Perhaps not a federation of city states, but I would definitely be in favour of a federation of England/Scotland/Wales/NI/Dependencies - perhaps even with London as a separate federal part
Absolutely not, the separation of powers is both unclear and inconsistent among the devolved nations. It's also not really constitutionally guaranteed. The devolved assemblies have very limited powers over taxation and welfare spending.
That's a suitably euphemistic way of putting it :)
The thirty or so years of recent low-level civil war in Northern Ireland are not mentioned there, or indeed anywhere in mainstream UK politics.
The 19th century Empire was run centrally from Whitehall. Gradually it rolled back in the 20th century: Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Israel, various Arab middle eastern countries, and so on. This has left the country with an imperial-derived system suited for paternalistically ruling people it considers inferior from a distance. It's just that the distance has scoped down. People within the UK and even within England are starting to regard it as distant and uninterested, especially in the recent floods this year and the last. It's on a much smaller scale than the Katrina disaster but I think the resentment is starting to build in a similar way.
Small-government conservativism in the UK means considering abandoning Liverpool as it's too far away.
My first real introduction to UK politics was listening to an only mildly tipsy ex-London mayor rant about how if he could, he'd gladly "pay the rest of the UK £10 billion to go fuck itself, and get us towed out into the mid-Atlantic and declared an independent city state."
Indeed - London is a hugely different economy. But it relies on people commuting in across a huge area. Where all those salaries were counted would make a huge difference to how the system worked.
To make it work properly would probably require a different currency, so London£ could free-float to the sky like the Swiss Franc while the rest of the UK had a weaker £ more suited to export-driven economy. A large chunk of the economy would be exporting power and water to Londonistan.
London would become even more like Singapore or Dubai than it already is: skyscrapers for the mega-rich surrounded by immigrant guestworkers.
