The Britishness of Their Scottishness in the Englishness of Our Britishness
The Upper (formerly Lower) Miliband has been demonstrating just how far the Labour leadership has progressed beyond the Brownite obsession with the tempestuous non-issue of Britishness; the answer, in case you hadn't guessed it, is not far. Anxious as ever to outflank the Conservatives in the perpetual struggle to lay claim to the last refuge of a scoundrel, the Upper (formerly Lower) Miliband waded into the Jubilee afterglow to warn the Scots that voting for independence would result in geographical catastrophe: "If they leave the UK they won't be British any more: it stands to reason." Apparently, should the fiend Salmond get his wicked way, the island of Great Britain will crack in two: Scotland and England are British in no other sense than that of being part of a political union, with mere six-hundred-mile lumps of continental shelf being purely the stuff of quibble.
3 Comments:
At 8:47 pm ,
Michael Greenwell said...
Brilliant stuff.
I think we discussed this sort of thing somewhere before. Where would that have been?
P.S.
the security thing for these comments says "Prove you're not a robot".
Do they mean that in the science-fiction sense? It might be beyond us to actually prove that.
At 9:59 pm ,
Jim Bliss said...
Yes, but didn't you hear the man? It stands to reason! How much more proof could you possibly need?
At 12:59 am ,
Philip said...
Michael: thanks. I think the subject came up during the Great Drunken Podcast of 2009 or thereabouts.
My favourite line about the distinction between people and robots concerns not Blade Runner replicants but Isaac Asimov's positronic breed. Dr Susan Calvin (with whom, like Asimov, I fell in love at an early stage) is asked whether robots are mentally all that different from people. "Worlds different," she says. "Robots are essentially decent."
Jim: strangely enough, when I read that phrase I heard it in quite a different voice to that of the Upper Miliband.
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