Take six terms at random:
Simplistically, I see a whole lot of islands called the British Isles, including two big ones -
The main problem is with the terms
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.
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
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
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]
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
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
* 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.
James
ReplyDeleteI find trying to define nationhood unbelievably difficult. In fact, I can't do it. All I know is what I feel. I feel Scottish but I know logically that I am British but I do not feel British.
I posted twice on this subject here
and here.
Time prevents my summarising them for this comment.
"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."
ReplyDeleteWell this is all very interesting in talking about Britain and being British but how does it explain the younger countries like Australia and Canada?
True Canada is a bit schizophrenic due to the francophone and anglophone influences and now the huge immigration flow but Australia has some of the most patriotic people you are ever likely to meet and since WWII it has been a huge mix of different cultures.
Still an interesting post with lots of things to ponder on.
Calum, I shall most certainly follow this up and David Farrer and MacNumpty because I want to know.
ReplyDeleteYou'll see it's not the Scots I'm down on at all but the way Britishness is being used as a portal for the EU.
JMB, the Australians are caught in the loyalist/republican dilemma and have been for some time. The ANZAC spirit comes out on April 25th but other than that thee is a new sense of nation indepedent of Britain.
Where are you in this?
Very interesting. I don't see why we can't maintain the best of our customs and still be a part of the EU, which I regard as essential. [I'm just ducking for a minute!] The Italians have no problem with this.
ReplyDeleteDieu Et Mon Droit is the motto of the Monarch rather than a motto of the nation. Can the modern monarchy really be expected to believe in the divine right of kings? Isn't that asking a bit much of these modest and retiring folk? :-) New mottoes all round, I say...in English.
ReplyDeleteJames
ReplyDeleteI must admit I struggled to follow your argument. I assume that is down to me rather than your post.
Is your point that, because Britishness is less closely held than Scottishness and Englishness etc, Brown is trying to dilute those national identities by promoting Britishness and thereby easing a further takeover by the EU?
My simplistic reading of Brown's actions was that he was trying to dilute his Scottishness to appeal more to English voters.
If that wasn't your point then I think it's time for bed.
As long as I can continue to eat haggis, drink beer and wear my kilt then no dramas mate.
ReplyDeleteAnd what of the Monmouthshire question?
ReplyDeleteThat still seems to cause some debate- depending on whether you live in Chepstow or Ebbw Vale.
I always think of the British Isles/Britain as the physical island, the UK as the country, and England as one of three subdivisions: along with Scotland and Wales. Now back to more studying for Thursday's linguistics test!
ReplyDeleteThank you for all these but I'll respond to Calum and Crushed here.
ReplyDeleteCalum, you're quite right but this is not taking into account Brown's agreed agenda. We can chop it and change it, sugar coat it and do as we will but he was at the 1991 Bilderberg Conference, he and his "mate" are European and are committed to that agenda.
I don't beliee uttering the word Bilderberg necessarily damns a man but two thigs - their own President said they were good "talent spotters" and then there were the questions in Parliament when Blair denied it point blank. Why would he do that and then again later?
Right, so go to the statements which came out of Davos [see Kaletsky in the Times] and it's a pan-European agenda.
The English don't like that. He knows it.
Crushed - that's why I intimated give or take a few miles. Is MMS part of England or the 13 of Wales? Historic conundrum, like Alsace-Lorraine.
Getting around the English people is a method.
You didn't mention Ming Campbell, I think.
ReplyDeleteIt's not so much Scots v Sassenachs, as Celtic kingship traditions vs Anglo-Saxon traditions; divine right vs the Witan. I think these traditions survive, which is why the Stuarts were, and New Labour are, intolerantly authoritarian.
How many Scots have been in the cabinet since 1997? And how many running the show behind the scenes, not least Ali Campbell? And the Union movement? If politics were governed by equal opps, how heavily over-represented would be the Caledonian section? Is is just a thing of feeling more comfortable dealing with your own kind, or is it "this thing of ours"?
Crushed by Ingsoc: hands off Monmouthshire, it's Hole In The Wall country, I may wish to hide there.
Oh I'm a republican all the way, for Australia and Canada. I meant that the Australians are patriotic about being Australian and I was totally shocked when the vote to become a republic lost.
ReplyDeleteI meant that in these young countries a common culture doesn't seem to have any meaning in the sense of nationhood because it doesn't exist but nations they become anyway.
I can't talk about Britain because I'm half Scot and proud of it so am a bit biased here.
Traditions of rulership, good and bad, do not depend on the existence of the Monarchy, and so the abolition of the latter would be far from an improvement.
ReplyDeleteI think for the British, the role of the Monarchy is now to provide some small limit to the real tyranny of elected PM-dictators. PMs like Blair loathe being reminded that they're NOT the Head of State.
Ask yourself WHY the British Left wishes to airbrush out the Crown and the Almighty. I think it is so that they may BECOME the C and the A, as in China, where the Party is above law, morality and religion.
I think Sackerson is right here. The Monarchy v PM thing is not unlike the President v Congress thing. The difference is that our monarchy has acquiesced in the curtailing of its powers by the party and thus Blair/Brown can act as dictators.
ReplyDelete