No Different Today Than It Was Back Then

I was reading yesterday about the plans that the Irish government has for the Irish people:

Drivers will be forced off the roads in Ireland and the population packed into “higher density” cities under a long-awaited climate plan which will ‘revolutionise’ people’s lifestyle and behaviours, according to local media.

“Nudge” policies such as huge tax hikes, as well as bans and red tape outlined in the plan, will pave the way to a “vibrant” Ireland of zero carbon emissions by 2050 according to the government, which last year committed to boost the country’s 4.7 million-strong population by a further million with mass migration.

Ireland, as described here, sounded more like the People’s Republic of China than an island adjacent to Britain.

I wonder what the Irish people think of the plans their government have got for them? Grandad in Ireland seems not impressed.

It’s only been 100 years or so since the Irish shucked off British rule, but now it seems that Ireland has more or less become a colony of the EU, and run by a top-down-controlling europhile political class even worse than any that us Brits experience.

I have similar questions about Scotland. The Scottish Nationalist Party wants independence from England, but like the Irish they want to remain in the EU. What’s the point of that?

I predict a new Irish revolt. This time it won’t be against Britain, but instead against the EU.  I also predict a Scottish revolt, also against the EU.

It seems that it’s the larger countries that first start revolting. And Britain is one of the larger countries in the EU. France is another. Italy as well. So that’s where the revolt has started.

Small countries feel more dependent on the EU, and so feel less able or inclined to revolt. They also tend to be the beneficiaries of EU largesse. But as the EU disintegrates, that largesse will dry up. And then the small countries will want to leave it too.

The EU has become yet another European empire like the Austro-Hungarian empire, and is now beginning to experience the same centrifugal forces as that lost empire.

…

Over the past few days I’ve been watching an illuminating series of YouTube videos about the English Wars of the Roses.

Quick summary: In about 1450 the kings of England weren’t English, but Norman. And they controlled extensive areas of France. But during the reign of the ineffectual Henry VI, nearly all of these lands in France were lost. And when the last of them fell (Bordeaux 1453), Henry VI seems to have had some sort of nervous breakdown, and collapsed into a catatonic stupor for 18 months. During this period two people stepped forward to take control of Britain: Richard, Duke of York, and Henry VI’s wife, Margaret of Anjou. These two spent the next 30 years locked in a struggle with each other that eventually became a civil war among the nobility of England, and between the houses of York and Lancaster, symbolized by the white rose of York, and the red rose of Lancaster. During this period one side would gain ascendancy only to lose it to the other. Henry VI was toppled from his throne, and then put back on it, and then finally (probably) murdered. It wasn’t until the arrival of Henry VII in 1485 that the civil war ended, symbolized by the red-and-white Tudor rose that was the emblem of his reign.

I think it’s quite easy to understand why this civil war took place. And it’s that during the reign of Henry VI the kings of England and the nobility of England lost all their revenues from their estates in France, and they all became correspondingly impoverished, and ended up fighting each other for what little revenue was left from their remaining lands in England and Wales and Ireland. And the nobility were decimated in the process, either fighting in battles like Towton (1461), or having their heads chopped off. Most likely the Wars of the Roses only came to an end when the numbers in the noble families were reduced to a size commensurate with their reduced income.

This much-reduced revenue might almost explain the dissolution of the English monasteries about 50 years later. Because in the reign of Henry VII’s son Henry VIII, the lost French lands were not recovered, and so instead the king grabbed the extensive lands owned by the Church, gaining their revenues for himself.

It might also explain why, after French kings took control of the whole of France, they became the wealthiest and most ascendant nobility in Europe, leading to the Sun King, Louis XIV, who reigned from 1643 to 1715, and then the French Revolution in 1789 in which both the king and the entire nobility were swept away.

It’s essentially no different today than it was back then. The EU is just another empire, and the European political class is a new aristocracy, against whom the peoples of Europe are beginning to revolt once again. They’re revolting against yet another over-centralised, top-down-controlling, corrupt, and ill-managed empire.