[nationhood] like trying to define love

From the Royal Palace of Westminster

Take six terms at random: England, Britain, the British Isles, Ireland Great Britain, the United Kingdom, and you'll get as many points of view.

Simplistically, I see a whole lot of islands called the British Isles, including two big ones - Britain and Ireland. Within Britain are three nations - England, Scotland and Wales. Within the other are two disputed political entities. The last two on the list above are political expressions of differing conjunctions of nations throughout history.

The main problem is with the terms Britain [a geographical term for the big island] and British. Yes - what on earth does British mean? It would be churlish not to recognize the contribution of the member nations to the British Empire of Victorian times and churlish not to recognize the present Commonwealth nations as part of that empire. But these latter are also late entries to the family.

Even here, surely, there is a distinction between Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and South Africans and all the other nations, not least in the manner in which they were set up in the first place.

Even within the home countries, there is a mess. Ireland is divided, the Scots are Highland, Lowland and Islanders; the Welsh are North and South, as is England. Even in the North, a Lancastrian is not a Yorkshireman.

Prodicus noted:

A town is too small. A continent is too big and lacks tribal or quasi-familial bonds strong enough to hold it together - an empire likewise.

What he doesn't touch on is the large county which was formerly a state - that can be a difficult entity to define. However, running through all this are "common values" and was there ever a vaguer term than that?

And yet it binds disparate elements. Also, every town which has a Boots or Tescos and drab architecture is part of the whole, from Brighton to Aberdeen, a whole which cannot be adequately defined. But say "Scottish" and it's readily defined. Say "Wales" and it's fairly clear, give or take a few miles. Say "England" and it is a variable distance out from London, bound by a single language.

Gordon Brown believes that 'sharing British values' makes one British. Prodicus comments:

I find it hard to distinguish between these allegedly British values and the values of most people of conscience living in the world's (more or less) liberal democracies …

Brown is a Scot and the two leaders in waiting, Cameron* and Fox are Scots, so therefore the politicians need to talk up Britishness to justify their intrusion into matters English in Westminster. But beyond that is an agenda, a Marxist agenda which has never gone away and has an EU face.

Prodicus again:

Abolition of the nation is necessary for Marxism because allegiance to one's own nation is inimical to Marxism's unfocused allegiance to an amorphous grouping such as 'everybody on the planet except the bourgeois'.

So the customs and closely allied - values - need to be diluted or abandoned and one of the ways to do that is to resort to the vague sense of "Britishness" which at once is all-inclusive, multi-cultural, EU friendly and lays the foundations for rule from overseas, through local faces.

This is precisely what the Christie quote here was all about. Prodicus notes again:

Customs are a core element in a nation's identity. They are vital to the group cohesion. Destroy them and you have damaged the nation's sense of itself, jeopardising its inhabitants' inclination to defend themselves as a group - as a nation.

But what if some bastardized, jingoistic vestige of customs which do not threaten the uber-state are left in palce to placate the people and only real customs and values are quietly eradicated?

Sackerson noted about Brown's appeal to values:

[O]ur new Prime Minister's latest proposal: a motto for the country, to show our "values". He is pretending that it has escaped his notice that we have one: Dieu Et Mon Droit. All part of airbrushing out the Monarchy, I assume.

Two concepts which have become well-nigh anathema over the last few decades and as Prodicus adds:

This … is a central aim of Marxist theory, and it has been dreadfully successful in England in the 20th century, more so than in any other nation I can think of.

In his view there is still hope:

Nations are essentially tribal - and they will not be suppressed. One cannot make a nation - or remake it - by artifice.

I'd like to believe this but it's probably going to mean a tenacious hold on Englishness [one reason I like Boris, born in New York] and Scottishness and Irishness and Welshness but the former is the least easily defined and therefore more easily put upon by Britishness but still, it must be done.

Creeping humanistic socialism believes it has already killed off G-d but the belief in nation is still clung to in both England [and France] and hasn't yet been wholly smothered.

* David Cameron - His father was born at Blairmore House near Huntly, Aberdeenshire. The Cameron family were originally from the Inverness area of the Scottish Highlands.