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Excuse this short thread on a long read - Spitfire Britain and the Zombie Union in @The_Drouth
http://www.thedrouth.org/spitfire-britain-and-the-zombie-union-by-scott-hames/
http://www.thedrouth.org/spitfire-britain-and-the-zombie-union-by-scott-hames/
This essay updates some ideas from my book and applies them to the current scene, focusing on the Britishness of devolution and what Brexit means for its future. (book here: https://hinesjumpedup.com/projects )
I've been fascinated by certain ‘stuck’ and AWOL qualities of unionist political thought, which has made almost no response to constitutional changes designed in its image over 4 decades. And now, I argue, it’s probably too late for it to adapt and evolve in the –ism sense.
That’s because Brexit-as-English-awakening torpedoes the British high politics that gave us devolution, and turns ‘the Union’ against unionism. I was wrong about 2014 'post-unionism', because Brexit nationalism mutates what Union and its avatars now mean, especially in England.
What Scotland thinks of this doesn’t matter so much, which scrambles the terms of Labour’s post-60s devolution bargain, now treated like malware rather than a core logic of UK governance. Not sure a distinct, saleable Labour Unionism could emerge today in these defensive circs.
Anyway it’s also a kind of response to Neal Ascherson’s excellent @LRB piece ‘Bye Bye Britain’ - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/neal-ascherson/bye-bye-britain
Click-bait headings for my own spiel would include: the Union must be justified in Scotland, but it can only be legitimated in England;
Click-bait headings for my own spiel would include: the Union must be justified in Scotland, but it can only be legitimated in England;
The waning energies of really-existing unionism are now antithetical to ‘the Union’, & seem to have no future as an ideology of belonging; nationalists should care more about the British dimensions of Scottish culture and history, which are becoming unintelligible to most folk;
But ‘the Union’ as a reified position and heirloom can potentially go on forever, whether or not there’s any living unionism to animate it; and this tells us something about the nature of Britishness/Englishness and its 'popular inventories' (Hall). Plus lots of metaphors.
