This piece in today's Guardian by Irvine Welsh is fairly typical of the sort of opinion which has been getting my back up in the last few weeks.
There's much talk of how Scotland has been covering itself in glory, putting on such a fine show of people power and 'true democracy', yet hardly any mention of the thuggery deployed by the YES campaign or the general spectacle of provincial small-mindedness behind this shining example to the world.
At times it has been like being transported back to the 80s: class war, but this time with an ethnic-nationalist edge. Perhaps another reason it has felt like such a throwback is the discourse of the pro-independence campaign has resembled that of a middle-aged bloke who still thinks and speaks like a twenty-year-old student.
It's a worldview where greed and incompetence are the only characteristics of the world's greatest financial service industry, where the UK is an 'imperialist' structure (I suppose under this same logic the EU is the Fourth Reich!), the BBC is primarily an establishment mouthpiece, the oil of the North Sea would belong to me the day after I move to Edinburgh and all that can be said of Westminster politicians is that they are inherently both elitist and corrupt.
Some of these people need to seriously grow up and ditch this pathetic posturing. Guys, you don't live over here in Latin America; instead you enjoy the quite extraordinary privilege of being citizens of one of the world's most open and mature democracies.*
Anyway, it's just an enormous shame that old historical boundaries provide 10% of the British population with a license to carry on in this thoroughly childish manner.
*Ironically perhaps, in the form of Salmond and the SNP they have just narrowly avoided rule by a Latin American-style populist demagogue.
2 comments:
Technically, about 4% of the British population held the rest hostage.
But anyway, I think there is, and remains, a case for Scottish independence. I don't think they should go it alone, and I supported the No campaign. But they do have a separate history and identity to England that has never been entirely integrated into a singular British culture.
For as long as that is the case, and it will be the case for an awfully long time, there will always be an undercurrent of separatism. We just have to live with it, manage it and try to work with it whenever possible.
By the way, installing Disqus comments would be a nice upgrade on the standard Blogger comment system!
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