18 November 2005
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I regret to say that I had never heard of MP Gisela Stuart until a fascinating essay by her was pointed out to me by fellow "Wittangemot" member John at The England Project. The article is worth reading in full; even though it is likely to cause disagreement here and there, I find the overall thesis to be very good and to explain very well why "Unio Europaea Delenda Est"The key elements for a functioning democracy are: a liberal market economy, the ability to remove by peaceful means those who govern us, and knowing who we mean when we say “we”. I suspect that the most difficult question to answer is the one which asks: who are “we”?
This comes immediately after the reason why we inhabitants of the EU fail to consider ourselves part of an EU democracy is explained, a reason which is why the EU should be treated with the greatest suspicion by any believer in democracy:Yet it has only been in the last five years or so that I have heard people in my constituency telling me, “I am not British – I am English”. That worries me. British identity is based on and anchored in its political and legal institutions and this enables it to take in new entrants more easily than it would be if being a member of a nation were to be defined by blood. But a democratic polity will only work if citizens’ identification is with the community as a whole, or at least with the shared process, which overrides their loyalty to a segment.
The trick here is that Gisela fails to analyse why people might say they are English not British. It seems to me that she should blame Phoney Tony and his Scotch pals for creating the Scotch Parliamant and (for that matter) the naff Taff Assembly. English people, actually I extend that to all British people, are keen on fairness (it is why we like bloated failures like the NHS because they appear to be fair - we all die equally of MRSA) and the problem is that at present there is a huge unfairness in the system that the Scotch get to elect people who decide things for the English but not (or at least not to the same extent) in reverse. I suspect that English self-identification is also a reaction against the multiculti crowd who are love ethnic minorities apparently at the expense of the rest. To put it bluntly until we expect the Welsh and the Scotch to identify themselves as British not as Welsh or Scotch it should not be a surprise that the English do likewise.