An Almost Peronist Flavour

Iain Martin writes:

Viewers tuning into STV, the Scottish version of ITV, will be treated to a Hogmanay special hosted by the talented (if politically misguided) actress Elaine C. Smith, who will present from a replica of her parents 1970s living room. This is not a wind-up; it is true.

Smith is a raving Scottish Nationalist, but this does not make her unusual and political affiliations should be no bar to presenting couthy television shows.

What is deeply weird though is the choice of guests on the show. The SNP leader and Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and her mother and her sister are the main attraction. The other guest is a pro-SNP “comedian”.

Any SNP supporter who cannot see that this initiative is mildly disturbing, that it has an almost Peronist flavour, needs to consider how bizarre it would look if ITV in England put on an “at home with the Camerons” special on Christmas Day.

It simply wouldn’t happen. Cameron would refuse. No television executive alive in London would consider asking anyway. The broadcasting regulators, mindful of bias, would have a heart attack if anyone tried.

Yet, in SNP-controlled Scotland this is the new normal.

Never mind Northern Ireland or the Falkland Islands.

One of the reasons for the abject failure of the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn by reference to long ago disputes over those two is that Middle England now wants rid even of Scotland, or is at most indifferent to the prospect of that loss.

Middle England would not have fought for the Falklands if it had meant that bombs might have gone off in England, or at any rate in the South. For exactly that reason, Middle England never wanted to fight for Northern Ireland, either.

That fight was abandoned as soon as there came to be much in the way of wider middle-class political influence on such matters, something that there had never really been before the 1990s.

While dominating the British economy, society, culture, and body politic, the middle middle classes have barely joined the Armed Forces in decades. Indeed, for about as long as they themselves have been an identifiable category.

They now almost never do so, and they have always been more or less defined by their contempt for those sections of society which did and do still send any great numbers of people into military service.

Other than hitting it in the wallet, which is absolutely guaranteed to work and which much of the earth can now do to Britain with barely any effort at all, terrorism at home is the only way to get the attention of this mighty bloc.

And since no one else wants the territory on which those people themselves live, they will cheerfully give anywhere else whatever to anyone who wants it enough to make a fuss. In return for the retained or restored quietness of their own lives, the bottom line of which is always the bottom line.

Ask the Israelis. Or the IRA.

People who imagine that anything in Sadiq Khan's background might make it remotely difficult for him to be elected in London should bear in mind that it was not until 2008 that London first declined any of its many opportunities to elect Ken Livingstone to anything, and even then it did not do so by very much.

In six or seven months' time, Livingstone may well have been restored to Parliament by the city that has never missed an opportunity to elect Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonnell.

London is not allowed to flood, but other places are. Steelworks can go bust, and the last mines can close, but the City's banks must be rescued without their even being required to pay any tax.

And one Republican bomb in London, or probably anywhere in the South of England, would result in an immediate and unconditional British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.

The economically, socially, culturally and politically dominant class would refuse to countenance any other response.

The rise of that class has coincided precisely with the simple abandonment of great swaths of the globe, sometimes because keeping hold of them was nothing more than mildly inconvenient, and especially if that retention had become at all expensive.

Thus were routinely left behind, without a second thought, "kith and kin" populations that were larger than the Unionist vote in Northern Ireland, and colossally larger than the population of the Falkland Islands.

Not that that process began with the almost accidental expansion of the middle class in the 1950s. As the Second World War raged in the Pacific, Churchill had been all ready to hand over Australia and New Zealand to the Japanese.

Just as, in May 1940, he had been all ready to give Mussolini Gibraltar, among several other places, including the ones inhabited by the white settlers in Kenya and Uganda.

Then again, Fascist rule might have suited the Happy Valley set down to the ground. But whether or not it would have done so was of no interest to Churchill.

Who in Middle England would now see anything kith-ish or kin-like in Happy Valley, or in 1940s Australia, or in 1970s white Rhodesia, or in the Unionists of Northern Ireland (when did they ever?), or in the Falkland Islanders' carefully contrived depiction of themselves as the rural South from three or four generations ago?

Middle England no longer sees that even in Scotland.

Moreover, it has contentedly allowed the North of England to flood in order to provide somewhere to locate, in the event of Scottish independence, the Trident that it has compelled the British State to buy instead of flood defences.