Occasional Blog
Hello.
It's been over two months since I've wrote anything, so apologies to regular readers of Toque. Apologies too go to the Our Kingdom team, who were expecting me to drive forward For England's Sake!. I will now, finally, be spending more time on that.
The debate seems to be moving on well without me, mostly thanks to the Scottish nationalists and the incompetent scatter-gun response to their plans from Messrs Cameron, Clegg, Miliband, Goldie, Alexander, Tom Harris, Murdo Fraser, etc.....Actually, scrub Murdo Fraser from that list because his seemed to be the only remotely coherent Unionist response. Thanks to all the media coverage of the 'Scottish problem' and the "Don't panic Captain Mainwaring!" coverage of the issue in the press (take a bow Alan Cochrane) this blog actually received more visitors in October when I wasn't blogging than during any other month of this year.
Some bloggers might be disheartened about being more popular when they're not blogging, but not me. Far from it. In fact I'm delighted because it shows that the subject that I blog about is gaining traction When we moved down to Devon (Yes we've left Lewes) I did toy with axing this blog, partly in anticipation that I would have less free time to devote to it. But I've decided that I'm going to continue out of sheer bloody-mindedness and because I find it therapeutic. Better to blog than be a suicide bomber.
Articles like this, in which issues concerning English planning laws are couched in British terms, continue to infuriate me enough to want to highlight them.
Unfortunately it's not only the deliberate conflation of England with Britain for reasons of political artifice that are the problem. The confusion is cultural as well as political, as this exhibit from the League Cup website demonstrates.
Yes, an English football website presents you with four English bands and asks you to pick your favourite British band, when the only thing remotely 'British' about these very English bands is the fact that Coldplay have a Scottish bassist.
Can you imagine a website asking you to choose your favourite British band from Franz Ferdinand, Biffy Clyro, Idlewild and The Fratellis? No, because all those bands are Scottish. This may seem like an extraordinarily silly and petty thing to get annoyed about but it is a gripe of mine precisely because it is central to the English Question and the constitutional mess of the United Kingdom: Why is it acceptable and commonplace to conflate England and Britain but not Scotland and Britain, Wales and Britain or Northern Ireland and Britain? It is the cultural conflation that allows people like Cameron to cynically perpetuate the political conflation, setting back the cause of democracy in England as he does so whilst reinforcing the damaging Anglo-centrism of Britain.
If it's the less petty but more academic analysis that you're after, may I recommend These Englands: A Conversation on National Identity
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