THE British government is nursing a long overdue bloody nose after sticking it once too often into other folks' business.

Prime Minister David Cameron was ignored at the G20 Summit after his guarantee of UK involvement in any action against Syria had been bombed out by his own parliament.

But I don't give a hoot if a lackey of Russian President Vladimir Putin did indeed refer to the UK as "just a small island no-one pays attention to".

I don't care if warmonger US senator and failed Presidential candidate John McCain whines that "our dear friends the British are no longer a world power".

To both of them I'd say, thank God for that! Now go away and give us peace.

For too long, successive lapdog British governments have ordered our armed forces to roll over for good old Uncle Sam.

Talk of a special relationship was so much tosh. It was special only as long as we did America's bidding.

Britain's foreign interventions over the past 10 years all came at the behest of McCain and his ilk.

We're still living with the fall-out from the corrupt invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair's down payment on his dream of becoming a world statesman after quitting No10.

Like previous and subsequent PMs, Blair's foreign policy was driven not by conscience or righteous indignation but entirely by national self-interest - America's.

Where was that indignation during the genocidal slaughter of millions in Angola, Congo, Somalia, Rwanda? Why were the western news networks not embedded in those war zones, beaming back the horrific pictures designed to tug at heartstrings and rouse public sympathy for military intervention?

I'll tell you why. In every Godforsaken country deemed of no mineral or strategic value, their people are left to perish in private.

Did America and Britain call for the bombing of Baghdad in 1988 when Saddam Hussein gassed his own people? Of course not, back then Iraq was Uncle Sam's best buddy.

Now, with Iraq and Egypt imploding, America wants to retain a listening post in Syria to monitor bogey man Iran, which will continue to dominate their interest in the Middle East.

But tell me this. Where is Britain's national interest served by being dragged into places like Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Iran?

Successive governments have blown billions in taxpayers' money trying to buy influence across the globe, and they've succeeded only in taking the Great out of Britain.

Our wee island is skint. We have a huge budget deficit, record unemployment, rampant poverty, and thousands surviving only with the help of food banks.

And the rich get richer and don't give a monkey's that the poor get poorer.

What financial crisis, old bean? City fat cats, bonus bingers and multi-national tax dodgers have carried on regardless.

It's long past time we concentrated on curing our own problems before interfering in anyone else's.

We can start by bringing home ALL our troops, strangling the flow of billions in overseas aid (it's ludicrous that we give money to countries richer than ourselves), and forgetting the billions for a new nuclear deterrent.

If we're not prepared even to discuss "a limited military strike" against a regime which slaughtered hundreds of their own people with chemical weapons, then we're sure as hell not going to nuke anybody.

Cameron has been ejected from the big boys' playground but still hasn't got the message.

From outside the tent, he proclaims: "Britain will be the leading power making the arguments and bringing other countries together on the issue of humanitarian aid."

Listen to yourself, man. Better still, listen to the voters, who no longer wish to bankroll No10's outdated imperialist obsession with being the global polis. How about arresting the slump at home?

Britain has already committed £348m in aid during Syria's two-year civil war. Well, I wouldn't give a thin dime more. Leave it to the Yanks and the mega-rich Arab states, it's in their interest, not ours.

Meantime, the west's foreign interventions should provide pause for thought here in Scotland.

According to the stultifying negativity of the Better Together lobby, Scotland is a subsidy junkie basket case who will be shunned by NATO and Europe and couldn't last a minute on her own.

So why on earth are Cameron and his clique so desperate to keep us in the Union? It surely can't have anything to do with minerals, can it?