Last of the British? September 21, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite , trackback
There are sixty million Britons, yet if you go house to house through England, Wales, Scotland and the six counties you will find that relatively few people actually define themselves in this way. If a family from Glasgow, Cardiff or Sheffield turn up in a French hotel they will probably write (under nationality) respectively: ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’ and ‘English’. Beach is in a small but solid minority here: he was born in England but he considers himself, first and foremost, British (perhaps in part because he has lived half of his life abroad). The horror of this positon became evident in the recent referendum in Scotland. As the yes vote (for independence) rose remorselessly in the polls, at one point overtaking the no vote (for continued union) Beach had some of the worst days he can remember (and that includes life threatening-illness, deaths and breakups). He found it difficult to get to sleep and frequently his wife asked him what he was thinking about as he stared with crazed eyes into mid space contemplating a world that had ceased to make sense. All this was perhaps made that much worse by the inability to actually do anything over the Scottish referendum: (i) because, morally speaking, it was none of the business of anyone south of the border; and (ii) because, practically speaking, the very attempt for someone south of the border to start telling the Scots what to do would have had quite the opposite result. Yet among Beach’s English friends, back in the Shire, there was almost complete indifference: just one ‘British’ English friend shared the sheet-twisting angst and he too found himself isolated and misunderstood. Talk about the love that dare not speak its name… only a single mainstream non-Scottish blogger confessed to anything like this.
While the result is an enormous relief chez Beach the breakdown of the vote in the most reliable pseudo-exit poll we have shows that motives were mixed and that the British population in Scotland is perhaps about 15% (a strange concoction of ethnic minorities, Ranger fans and Union clans). This battle, so brilliantly fought by the Scot Nats is far from over… As the Quebec nationalists said after their several failures: à la prochaine!
How do you avoid this kind of pain? Probably the best solution is to stick with nationalities that will survive. To be English, to be Scottish, to be Polish, to be Jewish is to become a Platonic form: these ideals, because in the end that is what they are, would survive even if the people who carry the name were to fail. To be British, to be Austro-Hungarian, to be Yugoslav, to be Soviet… Well, that is just asking for trouble, and perhaps well-deserved trouble. What did the grand-old nobles of Vienna feel in 1918 as they saw the beloved (and essentially decent) world that they and their ancestors had guarded for two hundred years collapse into a dozen squabbling ethnicities? What about the CCCP loyalists watching Balts and Ukrainians tearing down the hammer and sickle, deaf to appeals to the shared struggle with Nazi Germany (the Balts and Ukrainians had often, in fact, been on the other side)? Or what about Ambrosius Aurelianus in Britain, Aetius and Bonifatius in North Africa, or Stilicho in Italy, hands on their pommels, marching into a temple as the pillars holding up Romanitas were shaken out of their holes? Next life Beach is going to tick the English box and concentrate the little misery he’ll inevitably enjoy elsewhere… Other thoughts and nation and identity: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
24 Aug 2014: ECorcoran sends us to Spengler at the Asian Times (1), (2) and (3) (while not fully agreeing). Interesting for demographics.
26 Oct 2014: An old friend of this blog Sébastien writes: “What about the CCCP loyalists watching Balts and Ukrainians tearing down the hammer and sickle, deaf to appeals to the shared struggle with Nazi Germany” Answer: some of them became members of new communist parties. Two of them became politicians and dedicated their life to recreate the USSR. The first one is Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus since 1994: after being the only member of the Belorussian Soviet to vote against independence he was democratically elected President in 1994 and immediately recreated the old society (dictatorship included). The second one, a KGB colonel named Vladimir Poutine, was chosen to succeed Boris Elstine by his cronies and the oligarchs but in fact designed his own policies and went to the Lubianka triumphantly claiming “I’ve come back from enemy territory and I can tell you today we have succeeded beyond all hope!”.
