Will The National Question End The United Kingdom?
09/02/2014
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What does it mean to be "British" these days?  The only British people we seem to see in the news these days are particularly useless celebrities or Muslim jihadists exported by the diverse Cool Britannia.   It's no surprise that Britain itself is on the verge of dissolution, as support for Scottish independence is on the upswing just before the critical Yes/No vote on Scottish independence on September 18.

The YouGov survey for The Times and The Sun showed 48 per cent plan to vote No, 42 per cent back the Yes Campaign and 10 percent remain undecided.

[Salmond toasts 'very encouraging' opinion poll which puts his Yes campaign just six points behind in independence battle, by Daniel Martin, Daily Mail, September 1, 2014]

Of course, "nationalists" in this context means lefty Scottish politicians (few of whom are particularly solid on immigration) who will try to construct a kind of paleo-leftist alternate reality where the National Health Service always has enough money and Margaret Thatcher never existed.  Though David Cameron's quasi-conservatives are formally opposed to Scotland leaving the Union, at least some conservatives must be privately rejoicing at the prospect of independence.  After all, a runt United Kingdom will return a solid Conservative majority.

But this issue is of relevance to immigration patriots and students of multicultural politics.  Ultimately, governments around the world are rising and falling based on the question of who controls the resources of the state.  Even an institution as revered and successful as the United Kingdom has ultimately come down to which group of people can have more money spent on them by the central government.

SNP [independence supporters] have been working hard to attract the centre-left vote — with promises of more public spending in an independent Scotland.

Yet underneath it all is a cultural question — do people feel British or Scottish?  And if the jihadists beheading American journalists are also "British?" — why would you want to call such as them your countrymen?

An age of ethnopolitics is slowly breaking over the Western World.  The immediate issues focus on issues of economics and control over resources.  But the underlying fault lines are cultural.

 

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