Is David Cameron's joy the final nail?

Her Majesty's Prime Minister, who
conceived the late referendum on
the dismemberment of the United
Kingdom as a mode of entrapping
symptoms he could detect, of 
forces he could never understand,
immediately last Friday deliver-
ed himself of revelation again,
that self-determination in her
islands had been quashed for an-
other generation. Joy in clubland.

It was lost on no one, that this shallow and demeaning partisan boast exhausted the last of the underlying intimidation in Toryism's most frantic arguments for sustained oppression: that the repair, self-determination, would be irreparable. With what sublime and stark genius are the subjects spared their breath, in tautologies on their own desire?
We can't know, if such deeply immature arrogance will be cited, some day soon, as the final nail in his system's coffin. But we can begin to see in it, sentiment's share in mistaking ancient expe-diency for efficient distributions of justice.




Toryism, left to the Tories, has
always exposed itself to Acton's
warning of degeneration in power.
Mrs Thatcher's seizure of Disraeli's
party mirrored (yes, prefigured)
Reaganism's of Theodore Roosevelt's.
An ignoble party of nobility is all
the present generations in the Eng-
lish speaking world have ever seen.
How long will they wear its forms,
the more its pretenses are exposed?

With catastrophic miscalculation,

Tories have pursued their debasing

austerity policies with a smugness

implicating the Kingdom they rule,

as the Left, drenched in pessimism,

has surrendered the initiative to

disunion.

What is the meaning of unrecipro-
cated, nostalgic deferences? Finally,
who cares? Mr Cameron's nightmare's
above ground, and very much alive.
The chimes are audible, David, of 
when Harry cut the cord with Fal-
staff.

E.P. Thompson

Customs in Common

  Studies in Traditional

  Popular Culture

The New Press, 1993©

Jeremi Suri

Power and Protest

  Global Revolution and

  the Rise of Détente

Harvard University Press, 2003©

Hugh Trevor-Roper

The Invention of Scotland

  Myth and History

op. post.

Jeremy J. Cater, editor

Yale University Press, 2008©

Alasdair Roberts

The End of Protest

  How Free-Market Capitalism

  Learned to Control Dissent

Cornell University Press, 2014©

Katrin Bennhold

On Road to Scotland's Decision,

  Gambles and Fateful Steps

September 18, 2014

The New York Times©

Irvine Welsh

This Glorious Failure

September 19, 2014

The Guardian©