British Nationalists Fight Back
I quite like Jonathan Freedland. I thought his book, Bring Back the Revolution was an interesting read and raised some good points. His article in the Guardian last week is also worth a read, if only to see how left wing British Nationalists (are there any right wing ones left?) are starting to arrange their troops.
For a start - it really is a bit rich for a Labour supporter to accuse the Tories of raising the English deficit in a blatant way to win votes. What, and Labour don't? Labour don't use the chinless cannon fodder of the Celtic constituencies to shore up their vote? Brown and Blair aren't deliberately promoting British nationalism to save their own Labour skin? Come on Jon!
Normal Mouth asks on a previous posting what's wrong with someone believing in Britain? Freedland also tries to make a case for the imagined community as well. There's nothing wrong in that. The whole point of this blog is to say to Freedland - be honest. You're British Nationalists - come clean about it.
Making the case for an independent sovereign Wales or Scotland is a Welsh or Scottish nationalist statement. Doing the same for Britain is a British Nationalist point of view. Once Freedland and the other Brit Nat Left come honest with themselves and the public about that position then the mud-raking, insults and racism nonsense we in Wales have put up with for decades will cease and we can get on to the facts.
To answer Freedland's article though - what's the point of being a 'middling size' state? The UK Labour government can't influence labour laws, ties itself into US nuclear defence policy, its health system is creaking. I'm at a loss to think of an answer to what is the point of Britain? What can the UK do (apart from having a nuclear capability) which its constituent nations couldn't do? Why bother being a 'middling state' at all - why bother being a 'middling' anything? May as well be Welsh and proud of it. There are numerous smaller nations that prove how wrong the Brit Nats have been.
Normal Mouth is right - nothing is inevitable. But looking around Europe it just seems to me that Britain is losing its will to live.
Read Alex Salmond’s views on the article in the Guardian today!
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2 comments:
An interesting post. My point was that if we are going to descend into national identity politics then a British identification is just as valid as a Welsh/English/Scottish/Cornish one.
It's not written anywhere that Wales/Scotland/England/Cornwall have a stronger right to be considered a nation than Britain. Do you agree with that?
Than there's the other argument - that Britain as a multi-national state is a peaceful bulwark against nationalism...
So tell me Tarhun - if British is artificial, what is 'natural' about Welshness etc?
All national identities are ultimately artificial, the product of deliberate social decisions and retrospective classification. A few thousand years ago a bunch of disparate tribes existed that today are collectively grouped together as 'celts' for convenient classification, because they shared some common characteristics. But these people did not identify themselves as a common group (much less as a nation) until another alien people arrived - if then. Indeed, until this point these celts that you seem to think are natural fought each other!
The fact is that some people DO itentify themselves as British, just as other identify themselves as Welsh. You have no right at all to tell someone they should not feel that way simply because you do not regard that identification as valid (as if you have a right to pronounce on such things). To do so is to be guilty of the imperialism that you appear to deplore.
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