A 'Cash-Register Under a Red-White-and-Blue Shroud'

Christopher Harvie on the background to Two Flags' recent quest for Britishness:

"When Gordon Brown first approached the national question – and there is a history – he didn't home in on the revival of democratic political thought in Scotland, notably around the Scottish Constitutional Convention (1989-93). Tom Nairn's essays, Alasdair Gray's novels, and the lively feminism which ensured a 40% female parliament were influential on Charter 88 – encouraging active citizenship, open government and electoral reform. But instead he took to Linda Colley's bestseller Britons: Forging the Nation, 1688-1837.

After its publication in 1992 this robust work became a central text of whatever sustained attention New Labour gave to the constitutional ethos. Colley was, like her husband the historian David Cannadine, and TV's Simon Schama, a protégé of that worldly, though latterly very rightwing don, Cambridge's Sir Jack Plumb.

She attracted the London-based constitutional optimists, who sought a painless remodelling of the United Kingdom in a touchy-feely way, since her message seemed to be that the old Protestant-military-imperial paint had to be replaced by something more contemporary. But suppose the analogy wasn't with the paintwork but with the internal reinforcement of a ferro-concrete building? And what if the now-corroded rods were those of industry and class?

Colley's historiography, though gutsy, was partial. Her illustrations were great, but at a closer look they all came from London. She stressed trade and patriotism rather than manufacturing, and discounted divisions within Protestantism, which got worse just after her story ended: the Disruption in Scotland, the "treason of the Blue Books" in Wales. On the major constitutional change of her period, the incorporation after a bloodbath of unwilling Catholic Ireland, 1800-1, she was near-silent. She went on to endorse Anglocentric flapdoodle like Sir Roy Strong's The Story of Britain (1996) and she has not tried to defend her thesis when attacked, claiming to be "impartial" by being unacceptable to Scottish nationalists like your man and unionists such as Michael Gove MP: a debating manoeuvre, not an argument.

Things got really silly with another Plumb discovery. The egregious Niall Ferguson told the readers of the Sunday Telegraph on 1 January 2006 that Scotland ought to be "liquidated", basing part of his diatribe – argument isn’t the word – on a claim that Robert Burns:

"was too universal a man to be consistently a Scottish nationalist. He alternated between half-cut Braveheart mode ('Scots Wha Hae wi' Wallace Bled') and deep cynicism (‘Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!’)."

Ferguson is certainly a polemicist. His claim to be a historian is slighter."

Full article here...

4 comments

Thanks for pointing to that article; Harvie did a great job in 'No Gods and Precious Few Heroes' and this piece was just as good: a sharp, intelligent and passionate andling of a complex problem I loved his deflating of Niall Ferguson....

left by Delescluze on 26 January 2006

Yes Fergusons imbecility is remarkable. The idea of universalism marking someone as inappropriate for a cultural icon is great. I'm stil wiping the tears from my eyes.

left by Gus on 26 January 2006

i read the ferguson article too and can only say 'twat'

http://thumpingthetub.blogspot.com

left by michael the tubthumper on 27 January 2006

Aye, and not only a twat: he is also a wee nyaff.

left by Delescluze on 27 January 2006