Carryfast:
Why should the demands of the English voters be imposed on Scottish voters and vice versa.Or the European vote in England.Especially when neither has any democratic control over each other’s MP’s.
Because the MP is not the controller. The MP is the person you send to Parliament to represent you as part of the democratic process. Other voters send their MP. (The Parliamentary democracy we have is not necessarily the only kind of democracy, though.)
When your position here is boiled down, it amounts to a rejection of democracy because you don’t have control over the other voters! That’s not the purpose of democracy. Part of the function of democracy is to rehearse the mentality that you act as peers influencing collective policy, not as individual sovereigns bargaining for your own immediate benefit. We tolerate collective policies because they are mutually beneficial in the round. At some point in the past people have experienced the effects of acting as individual sovereigns themselves and of trying to deal with other individual sovereigns on those terms.
Another function of democracy is to provide a forum where common policies are discussed, and to embed the habit and expectation of discussion, and where individual voters are expected to familiarise themselves with policy and contribute to the collective understanding of the nature and effects of common policy (including proposed policy), and to help integrate different aspects of common policy.
Voting helps not only iron out individual idiosyncracies, but acts as a declaration that any particular policy has the commitment of the most people for the time being (which can always be changed later by another vote after a period of reflection, if a policy is put to the test and perceptions of it change). Voting is not the method by which policies are assured to be correct, only a measure of what the most people perceive to be correct, and hence it helps (more so than any other method) to maintain the integrity of the political whole.
On what evidence do you base your idea that Nationalism isn’t all about respect of the right to self determination of others.
There is a great deal of evidence that, within that mentality, if your own right of self-determination comes into conflict with others’ equivalent rights to self-determination, it is your own right that is prioritised over the others’ rights. Many political conflicts arise that involve the interests of more than one sovereign, and they don’t always arise in such a fashion that the problem can be simply put into abeyance or the status quo maintained indefinitely.
Few sovereigns are in practice willing to constrain themselves only to activities that absolutely do not impugn the rights and interests of others, because so little in life can be done within those terms. Other sovereigns who attempt to reinforce the principle on those whose commitment to the principle starts to slip, must themselves violate the principle and often much more grossly by interfering in the other’s affairs. And because the sovereign who was initially slipping from the mutual principles of respect had already begun to prioritise their own interests and reject mutual respect, the intervention of other sovereigns is rarely perceived as the firm but helping hand of discipline, but as a cause for a much greater grievance.
Are you saying that Catalans are expansionist nutters looking to take over Spain or that Ireland was out to take over the UK.
Not for the time being, but look at Israel and the Zionists. And bear in mind that I’m not saying nationalism is inherently expansionist geographically. I’m saying that it inevitably seeks to impose upon its neighbours even if it does not want to destroy them - and not always as an aggressive act, but as an expression of self-determination and a by-product of the wielding of power and what it seeks to achieve. The seeking to destroy comes later, once tensions and grievances have accumulated, when those neighbours refuse to be imposed upon, and indeed seek to impose in their turn.
Also bearing in mind that both the Nazis and Stalinists were allies in the Socialist anti nation state subjugation of Europe before falling out with each other.
Hitler was allies with everyone before he fell out with everyone. He had a peace treaty with Chamberlain at the same time as he was running the concentration camps (a practice that had itself been an innovation of the British only a few decades before).
As for local democracy you don’t seem to have answered the question as to whether you aree that MP’s in mining constituencies should have had the power to VETO or at least opt out of Thatcher’s mine closure policy ?
I thought I had answered that, when I said no, they should not in principle have the power to veto (although I can see why it sometimes exists initially in democracies whilst work is done to dissolve old divisions and dismantle degenerate local allegiances, such as in Northern Irish politics).
And even in your terms, it would follow that other MPs would have the right to veto access to their coal markets, their use of common infrastructure, and so on - which would still have the same effect of closing down mining activity, but by wielding power and vetoes on the assumptions that underpinned large-scale mining activity (such as the existence of outlet markets for coal in other Tory MPs’ territories), rather than simply controlling the activity directly.
The irony is that Thatcher (and those of her mentality) could have done substantial collective damage with such local vetoes, even in the absence of actually winning a majority in a general election, which is why such absolute local control is demolished in the course of building nations historically.
If miners as workers didn’t want a right-wing government, then maybe workers shouldn’t have voted for one, or maybe it reflects an underlying division amongst workers themselves that had to be resolved (and for which they’ll suffer in the meantime against bosses who are united).