Having heard or read a few interesting items lately, I realised and put them together as a a quirky time-slice portrait of the ‘United Kingdom’ – which I thought I’d share. Most are freely accessible materials, but to read the articles on Scotland requires subscribing to Red Pepper (which would be good because it’s always worth reading and it desperately needs subscribers!)
Wales: The Welsh M1: Cerys Mathew on the A470 which runs nearly two hundred miles through the heart of Wales from Llandudno to CardiffBay. It was created to connect north and south of the country yet it takes four hours – sometimes more – to make the journey. It’s certainly not the fastest road in the UK but to drive the A470 is to truly understand the landscape, history, culture and language of Wales.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03nt8g7
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03pmdld
England: It was 20 years ago today… How has England changed? In 1994 Will Self wrote a long essay about English culture: how has the nation changed since then? And do the old cherished ideas of Englishness bear any resemblance to reality?
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/17/how-has-england-changed-will-self
Scotland: At the crossroads: A new-born star – Roz Paterson sees new political alignments and vibrancy on the left; Imagining a better nation – Creating a different Scotland is beginning to galvanise radical thinking, argues Jim Johnson; More views on independence – Katy Clark MP, Philip Stott and Carolyn Leckie. Step backward, leap forward – Scotland is resistancing global capitalism, writes Tom Nairn
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/latest-issue/
(for an earlier version of Tom Nairn’s essay see New Faces of Nationalism
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/tom-nairn/new-faces-of-nationalism)
Northern Ireland: Excluded and silenced: Women in Northern Ireland after the peace process by Margaret Ward
January 20, 2014 at 5:23 pm
In 2001, 50,000 people signed a petition for a referendum on the prospect of a Cornish Assembly. http://robscornishblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/case-for-cornish-assembly.html
This call was ignored at the time and since, by a New Labour wedded to devolution on the basis of the top-down Euroregions, and LibDems paying some lip-service locally but doing nothing.
January 22, 2014 at 9:51 am
Thanks Kelvin these look interesting – maybe something on London being like another planet would fit in here too?!