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I'm dipping in and out of watching the live coverage of the death of the Queen of England, currently the coverage of the procession of the queen's body to the cathedral in Edinburgh, and addressing Charles as King. Peace to the woman, she's dead now, and they are no longer claiming rights to my fealty, so let them rule their own lands and good luck to them.
Now, royal coverage brings out the professional royal watchers/specialists in royal affairs for such coverage, and you have to expect an amount of bootlicking and sycophancy. But what strikes me - and maybe this is because I'm born and reared in the Republic of Ireland - is how tilted all this is towards the English audience. Right now they may have a few Scots on, but the coverage by British media is London-based, and for instance - I've heard an English live commenter burbling on as Charles' plane arrives, in an unmistakably RP accent with a posh tinge, about the Royal Standard of Scotland that is flying on the car awaiting to transport him that is "an emphasis on the descent of the king, ultimately back to King Robert the Bruce and the ancient lines of the Picts and Scots".
To which the only possible answer is: my arse it is. The name of the present royal House is Mountbatten-Windsor, because they had to change it from Battenburg due to anti-German sentiment from the First and Second World Wars. But again, this is all slanted towards an English viewership, eliding over the history between Scotland and England, and trying to pretend that no, of course all the other constituent parts of the United Kingdom are every bit as important as England.
Tell me again where he will be conducting his reign from? It's not Edinburgh, that's for sure.
As with this announcement of William now taking on the titles Charles bore: Duke of Cornwall. Prince of Wales. Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland. The titles of conquered nations, assumed and folded into the English rulership. A reminder as to who is the top dog in this "United" Kingdom.
Literally everything on TV is unbelievably London-biased. You've not caught onto anything new. Every other region of England feels this just as keenly as the Scots and Welsh. We are not represented by London either, and programming/advertising that uses its demographics feels just as alien to us. So don't try and divide this along those lines.
The act of the union invited a penniless and embarrassed Scotland, fresh off the back of their failed attempt at colonialism, to put a Scottish King on the throne of England. To the extent that you are moaning about the provenance of the royals, that you skate over this in such a cavalier way is very revealing of the intent of this post, and the particular basket of chips on your shoulder.
As an aside, I often notice this continual reference to the German origin of the royal family comes up a lot from people who would otherwise insist that second-generation immigrants are just as British as those who can trace their lines back hundreds of years. The exception, as ever, only seems to be made for targets of personal dislike.
If Scotland is a conquered nation, a notion that it completely and totally laughable, then we should all be so lucky as to be conquered, and become the beneficiaries of millions and millions of pounds of transfer from our supposed oppressors.
Back her up there, sunshine. It wasn't the Act of Union that put a Scottish king on the throne, that was the Tudors failure to have a male heir that lived long enough to have kids of his own. Due to Elizabeth finally dying without issue, the nearest heir was her first cousin twice removed, James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England, and ruled as James VI and I, uniting the crowns of Scotland and England.
England had often warred with Scotland and constantly tried encroaching on its territory. This was a peaceful annexation, since it was England that was now the seat of monarchy for both nations. A United Kingdom did not formally come into existence, however, until 1707 despite the union of the crowns: those Acts created the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
Ireland was not roped in until the Act of Union of 1801 which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Your current state of "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" came about as a result of the partition of Ireland
As for the rest of it, I don't care if they're British, German, or Martians, just so long as they acknowledge they have no right (and never had any right, save that of conquest) of claiming sovereignty over my nation. My grandmother was born a subject of Queen Victoria. I was born a citizen of the Republic of Ireland. Let Charles be king of England, and indeed Scotland and Wales (that is up to the Scots and Welsh, if ever they do gain independence, if they want the monarch to be head of state as with the Commonwealth). But he's not king of Ireland, and he damn well is not a descendant of Pictish kings. He'd have better right to claim German territories via his great-great-great-grandfather Albert; after all, the English long maintained romantic claims to territories not theirs (such as France) because a distant ancestor had been a noble there.
The Hanovers are also descendants of Elizabeth Stuart -- the line from there to the ancient Scottish Kings is (ironically) at least as direct as to the Anglo-Saxons -- it's the (French) Normans that were mostly cut out by the failure of the Tudors to reproduce.
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King Charles III is actually one of the many descendants of Brian Boru. If we're going by descent, he may actually (I don't know much about royal lineages) have more of a claim to Ireland than he does the Pictish lands.
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Given that Charles isn't claiming to be king of Ireland, what are you even asking for? A public ceremony where he shouts "I'm not king of Ireland! I'm not king of Ireland!"?
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Is he claiming to be king of all Ireland? Did the commentator specifically make a false claim regarding the ethnicity of his ancestors?
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Sure, it beats the hell out of the alternative, but receiving an influx of subsidies doesn't really do that much to dull the resentment for rule-by-outsider. Speaking as someone that originally hails from a non-city part of the American state of New York, no amount of "well ackshually New York City sends you tax dollars" reduced our dislike for having laws created for metropolis applied to our irrelevant backwater. There would have been a pretty strong consensus for rejecting the bribe if it also came with the removal of onerous legislation.
I don't know the Scotland-England political dynamics to have any idea if that maps on at all, I'm just saying that the residents of a region that receives government subsidies will not necessarily reflect on this as being a fortunate arrangement.
It does map, and it also maps onto the rest of England that isn't London, but there are a few wrinkles with the Scots that make it all the funnier.
Firstly, that the loudest online ScotNats tend to also be fierce EUrophiles, and are so mad that the UK as a whole chose to leave the EU (to which it was a net contributor) that they want to leave the UK (from which they are a net beneficiary). That the relative damage they would do to their economy would be multiples of what the UK faced when leaving the EU is never addressed.
In addition to that, ScotNats like to think of themselves as uniquely tolerant and progressive, especially in comparison to England, despite being 96% white and until recently, only having a single city accept refugees (until they were called out on it)... not that refugees want to go there anyway. Much is made of how progressive an indy Scotland would become, but the question of how this would be funded remains conspicuously unanswered by nationalists -- as over 60% of their economy depends on trade with the rest of the UK, in addition to their received welfare via the Barnett Formula.
I fully accept that it might not calm the underlying feelings, but at some point one would hope pragmatism must prevail. I don't really want a failed state next door either, to be honest.
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Ouch, right on the Darién Gap, a region tough enough to have no roads running through it to this very day? Thank you for filling in this (Darién) gap in my knowledge.
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Not as I understand it - there was already a (partially-)Scottish king on the throne of England, and had been for over a century. What happened in 1707 was that the Scottish elites were bailed out financially for the Darien disaster in exchange for agreeing to merge the Scottish and English parliaments, creating a single London-based government for both countries.
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