THE BRITISH THREAD II

I must apologize then, as you having a nice time in Edinburgh has changed my mind about the constant whingeing and blatant racism being chucked at the English AND Scottish No campaigners over the past months/years.

Maybe it was all a figment of our collective imagination.....maybe it..... wait a minute, what's this I spy......?

From the Telegraph, back in Dec 2012.....around about the time when Salmond was just starting to really get into gear, I believe.....


"Police recorded 1,295 racist incidents in 2011/12 where the victim was white and British. The total is up a quarter on the previous year and 57 per cent more than in 2004/05.
The category includes both attacks on English people and incidents where the victim is Scottish and the perpetrator is from an ethnic minority.
But the vast majority of perpetrators were also white, suggesting that many cases involved racism against the English.
SNP ministers said they were “very disappointed” by the figures but opposition parties said racist attacks against English people should be treated with the same seriousness as those directed at ethnic minorities.
The overall number of racist attacks increased by 10 per cent last year, with the largest number of incidents directed against the Pakistani community.
However, while the number of Pakistani victims has fallen markedly in recent years, attacks against white Britons have increased and they are on course to become the ethnic group most likely to be subjected to racism.
Willie Rennie, the Scottish Liberal Democrat, leader said: “We cannot allow anti-English rhetoric to creep into society and the SNP government must to all it can to combat this.
“While racism against some ethnic groups is falling, it is still far too prevalent in Scottish society. This includes racist abuse directed towards the English, which is just as bad as any other form of racism and cannot be tolerated.”
John Lamont, Scottish Tory chief whip, added: “If it is an increase in anti-English behaviour from those living in Scotland, we have to treat it with the same severity we do any other racist incident.”
But Christopher Thorpe, a doctor in cultural sociology at Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University, said he thought the police were recording more cases because people were becoming less tolerant of racist attitudes.
The Scottish Government figures showed there were 5,389 racist attacks last year, an average of 15 per day and the first increase in five years. The record total compares to 4,911 in the previous year.
Broken down by the ethnic origin of the victims, they showed that 23 per cent of attacks (1,357) were directed against Pakistanis and 22 per cent (1,295) against white Britons.
Since 2004/05, the number of incidents with Pakistani victims has fallen from 1,773, a drop of nearly a quarter.
Over the same period the total involving white Britons has increased from only 826 and is on course to become the most common type of racist attack. More than four out of five perpetrators last year (83 per cent) were also white and British.
Only three per cent of wrongdoers were Asian, suggesting the vast majority of attacks were white-on-white and English people were the victims.
Men aged between 26 and 35 were the most likely victims, while perpetrators were most commonly men aged 20 or younger.
Roseanna Cunningham, the Community Safety Minister, said: "Scotland has an outstanding reputation as a welcoming and tolerant nation and we cannot let a minority of people tarnish our image.
“Regardless of the reasons for the increase, we must continue with the work we are doing to tackle racism and hatred in all its forms whilst constantly looking at new ways of getting across the message to the next generation of young Scots.”


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/9737918/Record-number-of-racist-attacks-on-English-in-Scotland.html


Salmond and his thugs have been stirring this up for years, and not a peep from you.
One English grocer writes a letter and you spit your Earl Grey onto the screen in rage.

Bump

Bump2

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I mentioned before, there is an unwelcome underlying vein of xenophobia in the independence campaign. It's always been there.
There are no more football internationals at Wembley, remember. Requirement of Police, crowd behaviour too bad to be tolerated or easily contained.

But the barmy army of Scottish football fans is well known for good, and humorous good-natured behaviour, elsewhere. Only against the English...

Why is that, I wonder.

Because the trouble makers have had their passports confiscated, but that doesn't stop them travelling south.

Maybe it's not Wembley, but.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/teams/england

And Rangers v Celtic matches are such peaceful occasions.

In the 1930s the mostly Presbyterian Scottish nationalists wanted to deport all the descendants of Irish immigrants who came over during the potato famine. It was Westminster that stopped them. That's why George Galloway opposes Scottish independence because he fears a backlash from the nationalist Presbyterians. Sectarianism plays big in Scotland.

This is a very interesting facet of this situation which has not been full grasped by the English media as far as I can see.
A lot of Labour's traditional vote has apparently leached away to the Yes camp.
A lot of Scots of Irish catholic descent traditionally vote Labour, almost all of them in my experience.
The Orangemen in Ulster and in Scotland want passionately for the union to be upheld. That's a No vote.
The catholics hate the Orangemen and will do anything to thwart them.

Just one of the many undercurrents swirling about.

That reflects the attitudes of my parents, both of whom were immigrants from Ireland who came over here in their teens from Clare and Waterford.

It is interesting to speculate about why those divides have not been sustained so strongly in America. Human nature is, after all, the same in both places. I suspect the reason is that in America there were so many competing immigrant groups that the dominant establishment was never that dominant for long, and the soup of competing immigrant groups was so complex and diverse that keeping track and sustaining hatreds was just too much of a bother to sustain for very long. Certainly we had the same issues for a while: they just washed away after a few generations amidst all the complexity. In addition there was less geographical separation - or at least not as constant and lasting.

Thanks for that info, McTag and everybody. I'm just following along. My bias is toward no, which I've probably said here, but I'm plumb ignorant on all the history including recent history on all this, except for my reading this thread. I read the Guardian but mostly re cultural stuff; it's my replacement for the new york times and their paywall.

The NYT asks: If Scotland Goes, Then Britain Too?, related to an exit of the EU.




But the 'No-camp' has clawed back now a four percentage point lead over separatists, according to YouGov.

I suspect an at least equally proximate danger would be follow on actions in Spain (Catalonia and perhaps the Basque regions) Belgium and possibly even Italy.

It is also difficult for me to imagine any separation of Britain and Scotland without an extended period of financial chaos (or at least a damaging high degree of financial uncertainty) in a part of the world that doesn't need any more of that right now. My strong impression is that there are no real plans for the separation yet agreed to by the two entities, and, given the competing economic interests that would certainly arise from a separation, and all the knock-on social effects that would attend them, it is very hard to see anything like a smooth transition.

I certainly hope the trend you reported continues, and separation does not occur.

I'm off and on quite aware of the complications that go on in Italy. I seem to probably all who have paid attention to my interests here on a2k as some kind of mad italophile and that's true, I like the place, watching the bad with the good. But of course, much is amiss to any sane observer.

would you consider your self a partiorit or of any thing to do with and national sentiment

From your attached link....

"If an independent Scotland would be complicated, a Britain alone in Europe would be a complete mess, financial executives say."

By Europe, do you think he means the EU?

If Scotland goes, the odds are that Britain will leave the EU, as any referendum on the matter will no longer have the Scottish socialist pro EU vote to tip the balance back to staying.

Whether that is seen as a good thing for Britain or not is neither here nor there. As things stand, an rUK vote would probably return a leave verdict.

My money is on Parliament wheedling out of it again if Scotland goes, citing serious change of circumstance or some other guff.
Now that Parliament has seen how dangerous it is to hang such dire consequences on such a simplistic referendum question, I can't see the rest of us being offered any similar package of democracy anytime soon.

Oh, and if Britain remains in the EU, then why should our standing be that much different to what it was before?
We'll still have over 91% of our pre break up population, won't we? The only differences I can see is that "new" Britain will have lost some mountains, its average yearly temperature will be slightly higher, it will only have 50% of its previous oilfields and London will pretty soon have a much bigger financial base.

Our shipbuilding/defence industry will also be returned down to the South Coast and other British locations.

End of serious stuff.

In an effort to save having to import the stuff from abroad, we could give a real kickstart to the English whisky industry (already producing top grade whisky) and have a go at making our own shortbread with pictures of Morris Dancers on the tin for the tourists.
And Long term.....
In parts of Northumberland, heather can be planted in the areas surrounding grand old buildings and castles. Lakes can be created and seeded with trout and salmon fry, and Newcastle could be offered the newly redundant Scottish subsidy for a few years, to offer apprenticeships in Castle building for its young unemployed. Their bricklaying skills could be honed to perfection by the rebuilding (possibly just a bit of repointing here and there, maybe) of Hadrian's Wall.
Once a skilled team of bricklayers and stonemasons have been created, a replica of Balmoral could then be built somewhere just off the Great North Road (near that Little Chef diner), and the Royal purse could then save some money by not having to drive so far each year.

The good men of Northumbria can be given a yearly monetary allowance to dress up in their wives old tartan skirts whenever the Royal Family come up on holiday, and find old disused telegraph poles to chuck at one another for a day or two.

Midges could be bred to tolerate our milder climate.

A British haggis industry could be created, using leftover sawdust, beef stock cubes and old discarded football bladders.

Chef training schools could spring up in an effort to recreate the culinary signature dishes of our newly departed cousins. This would greatly regenerate Mars Bar production in the South, and batter production would go through the roof. Lard would also come back into fashion.

We could shift all our catteries up to the Northern borders, and pretend that the noise at sunset each day is a piper or two, playing us a lament.

The possibilties are endless......


See Walt? There are positives to be had on both sides of the border. In actual fact, I think that a fair portion of both our populations are secretly excited about the whole thing.

I have no idea. Europe is more than the EU, but in the UK it's mostly equal.

I only can remember when similar happened here in 1955, when the Saarland became a German state by referendum.

You want heather? We've got it in spades.


That's the New Forest.

Re the EU, last time we had a referendum the majority of people were hostile to the EU until it was properly debated. There was a UKIP Yorkshire MEP on the politics show on Sunday, she wasn't well briefed at all, and seemed to want to embrace Putin and abandon NATO.

With the exception of Nigel Farage and a few others there's no real intellectual base.

Also young people are far more pro European, so we should let all the 16/17 year olds have a vote, and the Poles.

I'm pretty sure he meant EU.

Seriously, the only thing that changes is that we will no longer have a comparable population to France. Mind you, the way we're breeding here, we'll soon be equal on that score again.

You're good with finding stats, Walt. What would we be after splitting?
Third largest? Fourth?

Makes not a jot of difference anyway, as it's Germany that runs the EU. Always has done, always will, despite your protestations of it being a democracy.
Losing 9% of our per capita voting power within the EU makes no difference, as we rarely achieve anything in negotiations anyway, and even then it's only when it doesn't clash with Merkel and what she wants.


Plus ça change......

At the moment it's France 65.8 million, all UK 64.1 million; in round figures rUK would have a population of 59 million, 90% of that of France