the anti-industry policies that Keir Starmer has backed.

A populist conservative presence is already well-established in Wales, thanks to the past success of Ukip. The ruling neo-nationalist order is far less entrenched than in Scotland. The refusal of the current First Minister Gethings to quit after a vote of no confidence highlights a crucial fact:

There is no respect for supposedly sacrosanct devolved institutions among its loudest exponents when they occasionally fail to deliver the outcome desired by insiders. It is possible to go further and say that the various “Celtic realms” in Britain have pretend parliaments where gangs of entitled activists, spouting progressive claptrap, simply make up the rules as they go along.

Northern Ireland drives home one other point common to all of the Celtic British fringe: the dire quality of leadership.

Unionism is more than ever a divided house. But in most of Ireland Republicanism is in poor shape mainly due to the abandonment of much of the nationalist terrain by Sinn Fein. It has become a pro-EU, globalist formation whose main role in opposition seems to be to chastise the government in Dublin for not going further, faster on Net Zero and open borders. Sinn Fein is likely to do well in the British general election but, more important, has been the plunge in its support in the Irish Republic where it managed only 11 per cent in local elections held on 7 June. This means its prospects of leading a majority government in the main part of the island have effectively collapsed.

Arguably, the key group in Northern Ireland are those middle-class professions, Catholic nationalist in outlook who are relatively content with being part of the UK and who tell pollsters that, in the event of a referendum on the border, they will back the constitutional status quo. The growing turbulence in the Republic as the legacy parties in Dublin and Sinn Fein seek to import a new electorate, means the appeal of uniting with the rest of the island is unlikely to grow.

Overall, the promotion of minority nationalism has resulted in people now being allergic to the idea of giving more power to politicians.

There is a pressing need in each of the Celtic realms for politics based on the representation of citizen’s real concerns — not synthetic, student union grievances.

The balkanisation of nations and historic regions of Britain was the first plank of the New Labour project to be rolled out, one meant to create a Britain largely in the hands of careerist political overseers and an administrative state.

Today Scotland and Wales are not proving receptive to ideas and policies shaped around anti-British hegemony after the misrule of the last decade. The ball should really be at the feet of patriotic, common sense conservatives. A changed political landscape after July 4 will allow the pro-Union side opportunities to effectively challenge policies that have already proven disastrous in Edinburgh and Cardiff when tried out in London by Keir Starmer.

This article is based on a speech delivered at the “Win or Lose: The Strange Survival of Conservatism” symposium hosted by the Danube Institute and New Culture Forum in London on 10 June with support by the International Reagan Thatcher Society