Scottish Raj. English Wrath.
Thus spake one Susan Condor a social psychologist at the University of Lancaster in a presentation to the British Psychological Society conference in Edinburgh yesterday.
And so
am I....
“English people like the Scots and they are happy about the Scottish Parliament. They do not feel they should have the same amount of self-rule because they do not have a sense of competition with the Scots or the Welsh.
They feel that as the biggest constituent part of Britain, they have a sense of responsibility to other smaller parts and that they have to demonstrate a certain constructiveness to their political demands.
The idea of the Scottish Raj may annoy people in the media and in politics but it simply has not filtered down to the ordinary English man and woman”
She and other researchers apparently found that the English were perfectly at ease with the Scots having their own Parliament, and at the same time holding power and influence in Westminster and the higher echelons of the London-based media — a development dubbed the “Scottish Raj” by Jeremy Paxman, the BBC Newsnight presenter.
On what research did this egregious woman base her findings, you may ask?
She interviewed around 100 people several times over the past five years for the study. Just 100 people on whom she based the findings which formed the base of this presentation which will this morning be grabbing the headlines. One hundred people out of Fifty Million.
Well I have news for M\s Condor. You have been talking to the wrong people. I don't know who they were or where they were but you have missed out on the fact that there is an incipient groundswell of anger and frustration relating the fact that we English feel we are being ignored in our own country and treated as second class citizens in matters democratic.
Get out of your ivory towers of academe (or should that be cacademe) and take the trouble to find out what is really happening.
You could start with the Campaign for an English Parliament for a start. Or the English Constitutional Convention. Or the English Democrats Party...or the Witanagemot Club (see links on right).
People in England know Scots have their own Parliament but that’s about it and they are not annoyed about it,” Dr Condor said. “It is a sense that this is what the Scots have decided they want and that therefore it is appropriate that they should have it."On the contrary, M\s Condor: we are bloody annoyed. Why else would we be trying to get our own Parliament? And we are even MORE bloody annoyed that Scottish MP's are allowed to vote on matters which affect England solely - but not the other way round.
The researchers are sceptical that this new sense of “Englishness” will one day manifest itself in calls from south of the border for a break-up of Britain and for the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish to go their own ways. “The break-up of Britain could come through a more formal political route but it would not be something at the moment that the English would push for,” Dr Condor said. “Such a break-up is certainly not the settled will of the English people.”Unfortunately M\s Condor, the breakup of Britain is already under way - at the behest of the Scots and the Welsh who asked for and received their own form of government. Now on the grounds of fairness, the English want their own Parliament.
I hope that the subsequent publicity given to this presentation of yours will add to the anger felt at the inequity of the situation and hasten that end.
You can read the Times report here.
You can contact M\s Condor with your views on this subject at her homepage here...
You can read about M\s Condor's extensive research with "Muriel", "Den" "Geo" and "Ned" et al here...
Extract 4 (a): 'It makes me shudder'
Muriel When I think British and I think English, I think colonialisation. I think (pause) extermination of cultures, of languages, of religions, of replacement with which, good for the white bwana. That's what I think. I know that there was Scottish people, I know that there were Glaswegian, I know that there was probably some of my forebears played a hand in that but that's what it conjures up and it makes me shudder. It makes me shudder, it makes me shudder that, again it comes down to this superiority [Muriel, aged 46, New Labour]
It's well worth trawling HERE through the other research papers on M\s Condor's site.
You get gems like this from a Scottish person now living in England:
As a Scot, when the Scottish parliament was instigated I felt cheated because I didn't have a vote to say whether I wanted a Scottish parliament, and I don't want one.
It's something that infuriated me. It's one of my pet things. I didn't get a vote. And yet, an English person living in Scotland would have a vote. I think, at the end of the day, I still spent the majority of my life in Scotland, I still regard myself as Scottish, so, you know, I believe I should have had the right to vote in the country. It's a bit like people that are British, on holiday abroad, or living abroad, they get a vote, don't they? Why wasn't I able to get a vote? And on the other way, if you've got a person who is foreign, English, who lives in Scotland, why were they allowed to have a vote?
