Even the most conservative English politicians, like Margaret Thatcher, acknowledge that just as Scotland entered into the Union voluntarily it has the right to leave.

No doubt there would be some difficult negotiations about the financial details, just as there were at the time the Union was created, but peace and good relations would be preserved.

However, if one listens to UKIP, the EU has a diabolical plan to break up England by replacing it with the nine regions (which apart from London have a rather shadowy existence as a layer of government most English people have never heard of). Presumably the aim would also involve breaking up the other large EU member states.

This alleged EU plan is something different from the idea of this diary. The administrative units into which member states would be disaggregated would be administrative areas rather than ethnic communities (the difference between say East Midlands and West Midlands is far less than that between England and Scotland).

I believe that most of the French administrative regions, like the English ones, do not entirely follow traditional divisions and could not be considered to represent distinct ethnic and cultural communities. Similarly with the German states.

I think the essential idea is to re-create the Holy Roman Empire, in a wider geographical area. Like the EU the Holy Roman Empire was sui generis. It consisted of a usually weak central power (the elective Emperor, whose power came more from his hereditary domains than the imperial office) and a relatively powerless diet. The member states varied between internationally powerful territories (Prussia in the later centuries of the Empire for example) and small local feudal entities of the utmost insignificance. All existed in some sort of limbo between being independent and subordinate parts of a larger whole. Not quite a federation or a confederation, but more than an international alliance.