Last edited Sun Aug 11, 2019, 05:00 PM - Edit history (1)
still be clinging to the scraps of the union flag.
He's very eloquent on the subject of what he terms "English nationalism" (the historically invisible nationalism that subsumes the UK member nations and offshoots under the mantle of "Britishness", and for too many, "Englishness", as if the country was in any way united or uniform).
He then seemingly shifts seamlessly to including the drive for Scottish independence under the rubric of "toxic nationalism" or even "dysfunctional nationalism" (with Ireland/Northern Ireland and Wales tagged in as if an afterthought since their desires are as yet less clearly expressed) while offering no evidence for this beyond his usual dogma - he's widely ridiculed in Scotland for having given the same largely irrelevant speeches and publishing the same irrelevant articles since before the first independence referendum, one Scottish cartoonist routinely depicting him as a dinosaur fitfully awoken to stir from the Old Centrist Left's tarpits.
He equates the anti-democratic machinations of Johnson, Cummings et al. with a Scottish independence movement that has so far played everything by the constitutional book - painfully so for those who're impatient for a second indyref. He conflates an inward-looking, incoherent xenophobic nationalism with a movement that's self-defined as internationalist and inclusive and holds those ideals dear and wants to be able to develop them unencumbered by its neighbour's drive (democratically or undemocratically) in another direction.
That movement pre-dated Brexit. Its arguments have only become more compelling as time has worn on. Brown has no answers other than slavish devotion to a rosy concept of a "tolerant, inclusive and outward-looking" UK that in reality never existed.
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