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1. 

   Seamus Sweeney

   November 28, 2015 at 08:08

   I remember coming across the 1940 version of this idea while reading Johnathan Fenby’s biography of de Gaulle – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/7817632/The-General-Charles-de-Gaulle-and-the-France-He-Saved-by-Jonathan-Fenby-review.html – and being rather taken aback by this dramatic albeit not entirely unprecedented plan.

   After all, wasn’t the Norman Conquest a kind of Franco-British Union? And wasn’t Calais an English annexation for over two hundred years? European Continental borders are fairly obviously porous and adjust over time, but the same applies to this archipelago – for instances close links between Scotland and North east Ireland, closer than those between Antrim and, say, Cork, are nothing new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1l_Riata

2. 

   Peter

   November 28, 2015 at 11:25

   It would never work. It’s impossible to imagine the degree of mutual affection, loyalty and sense of common purpose shared among the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish.

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