Benedict Anderson analyses how a national identity is manufactured,...a collective waking dream fed by comparatively recent technology, such as books in the vernacular language and common consumption of the same media. ...Great Britain [is] “an invented nation superimposed, if only for a while, on to much older alignments and loyalties”.
That's good though isn't it -- it denies any romantic, racist or ethnic basis for nationhood and generally reinforces the importance of flexible cultural identity politics? However, we soon warm to the main theme:
The same bunch of spivs, blimps and yahoos chuntering on this week about making Britain great again are more likely to shrink it, making the country smaller than at any time since the Stuart dynasty....the proximate cause of the UK’s demise will be easily ascribed: it will be death by hard Brexit...if remain-voting Scotland goes its own way, it will make the Brexit maelstrom look like a passing shower.
And then, some typical Grudian independence and balance:
While it would be easy to argue that this national instability is the fault solely of Johnson and his red-faced, jabby-fingered Brexiters, it would also be wrong....As described by Anderson and others, nation-building is a long journey of establishing common interests and promulgating them through an engineered common culture. The UK’s store of both is dwindling. As recently as Margaret Thatcher, the country had only four TV channels; today you need never watch the same thing as either your spouse or your offspring.
the idea of a national economy becomes ever more laughable....What’s left is the idea of a territory sullenly governed and subsidised by central London, which is itself a global entity – a host to multinational businesses, an international tax haven, a laundromat for the world’s hot and dirty money.
What happened to the idea of Britain? It lost the interest of elites who spotted easier, quicker ways to cash in. Perhaps all that’s left now is the most negative way to hold together a nation: an imagined enemy. It used to be the Frogs and the Krauts and all those other ugly words. Now? It’s the SNP, who used to have Ed Miliband in their pocket, the saboteurs in the judiciary and in parliament, the remoaner establishment.
What a curious mixture! Marxism plus sentimentality about the Union. Critiques of stamocap and strong petty bourgeois values over the horrors of cable TV threatening the family. Above all, using this stuff to rebuke Leavers, and ignoring the fatuous imagined community that is 'Europe' for the sentimental Remainers.
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