A Scottish parent living in Bradford has expressed concern that their young child is having to take part in “One Britain One Nation” week at their primary school.
The week involves pupils dressing up in red, white and blue and singing an “anthem” called “One Britain One Dream”, which ends with the repeating lines “Strong Britain Great Nation”.
Regardless of my nationality, I’d be extremely wary of allowing my child to take part in this kind of so clearly political festival.
Particularly as it’s so plainly not true that we are one nation (given that we are actually three nations and a province) and that there is a massive divide between the way that Scotland and England vote (ie how we want to live our lives), whether in UK elections or UK referenda.
The idea that we should be teaching kids that we are united, strong, or great, is an insult to education and has a rather scary overtone.
Frighteningly it brings to mind 1930s Germany…
As John O’Connell so rightly said: “Ein Volk, Ein Reich”.
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
Showings of “A Triumph Of The Will” coming soon…
(I think I have it on a tape somewhere…)
Learn the Marseillease!
(sings) “Allons, enfants de la Patrie…”
I went to a rugby match in Paris once – with a French girl – was wearing a kilt and had tricouleur face paint. Good fun.
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When patriotism is forced down necks it really is, as Samuel Johnson said, the last vestige of the scoundrel. (No, he didn’t. As John pointed out he said it was “the last REFUGE of the scoundrel”. Duh… Bed with no supper: Munguin
In other words, “everything is getting harder, but we must remember that we love our queen and this great country of ours… no matter how hard or dreadful life becomes for the lower orders.
“In the meantime, does anyone want to pay for my wedding? Because I only earn about 15 times the average wage and have at my disposal only 4 residences that I can use at my whim and free transport wherever I go. How can a fellow like me live off that kind of money?”
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And I can’t spell.
Marseillaise.
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Not a hanging offence, Derek! French has quite a few words which are rather a challenge for anglophones to get right in spelling or in speech – bouillabaisse, ratatouille, voyage, vieille – but they’re nothing compared to English and its bizarrenesses such as Knightsbridge, gyascutus, nauseous, practice and practise, desert and dessert, indict, liquefy, minuscule…
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My favourite is Featheringstone-Haugh pronounced Fanshaw.
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Oddly enough, Tris, “Featherstonehaugh” did actually pass through my mind as I was thinking up those choice bits of English – largely because I’ve just read some cozy mysteries in which one of the dramatis personæ is so named.
Spooky, eh?
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Yeah. Isn’t it?
Great minds, Ed… great minds!
Is that Featherstone-Haugh the one that works for the Foreign Office and has a sister with a title and penchant for solving murders?
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Oh yes, Lady Emily Hardcastle and her lady’s maid, knife-thrower and assassin Florence Armstrong from the Valleys via the circus, in Edwardian England.
Ooooh, this is just so incredibly spooky, Tris! I shall be awake all night in expectation of supernatural events!
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That’s it , Ed. Brilliant bedtime reading.
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French is a bother to spell, ain’t it just!¬
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Indeed, it’s incredibly sinister. I was reading a comment somewhere recently ( in the context of Tory England going in a far right wing direction) likening the situation to 1930’s Germany and quoting people in the UK post WW2, asking, ‘why did no one do anything about it?’ Might people in England or rUK ask the same one day?
Having read about the ‘One Britain one dream’ stuff, it really is akin to the message of the Nazi’s in Germany back then. Thing is some did try to do something about it, but they were persecuted, and/or their
family were threatened, and of course many had to exile. I had a German neighbour whose family had to exile to denmark during WW2, she said they were forced to do the nazi salute at school etc…her family’s farm was taken by the state. It’s a fine line between a right wing government breaking their own laws and international law, and enforcing a narrow far right wing, insular patriotism where those who do not agree with it are excluded at best, persecuted and threatened at worst.
England is on the verge of fascism, will anyone do anything about it or speak out, in England?
Scotland better exit the UK pronto, or have their parliament scrapped and or face a BritNat coup.
Of course the most worrying part is that the whole thing is a complete lie, it’s not educational, it’s indoctrination and brainwashing, abhorrent indeed in the 21st century. No anymore EU to stop this sort of mind manipulation of England’s school children. Terrifying.
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I’ve found the compulsory flags on driving licences and from UK government buildings and the “blue” passports vaguely amusing.
My passport was due to end in September this year but I had a text from the passport office saying that I should renew it earlier because of Brexit. No mention of a refund for the lost period, of course.
I dealt with the flag on my driving licence by putting a sticker of a Scottish flag over it.
I’ve yet to see a Jack in Dundee on a government building, possibly because these buildings are invariably shared and quite likely other tenants have refused permission.
I wonder what will be next.
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For once,I have to come to the defence of UK bureaucrats. In the Middle East i went through passports in short order – even the extra-large ones, because of all the regional travelling. Entry visas every time, and lots of stamping for entry and exit. A trip to Saudi alone took up two pages! Then UAE residence stamps also gobbled up space, plus Media City licence and various other entries.
That’s why I always ran out of passport space years before expiry. I’d stump up for a new one – and go through at least three weeks of being grounded as without passport I couldn’t go anywhere. (Awful. No dry stints in Saudi or Kuwait so I was forced to go the pub.)
The good word for the passport office is that the expiry date of the new one would be extended to match that of the previous, not 10 years from date of issue. I’d expect your new one to be treated the same way so you don’t lose out on early renewal.
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Ah well, thanks for the explanation. Of course, I’ve not much used my passport in the last ten years becasue I had caring duties for a lot of that time. And of course these days, at least in Europe, no one stamps a passport so, in the last 10 years although I’ve been to France a few times, Switzerland, Hungary, Austria, Ireland and Iceland, I’ve not got one single stamp.
I’m not renewing at the moment because I really don’t want one of these hideous blue passports and besides, I have no intention of undertaking international travel while Covid is still so troublesome.
I’ll probably have to get one at some point in the future, but I was hoping that it would be a Scottish passport or a European one.
It boils my blood that my Northern Irish neighbours have EU passports.
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You can at least get a Scottish cover to hide the blue bits. I used to have one on my EU passport – that’s still good for a few years – but Saudi immigration officials had a habit of dismantling passports and they’d disappear into a back office for ages. When it eventually reappeared – no cover. Where is it? Shrug, and ‘Next!’ So that was the end of that bit of independence assertion.
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I had one, John, but passports now have to be all the same size and made of the same material so that they can be read by the readers which are internationally used.
So they made me take the cover off so that it would fit into the reader.
After a while I gave up. I didn’t mind having an EU passport.
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Where does it come from? Is this a national education dept initiative that’s happening across all schools in England and all age groups, or a local education authority thing just for Bradford? Could it be a Patel brainwave, aimed at immigrants or second/third generation immigrants to help then ‘integrate’ and pass the Tebbit ‘cricket test’ for being proper English? And why has nobody called it out – apart from Tris and Munguin?
Whatever the answers, I can only agree with the comments about overtones of 1930s Germany. How long before the Scouts and Guides are replaced with an Englander Jugendbewegung lookalike?
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To be fair John, I’ve seen a fair few comments on Twitter about it.
It would be interesting to find out if this is a national thing or a local initiative.
I’ve never heard of any “un-Britishness” in Bradford… Much more of that here.
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Nationality is like sex, Tris: it’s all very well unless They make it compulsory.
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A good analogy, Ed.
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Quite so. Fascism as patriotism, and chuck that lazy misapprehension, so prevalent south of the Border, that the sotry of the Union is “How England became Britain”.
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Ach. “Chuck in”. “Story”. Eyes not properly open yet.
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Tris too, I think, Ed. Typed ‘last vestige’ of the scoundrel when he meant ‘last refuge’. Even with eyes properly open, I’m also guilty of perpetrating things like that, so take comfort in not being alone.
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LOL… what am I like!!!!?
Refuge it is.
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Ed gave me a good opportunity to be diplomatic (for once) instead of pouncing “Ho ho! Tris should check his Dr Johnson before getting quotes wrong. ” See, I can be quite considerate and thoughtful when I put my mind to it, despite that the RS may tell you.
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Corrected on the page with suitable remerciements to your good self.
Hmmm… I’m sure you can, when you put your mind to it!!!
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I blame my typing fingers, Tris, and give them a stern talking-to each time they f – um, their performance is suboptimal, not up to par, or simply NBG.
And to think I used to be a UN editor.
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Oh, and I thought it was Kevin who altered your work while you were making coffee…
You should get someone to make coffee for you. Munguin did and has never looked back.
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That’s an idea, Tris! As President Trump had a Diet Coke button on the Resolute desk, I shall have a coffee button on my much humbler chipboard and plastic veneer model. It will ring a bell in my kitchen next door above my collection of coffee machines, so I know where to go when I get up to make myself coffee!
Pity it won’t help me work out what kind of coffee I want, though, so it might not enhance my productivity as much as one might have thought.
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It was early in the morning, Ed!
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I’m afraid that worse things are going on in Scottish schools with sex education. Check out Barrhead Boy:
https://www.barrheadboy.com/through-a-scottish-prism-5/
It’s sickening.
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ForWomenScotland had a piece with details. I would add a warning “adult content” but since it’s being taught in schools…
I’m not saying sex education can’t be taught in schools but it should be anatomically and scientifically correct and age appropriate.
https://forwomen.scot/29/09/2020/rshp-education/
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Yes. I think it’s good that sex education be taught. It wasn’t at my school and my inept father stumbled incoherently through his explanation.
With many single parent families, it’s hard to cover all the bases. And internet on phones means that kids are often able to access porn at a ridiculously early age.
I wouldn’t like to have to make the decisions about what is taught to kids. Too much is wrong; too little means they pick it up for other kids or the net… and that’s not necessarily very wholesome.
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I see it’s over an hour. I’ll have to check it out later. Thanks, Dave.
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I’m totall confused by all this and who is what or whom. I’ve been reluctant to stick my head above the parapet and ask fr fear of being accused of something -phobia or just plain ignorance. Feel safe to ask here so I’ll plead guuilty to the latter. Is ‘trans’ applied to a male who has had (or is having) surgery to change sex to female, or does it equally apply to a female who’s gone (or going) the other way? Or is it jsut short for transvestite and someone who like dressing in the opposite team’s kit?
I saw a story earlier about an actor celebrating ‘trans’ status after having breats removed and also declaring as gay. In the picture, the person looks male so does this mark another stage in the transition? (Ah, could trans be short for that?)
Captionns for pictures from movies use male pronouns, but they show someon who looks a bity effiminate, not ‘unpretty’ to some extent. So was he/she sort of hermaphrodite but predominantly inclined to the male side and has now had that surgically (and maybe hormonally) confirmed. Why else would there be a need for breast surgery and such happiness afterwards? Not phobic either way, just confused.
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Dunno, in honesty.
But, as a rule there is always someone on MR who does 🙂
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If you’re trans, John, your “mental” gender does not match your biological one. On the principle that the only person who can tell you what their mental gender is, is the person in question, we refer to a biological male who identifies as a woman (and not a gay man in drag, or a cross-dresser) as a trans woman. Similarly, a biological female who identifies as male is a trans man.
It’s not common for people to be trans, but it’s hardly rare either: about 0.6%, if I recall the last information that came my way.
It should be remembered – and regretted – that suicide is all too common among trans and gay youth. It can be a very hard row to hoe if you don’t have supportive parents, your school environment is hostile, you are denied the medical help you need, and are subject to constant discrimination. Though things are much, much better now than when I was a lad, the figures you will see for how many of us monstrous deviants there are in society are almost certainly too low, because the impulse and the pressure to conceal one’s true self is still there.
If treatment with hormones and other drugs is started early enough – which it should be, because it’s necessary for their happiness and self-actualization – trans children develop with bodies that match their internal sense of their gender, and that’s regardless of whether they ever have surgery on their bits, which is not always the case, and not something that need concern the rest of us. In other words, no one can tell just by looking at them.
It really is none of our business to ask what strangers have between their legs, and in these enlightened days it shouldn’t be an issue, it really shouldn’t. We don’t want to be the kind of blue-nosed Puritan types with an unhealthy obsession with other people’s sex lives, or at least I hope we don’t.
With the problems LGBTQIA (that’s the whole list as far as I know it – lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer (i.e., everyone not otherwise covered), intersex, asexual) people have in being discriminated against in employment, among other things, high rates of suicide, substance abuse and so on are only to be expected, really.
Too many of those kids get kicked out of their homes too when they are young and vulnerable, and with educations disrupted and employers often refusing to hire them, it’s easy to see how many of them could end up working as prostitutes servicing a particular brand of clients. It appals me that parents sometimes do that, but having experienced it myself, I can assure you it happens.
As for sexuality – it’s actually an independent variable. It is no doubt strange to many that a trans woman, say, can actually be a lesbian as well, but it’s actually not at all surprising once you understand what’s going on and had an enlightening conversation or two.
I work on the principle that I should give people as much love and affirmation – if you’ll pardon the psychobabble – as I can, and if I can make people happier and help them cope with the difficulties they face, then that makes me happy too. It takes a lot of guts to live openly as an obvious trans person, and I greatly respect those who do. That’s one of the reasons why the sooner the necessary medical help can be given in a trans kid’s life, the better: it’s much easier to fit in that way, and it’s also why it is necessary for trans people to be able to change their ID documents to reflect their gender: there are many countries where you can’t.
In case anyone is wondering, trans kids generally know what their internal gender is just as early and just as certainly as everyone else. When people tell you who they are, it’s generally best to believe them.
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Thanks for that, very enlightening!
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Thanks, Ed. That clarifies the terminology – and much more. Many years ago I reviewed a book called Middlesex, as the name implies, about a person who is neither one nor the other and the social and psychological problems of coping with that. Nothing deviant involved, purely biological – born with an extra chromosone or the wrong chromonsome – and live with the consequences. I’m sure it will still be in print (author Jeffrey Mendonides if I remember right) and well worth a read if you can find a copy. Enlightening many ways, disturbing in others, but always brings a tear to the eye – unless you really are a wally dug.
Nearer home, one of the RS’s downstream relatives was deemed male at birth, but showed tendencies in the other direction from a very early age. Dolls instead of Action Man, changing into frocks on getting home from school. Sympathetic parents and medics helped, the latter advising to wait for puberty before any decision about reassignment. That age reached, the female commitment was confirmed and the process began. She started high school while still in progress, and happy to report,that passed largely without incidence of bullying or jeering or other unpleasantness. Now a fine arts graduate, and a successful painter. No one unaware of ther history would be any the wiser. Don’t know if this is an exception, but it did take place in England and at least one happy ending story among many which I’m sure will be much less so.
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Indeed, John. As I understand it, in an ideal case the treatment – hormones and puberty-delaying drugs – is started well before puberty, the better to influence body shape, muscle mass, that sort of thing, and more importantly, perhaps, to ensure that the trans person feels understood, accepted, valued and loved. Also, the earlier the kid is allowed to act / dress / behave in keeping with their own sense of self, the better.
Reassignment surgery is not something that every trans person wants, though. Like so many things, it’s an unforgivable intrusion into people’s private lives to pass laws about things which should be between them and their medical practitioner. Difficult when we live in an era of alternative facts and Big Brother State.
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I recognised the guy interviewing (Roddy MacLeod), didn’t know his name, he was at a SNP hustings several years ago, representing the Family Party. He did the same as the man in the video did with John Swinney and similar preamble, directed at Michael Russel on this occasion.
The hustings video shown was understandably cut in length however it was poorly edited. Was it the Lucas man’s question that John Swinney was answering? I ask this because the answer that I’ve heard (twice), goes on about the online content being a resource for teachers and that lessons on anal intercourse and mutual masturbation are not part of the curriculum.
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Sorry the above has appeared way down the thread, it was in reply to Dave’s Barhead Boy post.
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Ein Volk, Ein Reich – but is Boris cut out to be Ein Fuhrer ?
Seriously, Piers Brendon’s book The Decline and Fall of the British Empire suggests that such overt celebrations may be as well seen as much as funeral rites. The book quotes one wonderfully prophetic comment to that effect – but didn’t take a note and can’t face trawling 700 pages.
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LOL I don’t blame you, Cairnallochy.
I reckon, given the Brexit thing, and the isolation, that what they are trying to do is persuade the public that Britain is great and global and the best place in the world…when in fact, it’s all a bit of a mess and things will get worse and there’s no one in government with the vaguest idea of what to do about anything.
We had the worst per capita deaths in the world for Covid but hey, Britain is great and wonderful. God save the queen, and wave that flag high.
See we have flags everywhere and our railways, among the worst in Europe, are called GREAT BRITISH Railways.
The power of suggestion works on the hard of thinking.
It vaguely reminds me of Orwell’s 1984.
Boris is more cute out to be Ein Clown.
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One of the reasons that England left Europe is that most Europeans aren’t too keen on fascism.
Now they are free to embrace it openly.
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OT: https://twitter.com/i/status/1397487248103415810
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Umm 🤔 when in Bradford
No doubt tris could say that in Latin quo vadis giggle 🤭
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But I probably won’t.
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“Nkrumah never dies, never dies, never dies,
He forever lives.
Nkrumah will make you fishers of men
If you follow him.”
Ghana Youth Movement for K Nkruma., their Dictator and President.
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I’m not sure I’d like to fish for me, though…
I mean, whacha do with them, fry or what.
Gimme a bit of haddock any day!
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