What do we threaten the Scots with next? Exploding haggises?

Actually if I were Scottish, I would be voting ‘Yes’ just to spite all the people who are trying to frighten and browbeat me into voting ‘No’. Anyone with any spirit must surely feel this way.

If ever we do get the much-promised vote on EU membership, the anti-British side will use just the same tricks and smears to scare us into staying in this miserable liberal German empire. I only hope that, if so, we will have the backbone to ignore them and vote for our independence.

Listen to it – the poor Scots are threatened with currency collapse, bankruptcy, irrelevance and isolation. There’ll even be a frontier, doubtless with barking dogs, searchlights and minefields planted with exploding haggises.

Scroll down for video



In protest: PETER HITCHENS would vote yes to Scottish independence just to spite those who wish to remain in the union

Well, what do you think we’re all going to get if we stay in the EU? The real scare story is that 40 years of EU membership and wild overspending have brought the whole UK to ruin.

The current strength of sterling is an absurdity and can’t last. George Osborne’s boom is the most irresponsible bubble since the 1970s, based entirely on ludicrously cheap housing credit.

Roughly half the containers that leave our main port at Felixstowe contain nothing but air, and quite a few of the rest are crammed with rubbish for recycling, because our real export trade has collapsed, much of it throttled by EU membership.

The incoming containers are full, of course, of cars, clothes, gadgets and food – but how are we to pay for them?

As usual, the biggest story of the week was buried – the rise in our monthly trade deficit during July to £3.3 billion. That includes the famous ‘services’ which are supposed to make up for the fact that we don’t manufacture much any more.

It is impossible to see how we can live so far beyond our means for much longer. Both Government and people are deeper in debt than ever.

So forgive me if I point out that it’s quite scary enough staying in the UK. The trouble with the ‘Better Together’ lot is that scares are all they’ve got.

None of the three party leaders – supposedly rivals, actually accomplices – truly loves the Union.

They all view it as an outdated, conservative idea and they much prefer the glinting Teutonic rule of Brussels and Berlin.

They’ve been working night and day for decades to destroy British patriotism, culture and history, and replace them with a tasteless, pasteurised multiculturalism.

Who can blame the Scots for wanting to stay Scottish rather than be processed into the same greyish puree?

But David Cameron and Nick Clegg both correctly fear a ‘Yes’ vote will cost them their jobs, which they should by rights have lost after their dire results in the Euro elections in May.

And Ed Miliband fears that a ‘Yes’ vote will destroy his party’s chances of ever winning a Westminster majority. That’s all they’re fighting for – themselves.

Having got used to the idea that Scotland may say goodbye, I’ve been thinking about possible good consequences. Setting aside the puncturing of David Cameron, one of the most over-rated figures ever to become Premier, there’s the strong possibility that, without Scotland, we will actually leave the EU.

I don’t presume to speak for the Welsh, but I am quite confident that England on her own can, if she wishes, be a happy and successful civilisation. In fact it might do us no end of good to rediscover ourselves.

But one thing we must stop doing – in fact it would be a good idea to stop it now. A nation that has trouble keeping itself together has no business bombing other nations or peoples to try to force them to do our will.

A peek at out leaders' secret past

I am pleased that a film – The Riot Club – has been made about spoiled young men who spend their time at Oxford getting drunk and wrecking things.

Three of our most senior Tory figures belonged to such a club, and don’t seem to me to have been either frank or especially apologetic about their behaviour.

On the contrary, very serious (and I would think expensive) attempts have been made by unknown persons to prevent the publication of pictures showing these future grandees in their drinking suits.

Running Riot: A scene from the filmatisation of Laura Wade's play Posh, which is said to have been inspired by the Bullingdon Club

One such picture has been mysteriously, if clumsily, doctored, presumably to conceal something important.

Given that the Tory Party has made such an effort to attack Ed Miliband for his inability to eat a sandwich, I think we are entitled to dwell on its leaders’ ability to get hog-whimperingly drunk in tailcoats.

Cameron's 'triumph' is Libya's disaster

More news of Mr Cameron’s neglected triumph in Libya. As he prepares to dispatch RAF jets to pound yet another desert, our modern Churchill really should boast more about the outcome of his brilliantly directed overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi.

For instance, did you know that the Libyan parliament, keystone of the ‘democracy’ Mr Cameron created in Tripoli with British rockets and bombs, is now meeting in a requisitioned Greek car ferry, moored to a dockside in Tobruk? Tobruk, as some of you will remember from history, is the last stop in Libya before you get to Egypt.

It cannot, alas, meet anywhere else in Libya because the rest of the country is under the control of rampaging Islamist gangsters, and people-smugglers who daily send hundreds more refugees in leaking boats towards Italy and, eventually, Calais. The mood on board the car ferry is said to be ‘sombre’. I should think so.

If the entire Libyan parliament turns up at Tilbury on the good ship Elyros, I suggest that immigration officers direct them to the hills outside Witney, where Mr Cameron has a nice weekend home, paid for by you and me.

There, he and the Libyan MPs can wonder together where they went wrong.

A new study shows that teenagers who smoke cannabis are 60 per cent less likely to finish school or get a degree, compared with those who never touch it.

Daily users of the drug are also seven times more likely to attempt suicide than non-users.

These important facts could explain several worrying trends in our country. Yet the report was barely mentioned by most media – especially those who relentlessly plug irresponsible and wicked campaigns to destroy what’s left of our drug laws.

A survey into the past and present drug use of Left-wing media executives might explain this strange reticence. Time it was done.