Friday 26 September 2014

Tae Think Again



Here at This is How She Fight Start we like to pride ourselves on always being slightly behind the bleeding edge of the perpetually onrushing buzzsaw that is the 24-hour News Cycle. It’s the Ridcully approach to information management: if it really is important then people will still be talking about it a few days after the fact, and if they’re not, well, it can’t have been that vital anyway. And so it is that I eventually come to put down some thoughts on the Scottish referendum, a mere week after the fact. Next time I’m planning to discuss whether or not we should abandon the Gold Standard.

Truth be told, it’s taken me this long to work out my feelings on the matter. Actually, that’s a lie; my feelings are still pretty inconclusive, it’s just taken me all this time to work out how to express them with any sort of coherence whatsoever. Because as far as this issue goes I’m what the Japanese call, with their typical lack of nuance, haafu, or near as damnit. My granddad was Scottish, my dad now lives so far north of the border that he can occasionally see the Northern Lights, and the name on my passport is close enough to that of a real-life Scottish folk hero that internet vanity searches are a complete waste of time. (On which note, no, Google, I do not now nor have I ever fucking meant fightstar. You’re doubtless recording pretty much all of my online activity, so what exactly in that makes you think I have any interest whatsoever in an ex-boyband poppet’s inevitably failed attempt to manufacture some kind of ‘artistic integrity’ for himself? And don’t you start smirking, Twitter Search, you’re just as fucking bad.) I still support England during Calcutta Cup matches though, so would fail Norman Tebbit’s odious little nationalism test were I to apply for a hypothetical second passport, but the fact that I’m labeling it as ‘odious’ should key you in to one of the reasons I’m having trouble getting this all straight in my head.

Tebbit’s test, for those of you who remain happily unaware, was posited by a rightwing English politician concerned, as rightwing politicians so often are, by so many of them coming over here and doing all those unnatural and scary things that everyone knows they do – worshipping different gods, speaking different languages, having different coloured skin – all that eccentric, unfathomable, borderline freakish stuff held in just contempt by right-thinking people everywhere. Specifically, he claimed that a first, second, third, whatever, generation Pakistani immigrant could not be considered English until they supported the correct side when England played Pakistan at cricket.



To be [swallows hard] fair, it’s not an unilluminating way of framing the question, for all the grotesque discourses in invokes (we’re only a hop, skip, and a jump away from ‘Rivers of Blood’ here, it’s worth remembering). How do individuals decide where there sense of belonging lies? How do we accommodate those differences and pluralities inherent in the word ‘we’? Does a ‘we’ axiomatically mean a ‘they’? Is the group better defined from within or without? Was Bodyline a legitimate tactic? Difficult questions all. None of which really seemed to get addressed during the independence ‘debate’, which from the remove at which I had to observe it appeared to be nothing so much as the longest ever convention for charmingly accented snake-oil salesmen. Vats, lakes, oceans of the stuff were slopped and swilled around on both sides, to the point that whenever ‘oil reserves’ were mentioned I frankly had trouble believing there was any of the fucking stuff left. To say the details of the Yes side’s proposals hadn’t been properly thought through seemed sadly as true as the claim that No’s big ideas were worked out at five minutes to midnight on the back of a cigarillo packet, what with them having spent the previous two fucking years louchely chuffing away on the contents whilst watching polo matches and commenting archly on the ingratitude and unsightliness of the poor.

Though let’s be honest, this was never a discussion that was going to be decided by closely considered plans or detailed budgets or facts or logic. Nationalism in all its forms is an anathema to critical thought. Despite the, at best, hopelessly naïve ragbag of aspirations and expectations presented by the pro-independence side, had they been successful the upshot would clearly have been nothing more than exchanging rule by a bunch of insular elitist bastards in Westminster for rule by a bunch of insular elitist bastards in Holyrood. They would at least have been Scottish bastards though, and that’s not nothing. Nations exist largely to provide the ruling classes with something other than their self-interest to invoke when making decisions that will fuck other people over. By and large they also offer the rest of us something a bit more coherent to tap into in the way of economies of scale and communal support and identity, but it’s worth remembering that the advantages of the nation-state get sucked up far more than they trickle down. There’s something to be said for having the ‘up’ closer to you, and seeing as that’s not about to happen economically any time soon, it might as well be geographically.

However, here we are. They’ve stayed, and I’m not a little relieved by that, for purely personal, selfish reasons. Principally because I’m continually grateful for the role Scotland plays in keeping the rest of the UK honest, but also because living halfway round the world puts enough of a strain on your notions of identity and belonging as it is, without your mother country/ies falling apart. My parents got divorced during my first stint in Japan and the feeling of watching helplessly from afar as people you care about take irrevocable decisions in your absence was distressingly familiar. Having banged on at length about the essentially idiocy of national identity it’s still something of a shock to me that I’m parsing these events in those terms, but there it is. I suspect I’d have felt very differently had I been living back in the UK. Which, for the time being at least, will remain U, and that’s as close to a resolution as I’m going to be able to provide to this post. Though I can at least console myself that one of the defining features of this whole process has been an absence of resolution, so it’s not like I’m the only one who has difficulty in bringing things to a satisfactory climax.

I’m sorry. I’ve been under a lot of pressure at work recently.


9 comments:

  1. I've had thoughts on this, though my UK citizenship is much attenuated by my lapsed passport, and it due to a father who's not lived there for fifty years, who's no longer alive, and who'd gone as far as he could to lose his West-Yorkshire accent and attitudes (not nearly far enough, but 'You can always tell a Yorkshireman; you just can't tell them much.'). Only been to the place twice, at six and twenty-seven years of age, and for whole weeks at a time. Never to Scotland, whatever 'Scotland' means: the lowland Scots who came from the North of England, or the Highlanders cleared out to the ends of the Empire, including my end, centuries back.

    I look at this as a Canadian: we have Québec. Let me tell you an apocryphal tale.

    There's an international conference on multi-lingual countries, including Canada, Belgium, Rwanda, etc. The Canadian delegate has his turn at the stand, and drones on about Québec's two referenda, the absurd 'Loi 101' sign-law, and constitutional wrangling between Ottawa and the provinces. The Rwandan delegate interjects to say that he doesn't understand the problem. However, the Canadian delegate insists that much harm was done to inter-provincial relations, there was political deadlock, etc. The Rwandan delegate speaks up again to say, "Look! There were only two paths in your situation and ours. We took the other one..."

    The UK and Canada can be proud of that, or relieved. The other parallel is that the instinct of many to separate in both 'nations' is not only nationalist but sociopolitical. Neo-Conservatives dominate the debate in both your house and mine, and a pox upon them all. Québec, as Scotland, has a far more left-voting public than the balance of the rest of their countries. Québec's been able to achieve more social justice than Scotland by 'playing chicken' with Confederation; Scotland cannot lose by playing the same game with the Union, and good on them.

    Not having been to Scotland, but having endured the separatists while living in Montréal for five years, it seems Scotland's separatism is less ethno-linguistic, and more socio-political, than Québec's. I'd vote to go with Scotland and leave Westminster Conservatives and the lot who vote for them behind. But even as an Anglophone in Québec I wanted to feel as if I could run away from Canada with Québec.

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    1. I'm always both gratified and slightly annoyed when a comment is almost as long and definitely better informed than the original post. Quebec got invoked a fair few times in the course of this, so this was all genuinely informative. Thank you.

      That feeling of wanting to run away is a knotty one, isn't it? Yet another layer of things complicating by being an ex-pat (or not, as the case may be ;) And that's not meant to be pejorative, either. Sometimes the best you can do in a bad situation is to put as much distance between it and you as possible. I don't think I'm quite in that position yet with the UK, but I can sympathise with the instinct.

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    2. I apologize for the length, again. Less grandstanding than being careful to be precise, though I could have done it better: separatism is as much political as ethnological, Scotland as much as Quebec. And we should be overjoyed when the process is achieved without arms, whatever the outcome.

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    3. Absolutely no apology necessary. Always gratifying when a post prompts an interesting response that actually makes me more informed about the world. So wry sarcasm aside, genuine thanks for that, Should have thrown in a smiley or something in that first response, probably ;)

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  2. What does it mean that I cheer for the Japanese national teams in most sports and don't care much about America? I have no desire to be a Japanese citizen.

    Nothing deep or intelligent to say here. Sorry.

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    1. And likewise, always slightly annoying when a comment is pithier and more concise than the original post as well. I think we all know by now that anyone coming to this blog looking for depth and intelligence will go away sorely disappointed ;)

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    2. Everyone cheers for the other team when playing America, except two-hundred-odd million.

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    3. If by "pithy" you mean "short," then yes. Rather devoid of meaning though. The World Cup at our house was bizarre, since everyone's cheering order is all mixed up. The kids pulled for the US at the Olympics tho, even if I didn't.

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    4. Gonna be interesting to see how the kids' allegiances play out as they grow up, that's for sure. It's not like UK teams are usually good enough to be nailed on favourites, so the 'glory supporter' route isn't really going to be an option.

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