I am not British and so I have no real stake in whether or not Scotland chooses to leave the United Kingdom and strike out on their own. I believe that Scottish independence will result in a more or less permanently conservative bent to the Parliament in London, accompanied by a very socialist government in Scotland. I’m not sure that I look forward to the likely repercussions of that political future, although they will surely be mixed.
I do agree with Boris Johnson, however, that the very character of Britishness will be destroyed with this split. I’m uncertain if the Northern Irish and the Welsh will continue to see Britishness as a thing that is worth maintaining. I hope Scotland doesn’t blow the whole thing up, but I will at least be entertained by what ensues if they choose independence.
This is a very civil way of having a civil war, but just try to imagine if this country had actually split apart in the 1860’s. I don’t think we’d be happy with the result.
Well, Scotland isn’t a degenerate slimepit devoted to torturing people for money. Unlike the Confederate South. You’ll see a lot of irreverent (or bitter) liberals say that we should’ve let the U.S. South go during the American Civil War, but that would’ve been a catastrophic mistake. Gen. Sherman and Grant did the world a huge favor by smothering that infant in the crib. Too bad we had to fuck up with Reconstruction, but hey, lessons learned in time for post-WW2 Germany and Japan at least.
Thanks for your comment. Just a point of clarification: it wasn’t Reconstruction that was the problem; it was the Redemption that followed it, right?
Well, Scotland isn’t a degenerate slimepit devoted to torturing people for money. Unlike the Confederate South.
You’ve never eaten Scottish food…
You make a series of assertions without backing them up with facts. Among other things, I’d be interested in knowing in what manner the belief that letting the South go is irreverent or bitter. As for smothering the infant in its crib, the formal government of the Confederacy may have been dissolved but, the racism, fundamentalist religiosity, and the feelings of victimhood are alive and well in the American South to this day.
Your views completely ignore the effects on a young nation of the deaths, according to the latest scholarship, of 750,000 men in the prime of life – not to mention the tens of thousands of those who were wounded. Those deaths amounted to 2% of the population. If we suffered that kind of loss today the toll would be more than six million dead. Do you believe that that would have no deleterious effect on the nation?
Here’s a final tidbit for you: the Articles of Confederation established our first national government during the Revolution. Article XIII contained the phrase “and the Union shall be perpetual.” That phrase was left out of the Constitution so it could be argued that the Founders in their wisdom wished to leave the door open for States to leave the Union if they saw fit to do so.
As for smothering the infant in its crib, the formal government of the Confederacy may have been dissolved but, the racism, fundamentalist religiosity, and the feelings of victimhood are alive and well in the American South to this day.
There’s a world of difference between Jim Crow and chattel slavery. You should be ashamed of yourself to elide the difference like this to make your ineffably stupid talking point of ‘not much has changed’.
Your views completely ignore the effects on a young nation of the deaths, according to the latest scholarship, of 750,000 men in the prime of life – not to mention the tens of thousands of those who were wounded. Those deaths amounted to 2% of the population. If we suffered that kind of loss today the toll would be more than six million dead. Do you believe that that would have no deleterious effect on the nation?
A mere pittance compared to the millions of people being tortured and worked to death on a daily basis and who would’ve suffered the same fate for decades afterwards — assuming that they weren’t murdered after outliving their usefulness Holocaust or Congo-style.
Here’s a final tidbit for you: the Articles of Confederation established our first national government during the Revolution. Article XIII contained the phrase “and the Union shall be perpetual.” That phrase was left out of the Constitution so it could be argued that the Founders in their wisdom wished to leave the door open for States to leave the Union if they saw fit to do so.
Letting minority interest groups subvert democracy when their human rights aren’t being threatened makes the notion of democracy a sham. The United States letting the South go to continue their campaign of rape, torture, and murder would’ve rendered the whole idea of America being anything other than a get-rich-quick scheme for privileged white men a sham.
I will leave the mastery of ineffably stupid talking points, as well as the personal attacks, to you.
Read Mary Boykin Chesnutt’s A Diary from Dixie to learn slaveholders’ views on slavery in the 1860s South. You might come away with the idea that the South would have given up slavery anyway – or not.
The United States letting the South go to continue their campaign of rape, torture, and murder would’ve rendered the whole idea of America being anything other than a get-rich-quick scheme for privileged white men a sham.
Which of course it never was nor ever will be.
I will leave the mastery of ineffably stupid talking points, as well as the personal attacks, to you.
Look, Higgs, you implied that chattel slavery was in the same category as Jim Crow. That doesn’t deserve a polite and understanding response. That deserves a cruel and mocking one. That was the rhetorical equivalent of lighting up a cigar in the nursery.
You might come away with the idea that the South would have given up slavery anyway – or not.
How long would it have taken, though? 10 years? 20? 40? How much more torture and death would the blacks have had to endure before the South retired slavery?
Also, what makes you think that the end of slavery would’ve ended with American blacks being alive? Why wouldn’t have they been worked to death Congo-style? Or just outright killed once the South realized that they had a huge minority population that they couldn’t extract useful work from?
Which of course it never was nor ever will be.
That’s some bullshit of the highest caliber. 2016 America is much less vile than 1963 America which in turn is much less vile than 1910 America which in turn is much less vile than 1865 America. The current state of the United States might be unjust, but there’s been progress and there’s hope for future progress. Letting states subvert the union when they feel that their tyranny being threatened means that there would never be and will never be any real progress.
There’s a lot of stuff that you have to look at besides Mary Boykin Chesnutt. In the 1850s the fight was over the extension of slavery, not its continued existence. Bleeding Kansas was about the extension of slavery–the fighting was pro-slavery settlers against anti-slavery settlers. The Dred Scott decision was about the extension of slavery, since part of it held that the government couldn’t regulate slavery in the territories.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates, too, were all about slavery. And Lincoln’s position there, and in the 1860 election, was that he would not interfere with slavery where it existed, but he was opposed to its further extension. Of course, this was based on the idea that slavery couldn’t last if it was contained, and Lincoln made no secret of his opposition to slavery.
At any rate, if the South was going to give up slavery anyway, it’s hard to see why they would have felt they needed to secede as soon as Lincoln was elected. He wasn’t even proposing to interfere with their so-called rights, and yet they were so threatened by him that they went to war against the Union.
Well I wouldn’t be talking to you. My parents are Latinos who moved from Texas to the north in the 1970s. See those poor people in central america? That would be me in Confederacy.
The establishment of West Virginia actually is a better analogy to the situation in Scotland although the West Virginians reacted to Virginia’s secession with their own. Virginia was organized as a commonwealth instead of a state; that made the legal niceties much easier. Things didn’t go as well for the Free State of Jones.
Were it not for the presence of the European Union, I think that this vote would be a bigger deal. So whether an independent Scotland moves immediately into membership in the European Union is part of the story to watch. Also, what will be Scotland’s relationship to NATO and will it receive from the UK that part of UK military currently stationed in Scotland. Those practical considerations are more significant that the effect on “Britishness”, which seems to amount to a sort of English privilege anyway, barely allowing Lancashire and Yorkshire the privilege of being British.
The international consequences ripple beyond the British Isles themselves. Can one imagine, for example, a non-sectarion union of Ireland? Welsh and Manx independence? Independent Jersey and Guernsey?
What about Catalunya, Valencia, and the Basque Country? An independent Sami territory stretching across the north of Scandinavia and possibly Russia? And independent Flanders.
The European Union faces the political problem that the central banks of the rich large countries have dominated domestic financial policy at the expense of the smaller poorer countries in insisting on austerity for all. This has come close to bringing revolution in Greece, Spain, and Portugal. And only heavy police action has shut that possibility down.
More centralization in Brussels and more devolution of power in the larger countries of Europe would tend to create a political geography more like the United States and solidify continental power with less concern about which large country dominates. Even the de-federalization of Germany into its independent states is a possible outcome of this process.
One of the questions not often asked in long-term projections is what is the political geography of a peaceful and prosperous world that can handle the challenges that global climate change presents. That will likely challenge the notion that political territory and national cultural identity must completely align. The political challenge of handling diversity is not just an American issue; even a reduced England will face it within its own borders; the consequence of immigration from a global empire.
Ah, but the distill some mighty fine beverages.
that was supposed to be a reply to hawesg, sorry fat fingered it.
Irvine Welsh: The Scots poll can give hope to the Left across Britain
There is probably something to this. The UK is the only country in Europe not to have been occupied by a foreign power or had the ruling aristocracy thrown out at some point during the past 200 years. In fact England is approaching 1000 years since their last occupation, in 1066. That means that they still have a whole class of nobility running around with all the rotten things that this entails and no proper modern Constitution (even worse than the horribly out-of-date US Constitution).
With a proper parliamentary system (the UK still does first-past-the-post for MPs) there is no way the Tories win this past election with just 37% of the vote, since they were hard to the right of any other party to win a seat. Furthermore, it would have been hard for Labour to survive by being basically lackies for the Tories.
Oh, and to answer Boo’s comment: no, Northern Ireland will NOT be inspired by this to try for independence. Politics are completely different. The majority who favors the Union will continue to do so, especially because subsidies from England have been essential to their economy. And England/Ireland serve to provide a stabilizing effect these years in NI (unlike before the Good Friday Agreement) that would disappear should they become independent.
Duh: except Switzerland.
I don’t know what my forebears are thinking. If you adopt the Euro, you essentially become a vassal of the Germans. At least in the UK they get to vote.
As I’m sure you know, Britain did have a civil war (technically two, but I’ll stick to the earlier and greater one) — in the 1640s, followed by the Cromwellian interregnum that lasted until the Stuart restoration of 1660.
That civil war was not along ethnic lines, the divisions cut across all the ethnicities in a very complicated way. In fact there remains much controversy over what it was all about, but in my view it was fundamentally about religion and the form of government (an issue intertwined with the religious conflicts).
So it’s hard for me to see a parallel between the growing desire for autonomy in Wales and Scotland, and our civil war, except for northern Ireland, which was a colonial adventure as much as America or Africa (with colonization based on Protestant “plantations”). And oddly enough, Northern Ireland doesn’t fit into the autonomy dynamic, because it’s very existence is dependent on union with the crown. (They don’t call them unionists for nothing.)
Both Wales and Scotland, on the other hand, originated entirely independent of, and much earlier than, England; they came into the Union more or less peacefully, and if they should want out (whether or not that is a good idea) I see no reason why there would be war, civil or otherwise.
I do find it ironically amusing that Boris Johnson would say ‘a fundamental part of “our” identity will have been killed’. He is so obviously clueless as to the national feelings of the Welsh and the Scots.
Even if the Scots do “step back from the brink”, it is a clearly a terrible shock to the English to realize that so many Scots don’t give a hoot about the “British” identity.
Scotland joined peacefully although it had fought England not too long before. Wales, however, was conquered by Edward I; it didn’t join peacefully. Still no reason for war, of course.
…or at least that is what their actions say.
My sister-in-law (who is English but lives in Scotland) shared this on Facebook this morning:
https:/www.facebook.com/BritU1/photos/a.250794178361148.56092.227259427381290/651977778242784?type
=1&theater
Every word comes across as an abusive boyfriend telling his girlfriend that she’ll be sorry if she leaves him.
UGH.
At this point, I think the best strategy for the NO campaign is to STFU.
can we call it “Britsplaining”?
May the Scots do it. The whole world will rejoice. Catalunya may be next. The Scots are not fighting a civil war. The whole cosmos doesn’t revolve around the ultimately insignificant USA. People outside the USA invent societies and structures which no one in the USA has even dreamed of. But then the USA is basically intolerant of other people’s viewpoints, even within the country itself. See McCain, the Clinton clones, etc.
Actually, Northern Ireland isn’t British at all; it’s Irish, so it won’t worry about losing any Britishness.
That said, I have mixed feelings about Scotland leaving. I love Scotland, love visiting, and if all else were equal I’d love more than anything to live there. And it’s very possible an independent Scotland would allow that, where as the UK restricts citizenship and residency pretty severely. It’s also likely that Scotland would restrict land use and restore the land that’s been damaged by landowners.
Other than that, I don’t have a dog in this fight either, but I too worry about a permanent Conservative Parliament.
I saw somewhere that Scotland would continue to use the pound for its currency. But wether it uses the pound or takes on the euro, it is a prescription for real trouble. Those who do not control their currency are subject to insolvency. Just ask Greece, Spain or Portugal. Austerity will control them.
Another problem is their debt. If they take on British debt that is a foreign currency and, again, they would be subject to insolvency. A country that controls it’s currency like Britain, Australia and the US can never become insolvent. Not true if you use someone else’s money.
As Krugman says, ” be afraid, very afraid”.
The worry that England will have a permanent Conservative majority is overdone. Scotland, with 10% of the total population was always little more than a makeweight in Westminster politics. Besides, UKIP may well split the Conservative vote which s fatal in a primitive first past the post system. The Conservatives having “lost” Scotland, may well become unelectable for many years to come, especially as they are split on the perennial EU question.
UKIP is the classic little Englander, petit bourgeois English Nationalist party and could displace the Tories as the lead right wing as it has a clear (and popular) position on the EU. Labour also are clearly pro- EU and could benefit from the split on the right if they had the courage to actually offer a left alternative.
Scottish Independence would also reduce the likelihood of rUK leaving the EU – as leaving then would greatly disrupt substantial England-Scotland trade. So my sense is that Scottish Independence could actually increase the likelihood of Labour government in England – for better or worse.
Is there any possibility the Liberal Democrats would consider merging with Labour? If you added their vote totals together in the last election they would have taken many seats away from the Tories. Or am I thinking too much like an American?
I don’t think so. Coalesce, yes; merge, no. The lib dems are actually descendents of the social Dems who arose out of a merger of the Liberal Party and “moderate” right wing Labour party ministers. They tend to represent more rural constituencies whilst Labour is more urban based.
The ideological differences between the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems are very minor these days – all the more reason to guard party fiefdoms jealously.
However Scottish Independence, and even more so, EU withdrawal would be game changers for English politics, and yes, a lot could change. The lib dems and Labour are both pro EU which could become important if that becomes the defining issue in electoral politics.
Thanks for the correction. So, let me change that to :
“THE SCOTS came into the Union more or less peacefully, and if they should want out (whether or not that is a good idea) I see no reason why there would be war, civil or otherwise.”