G’DAY WORLD #243 - Dr Peter Ellyard part 3
Another show with the brilliant Dr Peter Ellyard today. I popped around to his place yesterday without any planned agenda and, as I had hoped, we ended up talking about a whole range of interesting things, including:
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What entrepreneurs dream about
Peter’s introduction to the operas of maestro Richard Wagner
How globalism and tribalism are playing out around the world
Why the United Kingdom might break up within five years
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What “Australian values” are
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Chavez’s activities in Venezuela
The rise of “sustainable individualism” over capitalism and communism
What a great gift this guy is.
If you missed them, check out my other shows with Peter.
GDAY WORLD #204 - Dr Peter Ellyard, Futurist
GDAY WORLD #213 - Dr Peter Ellyard, Futurist - part two
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June 9th, 2007 at 2:31 am
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5832390545689805144
Chavez doco
June 11th, 2007 at 10:00 am
Dr. Ellyard’s confident prediction of Scottish independence in the next 10 to 12 years strikes me as a little off the mark.
He sees a macro trend of parallel atomisation and globalisation of society, and places the Scottish Nationalist Party’s (SNP) recent victory in that context as a rejection of the UK and likely embrace of the EU, a supranational organisation (presumably a microcosm of the shift required for us all to switch primary allegiance to the planet), however I think this event can best be explained by local micro-political factors.
First, recognise that the SNP didn’t win very much. They didn’t get a majority of the vote and could only form a minority government (no other party joined them in coalition). Still a positive result but it is better attributed to the canny political opportunism of their leader Alex Salmond. He specifically ruled out a referendum on Scottish independence until the end of the term — the Scots knew a vote for the SNP was not a vote for independence. Why though would they vote SNP? It’s a classic mid-term protest vote against an unpopular incumbent. There’s no other effective opposition in Scotland to the governing Labour Party so the SNP picked up the votes of a lot of disillusioned former Labour voters.
In other words it was an electoral bloody nose to Tony Blair, not necessarily a prelude to independence. Leaving that aside, what chances the break-up of the UK in a decade? Perhaps, and the umbrella of the EU is certainly an amenable place for small nations to shelter. Abstractly speaking I think it will depend whether the idea of Britishness is an oppressive throwback to empire, or a genuine part of the identity of the UK’s inhabitants, albeit layered on top of other local allegiances. I’m with the latter.