Comments on: Maybe not quite as British as Finchley? Why, it must be Dennis Kennedy and the Cadogan Group.

By: WorldbyStorm

WorldbyStorm — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 08:23:58 +0000

Yeah, there are definitely going to be litmus tests for just how much things have changed and the one you point to is crucial because it deals with just the sort of political/identity issues that for all of Stormont 1 were ignored. I don’t have an aversion to the stepping stone argument, but this is a dual process, to make the North both more complementary of those within it and retain the option for future progress for Republican/Nationalists and simultaneously for Unionists. Quite a feat.

Tom, that’s it in a nutshell.

By: Ciarán

Ciarán — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 00:54:49 +0000

But hidden within those protestations is another message, one that Kennedy and the Cadogan Group have been pushing for quite some time, that being that all would have been well if Catholic could be reconciled to the NI state and somehow discard their nationalist and Republican political pretensions. I've heard it argued that this is currently what SF are doing by being in government with DUP in Stormont, except that the nationalist and republican pretensions are maintained. With both SF and SDLP giving support to the six-county set-up, you have a situtation (or sitcheeaschen) where for the first time in the history of the statelet it has support from the majority of nationalists - though in this case it's seen as merely a stepping stone or whatever and not an end in itself. Obviously it's not a new argument to suggest that good governance in the six counties would lessen the demand for the reunification of Ireland, but the question is whether or not that's even possible (see John McAnulty's contribution in the "Peoples Democracy, ideology and just what is Trotskyism?" comments). Personally I'm interested in seeing just what becomes of the Irish Language Act, which is according to some unionists a major threat to the "British" identity of Norn Iron. If they can't "appease" the Gaeilgeoirí, then what hope is there?

By: Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 00:45:45 +0000

The irony is the convoluted integrationist logic underlying it.

The state doesn’t impose British identity in the North, according to Kennedy, so it shouldn’t impose it in Britain either, so that the North can continue to be just as British as Britain.

By: WorldbyStorm

WorldbyStorm — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 22:06:29 +0000

That’s it. It’s quite a shift even for the ‘pragmatic’ Unionist camp.

By: Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:13:12 +0000

Kennedy seems to be arguing that pragmatic economic and democratic arguments for accepting British institutions can substitute for a strong sense of British identity.

What he doesn’t acknowledge, accept maybe in the final line, is that its precisely the economic and democratic arguments that have driven the rise of English, Scottish and Welsh nationalism.

It’s because Brown doesn’t want to address those arguments directly that he has resorted to ‘banging on about Britishness’.