For while it is the Scottish Question that is on the ballot paper, it is the British Question that is really on the table. Alongside the absence of nationalist sentimentality on one side of the argument, there is something equally remarkable on the other: the inability of the no campaign to articulate a coherent, passionate and convincing case for the existing United Kingdom seems, from the outside, quite staggering. Why has the British establishment so little to say for itself? Because Britishness was never really an ethnic identity. It was, after the empire, a set of institutional structures for contesting and distributing power: mass political parties, trade unions, churches, railways, a national health service, universities and so on. The “deep state” and the City of London continued to hold immense power, of course, but it was reasonable to believe that there was a democratic realm that could weigh in on the side of ordinary people, and convenient to call this realm Britain. The problem now is that almost all those democratic forces are hugely diminished. The no side in Scotland has found itself trying to defend a status quo that scarcely exists any more. theguardian/commentisfree/2014/sep/12/scotland-vote-braveheart-nationalism-democracy-independence?utm_content=buffer5fbb3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=buffer June, Zahna, Annette, Wallace, Amy, Jock, John, Chic, Keyser
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 10:01:11 +0000
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