Don’t hate us because we are an island, there are much better reasons.
Just one of those odd details of life. A funny little quirk of urban left wing discourse that goes way back, why my child even to the days before Twitter, is they have a reflex resentment about Britain being an island. They really, really hate that fact, and often repeat tropes about the insular country they are unlucky enough to be living in. Geography really has it in for them. Being an island is just one more horrible aspect of life in Britain they have to put up with, poor lambs. A Scottish nationalist twist is about being forced to share an island with the English. Today you see never-ending tweet streams about life in ‘perfectly normal island’ – BUT NO IT ISN’T REALLY LMAOOOO🙈😜. Maybe if we were located where Indonesia is it would be a reference to ‘totes okay archipelago’.
It appears not to mean anything beyond the metro British left’s performative self loathing – we have the worst food! The worst constitution! That is usually combined with ignorance of the countries they say they wish to emulate. But it does mean more than that. The over-schooled metro left acts in complete ignorance of what our geography means, of our maritime history and and traditions simply because the class it stems from does. To live on an island and not to be aware of that is a serious oversight, but is not anybody’s fault. The seas and oceans to so many are just blanks on the map, annoying channels and washes they have to fly over to get to the places with the tasty food and the carefully spelt out constitutional arrangements that they think so well of.
It is not anybody’s fault, nor even deliberate. That separation from the maritime is the culmination of globalisation, the hollowing out of dockland and fishing communities, and the shrivelling of the merchant marine. Human interest and political debate has moved to other power centres and areas of concerns. It is natural that political discourse has followed suit. But this is a merely temporary state of affairs. Turn off the easy, cheap gas and oil. Watch as your soils are depleted and modern agriculture starts to unwind. Suddenly the sea becomes what it always was. A hard but necessary route for travel and trade, a hard won resource, a cruel and fatal mistress.
