[LINK] "Does a single person in England care if the United Kingdom breaks up?"

[rfmcdonald]

A blog post by Ed West, journalist for the conservative The Daily Telegraph, appeared on my Facebook friends feed, shared by several people. The blog post seems to articulate fairly clear the vein of sentiment in England that doesn't much care what Scotland does.

[T]he English Empire offered Scots a chance to grow rich and to punch well above their weight on the international stage (from 1750 to 1950 Scotland’s contribution to trade, science and engineering was staggering for a country that size). But a common national identity was successfully forged, based on a common language, religion and empire.

Now the last two have gone, and the first is less important in the age of global English. Furthermore, British national identity has taken a consistent battering in recent decades, and the policies of Margaret Thatcher have meant that one of the major two parties has a negligible presence in Scotland and now wants to commit a mass suicide-makeover. So we have a situation where the main party in Scotland wants an independent Scotland, the main party in England, just as in 1707, has every reason to want an independent England, and the only party with a constituency in both doesn’t believe in nations at all but in super-states, universalism and diversity.

Scotland and England are already on diverging tectonic plates, with the former already looking towards Scandinavia (Scotland already has a “Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning" and a "Cabinet Secretary for health and wellbeing" – very Nordic).

And the union is likely to end because the Scots seem to show little emotional attachment to it (last I was in Edinburgh I saw one Union flag), for which a surprising amount of blame must be placed with Mel Gibson; similarly, the English will suffer very little psychic damage from the break-up. All the ideas of “Britishness” we have are basically Englishness by another name; when the English think of Britain they are essentially imagining Greater England, which politically and demographically the United Kingdom has always essentially been. An independent England would not see itself any differently, except that the highly stylish and beautiful Union Jack would be replaced with the rather dull St George’s Cross.

The comments are frequently dire, but sometimes interesting. Two noteworthy themes that came up repeatedly include a denial that the Scots have a distinctive identity and complaints about immigrants likewise destabilizing British identity.

Thoughts?