If you support Irish nationalism, why not Scottish nationalism?

Balmed Out wrote: »

Agree except the rushed part. Currency, EU membership etc should have been agreed issues before any date was set for the vote.

would the European Commission have agreed to enter into any kind of negotiations with a part of a member state or a regional administration?

Plus what could they offer them? The Council votes on accession, and they couldn't have accession negotiations unless they were a sovereign state.

I think the currency question is the one that seems to be causing the most angst and uncertainty.

MakeEmLaugh wrote: »

What's it to Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Judi Dench, Stephen Hawking et al? None of them are Scottish.

If you're only allowed to voice an opinion on the country in which you live, that limits what you can talk about quite drastically.

What's it to them, is right. Of course you can voice an opinion. It just a matter of who in Scotland or GB cares what people here think? Equally we are entitled to not have an opinion or to not particularly care what the outcome is apart from a bit of curiosity, if we so wish. Oh, and I'd never be limited in my choice of conversation topics if confined to Irish affairs, I can assure you.

MakeEmLaugh wrote: »

So, in all sincerity, how would you react to a political movement which advocated the Republic of Ireland rejoining the United Kingdom?

Would you view it as reasonable, or absurd?

Its unreasonable and absurd at this stage as it wouldn't provide us with any real advantages anymore as we have been doing our own thing since 1921.

We're not deeply integrated into the UK anymore and we've a lot of deeper integration into the EU than they have.

We've also ended up in a position where if the UK leaves the EU, Ireland will basically reap the benefit of all the multinational banks looking for a business-friendly, familiar, English speaking EU location with a similar legal system...

You can't unbreak a bad marriage like that any more than you can reassemble and unscramble a smashed egg. Even if you could it wouldn't ever be quite right and the investment in doing so would be a waste of time, energy and resources.

The UK and Republic of Ireland basically burnt the bridges during the run up to independence.

Effectively we (the current generations of Irish and British) are like the grandkids of a divorced couple both of whom moved on.

There's no reason not to be friendly but there's also no reason why we would reassemble our grandparents abusive marriage either.

Scotland on the other hand is contemplating moving from a benign status quo situation in the UK into the complete unknown. That's a very different scenario to Ireland rejoining the UK.

DarkyHughes wrote: »

there's a big difference between Scotland & Ireland. All of Scotland has the right to self-deterioration but only apart of Ireland does.

Self-determination I hope!

EU membership would be a MAJOR problem though for two reasons:

1) The Euro - a lot of Scots may not be as enthusiastic about that after the financial crisis.

2) Shengen Visa and Borderless Travel agreement would mean having to possibly build a physical border with England and Wales as they're not Shengen members.

Joining the EU as a new member involves accepting all treaties as they stand. Euro and Shengen wouldn't be optional as Scotland.

Existing members can refuse to accept new agreements and retain their existing status as already agreed. If a new Scotland were joining it would be basically faced with full membership or nothing. There's no question of it just signing up to the UK membership with all of its opt outs.

If they do declare independence it will be very interesting to see how the EU reacts though.

Given that the UK may withdraw from it anyway, I wonder if they might just bend the rules for Scotland and let it in without much fuss?

The only downside I see is that Spain and possibly Belgium might not want to see the EU giving an easy ride to breakaway regions as it would be a huge incentive for the Basques, the Catalans and the Flemish.

Grayson wrote: »

To be fair, there were plenty of famines all across the UK and it was Irish landlords that made it worse here.

Cromwell was a cnut. But the English civil war killed something like 1/3rd of the population.

Lets face it, however bad the english were to us, they were just as bad to their own citizens.

Regardless of what their record at home was, it doesn't really make their level of governmental competence in Ireland during the 1800s in particular any more impressive.

The famine here simply shouldn't have happened and it was British mercantile economic policies that drove it through a doctrine of total lack of state involvement in social welfare and a notion that there were 'deserving poor' and 'undeserving poor' and that somehow the Irish and done it it themselves by not being 'good' or 'godly' or whatever their daft criteria was at the time.

Establishment Victorians weren't really very nice people by any standards. Strict adherence to a class system and a lot of notions that you deserved your fate and that you shouldn't be helped seemed to prevail at the time.

In some respects, modern very right wing US politics is very similar to the norms of Victorian Britain i.e. that the state shouldn't really do anything other than wage war to protect profit of the empire.

The simple reality from an Irish perspective was that people were demanding change from an almost unreformed feudal land ownership system and a harshly mercantile economic dogma that was literally killing people.

I'm pretty sure the main reason the establishment were so keen to quash any uprising in Ireland is that conditions in parts of Britain weren't an awful lot better and there was a significant risk of the revolutionary notions spreading. Had push come to shove or had their been a serious economic crisis in Britain, you could have very easily seen a situation where there was a revolution of the "lower classes".

The British aristocracy absolutely hated the French for similar reasons. There was a terror that the French revolution was going to cross the channel at any time an the smelly peasants might rise up. The reality is that Ireland's leaving sort of was a limited "UK revolution". They just don't like to talk about it in those kinds of contexts and prefer to just tidy it all up as "the Irish Question"....

The rights, wrongs and reasons for the policies are largely irrelevant though.
The simple fact was the Irish were *very* annoyed with the establishment and supported revolutionary change because of the circumstances they were faced with at the time.

The Irish situation during the 1800s was extremely grim, even by comparison to poor parts of England. The only scenario as bad was the Highland Clearances in the 1840s

You also had a lot of pseudoscientific racism aimed at non-English populations in the UK in that period. There were a lot of ridiculous notions that the Irish and the Scots and the Welsh were literally racially inferior.

Scotland doesn't really have anything remotely like that situation at the moment and really the only arguments in favour of leaving are just purely nationalism.

All that I'm saying is that 2014 Scotland is not 1916 Ireland or 1840s Ireland nor is it Northern Ireland in 1976 for that matter either.

I don't really see the urgent push factor that would tip them over the edge to be annoyed enough to leave the modern UK.
They may well have had arguments for it in the 1800s (although the Scottish Establishment was also to blame there too).

You can't really compare Victorian UK to 21st Century UK. Ireland really left at what was effectively the tail end of the Victorian era and the start of the Modern Era.

Britain's fundamental change in society and politics really happened after WWI and more dramatically after WWII.

...

To sumarise a long post:

Ireland's 19th century history and Scotland's 21st century present aren't really comparable situations in almost any way.