Sir Halford Mackinder was a geographer at the London School of Economics in 1906 when he wrote a short book entitled Democratic Ideals and Reality published after the Kaiser War in 1919. Mackinder was guaranteed a bad twentieth century press once Hitler’s Nazis latched on to his ideas and set off on their quest for Lebensraum by way of Mackinder’s Heartland.

Mackinder’s thinking is first-rate but like everyone else last century he failed to anticipate the Reverse Colonialism that crept up on the old imperial powers at the end of the 20th century...something that fails to fit with any Nazi or Zionist chosen race theories. India provides a good example of the new world we inhabit.

Two thirds of India’s population of 1100 million live in 638365 villages...some very remote and without water or electricity. yet at the same time there are 25 million Indians living around the world in the Indian Diaspora. Two million of them live in this country. Hundreds of them are millionaires and a couple are billionaires. India has eighteen official languages and 1600 regional dialects but fifty million Indians speak English and this is likely to rise to seventy million quite soon...overtaking the English-speaking population of these European offshore islands.

In cricket test matches one of the questions asked is whether Our Indians...like Monty Panesar...are better than Their Indians. Heathrow to Mumbai is looked upon as domestic travel by many Indians...and there are suggestions that if Shakespeare were alive today he would be writing Bollywood scripts. There are successful Indian populations all over the world...in America, South Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean...tied together by family links, mobile phones, the internet, Bollywood, cricket and travel. But the capital of this Greater India is London not Delhi.

Statecraft needs new words to deal with this new world...or wordsmiths to breathe new meanings into old words. We should start with the word State. Any group can get together and call themselves a State. Historically the word has been reserved for City States like Firenze, Bruges, Hamburg or the City of London...a state within a state if ever there was one. People with shared interests preferred to see themselves as Tribes where there were blood ties...or as Guilds and Livery Companies where bonding took some other form like shared work skills or common trading interests.

It is ironic that in 1776 a group of Freedom Fighters...they would be called Terrorists or Insurgents nowadays...in the thirteen breakaway English colonies of Virginia, New England and the Carolinas were the first to register as the United States. When the League of Nations collapsed in the 1930s the only collective name available was the United Nations. But this is not a good name for a league of states bound by a treaty of confederation ruled by a Gang of Gun Runners. China along with the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council...America, Britain, France and Russia...top the league of Global Armaments Manufacturers...and Killingry Exporters.

Outsiders arrive in our towns and villages in several guises. Commercial Outsiders like Tescos are the most obvious Outside Interests threatening a small town. But Administrative Outsiders like District Councils also pose a grave threat to a locality because of their presumptuous claims to rule over the people who live in small Town States within the geographic area of their administrative jurisdiction. However there is also a third category who we can call Personal Outsiders who come to the nicer small town in pursuit of their own selfish interests. Perhaps the most obvious sub-group in this category are the Second Home Owners.

George Bernard Shaw...a key contributor to The Fabian Papers in 1884...always insisted that Socialism is Equal Money. For Shaw dividing the Economic World into a Public and Private sector was a rhetorical device that obscured reality. Shaw understood that the Man on the Clapham Omnibus had his own meagre supply of Personal Possessions and was regularly being ripped off by the rich and powerful with their Private Property and the One Pound One Vote theology with which they sought to legitimise this wide scale theft of the Commons by enclosures, clearances and other legal trickery. Shaw called this third category of property Common Wealth.

The Common Wealth of a particular group of people might relate to a particular place and could be looked after by people in some other place. But this is only a weak tendency. The largest Hedge Fund in the world is run by a civil servant from a small office in Oslo. The Norwegian Government set up a savings fund so that the descendants of today’s two million Norwegians could enjoy the fruits of the natural mineral resources being extracted from the Norwegian North Sea. The Scots could have done the same had they focussed their considerable political skills on breaking away from their union with England...as Vermont is intent on seceding from the other American states.

But instead the Scots have allowed themselves to be deluded into believing that a few million feuding Catholics and Presbyterians from north of the border could wield long-term power over England’s forty four million Elizabethan Subjects by means of a decade of ineffectual and unprincipled rule from Labour Party headquarters in Glasgow and Dundee. The Indians are taking a different route by becoming an economic superpower. As a white middle-class Englishman I have little doubt which side my bread is buttered.