The Dis-United Kingdom Thread - (Indyref 2, United Ireland poll, Welsh independence)

[Patrick Thistle]

There's an Indy tweeter called Niki who describes herself as Indo-Cymraes and has had despicable racist abuse in response to her pro-Indy views. The threats are now being investigated by the police. The abuse is coming from supporters of the union rather than "ethnonationalists" wanting independence.

[Lang Spoon]

There are of course racist scum within the Scottish Indy ranks, but the worst knuckle draggers online usually have a Union flag on their handle.

[Lang Spoon]

Much of Unionist Twitter seems to exercise way more of their hate on "wee nippy" and Humza Yousaf than on the white male members of the Scottish cabinet as well. Surely just coincidence.

[ursus arctos]

Everything is GamerGate

[NHH]

Indeed, there's never been an election where Labour only won a majority due to Scotland and/or Wales, AFAIK, though a few where the Tories would have had the plurality.

Not true. Labour would have lost in 1964, wouldn't have been the largest party in Feb 74 and wouldnt have had majority in Oct 74, were it not for the Scottish Labour MPs.

[laverte]

Thanks for the replies and for respecting that i'm arguing in good faith. i know there are a lot of pro-union bores and bullies around and they must be exhausting to deal with.

The thread makes a case that the current situation isn't necessarily a reason an Independent Wales couldn't afford to be Independent.

i dislike economism generally, and i'd regard any claim that Scotland/Wales could not "afford" independence to be patronising and contemptuous. i lived in Scotland for five years and became very attuned to this sort of superciliousness and ignorance from English people. i don't blame anyone who feels a pressing desire to reject the subservience it implies and think about freeing themselves from English rule.

You mentioned your own defined trinity of blood, place and history and then say blackness isn't about those things. So is that your answer for why Wales should be considered a nation? Because it has those things. Almost every part of the world where black people have that trinity of claims has sought and gained independence from the UK if the UK had imposed itself on them.

i don't think we can fruitfully compare European colonisation of Africa with the relationship between England and Wales. Not least because most nations in Africa were created by white men drawing lines on the map of a place they knew nothing about. As a result, the state generally preceded the nation in the colonised world, and indeed was designed not to align with any ethnic or religious community. State nationalism in Africa tends to be a centralising, unifying (and often coercive) force, which exists in opposition to ethnic, religious and tribal 'nationalisms'. Wales is the opposite: it is historically legible as a nation, and that is what legitimates its claim to be a state.

ideally I'd prefer to be a citizen of The Culture, but unfortunately that isn't an option

Agreed. We can dream?

Likewise with the SNP:

https://twitter.com/SNPBAME/status/1354166257940049921

'SNP business convener' Kirsten Oswald was in my year at university. (Who wasn't, eh?) Her eminence doesn't allay my suspicions. There are lots of my contemporaries i'd associate with anti-racist activisim: it was the era of the BNP's first breakthough.

Kirsten would not be someone that sprang to mind.

English Nationalism is the driver of the break-up more than anything.

No question. Independent nation-states are not an inevitable reaction to it, though, and i'm trying to tease out / understand why that objective seems to have rallied almost all of the oppositional and progressive forces in Scotland and Wales, as well as some English sympathisers.

Independence will very likely provoke an even nastier, more self-pitying turn in English nationalism, at least initially. Hopefully, the residents of Scotland and Wales will have fenced themselves off from the worst of its impact by virtue of some useful historic ethno-territorial borders. But that protection isn't available to the English working classes, and especially to BaME and foreign-born residents, plus whichever minority is Hate Group of the Month in the tabloids, who will bear its brunt. i'm not in any way claiming the Scots and Welsh are responsible for this, but i do think it is foreseeable and therefore one thing to take into account when weighing the pros and cons of voting to dissociate from England via a separate nation-state.

A long and interesting and challenging post... lots of what you said there, I think I should think a bit harder and longer about it.

Thank you TonTon, i really appreciate that. Well, i'm not sure "long" is a compliment as such, but it's certainly true! i too need to think longer and harder about this, and the replies to my post are helping with that.

There's a fair whack in there that I'd agree with, and yet I'm very firmly pro-indy. Primarily because I am very firmly anti-UK, and think its breaking will be a good thing for everyone. In the long run at least. Might be extra shit for us in England for a while, mind.

i think i'm the opposite: if i'm allowed to vote (born in Scotland to a Scottish mother, so depending on the criteria, it's not unfeasible) i don't think i can bring myself to support independence, but i kind of hope it happens anyway. It's probably a good thing overall, or at least a necessary thing; it's just not for me. Then again, the sight of Farage, Johnson and Starmer waving flags and singing the praises of the union could change my mind. i'm not very firmly anything, i suppose, except keen that independent Scottish and Welsh states should live up to their promises by being better than the UK, given that independence will come at a cost to some, perhaps even to many that are left behind. And that means being clear about what/whom independence is and is not for, and having a plan that goes beyond throwing off the shackles of neocolonialism, or Kirsten Oswald's waffle about tolerance.

BLT's post is interesting and the Fanon angle clears up some of what was eluding me. i hope to come back to it when i'm less tired!

[Lang Spoon]

Wow I can't think of anyone famous in my year, yours was storied with assorted movers and shakers laverte! (Also I never went to the GUU so...)

I'd imagine that unless Fish Gove and his pal George Galloway get to set the terms of the next ref residency in Scotland will be necessary to vote (the franchise limits Holyrood passed this term allow all residents 16 and older (including EU citizens, citizens of countries outwith the EU including refugees) the right to vote in it, but not me or you. And that seems fair to me).

[Patrick Thistle]

Hi Laverte. I felt you've been posting in good faith. (Which is partly why I was surprised you thought that tweet thread was aimed at you.)

I think I know what you're getting at regarding the difficulties faced by some sectors if England was a separate state. I'm sceptical that Wales or Scotland can do much to alleviate that. I don't believe Wales can influence much in England, except by getting policy right and England following after which has happened a few times (both in and before the pandemic) but then becomes the bright idea of the English government. (The 5p tax on carrier bags being an example)

Plus there is the ongoing English working class animosity towards Wales. The attitudes to Wales among the "working class" often descend to the "hur hur hur sheepshaggers" comments on social media and chanted as football matches. One of the main reasons Labour didn't win the 1992 election was because Kinnock was "the Welsh windbag". His Welshness was weaponised against him. (Am well aware there are other issues with Neil and the rest of the Kinnock clan before the thread gets derailed)

So, I'm sorry, but I think putting responsibility for what happens to the English working class under a perpetually Tory government on the Indy movement is a stretch. That group needs to wake up and take control of its own destiny. (If it even truly exists any more - I queried this a while a go on the Labour thread. I'm not sure working class is the right term at all.)

[Nefertiti2]

https://twitter.com/SCClarkCymru/status/1355146449957367814?s=20

[DCI Harry Batt]

Properly disgusting. You can get away with pretty much fucking anything in prisons, and even more so when locking up migrants.

Letters sent.

[Patrick Thistle]

Meanwhile

The UK Government has been accused of a "deliberate and premeditated attack on devolution" after leaked documents appear to show it hid key parts of Brexit planning from the Welsh and Scottish governments.

The documents, published on political website Guido Fawkes, appear to show ministers being warned that plans for the UK to assume control of state aid "should not be shared publicly or with the devolved administrations at this stage."

Source ITV news
https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2020-...ans-from-wales

[Lang Spoon]

Modern Democracy. Stronger together. Mediaeval shenanigans.

[Patrick Thistle]

That was from last October and I wonder if I've posted it before.

It says something when we are relying on Guido Fucking Fawkes to report on attacks on democracy.

[Lang Spoon]

Don't worry, Sir Keith will be making an Important Speech about the Family of Nations sometime soon.

[laverte]

Bizarre Löw Triangle Your invocation and explanation of Fanon are helping me to 'get it' at last. Thank you for that. i don't quite know how to feel about what seems like his pragmatic idealism. i mean, that's an oxymoron, and yet it does make sense. Perhaps if i had lived in Scotland more recently (or Wales ever) i wouldn't fret about the contradiction.

The popular conception of Wales or even Welshness is largely civic (i.e. based on the actually existing territorial Wales, rather than blood quanta).

i struggle with this. Not the civic part, but the national. Why use a territory that owes its existence and legitimacy to some kind of ethnohistory, when you are trying to keep out that kind of ethnic nationalism? i think Fanon helps, but the fact that it's convenient and intelligible and already there doesn't disguise the fact that it will still be a nation-state based within inherited boundaries, understood simultaneously as civic (where Wales is) and ethnic (where the Welsh have historically been). That worries me.

Hi Laverte. I felt you've been posting in good faith. (Which is partly why I was surprised you thought that tweet thread was aimed at you.)

Oh, apologies for the misunderstanding. i seem to be the only person on the thread defending any kind of unionism, so i supposed i might be implicated, but it's true i haven't advanced any of the arguments the twitter thread sought to refute.

I don't believe Wales can influence much in England, except by getting policy right and England following after which has happened a few times (both in and before the pandemic) but then becomes the bright idea of the English government.

Perhaps that dodgy graphic with Wales as a woman and England as a man was on to something after all!

Plus there is the ongoing English working class animosity towards Wales. The attitudes to Wales among the "working class" often descend to the "hur hur hur sheepshaggers" comments on social media and chanted as football matches.

i would want to restate here that a lot of the working class in England is Black, Asian or East European. i don't believe they feel animosity to Wales and Scotland to a significant degree. But i understand your frustration and exhaustion (even though my family in Oban gets sheepshagger banter mostly from lowlanders).

Middle class Tories in the home counties are, to me, more obviously obnoxious and condescending towards Scots (and probably Welsh), and also more responsible for seemingly endless right-wing rule.

The occasional harassment my wife and i get when we are together in public invariably comes from white people who look and sound working class. There is no Queer Nation State (QNS) for me to escape to, and so i have no choice but to live among people who may despise and in extreme cases assault me. A minority that can vanish into its own nation state does have a kind of privilege, of which i'm probably envious.

i've been asking myself whether i would want to live in a QNS if one existed. i would be tempted. It might depend on how excited i was about the goals of the QNS. i'm not interested in living among 'my kind' for the sake of it, nor would it be enough just to want to build a fence to keep out boors and bigots. But i know i couldn't leave without taking a long look over my shoulder at what and whom i was leaving behind. Then again, i'm an instinctive alliance-builder and anti-separatist, it's almost a kneejerk reaction with me.

One of the main reasons Labour didn't win the 1992 election was because Kinnock was "the Welsh windbag". His Welshness was weaponised against him.

i wondered about that when you mentioned Brown's dourness as a reason for Labour's defeat in 2010.

Kinnock had flaws but it's now shocking to remind myself how fluently and inspiringly he spoke in public ("windbagging"), compared with the tongue-tied non-entity in charge of the UK at the moment who is supposed to be a great wordsmith.

So, I'm sorry, but I think putting responsibility for what happens to the English working class under a perpetually Tory government on the Indy movement is a stretch. That group needs to wake up and take control of its own destiny.

Don't be sorry!

i think the fact that the Scots and Welsh have given up trying to reform the UK or resist the English ruling classes suggests that the workers won't do better. The Tories and their propagandists are very skilled at applying divide and rule.

i'm not keen on "take control" narratives. We all need to build alliances with groups of people we're repeatedly invited to treat as suspicious, threatening, and opposed to us; meanwhile, the apparatus through which we might maintain those alliances is being taken away from us and dismantled. (Depending on your point of view, that might include the UK.)

Wow I can't think of anyone famous in my year, yours was storied with assorted movers and shakers laverte!

i guess so. i can think of another pair of MSPs, actually, and some other minor media figures. 'My pal' Iain Martin wasn't in my year, i think he was one above although he did an ordinary degree (three years instead of the usual four) so that he could get cracking with a career in the newsrooms of the Tory press.

(Also I never went to the GUU so...)

That's impressive*! You didn't miss much.

I'd imagine that unless Fish Gove and his pal George Galloway get to set the terms of the next ref residency in Scotland will be necessary to vote (the franchise limits Holyrood passed this term allow all residents 16 or older (including EU citizens, citizens of countries outwith the EU including refugees) the right to vote in it, but not me or you. And that seems fair to me).

It seems fair to me too. i didn't know Holyrood had pronounced. There was an Anglo-Scot** in my old CLP who thought Labour could negotiate a vote for ex-pats in return for granting a second indyref, but he was a strange fellow, and i'm not surprised he was talking out of his arse.

*A glossary for non-alumni: Glasgow university has two unions, dating from the time they were gender segregated. The GUU – the old men's union – was finally forced to admit women students in the 1960s but its gender politics had progressed barely at all when i was there in the 1990s. It's where you went to snog a future MSP, a rugby player, or a boy whose first name was a surname. The other union, the QMU, was the home of present and future goths, barflies, lesbians, dilettantes and underachievers ... and presumably Lang Spoon!

**Is there an equivalent to plastic paddies for pseudo-Scots (like me)? Silicone Sandys? Flexible Frasers?

[Gangster Octopus]

Counterfeit Caledonians.

And I'm on your side, by the way. I'm just not very good at explaining stuff...

[Lang Spoon]

Dilettante underachiever is my LinkedIn bio. Tbh I preferred the tower block of places to puke that was Strathclyde Union. Even if the mesh netting over the central stairwell gave a prison vibe. Or GSA for the dancey music and the arty guruls i could barely talk to.

Holyrood passed a bill setting out the franchise etc for the next Ref, but of course Westminster, and especially that slippery eel Gove, will look to fix the franchise, Ref question and timing to their advantage, should they ever grant the Section 30 order giving Big Parly consent.


there's also another poster on this thread laverte who is unequivocally in the Stronger Together camp.

[Patrick Thistle]

Oh, apologies for the misunderstanding. i seem to be the only person on the thread defending any kind of unionism, so i supposed i might be implicated, but it's true i haven't advanced any of the arguments the twitter thread sought to refute.

There's were comments on another thread by others.

i would want to restate here that a lot of the working class in England is Black, Asian or East European. i don't believe they feel animosity to Wales and Scotland to a significant degree.

Sure and maybe not. But I wouldn't lump them in with who I'm talking about. Maybe the problem is there are lots of working classes rather than a lumpen proletariat.

i wondered about that when you mentioned Brown's dourness as a reason for Labour's defeat in 2010.

I voted Labour in 2010. I think my actual take on that was his perceived dour demeanour put off the Liberal Democrats from coalitioning with him.

i think the fact that the Scots and Welsh have given up trying to reform the UK or resist the English ruling classes suggests that the workers won't do better. The Tories and their propagandists are very skilled at applying divide and rule.

i'm not keen on "take control" narratives. We all need to build alliances with groups of people we're repeatedly invited to treat as suspicious, threatening, and opposed to us; meanwhile, the apparatus through which we might maintain those alliances is being taken away from us and dismantled. (Depending on your point of view, that might include the UK.)

I think the many other things I've posted illustrate which people are opposed to a progressive Wales and they run the UK.

[DCI Harry Batt]

i would want to restate here that a lot of the working class in England is Black, Asian or East European.

I think there is no ceiling on the number of times it's worth saying this. Kinda sadly, really.

Middle class Tories in the home counties are, to me, more obviously obnoxious and condescending towards Scots (and probably Welsh)

I find it really odd, and really horrible, the number of English people who think it's ok, or funny, to be really unpleasant about people from Scotland and Wales. Not just yer ordinary everyday racists, although them of course and more so than most. But people who seem otherwise mostly fairly decent.

[ursus arctos]

What the Italians call "territorial discrimination" is one of the most widespread forms of othering in the developed world, even among those who generally know better

[Lang Spoon]

"Teuchters"/sheepshaggers for anyone north of the Forth Clyde canal seemed fair game in Glasgow (and was used in Fife for highlanders/Aberdeen types) while soapdodgers was applied in the reverse, culchies v Dubs/Jackeens here. Though there seems more venom when applied to Scots/Welsh from English bantz merchants, if less than when I've heard North Italians vent about "Terrone", which can be terrifying in the strength of hatred. Funnily enough blanket disparaging of "English bastards" seems pretty much beyond the pale in Scotland, certainly in half polite non-fitba society it would get disapproving looks.

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

Bizarre Löw Triangle Your invocation and explanation of Fanon are helping me to 'get it' at last. Thank you for that. i don't quite know how to feel about what seems like his pragmatic idealism. i mean, that's an oxymoron, and yet it does make sense. Perhaps if i had lived in Scotland more recently (or Wales ever) i wouldn't fret about the contradiction.

i struggle with this. Not the civic part, but the national. Why use a territory that owes its existence and legitimacy to some kind of ethnohistory, when you are trying to keep out that kind of ethnic nationalism? i think Fanon helps, but the fact that it's convenient and intelligible and already there doesn't disguise the fact that it will still be a nation-state based within inherited boundaries, understood simultaneously as civic (where Wales is) and ethnic (where the Welsh have historically been). That worries me.

i agree with a lot of what you say - there are reactionary currents within these forms of civic nationalism (both in wales and particularly in scotland) which present serious risks going forward.

either way i'm not a civic nationalist. my main critique of civic nationalism is that it, even perfectly expressed, constructs a similar in/out divide to ethnonationalism but bases it on citizenship and congratulates itself for only dehumanising and murdering people who don't have the proper paperwork.

and anyway, those risks ought to be balanced against the actual white supremacist regime in westminster, and there's no sign the british public has had its fill of it yet.

perhaps that's a false dichototmy and it's not boris or sturgeon, but the prevailing tendency in post war Britain has been a cross party consensus for increased racist violence in the criminal justice system and the border regime. i don't think independence movements are likely to reverse that significantly, but they represent a chink in the armour. Britannia delanda est innit.

[Diable Rouge]

There is a certain truth to that, in that it is relatively easy for skilled and educated minority workers here to acquire citizenship, but refugees and asylum seekers still have to deal with Direct Provision centres, which the government is slow to dismantle, knowing that the only alternative, namely providing them with social housing, would be unlikely to prove popular.

[Lang Spoon]

"Slow" equals 20 years of deliberate racist inertia and expansion of the whole evil system by successive Ministers and the senior mgmt of the DoJ.

[Patrick Thistle]

First they ignore you
Then they laugh at you
Then they fight you