Send Parliament Sailing Off on its Barge to France and Let the USA Buy the UK

Let me start with a poem for J.D. Vance, using the rhythm of Chesterton’s poem ‘The Rolling English Road‘, the closest we have to a hillbilly elegy. To get the rhythm going, you’ll have to pronounce every syllable of “European Union”:

The European Union panjandrums start to weep

For J.D. Vance, Veep USA, has roused them from their sleep

With rocking speech, and rolling speech, that makes a grown man cry:

He tells the Munich audience that they must surely try

To fork out more for NATO, fight for liberty of speech

The day he comes to Germany, by way of West Palm Beach.

As Vance almost put it, the UK is not so much a state, as in a state.

I have two suggestions. 

The first is provoked by President Trump. He caused a bit of a storm a month or two ago when he suggested that the USA should purchase Greenland.

This is the sort of thing we are not used to nowadays but was common in previous centuries. Jefferson paid Napoleon $15 million for the purchase of Louisiana. Alaska was bought for $7.2 million under Johnson in 1867. It was very amusing, and flattering to Westminster, when a Danish former minister for the autonomous territory of Greenland, Tom Høyem, who served in the 1980s, and is now 83, claimed that the UK had the right of first refusal if Greenland were to be put up for sale. Some journalists asked the Foreign Office and British Library about this, but, as far as I know, they did not get a reply. Too busy getting rid of the Chagos Islands, possibly. Well, the USA could afford Greenland, the UK could not. The story annoyed the Prime Minister of Greenland, Múte Egede, who has been using the full force of decolonising language to suggest that Greenland should become a mighty state on its own account. Denmark was guilty of genocide, etc. It is “now time to take the next step for our country” to remove the “shackles of the colonial era and move on”, etc. The Americans would like nothing better to get Greenland to move on. A humorous US representative Buddy Carter has even introduced a bill in Congress to rename Greenland “Red White and Blueland”.

Well, forget Greenland. My suggestion is that the USA should buy the UK. England, Scotland, Wales and Ulster could be the 51st to 54th states. Ach, why not have Eire as a 55th? That would certainly wind up the EU. It would do wonders for freedom of speech. The King could remain as a sort of Governor General. I would suggest a face-saving constitutional arrangement whereby the United States could be invited to join the Commonwealth: this would enable the King to pay homage to the President as Head of the States, but also enable the President to pay homage to the King as Head of the Commonwealth. Westminster could become a mere state parliament. Oxford and Cambridge could acquire some Harvard-sized endowments. All our disaffected youth could learn guitar in Nashville and take up football scholarships in Utah and Idaho. England would become the new East Coast of America. I leave you to contemplate all the many other side-effects of this. Somehow or other, we should try to get a Union Jack on the Stars and Stripes.

The second suggestion is provoked by the UK equivalent of Buddy Carter, a home-grown humorous politician. This is Craig McKinlay, former MP, now Lord, who suggests that while the Palace of Westminster is repaired, Parliament should be moved to a floating barge on the Thames. This is a cheap alternative to moving Parliament somewhere else, or rebuilding a kitsch theatrical simulacrum of the House of Commons chamber in Elstree Studios: all the other suggestions so far have been ruinously expensive, and so the matter of restoring the Palace of Westminster is continually delayed, creating more ruinous expense.

My suggestion is that we accept McKinlay’s idea. And then we should cut the mooring of this floating barge and let it float down the Thames out into the North Sea. Perhaps, it will drift across the Channel to France, where the French police can deal with a group of immigrants who, probably, will be all too delighted to return to the European Union. What I envisage is a sort of equivalent of the ruse in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where the useless members of the doomed planet Golgafrincham (hairdressers, insurance salesmen, security guards, management consultants etc.) are sent off in Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B to Earth, notionally simply to be got rid of, but where, alas, they eventually become our ancestors. Highly ironic. Anyhow, by analogy: if we can get all the MPs onto a debating barge with green seats, I think it will be an easy matter to get a few Fletcher Christian and Bill Sykes characters, of whom there are still a few in the UK, to cut the ropes and send our representatives off like Captain Bligh to prosper elsewhere.

After this, we form an embassy composed of Russell Brand, Nigel Farage, Paul McCartney, perhaps also the Daily Sceptic Editor-in-Chief, and anyone else who understands America, and send it to Trump’s White House to negotiate a selling price. I advise that the ambassadors walk into the Oval Office carrying copies of Art of the Deal under their arms, perhaps also bringing a display folder with some nicely etched prints of stately homes and their golf-ready grounds. David Starkey and Niall Ferguson can accompany the embassy to make sure the constitutional arrangements accord with 1689, 1707, 1776, 1801 etc. And let’s do it quick, while the bust of Churchill is still near the President’s desk.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.