An American Democrat is a British Conservative

Via The Dish

Andrew Sullivan wrote in November 2014 that 'A British Tory Is An American Democrat':

"Here’s an indication of just how far to the right the American political discourse is, compared with Britain – the developed country most in tune with American neo-liberalism (above). That’s why David Cameron and Barack Obama have long had such an easy relationship. Either one could fit easily into the other’s cabinet. And maybe it does help explain why I still consider myself a conservative. I am, as a Brit."

#WhitePaper - Salmondite as Redmondite politics

Newton Emerson wrote in the Sunday Times of February 16 2014:

"The parallels between Redmond and SNP leader Alex Salmond are remarkable, as the Scottish press has noted. In his long, democratic fight for Home Rule, Redmond played down identity politics, spurned cultural nationalism and focused on debating the practicalities, until he could portray the debate as negotiating the inevitable. Salmond has done the same and the results are transformative. Meanwhile, Adams remains an anti-Redmondite two decades after the IRA-ceasefire. His vision of a United Ireland is high on symbolism and low on detail, invoking all the alarm of change with none of the assurance of fact."

#WhitePaper - Unionists don’t simply need a plan, they need a story

Cartoon of Alex Massie by Morten Morland

Alex Massie (@AlexMassie) wrote in The Spectator here

"For a long time now, the case for the United Kingdom has been made in a tiresomely negative sense... Practical difficulties are the things politicians are elected to solve. Or at least ameliorate. The case for the Union needs to be about something bigger and better than that. Unionists don’t simply need a plan, they need a story."

Being British is not about being not-Irish

Stuart Hall, cultural theorist and founder of cultural studies, said:

"I think that the British have a future only if they can come to terms with the fact that Britishness is not one thing and has never been one thing there have been a million different ways of being British and there’ve been a million different struggles about Britishness which only retrospectively are then smoothly accommodated into the story as if its unfolding seamlessly from
 Beginning to end.”

Alex Massie recently said here:

"You can be a Highlander, Scottish and British — just as you can be Cornish, English and British."

Writing is hard, Ctd

Speak fluent human! RT “@mathewi good advice on "throat clearing," which I am kind of addicted to RT @zseward pic.twitter.com/8uY24QwT4Y”
— Brian John Spencer (@brianjohnspencr) December 17, 2013

Read Gideon Lichfield in the tweet above. See what he says about "throat clearing." Well, writing can be very hard. Perfectly hard enough to not require the extra difficulties that are of the perfectly avoidable kind. People often have the habit of coating their writing with introductory layers of fluff that mask for an introduction. According to Lichfield: avoid the throat clearing. 

My previous posts in Writing is hard series are here with Alex Massie, with Tim Kreider here, with Christopher Hitchens here, with American author Stanley Karnow here, with Ernest Hemingway here, with Neil Gaiman here, with James Joyce here, with Dan Brown here. My piece that looks at George Orwell's 6 rules to good writing is here. I also wrote a piece on The Huffington Post here.

I've also posted here about the propensity for law school to teach law students to write badly here. I made The Case For Plain English here. I've also written a few pieces, including here, on Writing on Paper as a way of making the writing process easier. Apparently blogging is an art form, see here.

Alex Massie - Causing offence has become the greatest sin imaginable

Alex Massie (@alexmassie) featured on Ask Andrew Anything here and above and said of the British and American press and wider culture:

"Causing offence has become the greatest sin imaginable in modern America and to some extent in Britain also as well where we so often follow American cultural leads."

My blog post on self-censorship as the worst form of censorship here. The student culture of censorship here. My blog post on the urge to censor in Northern Ireland here.

Writing is hard, Ctd Alex Massie

Do the Germans have a word for the period of anxiety between filing a column and discovering whether your editor thinks it is any good?
— alexmassie (@alexmassie) November 13, 2013

Alex Massie - It's about remembering not celebrating

Scotland's Alex Massie wrote on wearing the poppy in The Spectator blog here. He said:

"Consider the photograph at the top of this post. It was taken on Armistice Day in 1924. In Dublin.Yes, Dublin. The Union Flag is flown. The National Anthem – ie, God Save the King – is sung. A Celtic Cross is erected on College Green prior to its transportation to France where it would serve as a memorial to the 16th Irish Division. Some reports estimate as many as 50,000 Irishmen attended the commemoration. (There is British Pathe footage of it here). The Irish Times proudly reported that “the display of Flanders poppies was not equalled by any city in the British isles”. 

He continued: 

"Commemorations on this scale were not unusual in the 1920s. Two years later some 40,000 Irishmen marched to the Phoenix Park for a service of commemoration beneath the imposing Wellington Monument... The poppy and remembrance fell from favour in Ireland, elbowed aside by the rival story of the Easter Rising. A rebellion thought contemptible by most Dubliners became the national epic (in large part thanks to the British government’s obtuse reaction to the events of Easter 1916, a reaction that remains obtuse even if considered within the context of the First World War). But we can see more clearly now even if, paradoxically, also more darkly. This is Ireland, after all.

He continued:

"[The] enthusiasm was not restricted to Unionists. In 1919 Joe Devlin, the nationalist MP for West Belfast, declared that the 16th Irish Division’s dead “died not as cowards died, but as soldiers of freedom, with their faces toward the fire, and in the belief that their life-blood was poured out in defence of liberty for the world”. If England’s difficulty was, for some, Ireland’s opportunity there remained many others who saw the struggle for Ireland as a small part of a wider struggle to establish the rights of all small nations. Fighting for Belgium or for Serbia was a proxy for fighting for Ireland."

He concluded:

"No-one celebrates the First World War. How could you? But remembering it, in all its complexity, is one way of helping to understand who we are and how we came to be who we are, wherever we happen to be."

Read Alex Massie in full here. Read my previous blog post on the Irish in WWI featuring historian Diarmaid Ferriter and John Redmond here.