The War on Scotland

One of the weirder diversions of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy these days is Scotland-bashing. It's looking like Niall Ferguson will father nearly as many op-ed pieces as his mythical Irish namesake fathered children, because Mark Steyn is at it in Tuesday's Telegraph:

And it means the Scottish National Party is going through the motions: nobody needs a Scottish nation if there are no more Scottish nationals ... Scottish nationalism [] has achieved all the features of a failed nation state without achieving the status of a nation state ... Scotland has become a minor member of the axis of extinction: Germany, Japan, Russia - once great nations now recording net population loss...

This directly takes the baton from Fergie on Sunday:

Scotland, which in certain respects really is - as I remarked here a few weeks ago - the Belarus of the West. So whatever became of Progress with a capital P? Why, after around a century of sustained improvements, is public health in some developed countries deteriorating?

The obvious answer is, of course, that Russians and Scots alike lead unhealthy lives. They smoke too much tobacco. They drink too much alcohol. They eat too much high-cholesterol food. (Do they have deep-fried Mars bars in Moscow? An enterprising Scot could make, er, a killing by exporting that particular delicacy.)

But while Fergie at least writes of a place he grew up in, Steyn -- the Canadian who lives in New Hampshire -- is projecting other concerns onto the Scots:

The Scottish Executive would like Scotland to have control of its own immigration, as the province of Quebec does. Quebec's collapsed birth rate has also cost it its dreams of nationhood and, like Scotland, it looked to immigration to save it, since when it has attracted a lively range of jihadist cells for whom Montreal offers the advantage of being a terrorist-indulgent neighbourhood only a stone's throw - or a bomb's - from the Great Satan's border. As the estate agents say, it is location, location, location. Glasgow has no such unique selling point.

Something we thought might happen -- those awful Quebeckers have kept Canada's Conservatives from forming a majority government, so work them into the slam, and better still, imply that Quebec's pursuit of Francophone immigrants around the world is the inverse of the US harbouring all those Fenians in the 19th century. On the other hand Steyn is fine with the present day Fenians:

Scotland is the canary in the United Kingdom's coal mine, but, given that three of the four component parts of the realm are mired in the same bloated, dead-end dependency culture, it would be foolish for the English to assume they won't get stuck with the bill for a Celtic fringe decaying into a long-term geriatric hospice. I doubt any Scot with an eye to electoral viability would want to run on anything that smacked of American conservatism, but surely they could at least learn something from Ireland, where, you will recall, Braveheart was filmed.

That sentence, with its implication that 1/4 of the UK = Republic of Ireland shows that Steyn is nowhere near ready for this Venn Diagram, let alone an entry in United Irelander's Rename the British Isles competition. But aside from the buffoonery, one thing going on here is the adoption of Scotland as a case study for the Eurabia shite of the right. They tried that on France, but the messy facts -- namely France's healthy population growth -- got in the way. Then again

If that you will France win,
Then with Scotland first begin.

UPDATE: On 2nd reading it's not clear what the above Steyn passage means regarding the constituent parts of the UK, but the sweeping statements therein contribute to that problem. But he does seem to know that the Republic of Ireland is a separate country.