Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

Lots of Southerners support AOC and Bernie though But at least that is based on ideas and political values. Though obviously I am not a big fan of this strong identification with political partisanship and often point out how dangerous and bad it is. We have all these militias paranoid that the other group is coming to kill them.

Just on this it's also very true in the UK - you know about 30% of Londoners voted Leave and the same in the most Leavey areas voted Remain. It's one of those things that's worth remembering.

Ok. But don't nationalists claim that, in fact, everybody from a certain group does see things the same way? I mean we know that is not true, as you are clearly pointing out how supposedly the "nation" of "America" constantly fights itself. So how does falling for this false narrative help or actually do anything? What are we achieving by painting this fake picture that as soon as we create this nation state we will live in harmony? We know we won't. Ideas based on things that are provably false are not good ideas.

I don't think that's what they're saying at all (and I'd point out that it's not just "nationalists" who are pro-independence - in the UK all of the Green Parties in each nation support independence and Scotland occasionally elects Scottish Socialist Party MSPs who support independence too).

And I think the point is with Scotland that there was a referendum in 2014 that the independence side lost and that should settle it for a generation - unless the situation seriously changes and there's evidence of strong support for another referendum. Since then we've had the Brexit referendum which, I think, is a change in the situation. The SNP won 48 out of 59 Westminster seats in the 2019 election and, in 2021, will run on a platform of another referendum in the Scottish Parliament elections. The Scottish Parliament is single member constituencies and PR (a bit like Germany) that is designed to produce coalitions, there's a strong chance the SNP will win an outright majority. Given that I think we can say the UK government and the unionist parties have changed the situation and they've had 5-7 years to undermine the support for a second referndum, which they've not done.

I think most Irish are cool. And yes clearly Ireland is a great example of rousing success that should be repeated, I think it kind of shows how partition solves little. Anyway I don't understand "strangely, that was totally acceptable" I mean it was in an era where massive population transfers and all kinds of nationalist schemes were acceptable.

I mean I don't think you can blame partition on the Irish or the nationalists.

The thing that annoys me about the SNP isn't that they're good at politics it's that people elsewhere buy it which reinforces their message. So, for example, I've seen loads of serious American journalists re-tweeting the thing about female leaders handling covid better with Scotland on the list - and there's Devi Sridhar who's basically propagandising for the SNP's great success in crushing covid on UK and international news channels. Both of those are absurd - Scotland's basically fucked up as much as England. Similarly the Westminster media (because they're so focused on Westminster) basically treat Sturgeon as if she's a foreign politician commenting on our politics rather than an active participant - it's bizarre.

Equally the Remainers who love her and now back independence (from Islington) drive me crazy with their comments about how Scotland's run so much better when on most measures about devolved areas like education and health Scotland is behind England and has got worse while the Tories were in charge.

It's infuriating - but all of these external voices then get amplified within Scotland to re-inforce the SNP's spin and give the impression of how well they're doing.

[Josquius]

Even if we take the Scottish independence decided for a generation stuff as an absolute, technically that means the next one is due later this decade either way.

I was very definitely against Scottish independence back in the last referendum. But now in light of brexit...Selfishly I hope it doesn't happen but putting myself in the shoes of someone living in Scotland I really can't blame them for wanting to release the lifeboat.... plus small aspects of thumping ignorant British nationalists, albeit at the expense of making ignorant Scottish nationalists cream their kilts.

Scotland does have things better than England though. It's really stark how much better maintained the roads are when you cross the border. The borders railway reopened, free university, free prescriptions... I would definitely back the north joining Scotland.

[The Brain]

Will there be border reivers?

[Sheilbh]

Yeah they have free university and free prescriptions but those are quite expensive. I feel like the cost of those policies probably partly explain why working class and poor English students are, I think, four times more likely to get to university than their Scottish counterparts (and, like England, they spend fuck all on FE Colleges or other alternatives). Similarly they have better health outcomes in hospitals.

The people who benefit most from those policies are middle class people who can afford university and prescriptions because they're universal - and maybe that is the right way to go. But I think that is the sort of centrist populism that the SNP are exceptional at. It's stuff like this that reminds me of Fianna Fail.

[Tamas]

Spin it all you want, but the cultural aspect of living together matters on the scale it matters in any other human interaction: agreeing and keeping to a set of behavioural patterns that enable us to coexist without too much friction.

You require that in (functional) families, friendships, of course you require it in wider society as well.

But putting a border and an entirely separate legislature between you and anyone "other" is not a requirement nor a guarantee for this. I mean, FFS, the more tribal a part of the word is, the less capable those independent entities seem able to coexist.

[The Brain]

Nationalism has many aspects, one important aspect is that it makes people care a lot about the wellbeing of people who aren't family or acquaintances, but in fact strangers. Not too strange strangers though, many people find it harder to relate to persons that don't speak a common language or whose culture is very different from their own. For now, and I think for quite some time to come, this will still be the case. While this situation exists you have to ask yourself: do I turn down a piece of the cake because I can't have the whole cake? For many people today the alternative to nationalism isn't "globalism" (as it were), but tribalism.

[Tamas]

Nationalism has many aspects, one important aspect is that it makes people care a lot about the wellbeing of people who aren't family or acquaintances, but in fact strangers. Not too strange strangers though, many people find it harder to relate to persons that don't speak a common language or whose culture is very different from their own. For now, and I think for quite some time to come, this will still be the case. While this situation exists you have to ask yourself: do I turn down a piece of the cake because I can't have the whole cake? For many people today the alternative to nationalism isn't "globalism" (as it were), but tribalism.

This is probably a valid point but the US of A is not only still stuck in turn-of-the-1900s style nationalism, but also values greatly that members of the nation should not concern themselves with the wellbeing of fellow nation-members.

[Sheilbh]

Great piece in the Atlantic that expands on the point I was making about how our discourse is so shaped by the US:

The World Is Trapped in America's Culture War

America won the internet, and now makes us all speak its language.
    Story by Helen Lewis
    October 27, 2020

LONDON—Sharing the internet with America is like sharing your living room with a rhinoceros. It's huge, it's right there, and whatever it's doing now, you sure as hell know about it.

This month, Twitter announced that it would restrict retweets for a few weeks, and prompt its users to reconsider sharing content which has been flagged as misinformation. The reason for this change, of course, is the U.S. presidential election. The restricted features will be restored when its result is clear.

Anything that makes Twitter fractionally less hellish is welcome, as is the recent crackdown by Facebook and YouTube on QAnon conspiracy groups and Holocaust denial. But from anywhere outside the borders of the U.S., it is hard not to feel faintly aggrieved when reading this news. Hey guys! We have elections too!

After all, according to an anguished 6,000-word memo by Sophie Zhang, a departing Facebook data scientist, the political situations in Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Ukraine, and elsewhere have all been negatively influenced by online manipulation. "In the three years I've spent at Facebook, I've found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry," she wrote, adding that interference in Western Europe and the U.S. was taken more seriously than that in smaller, non-Western countries. (In a statement, Facebook told BuzzFeed: "We investigate each issue carefully, including those that Ms. Zhang raises, before we take action or go out and make claims publicly as a company.")

Every country using the English-language internet experiences a version of this angst—call it the American Rhino Problem. With so many dominant tech companies headquartered in Silicon Valley, the rules of the web are set there—and by politicians in Washington. The West once sent missionaries to bring Christianity to Africa; in 2013, Mark Zuckerberg promised to "bring the world closer together" by providing internet access to millions in the developing world. (That particular project failed, but there are now more Facebook users in India than anywhere else.)

Britain, where I live, cohabits particularly closely with the American rhino, because of our shared language and history. Brits watch Friends. We read John Grisham novels. We know what a sidewalk is, even though it should be called a "pavement." The website of the BBC, our national broadcaster, is always plastered with stories about the U.S., while Ireland, which was under British rule until a century ago and with whom we share a border, might as well be the moon. Ask 100 Britons to name the current Taoiseach, and you'll see 99 blank faces (and one inevitable smart-ass). Ask 100 Britons to name the U.S. president, and—well, I envy anyone who draws a blank there. Please give me directions to the rock under which they've been living.

The British political elite loves the United States: Every political adviser here goes to sleep hugging a West Wing box set. Our pollsters and political scientists become feverishly excited when they can switch from talking about our own elections—which have six-week campaigns, and have been tediously designed so the party with the most votes gets to be in charge—to the byzantine madness of the Electoral College. (Right now, everyone here has strong opinions on Florida.) And so the nonstop reality-television show that is the Trump White House has been inescapable in London, to a degree that is disproportionate even considering America's undoubted global influence. China makes our toys, our clothes, and our anti-COVID personal protective equipment, but occupies a fraction of our mental bandwidth.

Nowhere is the American rhino more obvious than in social-justice activism. "Over the past couple of months, many Britons have imported American discourse on race wholesale," the British writer Tomiwa Owolade argued at Persuasion, a newsletter edited by my colleague Yascha Mounk, in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests this summer. "When asked to analyze the experiences of Black people in the United Kingdom, we now talk with an American accent."

Here is one insignificant, but telling, example: In August, multiple stories focused on a photograph of the British singer-songwriter Adele with her hair in Bantu knots. She was "accused of cultural appropriation," the U.S. entertainment magazine Variety reported. According to the television channel ABC, the star was facing a "backlash" and was "caught in the crossfire." Fox News had her "slammed" and "taking heat" for the hairstyle. The gossip site PageSix claimed that "a new photo of Adele has sent the internet into a tizzy." Sensing the high level of interest in the story, British media websites covered it in similar terms.

Yet the controversy had an odd hollowness. One of the few named commentators quoted was Jemele Hill, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, whose tweet expressing mild exasperation with the outfit received 27,000 likes. Incredibly, Fox News quoted "someone" who was offended. (Someone always is.)

But prominent Black Britons, including model Naomi Campbell and talent show winner Alexandra Burke, defended the singer. The politician David Lammy, a member of Parliament for the Labour Party, pointed out that Adele was celebrating the annual Notting Hill Carnival, which has a long tradition of masquerade and "dress up." Most coverage was framed as a debate, but even the few pieces which offered straightforward criticism tended to be mild. One writer acknowledged the "differing responses to the star's misstep," while another argued that she could understand that Adele was "trying to be respectful at an event celebrating black culture with her Bantu knots," before concluding that the look nevertheless "left a bad taste in my mouth."

Sunder Katwala, the chair of the identity-focused think tank British Future, told me it was notable that when the British talk-radio station LBC discussed the controversy, it had to bring on the American writer Ernest Owens to make the case against the singer. "In the United States, Black women are often ridiculed for wearing their hair in cornrows and Bantu knots," Owens said. "But someone like Adele who is a white woman, she can choose to put that hairstyle on. It's a trend for her." Owens later conducted another interview with Talk Radio in London, and his Twitter replies show that the BBC was also trying to get in touch. Somehow, a man from Philadelphia had become the designated arbiter of whether it was appropriate for a British woman to wear a Jamaican flag bikini and a hairstyle named for people in southern Africa. (American readers: If you think being stuck in a culture war is bad, imagine being stuck in someone else's.)

The apparent absence of anyone in Britain who was truly outraged by Adele suggested to Katwala that there was something synthetic about the whole debate. He said he wondered whether it was an attempt by the British right to import American culture wars—which have benefited Republican politicians looking to drum up support among working-class voters. In the U.K., provocateurs such as Piers Morgan seek out the most eye-catching opinions of not only British activists to denounce, but American ones too. Morgan's new book, Wake Up, is a jeremiad against "the woke world view." It expresses fury at the British government's handling of COVID-19 and the failed police investigation into the disappearance of a British toddler, but also about Google removing the egg from its salad emoji, Rose McGowan's tweet apologizing to Iran for the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the use of the N-word in rap music, and the opinion writer Bari Weiss's resignation from The New York Times.

The wall-to-wall coverage of the Adele story and of other apparent outrages reflects a simple demographic and economic truth: There are six times as many Americans as Britons, so English-language publishers around the world are keen to serve the U.S. market. Going viral on the British corner of the internet is less rewarding, in terms of web traffic and advertising revenue, than "breaking America."

But what happens when another country's conversation about race takes place in an "American accent"? In his article for Persuasion, Owolade argued that this risked cloaking "the reality of Black British lives behind an abstraction that flattens our humanity." He noted that while many Black Americans are descendants of slaves, the majority of Black Britons are immigrants, or the children of immigrants—which should influence our discussions of diversity initiatives here in Britain. While Black Britons are underrepresented in publishing and the arts, the same is not true in the kinds of professions toward which middle-class immigrants push their children. "In a country in which black people make up only 3 percent of the population, for example, 6 percent of junior doctors are black," Owolade wrote.

Katwala also stressed that British-born people from a Black Caribbean background are four times as likely as Black Americans to have a white partner, and those from a Black African background are twice as likely. The majority of mixed-race Britons are themselves in mixed-race relationships. As a result, he added, the "segregationist strand of Black American race thinking" is not really present in Britain. As for cultural appropriation: "I've got an Indian name. I grew up Irish Catholic and did Irish dancing. Where are the boundaries?"

This undisputed rule over the English-language internet is not just a problem for smaller countries such as Britain—it isn't good for the United States either. Being part of the dominant group always leads to shortsightedness: an assumption that your laws, culture, and taboos are universal, the default state of humanity.

Citizens of pretty much any other advanced democracy will find it strange to read an American journalist's claim that "we have long lines for voting for the same reason we have long lines for major concerts: it's a rare event for which demand occurs all at once." I have voted about a dozen times in Britain, in local and general elections, and have never had to get in line, despite a determinedly lo-fi system. Our polling stations are church halls and elementary schools, our ballots are strangely shaped pieces of paper, and the staff are largely volunteers and retired people. (Many Americans living in affluent, white-majority districts will have had the same smooth experience.) That voting takes so long in some parts of the United States is, itself, a political issue.

The situation reminds me of the caustic headline that The Onion, a satirical website, runs every time a mass shooting occurs in the U.S.: "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens." In fact, guns may be the best example of how hegemony breeds insularity, as Americans forget how unusual their gun laws are compared with those in other liberal democracies. For that reason, internet discussions of social justice usually treat the widespread presence of guns, and high murder rates, as a given. "Something is weirdly absent from the general discussion about police violence in America: the weapon most commonly used to inflict it," as my colleague Derek Thompson wrote this summer.

From here, that omission looks weird indeed. Although London's Metropolitan Police Service was notoriously described as "institutionally racist" in 1999, following its bungled investigation into the murder of a young Black man, far fewer officers carry guns in the U.K. than in the U.S. From April 2017 to March 2018, there were only four fatal police shootings in Britain. "American police are always armed, are frequently seen in combat gear, and are instructed that their first duty is to protect fellow officers, not to protect the public," Kathleen Burk, a professor emerita of modern and contemporary history at University College London, wrote this summer. "Conversely, most policemen in the U.K. are not normally armed and are trained to police with the consent of the population: their main role is to protect the public." In other words, it's not that American police are racist and British officers aren't, but that racism manifests differently in each country—and here, any police bias is far less likely to lead to a death.

Still, there are some upsides to living alongside the American rhinoceros. Every few months, British journalists have a good laugh at one of The New York Times' irregular forays into describing our country, with its swamps (no), petty crime (cheeky) and taste for boiled mutton (absolutely not). We know that Britain occupies a particular place in the American imagination, because of your interest in our royal family, The Great British Baking Show, and Downton Abbey. You need us to be quaint and backward, because it flatters your own self-image. We are the old country. You are the New World.

Living on the American internet is a reminder that for much of Britain's recent history, we were the ones turning up in foreign countries, lazily declaring them to be a "land of contrasts," and their people "simple but happy." As a former colonial power, the current situation is no more than we deserve. America, our former colony, won the internet, and now makes us speak its language.

Helen Lewis is a London-based staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights.

[grumbler]

I wasn't really describing nationalism or how nationalists think about it. My point is that I think nationalism is inherent in democracy because the core of democracy is the demos and deciding who that is and isn't - so far it's always been the imagined community of a nation rather than a class or religion etc.

  This is mere barefaced circular reasoning.  You define the nation as those who can vote, and then say that nationalism is inherent to democracy (because you've defined it so) because the nation is imagined (unlike, apparently, class or religion). 

The nation and the state are two very different things.  One is a citizen of a state, not a nation.

[crazy canuck]

I wasn't really describing nationalism or how nationalists think about it. My point is that I think nationalism is inherent in democracy because the core of democracy is the demos and deciding who that is and isn't - so far it's always been the imagined community of a nation rather than a class or religion etc.

  This is mere barefaced circular reasoning.  You define the nation as those who can vote, and then say that nationalism is inherent to democracy (because you've defined it so) because the nation is imagined (unlike, apparently, class or religion). 

The nation and the state are two very different things.  One is a citizen of a state, not a nation.

A good example of that, and a problem for the definition given in the book Sheilbh referred to, is that state giving voting rights to people who are no longer part of the nation.  A Canadian citizen who lives their life outside of Canada for all purposes, can still vote in Canadian elections.

[Josquius]

Markus Rashford has 1 million signers on his free school meals petition apparently.
Quite nicely shaping up to a big own goal for the Tories.

[Sheilbh]

Markus Rashford has 1 million signers on his free school meals petition apparently.
Quite nicely shaping up to a big own goal for the Tories.

I cannot believe this is happening again. They had exactly this issue in the run-up to the summer holidays. They now have it for the October holidays and will, no doubt, be astonished when it becomes an issue again over the Christmas holidays

I would also just flag again how many government own goals have been in Education - exam results, university outbreaks, free school meals. I cannot understand how they've decided no-one should lose their job over these repeated fuck-ups. I know Williamson is a former Chief Whip but, given that Johnson's had multiple marriages/affairs/divorces and has an indeterminate number of children, I've no idea what goss Williamson has on him

[Sheilbh]

Reading a long piece on immigration post-referendum. But one of the striking points is that there was a shift in attitudes about immigration which started before the referendum and has endured after it. No idea what caused it



What's also interesting is this is at a time of relatively high immigration. Pre-referendum EU migration was high, but fell significantly after the referendum but we have seen an increase in non-EU migration since then so the net migration numbers are basically the same I think.

[Richard Hakluyt]

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/554276

[KRonn]

I've been listening to many of my older CDs that I've had for many years but hadn't listened to for a long while. I started out by a renewed interest in them and also to get rid of the ones I no longer want to clean out some space. I'm finding lots of good music, some that I've forgotten about, so having fun with it.