Reasonable account of a state passing out of history

This is a decent essay by a reasonable man, offering a reasonable account of the sources behind the UK’s current crisis of identity.

Esler’s Scottish conscience can’t help but force him to be more honest about those sources, their contradictory natures and their workings out on the peoples of these islands than one usually finds in other similar works.

So he avoids the worst of the rose-tinted nostalgia he interrogates very well, yet he can’t help glancing back himself through a certain sepia-tinged gauze, and fails to make explicit certain connections and resonances that might pick out the glints of the harder edges to ‘Britishness’ that has underpinned that conquest state over the past three centuries. The suggestion that Bridget Cleary’s murder was somehow representative of the Irish Catholic community in general of the time and thus justify Protestant opposition to home rule is ludicrous. We hear about his ancestors in 1912 and their supposedly reasonable decision to stick with the UK; not so much about the proto-fascism and ethnic cleansing in the province 1920-22.

Indeed, for all the references to the ‘four nations’, Gavin doesn’t really provide any reason to credit Northern Ireland with a status equivalent to that of the three historic nations on the island of Britain. And one cannot escape the feeling that, like most non-English unionists charmed and mystified by what ‘Britishness’ means, Gavin simply missed that at root it’s a pseudo-nativist cosplay of a kind of Britannic “romanitas” by English elites, indulged in with the same amateurish spirit of ambiguity they bring to so many of the games they play between themselves.

With those legendary gifts for omission and understatement that mark the English aristocratic tradition, it was easy to overlook it as a Jock or a Paddy or a Taffy on the make in London. But it remained true nevertheless. Britain, Albion, the UK, the British Isles: it really doesn’t matter, for it was all only ever England, for England; this was a truth not requiring explicit uttering, but one tacitly approved of and maintained by all the right sort of people, from the better families and with the proper qualifications.

Anyway, still a decent if flawed light essay on current affairs improved greatly by some great narration.

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