{"id":7996,"date":"2015-05-11T05:20:57","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T10:20:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7996"},"modified":"2015-05-11T05:20:57","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T10:20:57","slug":"will-austerity-be-the-straw-that-breaks-the-eu-and-the-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7996","title":{"rendered":"Will Austerity Be the Straw that Breaks the EU AND the UK?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"posttitle\"><a class=\"entry-title\" title=\"Will Austerity Be the Straw that Breaks the EU AND the UK?\" href=\"http:\/\/www.theautomaticearth.com\/2015\/05\/will-austerity-be-the-straw-that-breaks-the-eu-and-the-uk\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Will Austerity Be the Straw that Breaks the EU AND the UK?<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>From where we\u2019re sitting, the biggest victory in the May 7 British election will turn out to be not that of the Conservatives, but of the SNP, the Scottish nationalists. The party took 56 out of 59 Scottish seats in the United Kingdom\u2019s Westminster parliament in London (with just half of the total votes..). Perhaps even more significant is the increased divide between Scotland and \u2018the rest of the UK\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>While Cameron\u2019s \u2018unexpected\u2019 victory marks a sharp turn to the right, the SNP\u2019s landslide win sets the Scots on a course that\u2019s close to a 180\u00ba opposite, even sharper turn to the left. Or in other words: while Britain voted for more of the same, Scotland voted for change. And never the twain shall ever see eye to eye again?! The left side of the spectrum was represented by the SNP, not by Labour, who Tony Blair now claims should run even more to the right \u2013 which he calls center.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps it\u2019s nice to start off with a more philosophical angle about the future viability and\/or inevitable fate of the United Kingdom. Just to set the overarching and underlying tone. Ian Jack had this for the Guardian yesterday:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2015\/may\/09\/did-end-of-british-empire-make-death-of-union-inevitable\" target=\"new\">Did The End Of The British Empire Make The Death Of The Union Inevitable?<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>.. what some of us were in Denmark to consider is the now almost-conventional wisdom about British identity: that it rose and fell with the empire, and with the empire\u2019s going the United Kingdom will almost inevitably break up. Stuart Ward, professor of global and imperial history at Copenhagen University, reminded us of this theory\u2019s several advocates, from Tom Nairn, writing presciently in 1977, to Linda Colley in her book Britons, published in 1992.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Will Austerity Be the Straw that Breaks the EU AND the UK? From where we\u2019re sitting, the biggest victory in the May 7 British election will turn out to be not that of the Conservatives, but of the SNP, the Scottish nationalists. The party took 56 out of 59 Scottish seats in the United Kingdom\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[40,5312,279,284,4930,4929,5311],"class_list":["post-7996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-austerity","tag-british-empire","tag-eu","tag-european-union","tag-scottish-national-party","tag-snp","tag-uk-united-kingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7996"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7997,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7996\/revisions\/7997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}