About turn!

It is almost a year now since my British passport expired. Since foreign travel is not on the cards for me in my current situation, I have not bothered to apply for a new one.

My first thought when I heard David Cameron's speech this morning was that I should perhaps apply not for a new British passport but for German citizenship. Were the United Kingdom (if still united after the Scots have made their decision with regard to independence) to leave the European Union, then I would need a residence permit here in the land which has become my de facto home, an absurd requirement to be confronted with in 2018 when I shall be seventy-eight years old.

The entire issue makes me profoundly sad. From the very outset I was enthusiastic about Europe. I may be Scottish by birth but I am European by inclination, since 1971 more at home on the Continent than on the island.

Remember why a union of the peoples of Europe was seen as the right way ahead? Was it not because the arrogance of sovereign nation states was behind the gravest catastrophes of the twentieth century? The answer was to re-think the concept of the nation state and promote the idea of a Europe of the Regions. Thus traditions, cultural identity and regional heritage could be preserved in a structure based on subsidiarity, much as the federation of German states has functioned since the Second World War.  In Mein Kampf the following could be read: "National Socialism must claim the right to impose its principles on the whole German nation, without regard to what were hitherto the confines of federal states."

 Was it not bold and far-sighted to re-introduce in post-war Germany a structure radically different from the militant nation state which it had been before? How sad now that Cameron should be seen as 'bold' in declaring that the protection of the United Kingdom's traditional sovereignty is more important than a wholehearted commitment to the discovery together as Europeans of new solutions to new problems of society, of industry, business and the economy, of security, of the environment and of the world our children and children's children will inherit from us.