The John Wilkes Society is Reborn

John Wilkes was radical and wrong; his latter-day equivalents are merely stupid and wrong. To buttress this notion, I submit the cases* of Simon Heffer and Melanie Phillips. We are talking, as you know, about the Scottish Question upon which these Daily Mail columnists have recently seen fit to pontificate. As we shall see, if these are the people teaching Scotland to Middle England then the plain yeomen of England should demand better from their newspaper. It is one thing to peddle nonsense – everyone must do what they can to earn a living – quite another to sell an argument that contradicts itself. Yet hark at this from Mr Heffer:

As in some marriages, divorces happen when one side walks out.

However, I don’t understand why it is assumed that, in this particular marriage, that side would necessarily be Scotland.
Whatever one’s feelings about whether the Union should survive, it is democratically offensive to imagine the English do not have a right to be consulted.