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The Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations research seminar:-
October 2, 2013
4-5pm, Room CA228, The ATriuM, Cardiff CF24 2FN.
Scots, “Britain” and the (so far) United Kingdom: Constitutional Niceties.
Professor Ian Brown, Kingston University
Abstract:
Ed Miliband has sought to assert the need for One Nation Labourism. In response to David Cameron’s plans to reduce provision of state benefits, The Guardian in a leader concluded ‘this is an agenda to cement Britain into two nations’. Here the conception ‘nation’ is that of an entity united in Benedict Anderson’s phrase in an ‘imagined community’. And the one nation that is imagined in unity (or division) is 'Britain’. Certainly the wall-to-wall televisual presentation of the Queen’s diamond jubilee and the London Olympics and Paralympics asserted again and again the conception of Team GB, an indissoluble Britain. And yet, in less than a year, a referendum will be held in Scotland, in the terminology of one side of the argument, to split up Britain and separate Scotland from the United Kingdom and, in the terms of the other, to re-establish Scotland’s independence. The question that arises is just what is ‘Britain’? What is the 'United’ Kingdom? Where does that formulation arise? And on what basis are Scots seeking to modify it rather radically?
Professor Ian Brown is Professor of Drama at Kingston University and an External Professor at the Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations.He is the editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Drama (2011) and From Tartan to Tartanry: Scottish Culture, History and Myth (2010).
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